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
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
The Question —What do you call the gooey or dry matter that collects in the corners of your eyes, especially while you are sleeping?—has over 800 distinct families of responses. The most common: (eye) boogers, sleep, (eye) gunk, and (eye) crusties.
Why the “y’all” line divides the US north from south, not east from west
reframe the very idea of disability:
Fitting and misfitting denote an encounter in which two things come together in either harmony or disjunction. When the shape and substance of these two things correspond in their union, they fit. A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole. The problem with a misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward attempt to fit them together.
At this moment, I would argue, many of our encounters with technology make us feel like misfits in just this way. Particularly for those of us who grew up, went to school, or first learned to use our minds in a pre-internet world, the cognitive impact of daily technology use can feel tangible, uncomfortable, and overwhelming. Our minds are changing in ways that make us feel alien to ourselves—or they’re not changing, and we feel increasingly out of step with our digital surroundings.
the temporal environment of accelerated work schedules makes formerly acceptable levels of production deficient, rendering those who cannot maintain the new speed of production debilitated. The speedup in production in the last two decades has created a whole new sector of the debilitated, if not the fully disabled: those with deficits of attention, flexibility, or sociability.
If the nature and pace of tech change are pushing more and more of us out of the neurotypical camp and into the realm of what was previously considered neuroatypical, we must remember that this is a still a new world for us, both individually and collectively. Our culture is just beginning to develop not only the technologies but the practices that will make the digital world inhabitable, and our schools and workplaces have barely begun to accommodate the changing nature of human thought and interaction.
Meanwhile, the sheer unfamiliarity of the situation leads us to overestimate its impact and disadvantages for reasons that are once again linked to our fears about disability.
To Cope with Digital Distraction, Embrace Digital Neurodiversity
the deluge of stimuli competing to grab our attention almost certainly inclines us towards instant gratification. This crowds out space for the exploratory mode of attention. When I get to the bus stop now, I automatically reach for my phone, rather than stare into space; my fellow commuters (when I do raise my head) seem to be doing the same thing. Second, on top of this, an attention-economy narrative, for all its usefulness, reinforces a conception of attention-as-a-resource, rather than attention-as-experience.
At one extreme, we can imagine a scenario in which we gradually lose touch with attention-as-experience altogether. Attention becomes solely a thing to utilise, a means of getting things done, something from which value can be extracted. This scenario entails, perhaps, the sort of disembodied, inhuman dystopia that the American cultural critic Jonathan Beller talks about in his essay ‘Paying Attention’ (2006) when he describes a world in which ‘humanity has become its own ghost’.
While such an outcome is extreme, there are hints that modern psyches are moving in this direction. One study found, for instance, that most men chose to receive an electric shock rather than be left to their own devices: when, in other words, they had no entertainment on which to fix their attention. Or take the emergence of the ‘quantified self’ movement, in which ‘life loggers’ use smart devices to track thousands of daily movements and behaviours in order to (supposedly) amass self-knowledge. If one adopts such a mindset, data is the only valid input. One’s direct, felt experience of the world simply does not compute.
Thankfully, no society has reached this dystopia – yet. But faced with a stream of claims on our attention, and narratives that invite us to treat it as a resource to mine, we need to work to keep our instrumental and exploratory modes of attention in balance. How might we do this?
To begin with, when we talk about attention, we need to defend framing it as an experience, not a mere means or implement to some other end.
there can be beauty and wonder in the unadorned act of ‘experiencing’. This might be what Weil had in mind when she said that the correct application of attention can lead us to ‘the gateway to eternity … The infinite in an instant.’
Attention is not a resource but a way of being alive to the world
That’s right. We’ve gone from it costing almost $3 billion for a clinically unacceptable genome in 2004 to less than $1,000 in 2015 for a high-quality genome that precisely analyzes the DNA you inherited from your mother and father. I just started a company called Nebula Genomics, whose intention is to make it zero dollars or less. At this point everyone should be getting paid to sequence their genomes. Because the system could save something on the order of a million dollars every time we save a single child from a rare genetic disease. That million dollars should then be spread out to all people who participated, including the 95 percent of people who didn’t get any bad news.
...One implication is that 25, 50, 250 years from now, we become a kind of clinical-trial society in which empirically driven decisions are constantly popping up. But by clinical-trial society, I mean all sorts of questions, because the information net becomes so rich — and the capacity to understand or deconvolute that information, because of computational power and because of A.I.-dependent algorithms, becomes so rich — that we begin to subject aspects of human behavior, human selves, that were previously considered outside the realm of assessment to a kind of deeper clinical assessment.
FROM GENE EDITING TO A.I. HOW WILL TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORM HUMANITY?
The digital environment is fundamentally a ‘Stack’ that totally dependent on one layer - the capacity to give every node an address. This was key to the need to develop a new standard - IPV6 which has the capacity to give every single atom in the universe a unique address (even more). The recent midterm election in the US used this as a means of voter suppression since many indigenous people on reserves do not have ‘street addresses’. I predict that the universe of knowledge will soon require every document to have it’s own IP address.
“As you move into a more global economy and more people order and get goods delivered at a distance, you need a more specific address than ‘the house with the red door across from the cathedral,’” says Merry Law, the president of a company that provides international addressing information.
Four billion people lack an address. Machine learning could change that.
Researchers at MIT and Facebook are proposing a new way to generate street addresses by extracting roads from satellite images.
An estimated 4 billion people in the world lack a physical address. Without one, residents lose access to important services like package deliveries, medical care, and disaster relief, as well as the ability to register to vote or obtain a driver’s license. Cities also have trouble planning new infrastructure, such as schools, water pipes, and electricity lines. (And this isn’t just in the developing world.)
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Facebook are now proposing a new way to address the unaddressed: with machine learning.
The team first trained a deep-learning algorithm to extract the road pixels from satellite images. Another algorithm connected the pixels together into a road network. The system analyzed the density and shape of the roads to segment the network into different communities, and the densest cluster was labeled as the city center. The regions around the city center were divided into north, south, east, and west quadrants, and streets were numbered and lettered according to their orientation and distance from the center.
This isn’t the only way to automate the creation of addresses. The organization what3words ( https://what3words.com/ ) generates a unique three-word combination for every 3-by-3-meter square on a global grid. The scheme has already been adopted in regions of South Africa, Turkey, and Mongolia by national package delivery services, local hospitals, and regional security teams.
The progress being made by AI seems to continue to accelerate - at least to a certain type of application. This is an interesting signal.
“Those multiplayer games are harder than Go, but not that much higher,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “A group has already beaten the best players at Dota 2, though it was a restricted version of the game; Starcraft may be a little harder. I think both games are within 2 to 3 years of solution.”
Deep Blue was a monster of a machine built solely to play chess, and its 1997 victory over Kasparov was not overwhelming. Today, though, even a smartphone can outplay Magnus Carlsen, the reigning world champion, and do so again and again
DeepMind Achieves Holy Grail: An AI That Can Master Games Like Chess and Go Without Human Help
AlphaZero, a general-purpose game-playing system, quickly taught itself to be the best player ever in Go, chess and Shogi
DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Alphabet, has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance.
The system, called AlphaZero, began its life last year by beating a DeepMind system that had been specialized just for Go. That earlier system had itself made history by beating one of the world’s best Go players, but it needed human help to get through a months-long course of improvement. AlphaZero trained itself—in just 3 days.
The research, published today in the journal Science, was performed by a team led by DeepMind’s David Silver. The paper was accompanied by a commentary by Murray Campbell, an AI researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
“This work has, in effect, closed a multi-decade chapter in AI research,” writes Campbell, who was a member of the team that designed IBM’s Deep Blue, which in 1997 defeated Garry Kasparov, then the world chess champion. “AI researchers need to look to a new generation of games to provide the next set of challenges.”
AlphaZero can crack any game that provides all the information that’s relevant to decision-making; the new generation of games to which Campbell alludes do not. Poker furnishes a good example of such games of “imperfect” information: Players can hold their cards close to their chests. Other examples include many multiplayer games, such as StarCraft II, Dota, and Minecraft. But they may not pose a worthy challenge for long.
Problems in life rarely come with all the information needed for their solution. That’s why an AI that can master any game of imperfect information might find application way beyond gaming, say in financial modeling, even war. A self-driving car equipped with such an AI might finally conquer the roads, producing wild success for whichever company first perfects the idea.
This is more than a weak signal - but still has a lot of uncertainty. It’s important to track as it could enable a significant wave of disruptive technologies.
The record for high-temperature superconductivity has been smashed again
Chemists found a material that can display superconducting behavior at a temperature warmer than it currently is at the North Pole. The work brings room-temperature superconductivity tantalizingly close.
Superconductivity is the weird phenomenon of zero electrical resistance that occurs when some materials are cooled below a critical temperature. The best superconductors have to be cooled with liquid helium or nitrogen to get cold enough (often as low as -250 °C or -480 F) to work. The holy grail for researchers is the idea that a material could be made to superconduct at around 0 °C — so-called "room temperature" superconductivity. If such a thing was ever discovered it would unleash a wide range of new technologies, including super-fast computers and data transfer.
The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or –23 °C.
The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.
This is a very important signal related to how we create social conditions the support wellness. The graphs are worth the view.
Why US life expectancy is falling, in three charts
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released three separate reports today (Nov. 29) on the declining life expectancy of Americans.
Between 2016 and 2017, the average life expectancy of someone born in the US decreased from 78.7 to 78.6 years. Although that may not seem like much, it adds to a more worrying trend: the only other time in US history that death rates have fallen steadily was a century ago, between 1915 and 1918. In that time frame, the US entered World War I, and the Spanish flu pandemic, which would ultimately kill 1 million Americans, began.
“Life expectancy is improving in many places in the world. It shouldn’t be declining in the [US],” Joshua Sharfstein, a physician and dean of the Johns Hopkins school of public health, told the Post. “I think this is a very dismal picture of health in the United States.” In neighboring Canada, for example, life expectancy is 82.3 years, and has been on the rise without any dip since 1992. Mexico’s life expectancy is currently 77.1, but that number has risen every single year since the World Bank began keeping records in 1960.
This is very good news - when it’s ready for primetime.
Australian researchers develop 10-minute cancer test
Researchers in Australia have developed a 10-minute test that can detect the presence of cancer cells anywhere in the human body, according to a newly published study.
The test was developed after researchers from the University of Queensland found that cancer forms a unique DNA structure when placed in water.
The test works by identifying the presence of that structure, a discovery that could help detect cancer in humans far earlier than current methods, according to the paper published in journal Nature Communications.
"Discovering that cancerous DNA molecules formed entirely different 3D nanostructures from normal circulating DNA was a breakthrough that has enabled an entirely new approach to detect cancer non-invasively in any tissue type including blood," Professor Matt Trau said in a statement.
The 10-minute test developed in Australia is yet to be used on humans, and large clinical trials are needed before it can be used on prospective patients. But the signs are positive.
Tests on more than 200 tissue and blood samples detected cancerous cells with 90% accuracy, the researchers said.
It's been used only to detect breast, prostate, bowel and lymphoma cancers, but they're confident the results can be replicated with other types of the disease.
For those you enjoy Yuval Harari - this is a great 40 min video talking about the emerging capacity to ‘hack the human body’ because of the developing digital environment and its atmosphere of data.
Yuval Noah Harari on Impact Theory
Yuval and Tom explore the potential implications of hacking humans, both the benefits and the risks. They also discuss how we can hack ourselves in a positive way.
This is another signal of what could be an emerging idea entangled with a desire for a new and better political-economic paradigm. But maybe it’s a signal of the possibility of another ‘atypical’ president?
I’m running for president because I know that we’re in the third inning of the greatest economic transformation of industry in the world and that our politicians don’t understand it all.
Universal income vs. the robots: Meet the presidential candidate fighting automation
7 questions for Andrew Yang, the 2020 US presidential candidate pushing for basic income.
Andrew Yang announced he is vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination back in February. His mission? Preparing America for automation.
But how is he going to do that? I got the chance to sit down with him at the Work Awesome conference in New York yesterday to ask him about his stances on trucking automation, AI policy, and his favorite topic, universal basic income (UBI).
The accelerating transformation of energy geopolitics continues to produce signals - this article include a 1 min video.
New catalyst material produces abundant cheap hydrogen
QUT chemistry researchers have discovered cheaper and more efficient materials for producing hydrogen for the storage of renewable energy that could replace current water-splitting catalysts.
Professor Anthony O'Mullane said the potential for the chemical storage of renewable energy in the form of hydrogen was being investigated around the world.
Professor O'Mullane said the stored hydrogen could then be used in fuel cells.
"Fuel cells are a mature technology, already being rolled out in many makes of vehicle. They use hydrogen and oxygen as fuels to generate electricity – essentially the opposite of water splitting.
"With a lot of cheaply 'made' hydrogen we can feed fuel cell-generated electricity back into the grid when required during peak demand or power our transportation system and the only thing emitted is water."
Another signal - at least a claim to watch - but whether it is this company or another - the trend is clear and approaching faster than many expect.
Within the next five to seven years, the cost of a battery pack will likely reach $100 a kilowatt hour. Why is that important? Because at that cost, electric vehicles will reach cost and range parity with gasoline cars without subsidies. And you give it another 15 to 20 years and we're likely to see deep penetration of EVs around the world, and with no tailpipe emissions, EVs will reduce air pollution, which is a major problem in many cities around the world. After 100 years of gasoline-based automobiles, this is a tectonic shift.
Chinese Company Says It Will Soon Cross $100 Battery Threshold, Slaying The Gasoline Car
Envision Energy will produce batteries for $100 per kilowatt hour by 2020, the Shanghai company's founder and CEO said at Stanford University, predicting the price will drop to $50 only five years later and end the reign of the internal-combustion engine.
Envision's analysts realized they could achieve these goals after the company purchased Nissan's battery division earlier this year, CEO Lei Zhang said at Stanford University's Global Energy Forum. Stanford just released video of Lei's remarks, which came in response to a slightly more conservative prediction by Stanford's Arun Majumdar.
"I have something to add on to Arun's comment," Lei said. "He mentioned by 2022 we are able to reach $100 per kilowatt hour, but I say we are able to arrive much earlier. By 2020 we are able to deliver the cost of $100 U.S. Just recently we bought a Japanese battery company, so we have very detailed analyzed this trend of cost, so we are able, probably by 2025, to achieve $50 U.S. dollar per kilowatt hour."
An important signal from this summer, but even more relevant in light of the Current Alberta Gov.’s reaction to oil price declines and the planning for future pipelines.
natural gas plants built today could be rendered uncompetitive well before their rated lifespan. They could become “stranded assets,” saddling utility ratepayers and investors with the costs of premature decommissioning
It’s worth noting that batteries have advantages over peakers other than price. They’re faster to build. A natural gas plant takes three to five years, while Elon Musk promised South Australia he would build them the world’s largest battery bank in 100 days or it would be free — and he delivered.
Clean energy is catching up to natural gas
The natural gas “bridge” to sustainability may be shorter than expected.
For around 10 years, the conventional wisdom in the energy sector has been that natural gas is ascendant. Coal is dirty, and it’s getting expensive, but it’s too early to jump all the way to renewable energy. To get from the fossil fuel present to the renewable future, we will need ... a bridge.
Natural gas is meant to be that bridge, a way to reduce our emissions relative to coal while we work on scaling up renewables. (The shift from coal to gas is a big part of why US emissions have declined over the past few years.)
In its role as a bridge, natural gas seems to have a comfortable future. First, it will replace coal and nuclear “baseload” plants, and then, as renewables grow to supply the bulk of power, it will provide flexibility, filling in the gaps where variable renewables (wind and solar) fall short. By playing these multiple roles, natural gas will long outlive coal and prove useful well into the latter half of the 21st century. It will enjoy a long, slow exit.
Or so the story goes.
Around 2015, though, just five years into gas’s rise to power, complications for this narrative began to appear. First, wind and solar costs fell so far, so fast that they are now undercutting the cost of new gas in a growing number of regions. And then batteries — which can “firm up” variable renewables, diminishing the need for natural gas’s flexibility — also started getting cheap faster than anyone expected. It happened so fast that, in certain limited circumstances, solar+storage or wind+storage is already cheaper than new natural gas plants and able to play all the same roles (and more).
The cost of natural gas power is tethered to the commodity price of natural gas, which is inherently volatile. The price of controllable, storable renewable energy is tethered only to technology costs, which are going down, down, down. Recent forecasts suggest that it may be cheaper to build new renewables+storage than to continue operating existing natural gas plants by 2035.
California is only the first US state - but other countries have already smelled the coffee and have legislated what seems like a ‘no-brainer’.
California officially becomes first in nation mandating solar power for new homes
‘Historic undertaking’ expected to boost number of rooftop solar panels across the Golden State.
California officially became the first state in the nation on Wednesday, Dec. 5 to require homes built in 2020 and later be solar powered.
To a smattering of applause, the California Building Standards Commission voted unanimously to add energy standards approved last May by another panel to the state building code.
Two commissioners and several public speakers lauded the new code as “a historic undertaking” and a model for the nation.
“These provisions really are historic and will be a beacon of light for the rest of the country,” said Kent Sasaki, a structural engineer and one of six commissioners voting for the new energy code. “(It’s) the beginning of substantial improvement in how we produce energy and reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.”
The new provisions are expected to dramatically boost the number of rooftop solar panels in the Golden State. Last year, builders took out permits for more than 115,000 new homes — almost half of them for single-family homes.
The vertical farm that has been much discussed as a new agricultural paradigm has a new twist. While not ready for primetime - the article provides a detailed explanation.
Old coal mines can be 'perfect' underground food farms
Abandoned coal mines across the UK could be brought back to life as huge underground farms, according to academics.
Mine shafts and tunnels are seen as "the perfect environment" for growing food such as vegetables and herbs.
The initiative is seen as a way of providing large-scale crop production for a growing global population.
Advocates say subterranean farms could yield up to ten times as much as farms above ground.
President of the World Society of Sustainable Energy Technology, Prof Saffa Riffat, believes the scheme would be a cost-effective way of meeting the growing need for food.
It could also breathe new life into many mines that have been closed since the decline of the UK coal industry in the late 1980s and offer a cheaper alternative to vertical farming in giant greenhouses.
This is a fascinating signal - of how technology enables the ‘extended mind’ and the implications for the future of work, especially if we can also hold in mind (pun intended) how AI can augment our capabilities. There are 5 short video - illustrating this beta test.
Cafe opens in Tokyo staffed by robots controlled by paralyzed people
On 26 November, a ribbon cutting ceremony was held in the Nippon Foundation Building in Akasaka, Tokyo for a very special kind of cafe.
Developed by Ory, a startup that specializes in robotics for disabled people, the OriHime-D is a 120 cm (4-foot) tall robot that can be operated remotely from a paralyzed person’s home. Even if the operator only has control of their eyes, they can command OriHime-D to move, look around, speak with people, and handle objects.
However, as the “beta” in its name suggests, this is a limited run and will only remain open until 7 December.
During this time a staff of ten people, with conditions such as ALS or spinal cord injuries and working from home, are paid 1,000 yen (US$8.80) an hour (a standard wage for part-time work in Japan) to serve up coffee and interact with the clientele. But more importantly than money, these people are also given a newfound independence.
Another important signal in the rise of Robotics and AI.
“Around the world, even the cheapest labor market can’t compete with us,” Tang Xinhong, chairman of Tianyuan, told China Daily last year, referring to the cost of producing each T-shirt, which he expected to be only 33 U.S. cents.
Your Next T-Shirt Will Be Made by a Robot
Georgia Tech spin-off SoftWear Automation is developing ultrafast sewing robots that could upend the clothing industry
Sometime later this year, dozens of robots will spring into action at a new factory in Little Rock, Ark. The plant will not make cars or electronics, nor anything else that robots are already producing these days. Instead it will make T-shirts—lots of T-shirts. When fully operational, these sewing robots will churn them out at a dizzying rate of one every 22 seconds.
For decades, the automation of the sewing of garments has vexed roboticists. Conventional robots excel at manipulating rigid objects but are rather inept at handling soft, flexible materials like fabric. Early attempts to automate sewing included treating pieces of cloth with starch to temporarily make them stiff, allowing a robot to manipulate them as if they were steel sheets. This and other approaches, however, never became commercially viable, mainly because the clothing industry has resisted automation by relying on cheap labor in developing countries.
Now a Georgia Tech spin-off, SoftWear Automation, in Atlanta, claims to have built a practical sewing robot. And it doesn’t need starch. Rather, it’s based on a much higher-tech approach, one that combines machine vision and advanced manipulators. At the Arkansas factory, owned by Tianyuan Garments Co., one of China’s largest apparel manufacturers, SoftWear’s robots, called Sewbots, will equip 21 production lines, designed to make 23 million T-shirts per year for Adidas.
There is no reason that a nation’s cities couldn’t collaborate to form national (or international) open-source foundations that can provide both the hardware clouds and open-source software platforms that would enable every city to enact a ‘costless’ coordination platform to displace the privateering efforts of entities such as Uber, AirBnB, Taskrabbit, and so much more. Each ‘smart city’ could implement a digital infrastructure enabling citizen to self-organize the coordination between those who can offer with those who need.
Uber Is Headed for a Crash
By steamrolling local taxi operations in cities all over the world and cultivating cheerleaders in the business press and among Silicon Valley libertarians, Uber has managed to create an image of inevitability and invincibility. But the company just posted another quarter of jaw-dropping losses — this time over $1 billion, after $4.5 billion of losses in 2017. How much is hype and how much is real?
The notion that Uber, the most highly valued private company in the world, is a textbook “bezzle” — John Kenneth Galbraith’s coinage for an investment swindle where the losses have yet to be recognized — is likely to come as a surprise to its many satisfied customers. But as we’ll explain, relying on the extensive work of transportation expert Hubert Horan, Uber’s investors have been buying your satisfaction in the form of massive subsidies of services. What has made Uber a good deal for users makes it a lousy investment proposition. Uber has kept that recognition at bay via minimal and inconsistent financial disclosures combined with a relentless and so far effective public-relations campaign depicting Uber as following the pattern of digitally based start-ups whose large initial losses transformed into strong profits in a few years.
One more important signal of the emerging technology of drones. If this technology can disrupt current forms of delivery - than militaries have to rethink what the future of other forms of ‘delivery’ is. Do we need to invest in person piloted air-land-sea platforms? Or is the future a vast swarm of diverse drone capabilities? Which will be more economically feasible and provide a capacity for rapid adaptability?
Alphabet’s Wing spinoff is about to launch drone deliveries in Finland
Alphabet’s Wing spinoff is set to launch a drone delivery service in Helsinki, Finland’s capital, in spring next year, the company has announced. It will be its first operation in Europe.
The news: It will just be a small-scale trial, with the drones only able to carry packages weighing up to 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) on a round trip of up to 20 miles. Wing is pitching the drones as an environmentally friendly choice, claiming they have a carbon footprint less than a 20th that of traditional deliveries. Wing graduated from Google’s X division in July to become a separate company, after six years of development.
Drone delivery: Wing is asking Finnish would-be users what they would like to have delivered, with options including medicine, groceries, and lunch. It obviously sees Finland's interesting weather as a good testing ground, too. “If our drones can deliver here, they can deliver anywhere,” Wing says. It has spent the last 18 months trialing drone deliveries in southeastern Australia, which poses fewer challenges in that department.
This is truly an important signal - AI and robotic not only enhance human capability - but providing a new foundation for augmenting the capacity for self-directed enhancement of more lifeforms.
This Plant Is Driving Its Own Robot
A robot that can detect a plant's electrochemical signals goes where the plant wants it to go
Cybernetics usually refers to humans enhancing themselves with robotic parts. Sometimes, we heard about animal-robot cyborgs, or insect-robot cyborgs. It’s not all that often that we hear about plant-robot cyborgs, because what’s a plant going to do with a robot, right? But you could argue that plants have the most to gain from robotic enhancements, because otherwise (with a few totally cool exceptions) plants aren’t capable of mobility or manipulation at all.
It’s straightforward to see how mobility and manipulation could be useful for plants, but the real question is, How do you get a plant to tell its robotic parts what to do? At the MIT Media Lab, Harpreet Sareen is trying to figure this out, and Elowan the mobile cybernetic plant is just the first in “a series of plant-electronic hybrid experiments.”
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