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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How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the 22nd century. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the 22nd century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them and navigate the maze of life?
Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans have never been able to predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.
A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of human society were not going to change. If you lived in China in 1018, you knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans might invade from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be about 40, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.
In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain-computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.
Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind
‘I think, therefore I am,’ the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes proclaimed as a first truth. That truth was rediscovered in 1887 by Helen Keller, a deaf and blind girl, then seven years of age: ‘I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no world … When I learned the meaning of “I” and “me” and found that I was something,’ she later explained, ‘I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me.’ As both these pioneers knew, a fundamental part of conscious experience is ‘inner speech’ – the experience of verbal thought, expressed in one’s ‘inner voice’. Your inner voice is you.
That voice isn’t the sound of anything. It’s not even physical – we can’t observe it or measure it in any direct way. If it’s not physical, then we can arguably only attempt to study it by contemplation or introspection; students of the inner voice are ‘thinking about thinking’, an act that feels vague. William James, the 19th-century philosopher who is often touted as the originator of American psychology, compared the act to ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’.
Yet through new methods of experimentation in the last few decades, the nature of inner speech is finally being revealed. In one set of studies, scans are allowing researchers to study the brain regions linked with inner speech. In other studies, researchers are investigating links between internal and external speech – that which we say aloud.
The inner voice
Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.
I know many people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them.
That's the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love is that you can't buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love. But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.
So let me get this straight: The most important lesson and "the ultimate test" of a life well-lived has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the most powerful emotion a human being can feel: love.
Warren Buffett Says Your Greatest Measure of Success at the End of Your Life Comes Down to 1 Word
An interesting 15 min TED Talks on the possibilities of AI - unleashing the human spirit from routine work and enabling a focus for humans to pursue 'labors of love'.
How AI can save our humanity
AI is massively transforming our world, but there's one thing it cannot do: love. In a visionary talk, computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee details how the US and China are driving a deep learning revolution -- and shares a blueprint for how humans can thrive in the age of AI by harnessing compassion and creativity. "AI is serendipity," Lee says. "It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human."
Also here he is talking with Peter Diamandis
Kai-Fu Lee + Future of AI
In this webinar, Peter speaks with Kai-Fu Lee - One of the world's most respected experts on AI. The discussion covers how Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the world as we know it. Topics include - How AI will transform every major industry and impact our lives, and if technology is killing jobs, and robot and human co-existence.
This is a great signal of how humans augmented with AI are better then each by themselves.
“It went really well,” says Matthew Lungren, a pediatric radiologist at Stanford University Medical School, coauthor on the paper and one of the eight participants. “Before, we had to show [an X-ray] to multiple people separately and then figure out statistical ways to bring their answers to one consensus. This is a much more efficient and, frankly, more evidence-based way to do that.”
AI-Human “Hive Mind” Diagnoses Pneumonia
A small group of doctors moderated by AI algorithms made a more accurate diagnosis than individual physicians or AI alone
First, it correctly predicted the top four finishers at the Kentucky Derby. Then, it was better at picking Academy Award winners than professional movie critics—three years in a row. The cherry on top was when it prophesied that the Chicago Cubs would end a 108-year dry spell by winning the 2016 World Series—four months before the Cubs were even in the playoffs. (They did.)
Now, this AI-powered predictive technology is turning its attention to an area where it could do some real good—diagnosing medical conditions.
In a study presented on Monday at the SIIM Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging in San Francisco, Stanford University doctors showed that eight radiologists interacting through Unanimous AI’s “swarm intelligence” technology were better at diagnosing pneumonia from chest X-rays than individual doctors or a machine-learning program alone.
It was a small study, but the findings suggest that instead of replacing doctors, AI algorithms might work best alongside them in health care.
The advent of AI and robotics may eliminate many types of work - but it may also enable many to be able to work at jobs they weren’t previously able to do.
“I want to create a world in which people who can’t move their bodies can work too,” said Kentaro Yoshifuji, chief executive officer of Ory Lab. Inc., the developer of the robots.
Cafe utilizing robot waiters remotely controlled by disabled to open in Tokyo
A cafe will open in Tokyo’s Akasaka district in November featuring robot waiters remotely controlled from home by people with severe physical disabilities.
The cafe, which will be open on weekdays between Nov. 26 to Dec. 7, will deploy OriHime-D robots controlled by disabled people with conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neuron disease.
The robot waiters, 1.2 meters tall and weighing 20 kg., will transmit video footage and audio via the internet, allowing their controllers to direct them from home via tablets or computers.
At an event marking the OriHime-D’s debut in August, a robot controlled by Nozomi Murata, who suffers from auto-phagic vacuolar myopathy that causes muscle weakness, asked a family if they would like some chocolate.
This is really a must view and read - some very interesting visuals of the system in action and a discussion of China’s Social Credit system from the point of view of two people. It seems to me that some form of social credit system is inevitable - the question is - will it support participatory democracy and egalitarian society or will it be a choice architecture for totalitarian surveillance society.
Leave no dark corner
China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. For some, “social credit” will bring privileges — for others, punishment.
What may sound like a dystopian vision of the future is already happening in China. And it’s making and breaking lives.
The Communist Party calls it “social credit” and says it will be fully operational by 2020. Within years, an official Party outline claims, it will “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.
Social credit is like a personal scorecard for each of China’s 1.4 billion citizens.
In one pilot program already in place, each citizen has been assigned a score out of 800. In other programs it’s 900.
Those, with top “citizen scores” get VIP treatment at hotels and airports, cheap loans and a fast track to the best universities and jobs.
Those at the bottom can be locked out of society and banned from travel, or barred from getting credit or government jobs.
The system will be enforced by the latest in high-tech surveillance systems as China pushes to become the world leader in artificial intelligence.
Surveillance cameras will be equipped with facial recognition, body scanning and geo-tracking to cast a constant gaze over every citizen.
A possible alternate view is a fragmentation of governance though emerging forms of criminal and other conflict.
The Coming Crime Wars
Future conflicts will mostly be waged by drug cartels, mafia groups, gangs, and terrorists. It is time to rethink our rules of engagement.
Wars are on the rebound. There are twice as many civil conflicts today, for example, as there were in 2001. And the number of nonstate armed groups participating in the bloodshed is multiplying. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), roughly half of today’s wars involve between three and nine opposing groups. Just over 20 percent involve more than 10 competing blocs. In a handful, including ongoing conflicts in Libya and Syria, hundreds of armed groups vie for control. For the most part, these warring factions are themselves highly fragmented, and today’s warriors are just as likely to be affiliated with drug cartels, mafia groups, criminal gangs, militias, and terrorist organizations as with armies or organized rebel factions.
This cocktail of criminality, extremism, and insurrection is sowing havoc in parts of Central and South America, sub-Saharan and North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Not surprisingly, these conflicts are defying conventional international responses, such as formal cease-fire negotiations, peace agreements, and peacekeeping operations. And diplomats, military planners, and relief workers are unsure how best to respond. The problem, it seems, is that while the insecurity generated by these new wars is real, there is still no common lexicon or legal framework for dealing with them. Situated at the intersection of organized crime and outright war, they raise tricky legal, operational, and ethical questions about how to intervene, who should be involved, and the requisite safeguards to protect civilians.
The Internet is in crisis - slowly becoming enclosed by corporate privateers and all of us should be considering transforming the Internet into public infrastructure. That said - Google is working hard to bring the Internet to areas where for-profit enterprises and competition among incumbents haven’t delivered.
"Instead of one balloon utilizing one ground-based connection point to serve users, we can use that same terrestrial access point to activate a network of multiple balloons, all of which can connect people below," explained Loon's head of engineering, Salvatore Candido.
Alphabet's Loon balloons just beamed the internet across 1000km
Loon engineers can now boost internet coverage using a web of balloons connected to a single ground access point.
Loon, the former Google X project and now independent Alphabet company, has developed an antenna system that could create a far greater ground coverage than previously possible.
According to Loon each of its balloons, from 20km above earth, can cover an area of about 80km in diameter and serve about 1,000 users on the ground using an LTE connection. However, Loon balloons need a backhaul connection from an access point on the ground and without that connection the balloons can't provide connectivity to users on the ground.
But on Tuesday the company revealed it had sent data across a network of seven balloons from a single ground connection spanning a distance of 1,000 kilometers, or about 621 miles.
It also achieved its longest ever point-to-point link, sending data between two balloons over a distance of 600km.
A good signal confirming McLuhan’s notion that the earth is now within a human-built environment - as as such is now a work of art - thus we must accept the challenge of becoming worthy artists. But we may also have to become improv artists in order to step-up to our response-ability to the continual challenge of complex change
NASA probe will track melting polar ice in unprecedented detail
The Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite can measure changes in ice thickness to within half a centimetre.
NASA is set to launch its most advanced global ice-monitoring satellite, which has been in the works for nearly a decade.
The agency plans to send the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) into space on 15 September atop a Delta 2 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will focus on measuring changes in ice thickness in places including Greenland and Antarctica, but it will also collect data on forest growth and cloud height.
The satellite is designed to track seasonal and annual changes in ice thickness to within half a centimetre — a resolution greater than any previous elevation-monitoring satellite. The US$1-billion spacecraft will orbit 500 kilometres above Earth’s surface, and cover the globe every three months for the next three years.
Another signal about managing real-time information for complex systems bringing food security (on many levels) to bear on the entire food web.
How Blockchain Technology Could Track and Trace Food From Farm to Fork
IEEE standards working group is using the distributed ledger to improve and secure the supply chain
During a foodborne-illness outbreak, identifying the root cause of the contamination can be difficult. The food supply chain includes a lot of players—farmers, distributors, processors, packagers, and grocers—often from different regions or even multiple countries. Each business in the chain has its own private record-keeping system; some still use pen and paper.
An E. coli outbreak in the United States that began in April—the largest in more than a decade—came from tainted romaine lettuce that sickened more than 200 people in 36 states. It took government investigators two months to track the lettuce back to a grower in Yuma, Ariz.
Almost one in every 10 people around the world get a foodborne disease each year. Of those 600 million people, 420,000 die as a result, according to the World Health Organization.
IEEE and several other organizations are exploring how blockchain technology could track the source of an outbreak and help contain it. Rather than each company storing information in its own system, the businesses would contribute encrypted blocks of data to a distributed ledger that could be monitored and verified. Through data provenance, or proof of ownership, blockchain provides the ability to isolate where in the supply chain a problem occurred. This could lead to a more targeted recall process and create less risk for consumers and other stakeholders.
Bruce Sterling wrote ‘Shaping Things’ in which he coined the terms ‘Spime’ - future-manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.
The concept of spime an object with a data tracker - like a near-field sensor or RFID chip - would enable people to track the life cycle of their goods - from factory to recycling. Perhaps we need to embrace such a concept - so that we don’t fall prey to artificially created scarcities. Then again maybe we will eventually have custom made products.
Why fashion brands destroy billions’ worth of their own merchandise every year
An expert explains why Burberry, H&M, Nike, and Urban Outfitters destroy unsold merch — and what it says about consumer culture.
The British luxury brand Burberry brought in $3.6 billion in revenue last year — and destroyed $36.8 million worth of its own merchandise.
In July 2018, the brand admitted in its annual report that demolishing goods was just part of its strategy to preserve its reputation of exclusivity.
Shoppers did not react well to this news. People vowed to boycott Burberry over its wastefulness, while members of Parliament demanded the British government crack down on the practice. The outrage worked: Burberry announced two weeks ago it would no longer destroy its excess product, effective immediately.
Yet Burberry is hardly the only company to use this practice; it runs high to low, from Louis Vuitton to Nike. Brands destroy product as a way to maintain exclusivity through scarcity, but the precise details of who is doing it and why are not commonly publicized. Every now and then, though, bits of information will trickle out. Last year, for example, a Danish TV station revealed that the fast-fashion retailer H&M had burned 60 tons of new and unsold clothes since 2013.
A signal of how to use AI on the big data we’ve been accumulating for decades.
Artificial intelligence helps track down mysterious cosmic radio bursts
Breakthrough Listen researchers used artificial intelligence to search through radio signals recorded from a fast radio burst, capturing many more than humans could. In fact, they now used machine learning to discover 72 new fast radio bursts from a mysterious source some 3 billion light years from Earth.
“This work is exciting not just because it helps us understand the dynamic behavior of fast radio bursts in more detail, but also because of the promise it shows for using machine learning to detect signals missed by classical algorithms,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen, the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe.
For the ‘anything that can be automated - will be’ file. The question remains on not the speed of delivery but the quality of the coffee or other drinks.
Robotic Coffee Shop Cafe X Gets You Coffee in Under 30 Seconds
The robot invasion of the food and beverage industry is well underway from bots making pizza and ice cream to android waiters delivering your food. The next target seems to be your daily coffee.
San Francisco’s Café X is a robotic coffee shop that hopes to revolutionize and speed up the coffee process by employing an army of robots. It’s not really an army, more of an assembly line that quickly puts together your coffee. We emphasize quickly as they make your drink in under 30 seconds. No need to worry about getting the coffee exactly how you asked, the robotic precision gets your order right every time.
Robotics and AI are best seen as human enhancers (not including what will be possible in the transition enabled by domesticating DNA).
“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” said Justin Sanchez, who directs DARPA’s biological technology office, at the Agency’s 60th-anniversary event in Maryland.
“The signals from those aircraft can be delivered directly back to the brain so that the brain of that user [or pilot] can also perceive the environment,” said Sanchez. “It’s taken a number of years to try and figure this out.”
It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm
DARPA’s new research in brain-computer interfaces is allowing a pilot to control multiple simulated aircraft at once.
A person with a brain chip can now pilot a swarm of drones — or even advanced fighter jets, thanks to research funded by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
The work builds on research from 2015, which allowed a paralyzed woman to steer a virtual F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with only a small, surgically-implantable microchip. On Thursday, agency officials announced that they had scaled up the technology to allow a user to steer multiple jets at once.
More importantly, DARPA was able to improve the interaction between pilot and the simulated jet to allow the operator, a paralyzed man named Nathan, to not just send but receive signals from the craft.
In essence, it’s the difference between having a brain joystick and having a real telepathic conversation with multiple jets or drones about what’s going on, what threats might be flying over the horizon, and what to do about them. “We’ve scaled it to three [aircraft], and have full sensory [signals] coming back. So you can have those other planes out in the environment and then be detecting something and send that signal back into the brain,” said Sanchez.
The advance in domesticating DNA are bringing regular new insights to all domains of biology and even to the biocultural co-creating of beings - beyond the traditional nature-nurture polarity.
The very different individuals that arise from hive members’ identical genomes have made the honeybee “one of the most well-known and striking examples of phenotypic plasticity,” says Gene Robinson, a genomicist at the University of Illinois who was not involved in the study. Bees are a model, he says, for “understanding how environmental signals are transduced and then trigger these alternate developmental pathways.”
As Bees Specialize, So Does Their DNA Packaging
A study of chemical tags on histone proteins hints at how the same genome can yield very different animals.
The bee genome has a superpower. Not only can the exact same DNA sequence yield three types of insect—worker, drone, and queen—that look and behave very differently, but, in the case of workers, it dictates different sets of behaviors.
A key to the genome’s versatility seems to be epigenetic changes—chemical tags that, when added or removed from DNA, change the activity of a gene. Previous studies had shown distinct patterns of tags known as methyl groups on the genomes of bees performing different roles within their hives.
In a study published in Genome Research last month, Paul Hurd, an epigenetics researcher at Queen Mary University of London, and colleagues looked at a different type of epigenetic change: histone modifications. DNA wraps around histones, and chemical modifications to these proteins are thought to affect how available genes are to be transcribed.
And one more interesting signal about the rise of urban wildlife.
Urban bees are living healthier lives than rural bees
Bumblebees are making it in the city.
Research published in the Royal Society B found that bumblebees living in urban areas experience healthier lives than their counterparts in rural habitats. Their colonies are larger, better fed, and less prone to disease. Urban colonies also survive longer than their country cousins.
Researchers raised colonies of wild-caught bumblebees in agricultural and urban environments. Every week, the researchers would count the bee population in each hive three times.
