Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Contents
Quotes:
Articles:
New Economic Spaces
The new technological environment of business is marked by conflicting constraints and value-creating relationships that change rapidly and constantly. It is a complex environment. In complex environments, the way to vitality and resilience is a continuous recombination of successful elements to create new versions, some of which may thrive.
As a result, the operating system of work is starting to change in a radical way. Success is based on continuous redefinition of the organization itself. It is about recombining options and contributions in a competitive and cooperative network environment.
The concept of economic space represents a new logic of organizing based on neither the traditional market nor a process. Whereas processes involve relations based on dependence and markets involve relations based on independence, the new economic spaces involve relations of dynamic interdependence.
The network is the key resource. Every valuable piece of learning can be put to use by someone else, or somewhere else. At best, then, work is remixing and recombining successful elements to create new versions.
Interaction creates capability beyond individuals. Cooperative performance can be more than what could ever be predicted just by looking at the performance of the parties involved.
Strategy used to be about rational choice between a set of known options and variables. The variables of creative work and complex environments have increased beyond systems thinking and process design. Under circumstances of rapid technological change, the management challenge is not better planning and control, but creation of protocols that make possible openness to possibilities. By creating and integrating more relationships, the networked business broadens its opportunity space dramatically. The only common goal the nodes of the network have is the growth of the network.
Order, design and local proximity have been the leading principles of work during the industrial era, but what if in the future easier and more valuable work were in effect based on dynamic connections and interaction with people in the larger network? Exploration, finding these people and connecting with their learning is now possible with the help of new protocols and programmable contracts. The small-world geometry of social science offers a way to see order and design in these apparently disordered networks. Purpose-driven proximity complements local proximity in the world of work.
The Internet is no longer about linked pages but connected purposes. We want to do something — with the help of enabling protocols and other people we can.
Esko Kilpi - New Economic Spaces
The braided stream of human evolution matches with what we are seeing in other mammals. As geneticists have sampled more and more populations of wild animals, they are finding what has been known for our domesticated plants and animals for a long time: hybridisation and introgression of genes among species and distant populations is ubiquitous in the natural world.
Eastern coyotes now form a spectrum of populations with a high fraction of wolf and domesticated dog ancestry. European mallard ducks, introduced by hunters into New Zealand, rapidly hybridised with indigenous brown ducks, and now outbreed them. People long ago interbred Indian zebu with taurine cattle, creating arid-tolerant breeds that now are spread across most of Africa. What has changed most is our ability to see small fractions of mixture across whole genomes. Just in the last few years, scientists showed that grizzly bears well south into North America carry genes from polar bears, a legacy of ancient population mixture. Hominins are not exceptional; our mixing is the way that widespread mammals evolve.
If this is true, should we really be calling these populations different ‘species’ at all? After all, most of us learned that species are defined by their ability to interbreed. For ancient populations known precisely because they bred with humans, it feels wrong to use a term that leads people to assume they could not.
Human evolution is more a muddy delta than a branching tree
You say there are new ideas on each and every thing every day, and there are, especially in technology and biology and so many fields that are evolving so fast. But if you’re a student going to university to study economics today, you are going to be one of the policy leaders, one of the thinkers of the 21st century shaping this world in 2050. But I believe students today are still being taught economics that come out of the textbooks of 1950, based on the theories of 1850. Given the challenges of the 21st century, from climate change to extreme inequality to repeated financial crises, this is shaping up to be a disaster.
I feel so sorry for Simon Kuznets because back in the 1930s he was asked by Congress to come up with a measure of national income. He did a fantastic job and came up with this measure, which we now know as GDP. But at the time when he created it, he gave us a caveat. He said, “This measure should in no way be mistaken for the measure of a nation’s welfare.” Did we listen? No. Kuznets said “It doesn’t include all the incredible valuable unpaid caring work of parents, all that cooking, washing, sweeping, cleaning, raising the kids that’s done every day. It doesn’t include the value of communities and the things that communities produce and do for each other that doesn’t show up in the national economy. It’s just a flow measure. We’ve got to also look at the stocks, what’s happening to the underlying financial capital, but also natural and social and human capital.”
He saw this was a very thin measure and gave us a caveat. It got ignored because there’s nothing like the temptation of a single number for policymakers to latch onto.
Kate Raworth - The Huge Hole in the Standard Economic Model
This is a thoughtful piece related to the need for more appropriate frameworks and protections to guide the ongoing development of the digital environment. Protections for free speech and Protections against hate and violence - Protections to ensure access to the platforms that enable the Digital Environment to serve our freedoms and rights for all.
There's a saying in legal circles that hard cases make bad law. We need to be careful of that here. What I do hope is it will allow us all to discuss what the framework for all of the organizations listed above should be when it comes to content restrictions. I don't know the right answer, but I do know that as we work it out it's critical we be clear, transparent, consistent and respectful of Due Process.
Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again.
Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.
Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.
Where Do You Regulate Content on the Internet?
There are a number of different organizations that work in concert to bring you the Internet. They include:
- Content creators, who author the actual content online.
- Platforms (e.g., Facebook, Wordpress, etc.), where the content is published.
- Hosts (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Dreamhost, etc.), that provide infrastructure on which the platforms live.
- Transit Providers (e.g., Level(3), NTT, etc.), that connect the hosts to the rest of the Internet.
- Reverse Proxies/CDNs (e.g., Akamai, Cloudflare, etc.), that provide networks to ensure content loads fast and is protected from attack.
- Authoritative DNS Providers (e.g., Dyn, Cloudflare, etc.), that resolve the domains of sites.
- Registrars (e.g., GoDaddy, Tucows, etc.), that register the domains of sites.
- Registries (e.g., Verisign, Afilias, etc.), that run the top level domains like .com, .org, etc.
- Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (e.g., Comcast, AT&T, etc.), that connect content consumers to the Internet.
- Recursive DNS Providers (e.g., OpenDNS, Google, etc.), that resolve content consumers' DNS queries.
- Browsers (e.g., Firefox, Chrome, etc.), that parse and organize Internet content into a consumable form.
There are other players in the ecosystem, including:
- Search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.), that help you discover content.
- ICANN, the organization that sets the rules for the Registrars and Registries.
- RIRs (e.g., ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc.), which provide the IP addresses used by Internet infrastructure.
Any of the above could regulate content online. The question is: which of them should?
This is also in important signal and very complementary to the one above. Written by Ethan Zuckerman from the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab, Global Voices, Berkman Center.
But be warned - the article discusses some very controversial topics. It does not condone these topics - but does explain them.
Mastodon is an important signal of open source capability and may be of interest to anyone who wants to provide a Twitter-like communication for a group.
Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable
In April 2017, there was a wave of excitement about Mastodon, a federated social network begun in October 2016 by Eugen Rochko, a 24-year old German software engineer, as an alternative to Twitter. Recent news about CloudFlare’s decision to stop providing services to the Daily Stormer has me thinking about decentralized publishing, one possible response to intermediary censorship. As it turns out, it’s an interesting time to catch up on Mastodon, which has grown in a fascinating, and somewhat troubling, way. (Mastodon is one of the topics of the report Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula and I released today, “Back to the Future: the Decentralized Web”.)
Mastodon is different. It’s an open source software package that allows anyone with an internet-connected computer to set up an “instance”. The server administrator is responsible for setting and enforcing rules on her instance, and those rules can vary — sharply — from instance to instance. Each server has its own namespace. I’m @ethanz on octodon.social, but if you want to be @ethanz on mastodon.social, no one’s going to stop you. In this sense, Mastodon is less like Facebook and more like email — you can have your own address — and your own acceptable use policies — on one server and still send mail to a user on another server.
To have that ability to share messages with users of other servers, Mastodon has to support “federation”. Federation means that I can follow users on other Mastodon instances — you can have an account on mastodon.xyz and read my posts on octodon.social. It’s a bit more complicated than using a service like Twitter or Facebook, but it has the great advantage that communities of interest can have their own community rules. Don’t want adult content on your server? Fine — don’t allow it. Want to shield your child from adult content? Don’t federate your server with servers that allow NSFW content.
It’s hard to say how fast Mastodon is growing, because it’s hard to say how big Mastodon is. The Mastodon Network Monitoring Project does its best to keep up, but servers come online and go down all the time. If you’re running a Mastodon server and don’t register or federate it (perfectly reasonable if you want a community just for people you invite) it won’t register on the project’s dashboard. So we might think of the 1.5 million registered users on ~2400 servers as the network’s minimum size.
A lot of effort is being made to understand the impact of Millennials on the work place and how organizations will have to adapt to make the most of their abilities. This is an important signal not just of an emerging new generation but of the consequences of the ‘magical’ technology (sophisticated tech indistinguishable from magic) beginning to emerge and promising to accelerate advances in the next decade. Remember the smartphone is only a decade old. This is the generation that will grow up in a world of self-driving cars, and other forms of AI, drones and robots of all sorts.
The research firm eMarketer estimates that 60.5 million people in the U.S.—a little less than a fifth of the population—will use a digital assistant at least once a month this year, and about 36 million will do so on a speaker-based device like Amazon Echo or Google Home. These things are most popular among people age 25 to 34, which includes a ton of parents of young children and parents-to-be.
Growing Up with Alexa
What will it do to kids to have digital butlers they can boss around?
When it comes to digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, my four-year-old niece Hannah Metz is an early adopter. Her family has four puck-like Amazon Echo Dot devices plugged in around her house—including one in her bedroom—that she can use to call on Alexa at any moment.
“Alexa, play ‘It’s Raining Tacos,’” she commanded on a recent sunny afternoon, and the voice-controlled helper immediately complied, blasting through its speaker a confection of a song with lines like “It’s raining tacos from out of the sky” and “Yum, yum, yum, yum, yumidy yum.”
Giggling and clapping, Hannah danced around the room. I think this ability to get music on demand is neat, too, and I didn’t want to be rude, so I danced with her. But at the same time I was wondering what it’s going to mean for her to grow up with computers as servants.
This is an interesting 20 min video about the End of Competitive Advantage. Worth the view. When there is consistent flow in an organization it is more natural to adapt to change. Key is to separate power in an organization from the control of resources. Also ‘you can’t manage a secret’ and a ‘tour of duty’ career path.
Rita McGrath on Constantly Reconfiguring and Adapting Your Business
At the BRITE ’16 conference, Rita McGrath, Author of The End of Competitive Advantage, talked about how the nature of a long-lived competitive advantage has changed, with new entry conditions, such as network effects, taking over from traditional ones. McGrath discusses the new sources of advantage and how firms should be thinking about them in a more transient society.
This is an interesting piece from a former longtime Google employee - commenting on Google culture and the implication of its recent turbulence related to the employee written ‘manifesto’ that has become a meme across the Internet.
In my years at Google, my default approach to work—and indeed, to life—became more risk-friendly and more global. My critical thinking and long-game skills grew stronger. Six years after leaving, I still root for the company. Even when I’m critical about one of its products or positions, I trust Google to mostly get it right...eventually.
WHAT GOOGLE'S OPEN COMMUNICATION CULTURE IS REALLY LIKE
When I started at Google in 2002, there were about 500 employees. When I left nine years later, there were over 50,000. For all that time, I marveled at the relative cohesion of company culture—the values that Google successfully conveyed to tens of thousands of employees across the world. Today Google has about 75,000 people on the payroll. The situation that exploded a few weeks ago—with former employee James Damore’s contentious memo causing internal and public fallout—makes me wonder if this is the breaking point for Google’s unique ethos of open communication.
Google culture has always been a somewhat messy, dynamic, and aspirational ecosystem, rooted in a strong sense of ethics. The company is deservedly famous for encouraging employees to explore a wide range of ideas and to question the status quo. I remember thinking that the dysfunctional office life in “Dilbert” cartoons didn’t really apply to Google. Even at its size today, it’s rare for Google to be home to asshole leadership, behavior, or decisions.
If some of this makes Google sound a bit like a university, that’s no accident. When they launched Google, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were grad students at Stanford, surely used to questioning assumptions and lively debate. So Google grew up with features that it still retains: All-hands meetings are built around an open mic and unscripted Q&As with executives. A quarterly board report is presented to all employees. (How many companies would consider doing either?) For sharing and discussing information, there are about 87,000 Google Groups email lists organized around every kind of topic—both work-related and not so much. There are some 8,000 miscellaneous—famously, “misc”—discussions, devoted to everything from juggling and philosophy to rockets and “terrible-ideas-discuss.”
This is a must hear podcast with Yuval Harari about his most recent book Homo Deus. He integrates the many trajectories involved in the current ‘change in conditions of change’ to re-imagine what the future can be.
When Man Becomes God - Yuval Harari
In his new book “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari argues that humankind is on the verge of transforming itself: advances creating networked intelligences will surpass our own in speed, capability and impact. But where will this leave us?
This may signal another significant breakthrough powering (pun intended) the phase transition in energy geopolitics.
In a normal battery, you have some ingredients, like lithium or alkaline, and a separator, like a piece of cloth that you put between them. Then you pour in a liquid so that the ions can move around. Bad things happen with liquids. Films form, things go into [the] solution and run around and react with each other—you have safety issues like the battery catching fire. To be solid instead of liquid is something people have been striving for for 100 years. But in this battery, you have no liquid. You have just a plastic, a polymer, that replaces the liquid, so it’s solid. It’s a pretty big difference from a chemistry standpoint. It also turns out that this polymer just happens to be essentially a fire retardant material. So when you build batteries with this polymer, you don’t have a safety problem.
BILL JOY FINDS THE JESUS BATTERY
As technology tries to maintain its dizzying ascent, one dead weight has kept its altitude in check: the battery. Our chips keep getting faster and our data rates keep climbing, but at the end of the day—or worse, by mid-afternoon—those power meters on our screens inevitably turn to red. Every great device, gadget, electric car, and robot would be even greater if batteries didn’t suck so badly. Despite a steady flow of rumors that transformative breakthroughs are just around the corner, progress has moved at the pace of a tar flow.
But earlier this month came news of a potential game changer, from no less a tech luminary than Bill Joy. A long-time investor in clean tech—for years he was involved in venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins’ ill-fated foray into “green” funding—Joy is now serving on the board of Ionic Materials, a battery-tech company in which he has invested. (His personal investment comes on top of the KP funding he oversaw; he is no longer with the venture firm.) Because of Joy’s earlier history as a legendary computer scientist—a co-founder of Sun, a co-inventor of Java, and a visionary who was working on the Internet of Things two decades ago—his views have weight, separate and apart from his financial interest in the company.
As Joy explains it, Ionic’s innovations combine the advantages of the familiar alkaline batteries we buy at the drugstore (cheap, safe, and reliable) with those of the more expensive, fire-prone lithium batteries in our computers and phones (powerful, rechargeable, and more earth-friendly). He claims Ionic’s new approach is a big step to cheaper, safer, and more efficient batteries will not only power our devices and vehicles, but also enable an “energy internet” based on renewable sources.
Joy decoded the breakthrough to Backchannel, and also followed up on his famous WIRED essay about a future techno-apocalypse. The interview is edited for space and clarity.
The worlds of quantum phenomena and chemical reaction may be more related than we’ve previously thought - this is another important signal - not only for understanding chemistry - but for significant implications for understanding biology as well.
Today, Matthew Fisher and Leo Radzihovsky at the University of California, Santa Barbara, say that this confidence is misplaced. They show for the first time that quantum indistinguishability must play a significant role in some chemical processes even at ordinary temperatures. And they say this influence leads to an entirely new chemical phenomenon, such as isotope separation and could also explain a previously mysterious phenomenon such as the enhanced chemical activity of reactive oxygen species.
In short, Fisher and Radzihovsky are turning chemistry on its head.
How Quantum Physics Is About to Revolutionize Biochemistry
Chemists have largely ignored quantum mechanics. But it now turns out that this strange physics has a huge effect on biochemical reactions.
One of the strange consequences of quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of indistinguishability—that two quantum particles can be impossible to tell apart, even in principle. This happens, in part, because it is impossible to determine the precise position of quantum particles. So when two particles interact at the same location, there is no way of knowing which is which.
That gives rise to some exotic behavior, particularly at low temperatures when large numbers of particles can behave in the same way. The indistinguishability of photons makes lasers possible, the indistinguishability of helium-4 nuclei at low temperature leads to superfluidity and the indistinguishability of other nuclei like rubidium leads to Bose-Einstein condensates. Indistinguishability is rich in mysterious phenomena.
But some quantum particles are not indistinguishable in this way. Electrons, for example, are forbidden from sharing the same state by a law known as the Pauli exclusion principle. And that leads to a different kind of physics. The interactions between electrons, governed by this Pauli exclusion principle, is called chemistry and it is equally rich in exotic behavior.
The worlds of chemistry and indistinguishable physics have long been thought of as entirely separate. Indistinguishability generally occurs at low temperatures while chemistry requires relatively high temperatures where objects tend to lose their quantum properties. As a result, chemists have long felt confident in ignoring the effects of quantum indistinguishability.
This is an interesting signal - with many other potential uses that aren’t so entertaining - the creation of illusions and incantations of consumer driving choice architectures.
AI Helps Magicians Perform Mind-Reading Tricks
You are presented with two decks, one with images and the other with words. The magician shuffles and distributes the decks into piles of four cards. You get to choose two piles, one from the word deck and one from the image deck, to make a hand of eight cards. Then you’re invited to pick a word card and and an image card from your hand. Once you’ve selected a pair, you watch the magician reveal a previously written prediction about the cards you’ve chosen. The prediction is correct!
That kind of “mind-reading” magic trick could benefit from new AI computer algorithms. These algorithms are designed to exploit human psychology and help magicians choose the best card combinations.
This “association” magic trick relies upon making a spectator believe that the magician has managed to predict his or her free choice from a random combination of shuffled cards. In reality, the magician has preselected two decks of cards that together contain a category of card pairs that trigger a particularly powerful mental association for most people. To help pull off this mind-reading illusion, computer scientists created a computer algorithm that can automatically help find compelling word and image combinations.
On the other hand here’s a more positive signal of the use of AI to enhance human memory.
Artificial intelligence identifies plant species for science
Deep-learning methods successfully classify thousands of herbarium samples.
Computer algorithms trained on the images of thousands of preserved plants have learned to automatically identify species that have been pressed, dried and mounted on herbarium sheets, researchers report.
The work, published in BMC Evolutionary Biology on 11 August1, is the first attempt to use deep learning — an artificial-intelligence technique that teaches neural networks using large, complex data sets — to tackle the difficult taxonomic task of identifying species in natural-history collections.
It's unlikely to be the last attempt, says palaeobotanist Peter Wilf of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. “This kind of work is the future; this is where we’re going in natural history.”
Natural-history museums around the world are racing to digitize their collections, depositing images of their specimens into open databases that researchers anywhere can rifle through. One data aggregator, the US National Science Foundation’s iDigBio project, boasts more than 150 million images of plants and animals from collections around the country.
Here’s another signal pointing to changes in user ID - and how we may interface with the digital environment.
Meet the Company That’s Using Face Recognition to Reshape China’s Tech Scene
In China, you can use your face to get into your office, get on a train, or get a loan.
In China, face recognition is transforming many aspects of daily life. Employees at e-commerce giant Alibaba in Shenzhen can show their faces to enter their office building instead of swiping ID cards. A train station in western Beijing matches passengers’ tickets to their government-issued IDs by scanning their faces. If their face matches their ID card photo, the system deems their tickets valid and the station gate will open. The subway system in Hangzhou, a city about 125 miles southwest of Shanghai, employs surveillance cameras capable of recognizing faces to spot suspected criminals.
The technology powering many of these applications? Face++, the world’s largest face-recognition technology platform, currently used by more than 300,000 developers in 150 countries to identify faces, as well as images, text, and various kinds of government-issued IDs.
And China is aiming to go much deeper than face recognition.
China launches brain-imaging factory
Hub aims to make industrial-scale high-resolution brain mapping a standard tool for neuroscience
Neuroscientists who painstakingly map the twists and turns of neural circuitry through the brain are about to see their field expand to an industrial scale. A huge facility set to open in Suzhou, China, next month should transform high-resolution brain mapping, its developers say.
Where typical laboratories might use one or two brain-imaging systems, the new facility boasts 50 automated machines that can rapidly slice up a mouse brain, snap high-definition pictures of each slice and reconstruct those into a 3D picture. This factory-like scale will “dramatically accelerate progress”, says Hongkui Zeng, a molecular biologist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, which is partnering with the centre. “Large-scale, standardized data generation in an industrial manner will change the way neuroscience is done,” she says.
The institute, which will also image human brains, aims to be an international hub that will help researchers to map neural connectivity for everything from studies of Alzheimer’s disease to brain-inspired artificial-intelligence projects, says Qingming Luo, a researcher in biomedical imaging at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, China. Luo leads the new facility, called the HUST-Suzhou Institute for Brainsmatics, which has a 5-year budget of 450 million yuan (US$67 million) and will employ some 120 scientists and technicians. Luo, who calls himself a “brainsmatician”, also built the institute’s high-speed brain-imaging systems.
Another powerful signal in both change in the conditions of change and change in energy geopolitics.
China cementing global dominance of renewable energy and technology
It now owns five of the world’s six largest solar-module manufacturing firms and the largest wind-turbine manufacturer
China is cementing its global dominance of renewable energy and supporting technologies, aggressively investing in them both at home and around the globe, leaving countries including the US, UK and Australia at risk of missing the growing market.
A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa) found China’s dominance in renewables is rapidly spreading overseas, with the country accelerating its foreign investment in renewable energy and supporting technologies.
Analysing Chinese foreign investments over US$1bn, Ieefa found 13 in 2016, worth a combined $32bn. That represented a 60% jump over similar investments in 2015.
Another type of game is colonized by AI. I think the field will soon be populated with teams of humans and AI.
AI Crushed a Human at Dota 2 (But That Was the Easy Bit)
Machine learning software from OpenAI has beaten one of the world’s best players at the video game Dota 2. Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, says that it is the "first ever … defeat [of the] world's best players in competitive e-sports." The Verge reports that Danylo Ishutin, the human player who got beaten, found the AI "a little like [a] human, but a little like something else" to play against.
OpenAI’s software mastered the game, which requires players to defend a base from their opponents, by playing a copy of itself. “We didn’t hard-code in any strategy, we didn’t have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself,” explains OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachocki in a video. “It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it’s just pro level.”
It’s an impressive feat, not least because Dota 2 requires making decisions based on imperfect information, unlike games such as Go or chess. But it’s not all good news. Some players have reported that they beat the algorithm after studying its play, and at any rate the AI can only play one-on-one, which is far simpler than regular five-on-five battles that require extensive collaboration. According to TechCrunch, OpenAI says that the five-player game is on its list of problems to crack.
While this can be imagined as a very cool way to play classic and modern board games - it could also be a fantastic medium for many other forms of creative collaboration.
The First Multi-User Hologram Table is Here
Australian company Euclideon has built a working prototype of what it calls the world’s first true multi-user hologram table. Up to four people can walk around a holographic image and interact with it wearing only a small set of glasses – a far cry from bulky AR headgear. It’s set to go on sale in 2018.
The idea of the hologram table has been a staple of sci-fi for decades. Indeed, hologram tables themselves have popped up here and there, but never really caught on. That’s mainly because in the past, they just haven’t worked like people hoped.
This is a short reasonable article about the looming impact of AI, robotics and the digital environment on the future of work - current view is how it will be the automation of routine and repetitive tasks that will transform the work people do - not necessarily eliminating ‘jobs’.
6 ways to make sure AI creates jobs for all and not the few
Whenever I talk to people about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, it’s clear there is a lot of anxiety surrounding these developments.
And no wonder: these technologies already have a huge impact on the world of work, from AI-powered algorithms that recommend optimal routes to maximize Lyft and Uber drivers’ earnings; to machine learning systems that help optimize lists of customer leads so salespeople can be more effective.
We’re on the verge of tremendous transformations to work. Millions of jobs will be affected and the nature of work itself may change profoundly. We have an obligation to shape this future — the good news is that we can.
It’s easier to see the jobs that will disappear than to imagine the jobs that will be created in the future but are as yet unknown. If, as The Wall Street Journal suggests, we think of AI as a technology that predicts, it’s much easier to map its impact. We must push ourselves to do that and understand the future of work.
Here are six principles to keep in mind as we imagine how the world of work will evolve.
- Expect massive disruption
- AI will replace repetitive tasks more than jobs
- Middle-skilled jobs will be hit hardest
- Opportunities will be unequally distributed — at first
- Technology designers have responsibility
- The long-term trend can be positive — if we make it so
This is a strong signal of the emerging technology that is bringing the Star Trek approach to medical sciences closer.
The team at Duke estimate that the D4 chips will cost less than $1 and the mobile phone attachment developed at the University of California, Los Angeles will be less than $30 when produced in bulk.
Portable diagnostic tool detects disease in 15 minutes
Biomedical engineers have created a portable diagnostic tool that detects disease markers as accurately as the current gold standard, while cutting the waiting time for results to 15 minutes.
By inkjet-printing an array of antibodies onto a glass slide with a non-stick polymer coating, the D4 assay diagnostic tool from Duke University is a self-contained test that detects low levels of antigens – the protein markers of a disease – from a single drop of blood.
By creating a sensitive, easy-to-use “lab on a chip,” the researchers plan to bring rapid diagnostic testing to areas that lack access to standard lab-based diagnostic technologies. The platform is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The current gold standard for quantitative diagnostic tests is the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), which identifies how many specific antigens are present in a biological sample.
The D4 assay reportedly allows clinicians to avoid problems associated with ELISA – such as ease of use, time taken for diagnosis, and bulky lab instruments – without sacrificing sensitivity or accuracy.
The new assay can quickly identify a disease biomarker, and results can be read using a tabletop scanner or 3D printed smartphone attachment that uses the phone’s camera to read the results.
This is a great signal of domesticating DNA and the future of food-as-medicine and plants as manufacturing technology.
"Current vaccines for polio are produced from large amounts of live virus, which carries a threat of accidental escape and re-introduction.
"This study takes us a step closer to replacing current polio vaccines, providing us with a cheap and viable option for making virus-like particle-based vaccines."
Plants 'hijacked' to make polio vaccine
Plants have been "hijacked" to make polio vaccine in a breakthrough with the potential to transform vaccine manufacture, say scientists.
The team at the John Innes Centre, in Norfolk, says the process is cheap, easy and quick.
As well as helping eliminate polio, the scientists believe their approach could help the world react to unexpected threats such as Zika virus or Ebola.
Experts said the achievement was both impressive and important.
The vaccine is an "authentic mimic" of poliovirus called a virus-like particle.
Outwardly it looks almost identical to poliovirus but - like the difference between a mannequin and person - it is empty on the inside.
It has all the features needed to train the immune system, but none of the weapons to cause an infection…..
This is another very strong signal - of the accelerating emergence of Blockchain (distributed ledger) technology. Given Microsoft’s very powerful presence in enterprise level software - it should not be very long before organizations will feel comfortable and confident with Blockchain approaches.
Microsoft announces the Coco Framework to improve performance, confidentiality and governance characteristics of enterprise blockchain networks
Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced the Coco Framework, a first-of-its-kind innovation that will advance enterprise adoption of blockchain technology. Current blockchain protocol technology requires complicated development techniques to meet the operational and security needs of enterprises. The Coco Framework reduces this complexity, and when integrated with blockchain networks addresses critical needs for commercial adoption like high-transaction speed, distributed governance and confidentiality. Providing these foundational capabilities opens up more complex, real-world blockchain scenarios across industries — like financial services, supply chain and logistics, healthcare and retail — further proving blockchain’s potential to digitally transform business.
“Blockchain is a transformational technology with the ability to significantly reduce the friction of doing business,” said Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Azure at Microsoft. “Microsoft is committed to bringing blockchain to the enterprise. We have listened to the needs of our customers and the blockchain community and are bringing foundational functionality with the Coco Framework. Through an innovative combination of advanced algorithms and trusted execution environments (TEEs), like Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) or Windows Virtual Secure Mode (VSM), we believe this takes the next step toward making blockchain ready for business.”
When integrated with a blockchain network, key benefits of the Coco Framework include these:
- Transaction speeds of more than 1,600 transactions per second
- Easily managed data confidentiality without sacrificing performance
- A comprehensive, industry-first distributed governance model for blockchain networks that establishes a network constitution and allows members to vote on all terms and conditions governing the consortium and the blockchain software system
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