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. Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works. Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Articles:
JD.com, a giant Chinese e-commerce platform, recently opened a Shanghai fulfilment centre that can process 200,000 orders a day with just 4 employees. At its annual conference in May, Google introduced an AI virtual assistant called Duplex that can mimic the human voice with uncanny precision. Amazon, meanwhile, will soon open checkout-less grocery stores in Chicago and San Francisco, in what could be the first major transformation of bricks-and-mortar retail in decades.
From autonomous vehicles to cancer-detecting algorithms, and from picking and packing machines to robo-advisory tools used in financial services, every corner of the economy has begun to feel the heat of a new machine age. The RSA uses the term ‘radical technologies’ to describe these innovations, which stretch from the shiny and much talked about, including artificial intelligence and robotics, to the prosaic but equally consequential, such as smartphones and digital platforms.
But what do these technologies mean for workers? Here there is still little consensus. Leading robotics expert Rodney Brooks describes fears of mass automation as “ludicrous”, whereas Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos claims “it’s hard to overstate how big of an impact [AI is] going to have on society over the next 20 years”. Adair Turner, Chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, believes automation will be “rapid, unstoppable and limitless”.
What is certain is that the world of work will evolve as a direct consequence of the invention and adoption of radical technologies — and in more ways than we might imagine. Alongside eliminating and creating jobs, these innovations will alter how workers are recruited, monitored, organised and paid.
Good Work in an Age of Radical Technologies - RSA
Foresight as a practice, when distinguished from forecasting, is formally premised on the unknowability of the future and hence attempts to be more systematic in imagining futures that are not constrained by projecting the past. This does not mean that foresight practitioners do not use extrapolation and models to imagine the future. Indeed, they can use probabilistic statements as spring-boards for imagining the future and can even, in certain circumstances, aim to provide a probabilistic assessment of the future. Foresight processes however, usually take a different path from that of the forecaster. In general, foresight claims both a more creative and participatory mission, aimed at discovering new options and exploiting different forms of knowledge. As a result, foresight as a practice has experimented, somewhat haphazardly as is to be expected at the outset of new frameworks, with the challenge of both inventing and making sense of numerous new methods for generating and interpreting anticipatory assumptions and imaginary futures (Bishop, Hines and Collins, 2007; Wilkinson, 2009; Rossel, 2012).
Transforming the Future Anticipation in the 21st Century
The endemic lack of predictive success of the econometric project indicates that this hope of finding fixed parameters is a hope for which there really is no other ground than hope itself.
Real-world social systems are not governed by stable causal mechanisms or capacities. The kinds of ‘laws’ and relations that econometrics has established, are laws and relations about entities in models that presuppose causal mechanisms being atomistic and additive. When causal mechanisms operate in real-world systems they only do it in ever-changing and unstable combinations where the whole is more than a mechanical sum of parts. If economic regularities obtain they do it (as a rule) only because we engineered them for that purpose. Outside man-made ‘nomological machines’ they are rare, or even non-existent. Unfortunately, that also makes most of the achievements of econometrics – as most of the contemporary endeavours of mainstream economic theoretical modelling — rather useless.
Even in statistics, the researcher has many degrees of freedom. In statistics — as in economics and econometrics — the results we get depend on the assumptions we make in our models. Changing those assumptions — playing a more important role than the data we feed into our models — leads to far-reaching changes in our conclusions. Using statistics is no guarantee we get at any ‘objective truth.’
We simply have to admit that the socio-economic states of nature that we talk of in most social sciences – and certainly in economics – are not amenable to analyze as probabilities, simply because in the real world open systems there are no probabilities to be had!
To understand real world ‘non-routine’ decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour, ergodic probability distributions are of no avail. In a world full of genuine uncertainty – where real historical time rules the roost – the probabilities that ruled the past are not those that will rule the future.
What is important with the fact that real social and economic processes are nonergodic is the fact that uncertainty – not risk – rules the roost. That was something both Keynes and Knight basically said in their 1921 books. Thinking about uncertainty in terms of ‘rational expectations’ and ‘ensemble averages’ has had seriously bad repercussions on the financial system.
Probabilistic reasoning in science — especially Bayesianism — reduces questions of rationality to questions of internal consistency (coherence) of beliefs, but, even granted this questionable reductionism, it is not self-evident that rational agents really have to be probabilistically consistent. There is no strong warrant for believing so. Rather, there is strong evidence for us encountering huge problems if we let probabilistic reasoning become the dominant method for doing research in social sciences on problems that involve risk and uncertainty.
The main reason why almost all econometric models are wrong
What is a nomological machine?
In a simple, concise, and pithy definition Nancy Cartwright answers her own question, saying: “It is a fixed (enough) arrangement of components, or factors, with stable (enough) capacities that in the right sort of stable (enough) environment will, with repeated operation, give rise to the kind of regular behavior that we represent in our scientific laws”.
Nancy Cartwright: Nomological Machines
The smart city is an inevitable development - but not necessarily a smooth conflict free development - given the importance of governance and the resistance of incumbents. This is a useful signal of the current state of thought.
Forces of change: Smart cities
While smart cities earlier focused on connecting infrastructure for better insights, the spotlight is slowly shifting to better engaging governments, citizens, and businesses with the goal of providing improved city services and a higher quality of life. What exactly is Smart City 2.0?
It is most obvious in American cities how the car has architected the urban city. This is a very important signal of the potential of self-driving cars to not only transform mass transit but to drive (pun intended) the re-imagination of the cityscape and possibly instigate (along with other aspects of the digital environment) an initial real estate crisis.
Parking Has Eaten American Cities
A new study documents the huge amount of space taken up by parking, and the astronomical costs it represents, in five U.S. cities.
Parking eats up an incredible amount of space and costs America’s cities an extraordinary amount of money. That’s the main takeaway of a new study that looks in detail at parking in five U.S. cities: New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming.
The study, by Eric Scharnhorst of the Research Institute for Housing America (which is affiliated with the Mortgage Bankers of America), uses data from satellite images, the U.S. Census, property tax assessment offices, city departments of transportation, parking authorities, and geospatial maps like Google Maps to generate inventories of parking for these five cities. (The inventories include on-street parking spaces, off-street surface parking lots, and off-street parking structures.)
It not only estimates the total number of parking spaces in these cities and their overall estimated replacement costs, but develops interesting metrics such as parking spaces per acre, parking spaces per household, and parking costs per household—as well as providing maps of parking densities across these cities.
In sum, it provides additional empirical confirmation for parking guru Donald Shoup’s idea that American cities devote far too much space and far too many resources to parking.
This is an interesting signal related to the emerging digital environment - how it can be a positive benefit in terms of efficiencies and conveniences and how it can be ‘colonized’ to serve incumbent interests. Every light casts shadows.
There is a feedback loop going on here. In closing down their branches, or withdrawing their cash machines, they make it harder for me to use those services. I am much more likely to “choose” a digital option if the banks deliberately make it harder for me to choose a non-digital option.
The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it
All over the western world banks are shutting down cash machines and branches. They are trying to push you into using their digital payments and digital banking infrastructure. Just like Google wants everyone to access and navigate the broader internet via its privately controlled search portal, so financial institutions want everyone to access and navigate the broader economy through their systems.
Another aim is to cut costs in order to boost profits. Branches require staff. Replacing them with standardised self-service apps allows the senior managers of financial institutions to directly control and monitor interactions with customers.
In behavioural economics this is referred to as “nudging”. If a powerful institution wants to make people choose a certain thing, the best strategy is to make it difficult to choose the alternative.
As a high-school drop-out and former hippie - there was a time in the 50s to 70s where the ideas of changing one’s consciousness was popular and felt to be potentially able to deeply change society. Those aspirations did not manifest themselves - however they did not go away and continue to percolate in cultural consciousness. This is an important weak signal of another potential source of change as well as a new medium of therapeutic treatment - a very good scientific and friendly examination. Worth the read - 3300 words.
Caves all the way down
Do psychedelics give access to a universal, mystical experience of reality, or is that just a culture-bound illusion?
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a psychedelic renaissance. Research into the healing potential of psychedelics has re-started at prestigious universities such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Imperial College London, and is making rock stars out of the scientists carrying it out. Their findings are being reported with joy and exultation by mainstream media – on CNN, the BBC, even the Daily Mail. Respectable publishers such as Penguin are behind psychedelics bestsellers such as Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind (2018), which was reviewed enthusiastically across the political spectrum. Silicon Valley billionaires are putting their blockchain millions into funding psychedelics research, and corporates are preparing for a juicy new market. The counterculture has gone mainstream. Turn on, tune in, sell out.
The renaissance involves the resurrection of many ideas from the first ‘summer of love’ in 1967, in particular, the mystical theory of psychedelics. This idea was introduced by Aldous Huxley in his classic The Doors of Perception (1954). Having studied mystical experiences for more than a decade without really having one, Huxley took mescaline, and felt that he’d finally been let into the mystics’ club. Other 1960s gurus such as Alan Watts, Ram Dass and Huston Smith were also convinced that psychedelics led to genuine mystical experiences, and would be a catalyst for Western culture’s spiritual awakening.
The mystical theory of psychedelics has five key tenets. The first is that psychedelics lead to a mystical experience of unitive, non-dual consciousness, in which all is one, you are united with It, God, the Tao, Brahman, etc. This experience is timeless, ineffable, joyful and noetic (you know that it is true).
On the other hand - there is an increasing reliance on external forms of experience management - sometimes for very real needs - but sometimes - treatments are more profitable than cures. This may be very important as we advance into the blended world of digital enhancements.
As a sociologist, I am concerned about the formation of new pharmaceutical persons who are digitally enhanced to be compliant with the profit motives of corporations and the directives of health providers and drug companies. While all sorts of technologies monitor patients’ bodies, this is the first pharmaceutical to do so.
Digital mental health drug raises troubling questions
Moments after Neo eats the red pill in “The Matrix,” he touches a liquefied mirror that takes over his skin, penetrating the innards of his body with computer code. When I first learned about the controversial new digital drug Abilify MyCite, I thought of this famous scene and wondered what kinds of people were being remade through this new biotechnology.
Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and Proteus Digital Health won Food and Drug Administration approval to sell Abilify MyCite in late 2017. This drug contains a digital sensor embedded within the powerful antipsychotic drug Abilify, the brand name for aripiprazole, which is used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. The goal of the digital sensor is for doctors to monitor their patients’ intake of Abilify MyCite remotely and ensure that the patient is adhering to the correct drug dose and timing.
Pills with embedded sensors mark a new era in digital health and, I believe, herald the arrival of a new kind of digital cyborg identity, which sociologist Deborah Lupton defines as “the body that is enhanced, augmented or in other ways configured by its use of digital media technologies.” Drugs are cybernetic technologies in that we absorb pharmaceuticals through metabolic processes that biochemically recode our brains and bodies.
The magical illusions of movies are evolving - more magic realism. The short video and other images illustrate the new capacity very clearly.
Unreal Powers On-the-Fly Compositing with Handheld Camera
At NAB 2018 in Las Vegas, AMD partnered with ARwall to showcase a new use for real-time rendering in virtual production: an augmented reality wall that responds to changes in camera perspective, thus eliminating the need for compositing green screen footage with rendered CG in post-production. The ARwall Effects (ARFX) System, running on AMD hardware, was on display for all NAB participants to demo.
With the ARFX System, real-time images, computed with Unreal Engine, are displayed on a screen large enough to serve as a scene’s backdrop, and the images update in real time in response to the camera’s movement. When live actors stand in front of the wall, the result is an instantly “composited” shot — a real-time 3D virtual set extension.
This is an important signal of the emerging field of lab grown organs.
After 15 years of trying, scientists successfully transplanted lab-grown lungs into pigs
internist Joan Nichols and her colleagues at the University of Texas Medical Branch have spent years finding ways to engineer a lung from scratch in the laboratory, using donated cells. Theoretically, these lungs could be custom-built for each patient, solving both wait-time and compatibility problems. In early trials, though, these lungs have failed to keep donee animals alive for more than a few hours; the engineered organs couldn’t replicate the complexity of the blood vessels that enable the transfer oxygen to the blood stream. Until now.
On Wednesday, Aug. 1, Nichols and her team published (paywall) work in Science Translational Medicine showing that lungs created from pigs could be successfully transplanted into the animals for long periods of time. And it appeared that the engineered lungs were successfully providing oxygen to their blood, and were correctly growing the network of tiny blood vessels in the organ tissue.
This is a must view 60 min video that provides an excellent summary of the state of our knowledge of our microbiome - and the microbiome’s impact on our physical and mental health. There is a fascinating section relating the ‘obesity’ epidemic with the spread of antibiotic - as a means of changing our microbiome. For some people it is better to eat a bowl of ice cream than a bowl of rice!!!! Also there is research suggesting that particular microbiomes can be related to neurological diseases. We don’t have a single microbiome - rather we have archipelagos of microbiomes - the domestication of DNA isn’t only about manipulating our DNA - but also about understanding the depth of our ecological evolution.
Follow Your Gut: Microbiomes and Aging with Rob Knight - Research on Aging
Rob Knight explores the unseen microbial world that exists literally right under our noses -- and everywhere else on (and in) our bodies. He discusses the important influence the microbiome may have on the aging process and many end-of-life diseases.
Another very fascinating signal of our growing understanding of how ecologies work - in this case it is communication among bacteria - but the findings have significant implications for our understanding of the role of the individual and the collective - how cooperation is fundamental to evolution of fitness.
In a community of bacteria, signals pass from cell to cell in a connected path over a distance of hundreds of cells. Using fluorescence microscopes, the researchers were able to track individual cells that were "firing" (transmitting a signal). The scientists found that the fraction of firing cells and their distribution in space precisely matched theoretical predictions of the onset of percolation. In other words, the bacterial community had a fraction of firing cells that was precisely at the tipping point between having no connectivity and full connectivity among cells, also known as a critical phase transition point.
Bacterial communities use sophisticated strategy to communicate over long distances
Clusters of bacteria employ the same 'percolation' method we use to brew coffee
It's the way we end up with a fresh cup of coffee from a clump of beans. It's how ocean oil rigs extract petroleum from dense rock formations beneath the seafloor. It even helps explain how forest fires spread.
A theory known as "percolation" is now helping microbiologists at the University of California San Diego explain how communities of bacteria can effectively relay signals across long distances. Once regarded as a simple cluster of microorganisms, communities of bacteria--also called "biofilms"--have been found to utilize ion channels for electrochemical communication that helps the community thrive and survive threats, such as chemical attacks from antibiotics.
The findings, led by Joseph Larkin and senior author Gürol Süel of UC San Diego, are published July 25 in the journal Cell Systems.
Biofilm communities inhabit locations all around us, from soil to drain pipes to the surface of our teeth. Cells at the edge of these communities tend to grow more robustly than their interior counterparts because they have access to more nutrients. To keep this edge growth in check and ensure the entire community is fit and balanced, the "hungry" members of the biofilm interior send electrochemical signals to members at the exterior. These signals halt consumption at the edge, allowing nutrients to pass through to the interior cells to avoid starvation.
"This keeps the interior fed well enough and if a chemical attack comes and takes out some of the exterior cells, then the protected interior is able to continue and the whole population can survive," said Larkin, a UC San Diego Biological Sciences postdoctoral scholar. "It is essential that the electrochemical signal be consistently transmitted all the way to the biofilm edge because that is the place where the growth must be stopped for the community to reap the most benefit from signaling."
Mass producing biology science research is here and this is one good signal of it’s potential.
“This is a new ‘secret weapon’ in our fight against disease,’ said Freedman, who is a scientist at the UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, as well as at the Kidney Research Institute, a collaboration between the Northwest Kidney Centers and UW Medicine.
Robots Grow Mini-Organs From Human Stem Cells
An automated system that uses robots has been designed to rapidly produce human mini-organs derived from stem cells. Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle developed the new system.
The advance promises to greatly expand the use of mini-organs in basic research and drug discovery, according to Benjamin Freedman, assistant professor of medicine, Division of Nephrology, at the UW School of Medicine, who led the research effort.
A report describing the new technique will be published online May 17 in the journal Cell Stem Cell. The lead authors were research scientists Stefan Czerniecki, and Nelly Cruz from the Freedman lab, and Dr. Jennifer Harder, assistant professor of internal medicine, Division of Nephrology at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, where she is a kidney disease specialist.
The traditional way to grow cells for biomedical research, Freeman explained, is to culture them as flat, two-dimensional sheets, which are overly simplistic. In recent years, researchers have been increasingly successful in growing stem cells into more complex, three-dimensional structures called mini-organs or organoids. These resemble rudimentary organs and in many ways behave similarly. While these properties make organoids ideal for biomedical research, they also pose a challenge for mass production. The ability to mass produce organoids is the most exciting potential applications of the new robotic technology, according to the developers.
More development in the domain of precise imaging - as these capacity become widely accessible look for a phase transition is what we know.
"The entire fly brain has never been imaged before at this resolution that lets you see connections between neurons," he says. That detail is key for mapping out the brain's circuitry—the precise webs of neuronal connections that underpin specific fly behaviors.
Complete fly brain imaged at nanoscale resolution
Two high-speed electron microscopes. 7,062 brain slices. 21 million images.
For a team of scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, these numbers add up to a technical first: a high-resolution digital snapshot of the adult fruit fly brain.
Researchers can now trace the path of any one neuron to any other neuron throughout the whole brain, says neuroscientist Davi Bock, a group leader at Janelia who reported the work along with his colleagues on July 19, 2018, in the journal Cell.
"The entire fly brain has never been imaged before at this resolution that lets you see connections between neurons," he says. That detail is key for mapping out the brain's circuitry—the precise webs of neuronal connections that underpin specific fly behaviors.
This is another signal of the emerging diversity in computational paradigms.
Researchers move closer to completely optical artificial neural network
Researchers have shown that it is possible to train artificial neural networks directly on an optical chip. The significant breakthrough demonstrates that an optical circuit can perform a critical function of an electronics-based artificial neural network and could lead to less expensive, faster and more energy efficient ways to perform complex tasks such as speech or image recognition.
"Using an optical chip to perform neural network computations more efficiently than is possible with digital computers could allow more complex problems to be solved," said research team leader Shanhui Fan of Stanford University. "This would enhance the capability of artificial neural networks to perform tasks required for self-driving cars or to formulate an appropriate response to a spoken question, for example. It could also improve our lives in ways we can't imagine now."
An artificial neural network is a type of artificial intelligence that uses connected units to process information in a manner similar to the way the brain processes information. Using these networks to perform a complex task, for instance voice recognition, requires the critical step of training the algorithms to categorize inputs, such as different words.
This is very interesting signal - if it can be scaled in a relatively cost-effective way.
The ability to power a home with an order of magnitude smaller panel - is worth watching
Breakthrough could triple the energy collected by solar to 60% efficiency
Current solar cells are able to convert into electricity around 20% of the energy received from the Sun, but a new technique has the potential to convert around 60% of it by funneling the energy more efficiently.
UK researchers can now ‘funnel’ electrical charge onto a chip. Using the atomically thin semiconductor hafnium disulphide (HfS2), which is oxidized with a high-intensity UV laser, the team were able to engineer an electric field that funnels electrical charges to a specific area of the chip, where they can be more easily extracted.
This method has the potential to harvest three times the energy compared with traditional systems. The researchers believe their breakthrough could result in solar panels, no bigger than a book, producing enough energy to power a family-sized house.
Previously the group created the best transparent conducting material.
Here’s a very good signal for what can address near future security concerns for individuals and especially organizations.
Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity.
Security Keys are inexpensive USB-based devices that offer an alternative approach to two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires the user to log in to a Web site using something they know (the password) and something they have (e.g., a mobile device).
A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google.
... a Security Key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB device and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.
Remember the hype about ‘smart dust’ about a decade ago? The digital environment is getting smaller, larger, ubiquitous - where will it be in the next decade?
A new kind of spray is loaded with microscopic electronic sensors
The microchip-loaded aerosol could be used to track environmental and health hazards
Talk about cloud-connected devices.
Using tiny 2-D materials, researchers have built microscopic chemical sensors that can be sprayed in an aerosol mist. Spritzes of such minuscule electronic chips, described online July 23 in Nature Nanotechnology, could one day help monitor environmental pollution or diagnose diseases.
Each sensor comprises a polymer chip about 1 micrometer thick and 100 micrometers across (about as wide as a human hair) overlaid with a circuit made with atomically thin semiconducting materials (SN Online: 2/13/18). This superflat circuit includes a photodiode, which converts ambient light into electric current, and a chemical detector. This chemical detector is composed of a 2-D material that conducts electric current more easily if the material binds with a specific chemical in its environment.
Researchers can choose from a vast menu of 2-D materials to fashion detectors that are sensitive to different chemicals, says study coauthor Volodymyr Koman, a chemical engineer at MIT (SN Online: 1/17/18). In lab experiments, Koman and colleagues created a sensor spray that detected toxic ammonia vapor inside a sealed section of piping, as well as a spray that ID’d soot particles sprinkled across a flat surface.
This is a very interesting signal of emerging technology for creative and interactive work. The 3 min video illustrates the tech very well.
The Holographic Display Of The Future Is Here
The holographic display of the future is here and you can have one on your desk for under $600.
Ever since I saw Princess Leia appealing to Obi Wan that he was her only hope when I was 11, I’ve wanted a holographic display. Movies like Minority Report and Back to the Future II (do you remember the shark hologram that ate Marty?) have consumed thousands of people’s lives over the past few decades. But until now, no one has been able to make a scalable device that would let groups of people, unaided by a VR or AR headset, see and touch a living and moving 3D world.
That’s changing today with the launch of the Looking Glass, a new type of interface that achieves that dream of the hologram we’ve been promised for so long. The Looking Glass is technically a lightfield and volumetric display hybrid, but that’s pretty nerdy-sounding. I like to just call it a holographic display.
It’s a technology at the Apple II stage, designed for the creators and hackers of the world — specifically 3D creators in this case. If you’ve ever played with a MakerBot or Form 2, have a Structure sensor in your backpack, know what volumetric video is, or have 3D creation programs like Maya, Unity, or Blender on your computer, then you should get a Looking Glass. You can holographically preview 3D prints before you print them, experiment with volumetric video recording and playback, or create entirely new and weird applications in Unity that can live inside of the Looking Glass. And when I say weird I mean it — the founders Shawn and Alex put a 3D scan of me inside and gave me some new dance moves.
The trajectory toward fully renewable and near-zero-marginal cost energy continues to accelerated as well as produce powerful ideas to energize our future. This is a longish article with some nice photos.
The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery
Hoover Dam was a public works project likened to the pyramids. Now, after channeling a river, what if it could tap the power of the sun and wind?
Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel — to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century.
Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, an original operator of the dam when it was erected in the 1930s, wants to equip it with a $3 billion pipeline and a pump station powered by solar and wind energy. The pump station, downstream, would help regulate the water flow through the dam’s generators, sending water back to the top to help manage electricity at times of peak demand.
The net result would be a kind of energy storage — performing much the same function as the giant lithium-ion batteries being developed to absorb and release power.
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