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
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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In another, virtual experiment, we divided 4,000 human subjects into groups of about 20, and assigned each individual “friends” within the group; these friendships formed a social network. The groups were then assigned a task: Each person had to choose one of three colors, but no individual’s color could match that of his or her assigned friends within the social network. Unknown to the subjects, some groups contained a few bots that were programmed to occasionally make mistakes. Humans who were directly connected to these bots grew more flexible, and tended to avoid getting stuck in a solution that might work for a given individual but not for the group as a whole. What’s more, the resulting flexibility spread throughout the network, reaching even people who were not directly connected to the bots. As a consequence, groups with mistake-prone bots consistently outperformed groups containing bots that did not make mistakes. The bots helped the humans to help themselves.
Both of these studies demonstrate that in what I call “hybrid systems”—where people and robots interact socially—the right kind of AI can improve the way humans relate to one another. Other findings reinforce this. For instance, the political scientist Kevin Munger directed specific kinds of bots to intervene after people sent racist invective to other people online. He showed that, under certain circumstances, a bot that simply reminded the perpetrators that their target was a human being, one whose feelings might get hurt, could cause that person’s use of racist speech to decline for more than a month.
How AI Will Rewire Us
But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain.
In this sense, the attempt to work out the biology of mental illness is different from the attempt to work out the biology of cancer or cardiovascular disease. The fact that the brain is necessary to consciousness, added to the fact that the brain is a chunk of meat bathing in a chemical broth, does not yield the fact that conscious suffering is purely biological, or even that this is the best way to approach mental illness. Those unresolved, and perhaps unanswerable, moral questions loom over the history that Harrington traces here. The path she has chosen may require her to steer clear of such knotty concerns as the relationship of mind to brain or the relationship of political order to mental illness. But her account doesn’t just skirt the polemics she decries. It also overlooks the consequences of psychiatrists’ ignoring those questions, or using scientific rhetoric to conceal them.
At the risk of being polemical, let me suggest that Harrington’s word disingenuous fails to describe the cynicism of Robert Spitzer, the editor of the DSM-3, who acknowledged to me that he was responding to the fact that “psychiatry was regarded as bogus,” and who told me that the book was a success because it “looks very scientific. If you open it up, it looks like they must know something.” Nor does ironic accurately describe the actions of an industry that touts its products’ power to cure biochemical imbalances that it no longer believes are the culprit. Plain bad faith is what’s on display, sometimes of outrageous proportion. And like all bad faith, it serves more than one master: not only the wish to help people, but also the wish to preserve and increase power and profits.
Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
There’s an anti-prey-switching analogy! Bluefin tuna is an example I use a lot. Bluefin tuna are in very high demand in the international sushi market, so they get hunted commercially. As they’ve become more rare, they’ve become more valuable.
You get this perverse anti-ecological dynamic. In an ecological system, as something becomes rarer and harder to find, its ecological value goes down. That’s why predators prey switch: They have to expend too many calories to try to get that prey, or it’s too dangerous. But in a luxury market, all of a sudden you get the perverse incentive to hunt more because it’s worth more and more money. A bluefin tuna was just sold recently for more than 3 million dollars, a new record.
It’s bad for the bluefin tuna, right? But that also introduces a bad dynamic into the whole system. It’s destabilizing — not just for bluefin tuna but potentially for the whole food web. The tuna are embedded within a whole network of interactions.
And that’s part of the point of doing food web research, or interaction research. You pull out one node, you pull out one interaction, and it’s not just about those species. It’s about impacts that can potentially ripple throughout the whole system, and often in unexpected ways.
Clues to Future Sustainability in Old Food Webs
Humans are animals, mammals, primates — and something distinct. Over the past 2 million years, our genus, Homo, has undergone significant changes in bodies, behaviour and ecologies, resulting in the development of a human niche characterized by societal complexity.
No other species creates cash economies and political institutions, changes planet-wide ecosystems in a few generations, builds cities and aeroplanes, arrests and deports its members or drives thousands of other species towards extinction. These are the actions not of individuals, but of societies. Now, three books — by biologist E. O. Wilson, entomologist Mark Moffett and sociologist Nicholas Christakis — argue that the key to understanding our distinctiveness lies in how societies evolved. All showcase solid science engagingly; all share blind spots.
Evolving society: why humanity coheres
This is an good signal of the Web turning 30 and some indicators of its future.
“Against the backdrop of news stories about how the Web is misused, it’s understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the Web is really a force for good. But given how much the Web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the Web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30.”
A lesson that we—researchers, developers, and innovators—can learn from the Web is: Don’t underestimate the potential of your ideas, however humble they may seem. It’s our responsibility to leverage the good while safeguarding against any harmful effects. Let’s join hands and create a better Web—the Web we want.
As the Web Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary, What Should Its Future Be?
Several issues and challenges still need to be addressed
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, the most influential technology of our time. Its evolution and impact have been phenomenal, and its growth continues unabated. Within a mere 30 years, the Web has irrevocably revolutionized the world and our lives, ushering in the Information Age. It has become indispensable, and it has impacted almost every aspect of our activities and almost all industries. But no one anticipated it.
The Web has redefined the way we live, communicate, socialize, and transact. It has prompted companies to rethink how they conduct business, interact with customers and suppliers, foster innovation, and collaborate with others. It has changed the face of politics, governance, religion, and spirituality.
Web tools and services enable us to gain and share knowledge and information. And Web-enabled applications continue to transform banking, education, government, health care, and many other sectors.
The Web’s further development is being driven by:
- Advances such as Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, the 3D Web, and the Real-Time Web.
- Open standards, open data, and open-source software.
- The Internet of Things.
- Edge computing.
- Multimodal access and multilingual presentations.
- Internet-enabled consumer electronics.
- Smarter search engines and question-answering systems.
- Integrated, context-aware, collaborative apps.
- The demand for an open, neutral, equal-access Internet.
But the Web has a dark side too. Concerns include privacy violations, security breaches, lack of access, censorship, fake or incorrect news, information overload, online harassment, misuse, and illegal activities.
Welcome to the world of Artificial Agents - the test may be less about if we can know how they understand - than whether decisions are demonstrably better than humans make. An artificial agent can have a clear signal of performance much like athletes today have their resume of stats.
“This mindset, which probably relates to the growing mistrust citizens feel towards governments and politicians, constitutes a significant questioning of the European model of representative democracy, since it challenges the very notion of popular sovereignty,” Diego Rubio, the executive director for IE’s Center for the Governance of Change, said in a statement.
A surprising number of people trust AI to make better policy decisions than politicians
A new survey on Europeans’ attitudes towards technology found that a quarter of people would prefer it if policy decisions were made by artificial intelligence instead of politicians.
The Center for the Governance of Change at Spain’s IE University polled 2,500 adults in the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands in January. The results reflect an intense anxiety about the changes brought about by advances in tech, with more than half of respondents worried that jobs would be replaced by robots, and 70% saying that unchecked technological innovation could do more harm than good to society. Respondents also expressed concerns about the impact of digital relationships replacing human contact as more people spend time online.
Perhaps most interestingly, a quarter of the respondents said they would prefer AI to guide decisions about governance of their country over politicians.
This is an important strong signal yet is imbued with spectres of any day breakthroughs. Perhaps we have to consider the self-driving car as the first breakthrough robot for the common consumer.
Robotic Dreams, Robotic Realities: Why Is It So Hard to Build Profitable Robot Companies?
Roboticists need to discuss openly and honestly not only our successes but also our failures
In mid-November, we received the sad news that Alphabet is closing SCHAFT, a spinoff of the University of Tokyo robotics lab. The decision comes one year after Boston Dynamics was sold to SoftBank, the company that also acquired Aldebaran Robotics (known for the Pepper and Nao robots). During the 2018 IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, we heard that Rethink Robotics, which created the collaborative robot industry and had a large impact on our view of robots in industrial applications, had closed its doors.
Some months before, Jibo and Mayfield Robotics, makers of Kuri, were forced to shut down sales and operations. Jibo was once heralded as “the first social robot for the home” and was named one of Time’s “Best Inventions of 2017.” Other than a few robot vacuum companies (mainly iRobot), no company has developed a successful home robot.
The problem, as Giulio Sandini put it, occurs when one sells (or buys) intentions as results. Overselling is a dangerous strategy that can be counterproductive, even for the whole robotics community. Both companies and researchers publish videos of robots doing tasks, but sometimes they fail to point out the limitations of the technology or that those results were achieved in lab conditions. This makes it much more difficult to explain to non-roboticist industry executives the difference between creating a one-off demo and creating a real product that works reliably.
A counter signal about the emerging of effective remote controlled robots (drones) - including the potential for ‘kill bots’. There is a 1 min video.
A single lionfish per reef reduced young juvenile fish populations by 79 percent in only a five-week period. Many species were affected, including cardinalfish, parrotfish, damselfish, and others. One large lionfish was observed consuming 20 small fish in a 30-minute period.
“There are many methods of crowdsourcing the mission that we are considering. One is an autonomous hunting robot that asks for human confirmation on an image of the target lionfish before a capture is made. This would allow a much larger fleet of autonomous robots to be operated with oversight when it matters most”
Latest Generation of Lionfish-Hunting Robot Can Find and Zap More Fish Than Ever
It's round three of invasive lionfish vs. underwater robots
Lionfish don’t make for very good oceanic neighbors, though, and in places where they’re an invasive species and have few native predators (like most of the Atlantic coast of the United States), they do their best to eat anything that moves while breeding almost continuously.
As horrible as this is, lionfish have the right idea about successfully controlling fish populations—if you want fewer of something, eat it. Lionfish fillets are tasty, and there have been concerted efforts to raise demand for the meat for conservation purposes.
The trouble with this is where many lionfish hang out and breed, which is too deep for most recreational divers. This is where Robots in Service of the Environment (RSE) comes in. Founded by Colin Angle of iRobot, RSE has been developing remote controlled underwater robots that can efficiently hunt, stun, and capture lionfish at depths of 400 feet for up to 60 minutes at a time, and today they’re introducing their third-generation robot.
The RSE Guardian LF1 Mark 3 prototype is a modular unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) designed specifically for lionfish hunting. Two paddles at the front of the robot can zap any lionfish that swims between them, stunning it instantly. The incapacitated fish is then sucked into the body of the robot, and up to 10 fish can be captured before the robot needs to return to the surface. The battery, sensing, propulsion, and nearly everything else is contained in modules bolted to the chassis of the robot, making repairs and upgrades simple. Control is fully manual at the moment, and dependent on a tether to the surface, although RSE is exploring how assistive autonomy can make piloting easier.
This is a fascinating 29 min video summarizing human similarities and differences with animals. Well worth the view.
Are We Just Another Primate? Robert Sapolsky
In this talk from SAND 2018, Robert Sapolsky considers the unlikely realms where humans are merely on a continuum with other species...until you look closely. With a host of surprising and fascinating examples and illustrations he spells out the case that humans are a type of ape, operating on the same basic types of neurons found throughout the animal kingdom. So is there any behavior that we can say for certain is unique to humans?
This is an amazing and weak signal of new knowledge of evolution arising from our domestication of DNA.
Genetic Struggles Within Cells May Create New Species
Mitonuclear conflict — a struggle between the genes in a cell’s nucleus and those in its mitochondria — might sometimes split species in two.
In the complex cells of humans and other organisms, two different genomes collaborate to sustain life. The larger genome, with DNA encoding thousands of genes, resides in the cell nucleus, while copies of the much smaller one sit in all the energy-producing organelles called mitochondria. Normally, they work in quiet alliance.
Over the past five years, however, scientists have begun focusing on the consequences of mismatches between the two. Emerging evidence shows that this “mitonuclear conflict” can drive a wedge between organisms, possibly turning one species into two. It’s too soon to say how frequently mitonuclear conflict acts as a force in speciation, but researchers agree that better understanding of that tension may help to solve mysteries about what barricade separates some apparently similar populations into distinct species.
This is a weak but very interesting signal - may be related to the influence of music on cognition and perhaps can lead to understanding how sound can be used to enhance wellbeing.
In ways that the researchers still don’t understand, sound-triggered gamma waves seem to kick off other beneficial changes in the brain, too. In the mice, levels of a harmful form of tau in the brain, another protein implicated in Alzheimer’s, dropped, and blood vessels in the brain expanded, perhaps easing the disposal of A-beta. Immune cells called microglia also bulked up and grew more active, attacking A-beta.
When the mice were treated with both flickering lights and clicks, the effect was even stronger, Tsai says. The combined treatment led to fewer A-beta plaques across a big stretch of the brain, including the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, an area important for complex thinking. What’s more, the microglia seemed to swarm into a feeding frenzy. “Microglia pile up on each other, all congregated around the amyloid plaques,”
Flickers and buzzes sweep mouse brains of Alzheimer’s plaques
Memories also improved after a daily dose of fast clicking noises
Fast clicking sounds can boost brainpower in mice with signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Like flickering lights, these external sounds spur a type of brain wave that seemed to sweep disease-related plaques from mice’s brains, researchers report in the March 14 Cell.
It’s too early to say whether the same sorts of flickers and clicks could help people with Alzheimer’s. If so, the treatment would represent a fundamentally new way to target the neurodegenerative disease — with lights and sounds instead of drugs.
This is another interesting signal about the human sensorium. What are the boundaries of human sensation and what possible new senses will we develop? Also how has the spread of the electric environment and related magnetic fields influenced us?
Previous tests of human magnetoreception have yielded inconclusive results. This new evidence “is one step forward for the magnetoreception field and probably a big step for the human magnetic sense,” he says. “I do hope we can see replications and further investigations in the near future.”
People can sense Earth’s magnetic field, brain waves suggest
A new study hints that humans have magnetoreception abilities, similar to some other animals
A new analysis of people’s brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a “sixth sense” for magnetism.
Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it for navigation. Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way.
These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth’s magnetic field — although it’s not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information.
With this first compelling evidence that humans are subconsciously processing magnetic signals, “we can [try to] identify the brain region it originates from and try to identify the nature of the cells” responsible, says Michael Winklhofer, a magnetoreception researcher at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. “This is really the first step.”
Given the increasing legalization of Cannabis - this article signals a potential phase transition in therapeutic approaches and a shift of cultural consciousness. The FDA recently approved Ketamine as a breakthrough drug for treating depression and other mood regulation disorders. New research is being conducted with psilocybin for mood disorders and especially for end-of-life conditions.
Welcome to the trip of your life: the rise of underground LSD guides
Some Americans searching for alternative paths to healing have turned to psychedelics. But how does one forge a career as a guide when the substances are illegal?
Indigenous people are believed to have used plant-based psychedelics for millennia; now, factions of the western medical establishment seem to be catching on. But most psychedelics are still Schedule I controlled substances, in the same category as heroin and cocaine; possession or sale has been punishable by prison sentence since 1971. With rare exceptions, the only way you can legally consume psychedelics in the US is as a participant in one of a few clinical research trials conducted at universities such as New York University and Johns Hopkins.
These studies have yielded astounding results: they suggest that, when administered to carefully screened patients by trained health professionals, psychedelics are safe and potent tools for alleviating PTSD, addictions, cluster headaches, anxiety and depression.
Amid a broken healthcare system and rising rates of opioid addiction and suicide, Americans are searching for alternative paths to healing, which is where underground guides come in. The industry has its share of charlatans, but many guides hold themselves to ethical standards and protocols comparable to those established in clinical settings.
All sorts of AI tools are emerging that will enhance human creative efforts. This is still a weak signal - but one that could be at our fingertips very soon. The 2 min video is a Must See.
Nvidia AI turns sketches into photorealistic landscapes in seconds
at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic. The software will instantly turn a couple of lines into a gorgeous mountaintop sunset. This is MS Paint for the AI age.
Called GauGAN, the software is just a demonstration of what’s possible with Nvidia’s neural network platforms. It’s designed to compile an image how a human would paint, with the goal being to take a sketch and turn it into a photorealistic photo in seconds. In an early demo, it seems to work as advertised.
This is a brilliant signal of mass customizability via 3D printing - although the article (and very short videos) are focused on Ikea furniture - the concept can be applied to any furniture or household.
Ikea’s 3D-printed add-ons make its furniture more accessible for people with disabilities
Ikea furniture is ubiquitous because it’s affordable, but it’s not always accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities. For example, some wardrobes are handleless, and it can be difficult to turn on a lamp with its tiny switches. To remedy this, Ikea Israel teamed up with nonprofits Milbat and Access Israel to develop ThisAbles, a line of 3D-printed add-ons for Ikea furniture.
There are 13 designs available. They slip over Ikea furniture and accessories to turn a small button into a giant one or to lift a couch a couple of inches from the ground to help make getting up a little easier. Installation methods for all of the 3D modifications are demonstrated on Ikea Israel’s YouTube page, showing how a small tweak can make a huge difference for people with disabilities.
This is a very important weak signal - not only about the domestication of DNA - but its integration into digital technology.
Microsoft just booted up the first “DNA drive” for storing data
Microsoft has helped build the first device that automatically encodes digital information into DNA and back to bits again.
DNA storage: Microsoft has been working toward a photocopier-size device that would replace data centers by storing files, movies, and documents in DNA strands, which can pack in information at mind-boggling density.
According to Microsoft, all the information stored in a warehouse-size data center would fit into a set of Yahztee dice, were it written in DNA.
Demo device: So far, DNA data storage has been carried out by hand in the lab. But now researchers at the University of Washington who are working with the software giant say they created a machine that converts electronic bits to DNA and back without a person involved.
The gadget, made from about $10,000 in parts, uses glass bottles of chemicals to build DNA strands, and a tiny sequencing machine from Oxford Nanopore to read them out again.
Still limited: According to a publication on March 21 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the team was able to store and retrieve just a single word—“hello”—or five bytes of data. What’s more, the process took 21 hours, mostly because of the slow chemical reactions involved in writing DNA.
While the team considered that a success for their prototype, a commercially useful DNA storage system would have to store data millions of times faster.
This is a fascinating signal - one sent from very long ago - but may harken a new approach to trigonometry - but maybe to more mathematics
“The huge mystery, until now, was its purpose – why the ancient scribes carried out the complex task of generating and sorting the numbers on the tablet. Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles. It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius."
“The tablet not only contains the world’s oldest trigonometric table; it is also the only completely accurate trigonometric table, because of the very different Babylonian approach to arithmetic and geometry. This means it has great relevance for our modern world. Babylonian mathematics may have been out of fashion for more than 3,000 years, but it has possible practical applications in surveying, computer graphics and education. This is a rare example of the ancient world teaching us something new.”
3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Stone Tablet Gets Translated, Changes History
Dr. Daniel Mansfield and his team at the University of New South Wales in Australia have just made an incredible discovery. While studying a 3,700-year-old tablet from the ancient civilization of Babylon, they found evidence that the Babylonians were doing something astounding: trigonometry!
Most historians have credited the Greeks with creating the study of triangles' sides and angles, but this tablet presents indisputable evidence that the Babylonians were using the technique 1,500 years before the Greeks ever were.
A great signal of the emerging phase transition in energy geopolitics.
Georgetown, Texas, with a population of 65,000, is one of the first U.S. cities to be 100 percent powered by renewable energy. The city gets its renewable energy from two wind farms and a solar facility. The plants cover the city’s 170-MW peak power demand, with enough left over to sell to the state electric grid. Georgetown is an example of what the future of energy might look like.
Texas Renewable Energy Policy Sets an Example for the World
China, the EU, and other regions also are decreasing their fossil-fuel dependence
In many areas of the world, renewable energy is now a cheaper source of electricity than fossil fuels. It is possible that renewable energy soon will be the preferred choice all over the world.
Transition to renewables is no longer a question. The potential exists that renewable energy and its storage technologies will be able to generate 100 percent of the world’s energy in less than 30 years. The switch to renewable energy would reduce the cost of electricity to, on average, from US 80 cents to 60 cents per megawatt-hour globally, according to recent research by Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, in Finland, and the Berlin-based nonprofit Energy Watch Group.
In a study by the International Renewable Energy Agency, the global weighted average levelized cost of electricity of utility-scale solar photovoltaic has fallen 73 percent since 2010, to 10 cents per kWh for projects commissioned in 2017. A report released in January 2018 by Bloomberg New Energy Finance said $333.5 billion was invested globally in clean-energy projects during 2017.
