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:
Kairos history is a matter of ideology and values, and there is room for opinion there. You can tell the story from various points of view: rulers versus ruled, men versus women, economics versus culture, technology versus politics, western chauvinist versus post-colonial, whig versus communist, cultural-marxist versus neoreactionary. Kairos history is a dissensus, an inefficient marketplace of competing stories in a slowly evolving equilibrium, rather than a consensus. It is a dialectical war over what chronological history means.
Aionic history though, is a matter of texture and aesthetics. It is under the fray rather than above it. It is the canvas rather than painting. It is neither about consensus regarding facts, nor about dissensus over meanings. It is almost entirely a matter of imaginative invention and perspective taking, with the design objective being to maximize freedom for the living in relation to the dead and the unborn. A way of feeling the plot of the story that generates the most energy for you in particular. The right Aionic periodization is the one that unleashes the most missionary energy for you.
Douglas Adams, for example, had an excellent three-age Aionic periodization of history (note the interrogative focus on the quality of agency):
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?”
trust. Imagine an old database where any entry can be changed just by typing over it and clicking save. Now imagine that entry holds your bank balance. If somebody can just arbitrarily change your balance to zero, that kind of sucks, right? Unless you’ve got student loans.
The point is that any time a system lets somebody change the history with a keystroke, you have no choice but to trust a huge number of people to be both perfectly good and competent, and humanity doesn’t have a great track record of that. Blockchains are an effort to create a history that can’t be manipulated.
Edward Snowden Explains Blockchain to His Lawyer — & Rest of Us
Here is a view from complexity science: There are two quantities that trade off against each other, complexity and scale. We can do things that are large scale and things that are more complex.
Exercise is commonly divided into endurance, strength, balance and flexibility. All of these can be about scale. Walking for endurance and lifting weights for strength are both about scale. Scale shows up in the repetition of steps in walking or having every one of the fibers of your muscle contracting at once to lift a weight. This is different from walking where different combinations of fibers contract in each step so you can take many steps.
Complexity is different, it is about the variety of things you do. How many different kinds of motion and patterns of motion that you do as you exercise.
What are the benefits of complexity? Ability to do many different things. If you study one thing, and you are tested on that one thing, you learn to be good at it. If you do a variety of things and something new happens — a new challenge or a different opportunity — you are more likely to perform well.
Exercise is an artificial world where we decide what we do. We practice and test ourselves on the same tasks: how far we can walk, how much weight we can lift, how many repetitions we can do. In the real world we might have to do (or have the opportunity to do) many different things. Practicing a variety of things pays off in better responding to anything that comes up. High complexity exercises expand the space of possibilities of what we can do and the confidence that we can do them well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed an appreciation of complexity when he said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”
Yaneer Bar-Yam - Exercising in the Space of Possibilities
“We Homo sapiens may soon be an animal in the eyes of our successors,” the neuroscientist writes. “Natural selection is winding down for the human species.” As humans increasingly tinker with genetics and manipulate the genome—as was just demonstrated this week with the announcement that Chinese scientists used gene editing technology to alter the DNA of two newborn babies—Berns predicts a new species will come into existence. ”Call it Homo hominis. Man of men.”
This new species will be as far beyond us as we are beyond chimpanzees today in terms of intelligence and capabilities, according to Berns. “We would be doing the future remnants of our species a favor by considering now what it means to be sentient and what rights that confers,”
The neuroscience that shows us what it’s like to be a dog
This is a weak signal of the continued progress on life extension.
"It was an astonishing result, and one that got us thinking about the implications for treating or preventing a variety of ageing-associated diseases," said Professor Michael P. Lisanti, the research lead.
"Azithromycin is a relatively mild antibiotic that has been proven to extend lifespan in cystic fibrosis patients by several years.
Antibiotics eliminate senescent cells associated with ageing
Antibiotics have emerged as potentially lifespan-enhancing drugs, according to the results of new research carried out in the UK.
Genetic experiments that eliminate "senescent" cells – older cells, which lose the ability to divide – have already been proven to alleviate age-related dysfunction in model organisms.
Now, scientists have shown for the first time that an FDA-approved antibiotic – Azithromycin – can effectively target and eliminate senescent cells in culture.
Publishing in the journal Aging (US), a team from the University of Salford's Translational Medicine Laboratories compared the effects of a panel of FDA-approved drugs, on i) normal cells and ii) senescent cells, derived from human skin and lungs.
At a single low-dosage, Azithromycin was shown to effectively kill and eliminate the senescent cells, with an efficiency of 97 percent.
Moreover, the normal healthy cells thrived in the presence of Azithromycin.
This is an interesting signal - of how economic philosophy can interact with changing social conditions to change social relationships.
Marriages in the US are on the decline. Here's why
Forty-six percent of unmarried Americans hope to someday marry, yet falling rates of marriage make their prospects of tying the knot increasingly dim. A large body of research underpins the debate over the causes of this decline, variously identifying women’s increasing economic independence, changing attitudes toward marriage, and increased use of effective contraception as potential causal factors. Perhaps the most prominent theory in sociology, however, argues that a decrease in the number of “marriageable men” leaves women without partners.
What makes a man “marriageable”? In addition to being a romantic arrangement and a family form, marriage is an economic institution. So, when men lack economic resources, they may be less likely to marry. Another factor that could affect marriageability is criminal justice involvement. When men are confined to jail or prison, or when a criminal record trails after them following release, they may become less attractive candidates for marriage.
Interestingly, two trends may have simultaneously depressed rates of marriage in the United States. First, economic well-being has declined for people at the middle and bottom of the income distribution. Second, incarceration has boomed during precisely the same period in which marriage rates have fallen. In 1969, average earnings for men without college diplomas were 14 percent higher than in 2013. In 1969, about 200,000 people were incarcerated, but in 2013, that number was closer to 1.4 million.
Another milestone passed by Google’s Deep Mind - and signalling more breakthroughs in medical and biological advances.
“For us, this is a really key moment,” said Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind. “This is a lighthouse project, our first major investment in terms of people and resources into a fundamental, very important, real-world scientific problem.”
The human body can make vast numbers of different proteins, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to billions. Each one is a chain of amino acids, of which there are 20 different types. A protein can twist and bend between each amino acid, so that a protein with hundreds of amino acids has the potential to take on a staggering number of different structures: around a googol cubed, or 1 followed by 300 zeroes.
Google's DeepMind predicts 3D shapes of proteins
AI program’s understanding of proteins could usher in new era of medical progress
Having laid waste to the Atari classics and reached superhuman performance in chess and the Chinese board game, Go, Google’s DeepMind outfit has turned its artificial intelligence on one of the toughest problems in science.
The result, perhaps, was predictable. At an international conference in Cancun on Sunday, organisers announced that DeepMind’s latest AI program, AlphaFold, had beaten all-comers at a particularly fiendish task: predicting the 3D shapes of proteins, the fundamental molecules of life.
The arcane nature of “protein folding”, a mind-boggling form of molecular origami, is rarely discussed outside scientific circles, but it is a problem of profound importance. The machinery of biology is built from proteins and it a protein’s shape defines its function. Understand how proteins fold up and researchers could usher in a new era of scientific and medical progress.
On its first foray into the competition, AlphaFold topped a table of 98 entrants, predicting the most accurate structure for 25 out of 43 proteins, compared with three out of 43 for the second placed team in the same category.
Another signal from China - about the emerging significance of real-time data - personal or otherwise. Who will watch us - and how can we watch back?
According to Chinese officials, the information China collects about EVs isn’t used for citizen surveillance — it helps them improve public safety, plan infrastructure, and ensure manufacturers aren’t committing fraud in order to take advantage of government subsidy programs.
China Forces Tesla and Other EV Makers to Turn Over Driver Data
Every vehicle in the nation shares 61 data points — including its real-time location.
If you drive a Tesla in China, the government knows where your vehicle is at all times.
That’s according to a bombshell AP News story published Thursday. It claims Chinese law requires Tesla and more than 200 other electric vehicle makers to send the government constant updates on any vehicles driven in the nation.
Those updates include the real-time location of each EV, as well as 60 other data points — everything from the EV’s motor function to its battery status.
This is another important signal about our relationships with our technologies. Remember the movie “Castaway” with Tom Hanks - who ends up stranded on an island in a Robinson Crusoe situation - but instead of another human ‘Friday’ all Tom had was ‘Wilson’ (the volleyball) and Wilson kept Tom sane until he was eventually rescued. Today many people have pets as their ‘Wilson’ and some of these pets can be very costly. There’s also been numerous films and a Black Mirror episode exploring this topic. The future with our evolving AI-ssistants will be interesting. The images may intrigue or even disturb our sense of humanity. Given the changing demographics (more people over 65 than under 15) such technology may become ubiquitous.
Meet Zora, the Robot Caregiver
It may not look like much — more cute toy than futuristic marvel — but this robot is at the center of an experiment in France to change care for elderly patients.
When Zora arrived at this nursing facility an hour outside Paris, a strange thing began happening: Many patients developed an emotional attachment, treating it like a baby, holding and cooing, giving it kisses on the head.
Zora, which can cost up to $18,000, offered companionship in a place where life can be lonely. Families can visit only so much, and staff members are stretched.
Patients at the hospital, called Jouarre, have dementia and other conditions that require round-the-clock care.
The nurse at Jouarre who oversees Zora controls the robot from a laptop. He often stands out of view so patients don’t know it’s him at the controls.
The robot can have a conversation because the nurse types words into a laptop for the robot to speak. Some patients refer to Zora as “she,” others “he.”
Zora often leads exercises and plays games.
This is a great signal of the transformation of the construction industry - certainly not yet replacing all human labor - but it illustrates what AI and other technologies can do.
“The whole concept of this technology came around because there was a shortage of bricklayers,” an FBR spokesman said.
“The challenge for the bricklaying industry is that it is hard work on the body — it’s not a career people typically have for a very long time.”
WA’s Fastbrick robot building home in three days a ‘world-first’
PERTH-based Fastbrick Robotics has achieved what it says is a world-first with the fully automated construction of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in less than three days.
The ASX-listed company says civil and structural engineers verified that the structure — completed on Monday in WA by a robotic arm from a 3D model — met relevant building standards, setting the stage for commercialisation of the product.
The company’s Hadrian X — a truck loaded with pre-cut bricks — is able to drive to a construction site, where a laser-guided robotic attachment feeds blocks through an arm and continuously places them into position.
“We now have the world’s only fully automated, end-to-end bricklaying solution, with a massive market waiting for it,” chief executive Mike Pivac said.
The bricks are laid quickly and the Hadrian X allows builders to prefabricate internal elements because they can rely on the laser sub-millimetre accuracy.
The accuracy of the build, as well as the adhesive used in place of mortar, cuts power bills by making it thermally and acoustically efficient, the company says.
This is an interesting report on the current state of ‘robot adoption’. The graphs provide a clear picture and are worth the view.
The countries where robot adoption is happening faster than expected
There’s perhaps no more telling metric for our time than the number of robots in a country per every 10,000 manufacturing workers. With the threat of automation looming, it’s commonly understood that manufacturing jobs will be some of the first to go. But researchers believe the metric may not be the best way to measure countries’ openness to a bot-filled future.
As a new report from the Information, Technology, and Innovation Foundation notes, there is a naturally stronger economic case for adopting robots in higher-wage economies than in lower-wage economies, meaning the popularity of robots is skewed to favor countries that can afford to pay for them. This makes sense, given that industrial robots can cost well over $100,000 each.
The report suggests that instead, we should factor in countries’ average wages in order to get a real sense of how willing they are to embrace industrial robots.
Here is a signal of both the transformation of work and transportation. The images are definitely worth the view - and we will likely begin seeing them in action movies soon.
"Currently we have two crews already training (to pilot the hoverbike) and we're increasing the number," he told CNN. Hoversurf chief operating officer Joseph Segura-Conn explained that ideal candidates will be able to ride a motorcycle and have drone operating experiences. Video of one officer learning to pilot the hoverbike appeared online last month.
Dubai Police start training on flying motorbikes
The flying motorbike is back in Dubai -- and you could see the police riding one in the not-too-distant future.
A year after California-based startup Hoversurf showcased its hoverbike at tech expo GITEX in the white and green livery of the Dubai Police, the company has returned with a new model and evidence its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle might be, well, taking off.
Making good on a deal signed in 2017, Hoversurf has now gifted Dubai Police its first serial production unit of the S3 2019 Hoverbike and has begun training officers to fly it.
Another important signal related to the emergence of augmented reality device as routine.
US Army soldiers will soon wear Microsoft’s HoloLens AR goggles in combat
Microsoft has won a $480 million deal to supply more than 100,000 augmented-reality HoloLens headsets to the US Army,
Uses? The Army plans to use the headsets for combat missions as well as training. The technology will be adapted to incorporate night vision and thermal sensing, offer hearing protection, monitor for concussion, and measure vital signs like breathing and “readiness.” AR firm MagicLeap also bid for the contract, according to Bloomberg.
A first: HoloLens is used for training by the US and Israeli military already, but this would be the first time it’s been used for live combat. It’s another example of how AR is being adopted far more enthusiastically by organizations than consumers.
Tensions: The deal is more good news for Microsoft, which overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable company yesterday. However, there could be pushback against this contract—and it’s as likely to come from Microsoft employees themselves as from external groups. The relationship between the technology sector and the US military has become fraught over the past year, with employees at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft protesting their companies’ bids for government contracts. The solution? Move uneasy staff members to other projects, Microsoft president Brad Smith said last month.
Here’s another signal of the transformation of transportation - a Tesla competitor for the pickup trucker. The Images are definitely worth the view.
Rivian unveils all-electric pickup truck with unbelievable specs
After almost a decade of operating in a certain level of stealth, Rivian Automotive is coming out in a big way today by unveiling its all-electric pickup truck: the Rivian R1T.
They are promising some unbelievable specs that would compete with any gas-powered pickup truck on the market.
Unlike other high-profile electric vehicle startups, Rivian mostly stayed in the shadows to develop its EV technology and prepare a plan to secure volume production of its vehicles.
The startup was founded by CEO RJ Scaringe, a MIT graduate, and it has been in stealth mode since its inception in 2009 up until last year when they took over a shuttered Mitsubishi factory in Normal, Illinois.
They have invested millions in the plant in hope to eventually be able to produce hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles at the factory.
The Rivian R1T will be the first of those electric vehicles to make it to the market
Another great signal of the emerging transformation of energy geopolitics - while not ready for primetime - this is well worth tracking.
Self-Assembled Carbon Nanotube Antennas for Solar Power Revolution
NovaSolix’s carbon nanotube (CNT) antennas are small enough to match the nano-scale wavelengths of sunlight. Antennas can convert electromagnetic spectrum much more efficiently than photovoltaic (PV) cells. When perfected, NovaSolix antennas will capture over four times the energy of current solar panels. They will reach nearly 90% efficiency versus ~20% for today’s solar panels.
NovaSolix has invented a self-assembling antenna array solar cell which will be 2-4 times more efficient at a less than one-tenth the cost per watt of existing solar.
NovaSolix claims to have demonstrated a proof of concept to third parties that has touched 43% efficiency. That’d suggest a 72 cell solar module near 860 watts, with a 90% solar cell pushing 1700 watts.
They could buy used manufacturing hardware and retrofit them in the early stages of growth. The first manufacturing lines could cost $4.1 million, and would initially produce ~45% efficient modules, at a clip of 20MW/year with a proposed price of 10¢/W. At full efficiency, costs are cut in half and volumes per year doubled.
A sunny day can provide 18 miles of driving range on a 24% efficient solar cell. If NovaSolix increased solar cell efficiency to 90% then one day of sunlight driving would be 67 miles.
This is a good signal of an emerging change in our computational paradigm - the proliferation of an ecology of customized computational architectures. What the new approach enables is a distribution of research funding.
What Intel investors really worry about is that the largest internet companies will start making their own chips. This week, Amazon.com Inc., the biggest cloud-computing company, announced its first in-house server processor. The Graviton is made by TSMC, and it supports a new version of an Amazon cloud service that’s more than 40 percent cheaper than a similar offering powered by Intel chips, the company said.
the combined budgets of TSMC’s customers are not only larger than Intel but the gap is increasing. By 2020, they will spend almost $20 billion, according to its estimate, at least $4 billion more than Intel
A Company Few Americans Know Is About to Dethrone Intel
For more than 30 years, Intel Corp. has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world’s computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs," he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories.
These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry. AMD recently chose TSMC to make its most advanced processors, having spun off its own struggling factories years before.
TSMC’s threat to Intel reflects a sea change in chipmaking that’s seen one company after another hire TSMC to manufacture the chips they design. Hsinchu-based TSMC has scores of customers, including tech giants Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc., second-tier players like AMD, and minnows such as Ampere Computing LLC. The explosion of components built this way has given TSMC the technical know-how needed to churn out the smallest, most efficient and powerful chips in the highest volumes.
This is a longish article but a very fascinating and increasingly familiar story - signaling the complex story of our ecology, microbiome and evolutionary adaptation and pluripotency. This is well worth the read.
The Bacteria Lurking in American Showerheads
The water that flows through your home is teeming with microbial life. Trying to kill it off likely does more harm than good.
In 2014, I teamed up with Noah Fierer, a biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a large team of collaborators (including Matt Gebert, a technician in Noah’s laboratory who ultimately did most of the work) to begin what is probably the largest-ever study of the ecology of showers and showerheads. In the average American showerhead, the biofilm that grows contains many trillions of individual organisms, layered as much as half a millimeter thick. The mystery was why these showerheads sometimes abound in mycobacteria and in other cases lack them entirely.
Medical researchers have predicted that mycobacteria might be more common in well water inasmuch as it is less controlled, less treated, more susceptible to nature’s whimsy. But as ecologists, Fierer, Gebert, and I, along with the rest of our team, also had to contemplate the opposite—namely, that mycobacteria might actually be more common in the showerheads of people with municipal water, particularly that from treatment plants and countries that use chlorine or chloramine, particularly water from such plants in the United States.
When we examined our data, we found that the concentration of chlorine in the tap water from homes using municipal water in the United States was 15 times as high as that of homes with well water. Mycobacteria were twice as common in municipal water as in well water. In some showerheads from municipal water systems, 90 percent of the bacteria were one or another species of Mycobacterium. By contrast, many of the showerheads from houses with well water had no Mycobacterium. Instead, those biofilms tended to have a high biodiversity of other kinds of bacteria.
Lowry has spent 20 years studying Mycobacterium vaccae. He and his colleagues have found that exposure to this species boosts production of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brains of mice and humans. Increased serotonin production tends to be linked to greater happiness and reductions in stress. Indeed, Lowry has shown that, at least in mice, inoculating individuals with Mycobacterium vaccae leads them to be more resilient to stress.
Lowry suspects that many Mycobacterium species may have effects similar to those he has observed. The only way to know for sure is to test them one by one, and so this is what Lowry is now doing. He is culturing the mycobacteria we have gathered in showerheads to see whether any other species behave like Mycobacterium vaccae. If they do, it may mean that some of the Mycobacterium falling on you from your shower head may be beneficial in reducing your stress.
Lowry’s research reminds us that sorting out just which kinds of microbes are good and which are bad is gnarly, convoluted, and hard. Some mycobacterial strains may make you sick; others may make you happy. As for whether it is worth buying a new shower head every so often, we don’t know yet. But I suspect that after reading this, you will go home and change yours anyway.
This significant signal not only has important implications for medical issues - but may disrupt a great deal of our understanding of our genetic lineages.
Study shows mitochondrial DNA can be passed through fathers – what does this mean for genetics?
Some things you learn in school turn out not to be true, for example that there are just five senses or three states of matter. Now cutting-edge research has added to the list by proving the mitochondria (the power sources in our cells) comes from both our parents and not – as biology students are taught – just from our mothers.
The research, published in PNAS, showed conclusively that, in three unrelated families, mitochondria from the father’s sperm had been passed to the children over several generations. Overturning scientific understanding about this fundamental “truth”, opens the possibility for better treatment of mitochondrial disorders, which blight many families with devastating disease.
Mitochondria convert the sugars, fats and proteins that we eat into the molecules our cells use to power themselves. So when they go wrong, the result is often catastrophic, resulting in lifelong problems or even the death of an affected baby in the womb.
Here is another very fascinating signal - essentially about what living systems need to actually be alive. This finding is consistent with a recent book by Andreas Wagner called “Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle” which is a must read for anyone interested in evolution.
"I think these may be textbook-rewriting results since the whole field of ribosome research involves magnesium," Bray said. "Now, with what we've done, it's no longer the case that only magnesium works."
Stripping the linchpins from the life-making machine reaffirms its seminal evolution
A daring experiment corroborates translational system's place at earliest foundations of life on Earth
Bray, co-first author Timothy Lenz and co-principal investigators Glass and Williams published their results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on November 9, 2018. The research was funded by the NASA Exobiology program. Glass is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
This experiment had a good chance of crashing. Instead, it delivered whopping evidence to corroborate the earliest evolution of the translational system, the mechanisms which make life out of our genes. The study swapped out all its magnesium, tabula rasa, and showed that the system, centering on the ribosome, would have thrived basically as it is today 4 billion years ago at the earliest foundations of life on Earth.
Amazingly, the atomic swaps barely changed the shape of the ribosome.
"It's totally unbelievable this would work because biology makes very specific use of things. Change one atom and it can wreck a whole protein," Williams said. "When we probed the structure, we saw that all three metals do essentially the same thing to the structure."
When they tested the performance of the translational system with iron replacing magnesium, it was 50 to 80 percent as efficient as normal (with magnesium). "Manganese worked even better than iron," Bray said.
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