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
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Why should governments fail? Because leaders, whether self-appointed dictators, or elected officials, are unable to identify what policies will be good for a complex society. The unintended consequences are beyond their comprehension. Regardless of values or objectives, the outcomes are far from what they intend.
There is a solution. It is not a form of government, no “ism” or “ocracy’’ will do. It begins with widespread individual action that transforms society — -a metamorphosis of social organization in which leadership no longer serves the role it has over millennia. A different type of existence will emerge, affecting all of us as individuals and enabling us to live in a complex world.
To be successful in high complexity challenges requires teamwork. Each team member performs one part of what needs to be done, contributing to the complexity and scale of what the team does while limiting the complexity each individual faces.
Teamwork is more capable than economic coordination or central decision making.
The increasing complexity of society means professional and personal endeavors will be done in teams. Teams will range from a few individuals to many, in one place or spanning the globe. They will differentiate roles — sharing responsibility for decisions and actions.
Psychology will change. While heroic fiction describes individual striving, we need to learn that being a member of a team is heroic. As in sports, teams form collective identities.
We need to stop looking for leaders and start looking for teammates.
We need to find others we can trust about ideas, advice, and joint action.
We need to shift the ego’s focus on autonomy, to pride in collectivity.
We need to share the uncertainty we have as individuals in order to gain collective confidence and success.
Yaneer Bar-Yam - Teams: A Manifesto
Two years ago in Palo Alto, at a dinner with a high ranking executive from Google, the gentleman kept reminding me how he felt about the mortality of his company. I argued about its dominance of search, digital ads, mobile phone, the sheer size of its infrastructure… He interrupted me: “No. You’re mistaken. Today is different. Right now, some young people can rent large computing capacities at AWS or elsewhere and build something that will take us completely off-guard…”
Every tech company, regardless of its size and grasp of its market, has a deep sense of its vulnerability. (It echoes with a business professor at INSEAD, the renowned global business school, hammering to his students: “You know what should be the priority of a company? It’s not growth, or anything else. It is to survive!”)
This 2017 version of Facebook’s list of users datapoints gives an idea of the targeting capabilities of the network; it also offers to its 5 million advertisers the ability to create groups as small as 20 people. This feature paves the way for individually customized ad system, which is the wet dream of any propaganda outlet.
“Do no harm” to Facebook’s business model
Those who are the most pointedly afflicted are often precisely those who are least able to recognise their affliction, or to save themselves. And those with the resources to rescue themselves are usually already saved. As Kierkegaard suggests, the virtue of sobriety makes perfect sense to one who is already sober. Eating well is second nature to the one who is already healthy; saving money is a no-brainer for one who one is already rich; truth-telling is the good habit of one who is already honest. But for those in the grips of crisis or sin, getting out usually doesn’t make much sense.
In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Kierkegaard tells us that the ‘essential nature of [the demoniac] is anxiety about the good’. I’ve been ‘anxious’ about many things – about exams, about spiders, about going to sleep – but Kierkegaard explains that the feeling I have about these nasty things isn’t anxiety at all. It’s fear. Anxiety, on the other hand, has no particular object. It is the sense of uneasiness that one has at the edge of a cliff, or climbing a ladder, or thinking about the prospects of a completely open future – it isn’t fear per se, but the feeling that we get when faced with possibility. It’s the unsettling feeling of freedom. Yes, freedom, that most precious of modern watchwords, is deeply unsettling.
Why the demoniac stayed in his comfortable corner of hell
This 9 min video signals multiple issues and possible trajectories - not just answering many arguments against Universal Basic Income - but the new salient roles of cities as the key levels of government more responsive to citizens.
Pawar Drives Initiative to Test Universal Basic Income
A new resolution to bring universal basic income to Chicago may soon be making its way to City Council for a vote. Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th Ward, joins us in discussion.
Here’s an article and a 20 min video of the same Chicago Alderman on the same topic - but ranges across many dimensions of re-imagining the governance and financing of a city. Well worth the watch.
Ameya Pawar proposes mundane city treasurer’s office fight income inequality
Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th) on Friday floated a plan to “public-tize” Chicago’s water system by selling or giving away shares to city residents and paying them dividends that would amount to universal basic income.
A great and concise 15 min TED Talk on UBI - Worth the watch.
Poverty isn't a lack of character; it's a lack of cash | Rutger Bregman
"Ideas can and do change the world," says historian Rutger Bregman, sharing his case for a provocative one: guaranteed basic income. Learn more about the idea's 500-year history and a forgotten modern experiment where it actually worked -- and imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
This is likely a good signal of an emerging capacity for developing a metabolic economy.
Climate rewind: Scientists turn carbon dioxide back into coal
Researchers have used liquid metals to turn carbon dioxide back into solid coal, in a world-first breakthrough that could transform our approach to carbon capture and storage.
The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new technique that can efficiently convert CO2 from a gas into solid particles of carbon.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing the greenhouse gas from our atmosphere.
"By using liquid metals as a catalyst, we've shown it's possible to turn the gas back into carbon at room temperature, in a process that's efficient and scalable.
"While more research needs to be done, it's a crucial first step to delivering solid storage of carbon."
Hacking Matter has been a sort of frontier meme of the future - but what we know about matter - matters a lot and we continue to expand the bounds of what matter is.
An element is defined by the number of protons it contains. Create an atom with more protons than ever before, and you’ve got yourself a brand new element. Each element comes in a variety of types, known as isotopes, distinguished by the number of neutrons in the nucleus. Changing the number of neutrons in an atom’s nucleus alters the delicate balance of forces that makes a nucleus stable or that causes it to decay quickly. Different isotopes of an element might have wildly different half-lives, the period of time it takes for half of the atoms in a sample to decay into smaller elements.
Extreme elements push the boundaries of the periodic table
For superheavy atoms, chemistry gets weird
At a laboratory in Dubna, north of Moscow, scientists battered the berkelium with calcium ions to try to create an even rarer substance. After 150 days of pummeling, the researchers spotted six atoms of an element that had never been seen on Earth. In 2015, after other experiments confirmed the discovery, element 117, tennessine, earned a spot on the periodic table
Scientists are hoping to stretch the periodic table even further, beyond tennessine and three other recently discovered elements (113, 115 and 118) that completed the table’s seventh row. Producing the next elements will require finessing new techniques using ultrapowerful beams of ions, electrically charged atoms. Not to mention the stress of shipping more radioactive material across borders.
But questions circulating around the periodic table’s limits are too tantalizing not to make the effort. It’s been 150 years since Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev created his periodic table. Yet “we still cannot answer the question: Which is the heaviest element that can exist?” says nuclear chemist Christoph Düllmann of the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany.
This is another signal related to renewable energy alternatives - expanding the number of ways one can harness wind and sun. This is a longish article.
Heat your House with a Water Brake Windmill
Renewable energy production is almost entirely aimed at the generation of electricity. However, we use more energy in the form of heat, which solar panels and wind turbines can supply only indirectly and inefficiently.
Solar thermal collectors skip the electricity conversion and supply renewable thermal energy in a direct and efficient way. Much less known is that a mechanical windmill can do the same in a windy climate -- by eliminating electricity conversion and by oversizing its brake system, a windmill can generate lots of heat through friction.
Heat generating windmills convert rotational energy directly into heat by generating friction in water, using a so-called “water brake” or “Joule Machine”. A heat generator based on this principle is basically a wind-powered mixer or impeller installed into an insulated tank filled with water. Due to friction among molecules of the water, mechanical energy is converted into heat energy. The heated water can be pumped into a building for heating or washing, and the same concept could be applied to industrial processes in a factory that require relatively low temperatures.
Another signal of Algorithmic Intelligence and big data contributing to disruptive business models.
Unlike a house flipper, the company's primary profit is not selling the house for a premium, but in service fees. On homes in good shape Properly says it will refund back 75 percent of the difference if it sells a property for more than it paid.
Canadian startup Properly offers new way of buying and selling homes in Calgary
But uncertain market conditions in Calgary have some experts worried Properly's arrival is opportunistic
A Canadian tech startup is hoping a new way of buying and selling houses shaking up the U.S. real estate industry will catch on north of the border.
"We are in an era when transparency and convenience and choice is being offered to homeowners," says Properly CEO Anshul Ruparell. "And they have an opportunity to go through the transaction in a way that hasn't really been done before."
Properly is what's known as an institutional buyer or "iBuyer."
Also known as direct buyers, iBuyers use algorithms to determine the market value of a home. They can make an initial offer to buy the property directly from the homeowner within 48 hours, and the whole process can be completed in a week, with the seller setting the closing date.
Though based in Toronto, Properly is currently operating only in Calgary.
The company's data driven model is focused on buying only detached or semi-detached homes in the city, built after 1960 and worth $250,000 to $550,000.
This is a fascinating signal of the emerging use of AI (as forms of artificial agents) to create a form of immune systems monitoring changes in the state of the system to become aware and response to ‘infections’ by viruses.
New Security Technology Detects Malicious Cyberattacks on Drones, Cars, and Robots
Mitsubishi Electric has developed an algorithm that measures inconsistencies in multiple sensors to thwart malicious manipulation
Sensor-based automatic control technology is now used in hundreds of applications as varied as vehicle accident prevention, agricultural monitoring, and self-balancing robots. But as sensor interaction with the environment increases to enable control systems to “see,” “listen,” and “sense” their environment more accurately, the potential for cyber attacks also grows.
To counter this danger, Mitsubishi Electric has developed what it believes is the first sensor-security technology for detecting inconsistencies that appear in sensor measurements when a system is under attack. Development was supported by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
A key component in automatic control systems is sensor fusion technology. It works by combining the data from a number of sensors to produce more accurate information than if data were taken from individual sensors and used separately. For example, by combining the data from multiple sensors in a car, the result provides a more precise estimate of the car’s speed, which in turn improves better control over performance and reliability.
This is definitely a weak signal - but significant in any case - another aspect of digital security immune systems.
Circuit Secures the IoT Against Quantum Attack
MIT engineers design a system for IoT chips to do quantum-computer-proof encryption
One of the most frequently mentioned fears about future quantum computers is that they will someday crack our encryption codes and lay all our digital secrets bare. Despite it being a truly far-off possibility, cryptographers are already taking the threat very seriously.
The solution seems to be to develop one or more classes of encryption schemes that classical computers can use but quantum computers can’t crack. Less than two weeks ago, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology reported that its search for quantum-proof algorithms had reached the semifinals stage. Following a year-long evaluation, the agency has narrowed the field down to 26 algorithms, most of which fall into three broad families.
Now, at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference on Monday in San Francisco, engineers from MIT have reported the creation of an encryption system that performs one of these schemes on a chip small enough and energy-efficient enough to guard battery-powered nodes on the Internet of Things from future quantum attack.
In the digital environment where humans-things are entangled with other humans-things communication will be key - but in what languages? Will a new ecology to Artificial Agents proliferate whole domains of language ecologies?
Artificially Intelligent Players Invent Nonverbal “Languages” to Win Card Games
To win at bridge and Hanabi, AIs must come up with subtle cues to communicate
Machines are becoming more collaborative, both with humans and one another. Soon, we may have self-driving cars that negotiate rights-of-way and robots to assist nurses with home care. But first, they’ll need to learn to communicate, and not just through spoken language. Humans say a lot with their actions. Tapping the brakes both slows you and signals potential trouble ahead. Crossing your arms both protects you and signals reticence.
To teach artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate, researchers have turned to card games. While AI long ago bested humans at chess, Go, some forms of poker, and many video games, the games of bridge and Hanabi offer special challenges. Players must cooperate without a clear way to share information (such as by saying, “Hey, play this card!”). Researchers working on both games have recently developed AIs that invent their own implicit codes to coordinate their moves.
One more trial - signaling a future of autonomous agents providing a variety of delivery services. Two very short videos.
FedEx will trial autonomous delivery robots this summer
The SameDay Bot will deliver smaller packages from select retailers.
FedEx is making its first moves into autonomous delivery. The company announced today that it's working on the SameDay Bot, a small vehicle that can travel independently along sidewalks and roadsides, helping retailers make same-day and last mile deliveries to their customers.
The bot is being developed using the same technology used in mobility device iBot, and will feature pedestrian-safe tech, multiple cameras, LiDAR and machine learning to help it detect and avoid obstacles, and navigate uneven surfaces.
And another signal
Volvo to test full-size driverless bus in Singapore
Sweden’s Volvo Buses and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on Tuesday unveiled a full-size autonomous electric bus for testing this year in the city state.
Tests with one bus on the university campus could begin in a few weeks to months, before moving to public roads after regulatory approvals, NTU President Subra Suresh told reporters.
He hoped the tests could be extended to public roads in a year. A second bus will undergo tests at a city bus depot.
The 12-metre (39 ft) vehicle can carry up to 80 passengers and is the world’s first full-size, autonomous electric bus, Volvo and NTU said.
Another signal in the movement to make science research publishing open to all - it is also interesting when one considers the increasing trend of online media to be putting subscription paywalls in front of their publications.
“UC will embolden other institutions to take a hard line,” says Joseph Esposito, a senior partner at publishing consultancy Clarke & Esposito in Washington DC. “Some will be willing to walk away from deals.”
Esposito argues that pirate paper site Sci-Hub has undermined the ability of some publishing firms to continue to operate as they have before.
Huge US university cancels subscription with Elsevier
University of California and Dutch publisher fail to strike deal that would allow researchers to publish under open-access terms.
The University of California — the United States’ largest public university system — has cancelled its subscription with Dutch publishing giant Elsevier after months of negotiations over a proposed deal that would have allowed university researchers to publish in Elsevier journals under open-access terms.
The move is the latest in an escalating global row between scholarly publishers and academic institutions, which are pushing to make more of the scientific literature freely available and say that the costs of publishers’ subscriptions are becoming unreasonably expensive.
The University of California (UC) is the first US institution to have completely cancelled its subscription with Elsevier because of such negotiations.
UC pays about US$11 million a year to Elsevier in subscription fees, and the publisher wanted to increase the cost by about 80%, according to the institution’s calculations, said Jeffrey MacKie - Mason University, co-chair of the UC negotiating team, in an interview with Berkeley News, a website maintained by the university.
This is an important signal of emerging capacity to domesticate DNA
I always like to point out that there’s a certain serendipity to science. It’s wonderful, but it also means that you can’t predict outcomes. CRISPR technology is a great example of that. If you had told me 10 years ago that bacteria had evolved proteins that could be programmed to find and cut any DNA sequence, I would have just laughed. I would have been like, “Yeah, that’s definitely science fiction.”
Doudna’s Confidence in CRISPR’s Research Potential Burns Bright
No one needs to remind Jennifer Doudna about the power of CRISPR, the precision genome-editing technology she codeveloped. CRISPR “gives us a way to ultimately control the evolution of any organism — including ourselves. It is a profound thing. Human beings have now learned enough about our own genetic code that we can change it at will,” she said. “It’s kind of crazy to think about.”
That’s why when reports emerged last November that the scientist He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, had used CRISPR to alter the DNA of twin baby girls — crossing a line that genetic engineers had respected for decades and reaffirmed in 2015 — Doudna was quick to speak out. Describing herself to the media as “horrified and stunned,” she criticized his actions as risky, premature and unnecessary, given the absence of pressing medical need for the children to be modified experimentally. She encouraged the international scientific community to develop better guidelines for permissible genome editing in humans.
CRISPR technology makes genome editing temptingly simple because it allows scientists to cut and edit sequences of DNA in any species, including humans, at will. It was inspired by a long-overlooked defense mechanism with which many bacteria fend off viruses: By inserting fragments of viral DNA into specialized structures in their own genome (the “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” that give CRISPR its name), bacteria provide their daughter cells with a way to recognize and quickly rebuff future invasions by similar viruses. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin showed in 2012 that the bacterial system could be adapted as an editing tool. (Several other scientists, including Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute and Virginijus Šikšnys of Vilnius University are also credited with contributing to CRISPR’s development, and multiple patent lawsuits surround the ownership of the intellectual property.)
And to highlight Doudna’s interview.
Doctors plan to test a gene therapy that could prevent Alzheimer’s disease
A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.
No one knows for certain what causes Alzheimer’s disease. But one fact about the condition has gained nearly irrefutable status. Depending on what versions of a gene called APOE you inherit, your risk of the brain disorder can be half the average—or more than 12 times as high.
Sometimes called “the forgetting gene,” APOE comes in three common versions, called 2, 3, and 4. Type 2 lowers a person’s risk, 3 is average, and 4 increases the chance dramatically. The risk is so great that doctors avoid testing people for APOE because a bad result can be upsetting, and there’s nothing to do about it. There’s no cure, and you can’t change your genes, either.
Well, today you can’t. But doctors in New York City say that beginning in May, they will start testing a novel gene therapy in which people with the unluckiest APOE genes will be given a huge dose to their brain of the low-risk version.
Another signal of the potential emergence of ‘Star Trek’ like medical devices.
DEVICE SPOTS CANCER IN A SINGLE BLOOD DROP
A new ultrasensitive diagnostic device could allow doctors to detect cancer quickly from a droplet of blood or plasma, report researchers.
The “lab-on-a-chip” for liquid biopsy analysis detects exosomes—tiny parcels of biological information tumor cells produce to stimulate tumor growth or metastasize.
“Historically, people thought exosomes were like ‘trash bags’ that cells could use to dump unwanted cellular contents,” says lead author Yong Zeng, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas.
“But in the past decade, scientists realized they were quite useful for sending messages to recipient cells and communicating molecular information important in many biological functions. Basically, tumors send out exosomes packaging active molecules that mirror the biological features of the parental cells. While all cells produce exosomes, tumor cells are really active compared to normal cells.”
This is a good signal of emerging medical approaches to disease.
Second patient free of HIV after stem-cell therapy
The breakthrough suggests first case was not a one-off and could pave way for future treatments.
A person with HIV appears to be free of the virus after receiving a stem-cell transplant that replaced their white blood cells with HIV-resistant versions. The patient is only the second person ever reported to have been cleared of the virus using this method. But researchers warn that it is too early to say that they have been cured.
The patient — whose identity hasn’t been disclosed — was able to stop taking antiretroviral drugs, with no sign of the virus returning 18 months later. The stem-cell technique was first used a decade ago for Timothy Ray Brown, known as the ‘Berlin patient’, who is still free of the virus.
So far, the latest patient to receive the treatment is showing a response similar to Brown, says Andrew Freedman, a clinical infectious diseases physician at Cardiff University who was not involved in the study. “There’s good reason to hope that it will have the same result,” he says.
Like Brown, the latest patient also had a form of blood cancer that wasn’t responding to chemotherapy. They required a bone-marrow transplant, in which their blood cells would be destroyed and replenished with stem cells transplanted from a healthy donor.
The team found that the virus completely disappeared from the patient’s blood after the transplant. After 16 months, the patient stopped taking antiretroviral drugs, the standard treatment for HIV. In the latest follow-up, 18 months after stopping medication, there is still no sign of the virus.
This is a fascinating signal related to domesticating DNA and hacking matter - enabling the enhancement of our sensorium - new forms of perceptions.
Night-vision ‘super-mice’ created using light-converting nanoparticles
The particles bind to photoreceptors in the eyes and convert infrared wavelengths to visible light.
Cue the super-mouse. Scientists have engineered mice that can see infrared light normally invisible to mammals — including humans.
To do so, they injected into the rodents’ eyes nanoparticles that convert infrared light into visible wavelengths.
Humans and mice, like other mammals, cannot see infrared light, which has wavelengths slightly longer than red light — between 700 nanometres and 1 millimetre.
But Tian Xue, a neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, and his colleagues developed nanoparticles that convert infrared wavelengths into visible light. The nanoparticles absorb photons at wavelengths of around 980 nanometres and emit them at shorter wavelengths, around 535 nanometres, corresponding to green light.
Xue’s team attached the nanoparticles to proteins that bind to photoreceptors — the cells in the eye that convert light into electrical impulses — and then injected them into mice.
The researchers showed that the nanoparticles successfully attached to the photoreceptors, which in turn responded to infrared light by producing electrical signals and activating the visual-processing areas of the brain.
This is a very important although still weak signal of domestication of DNA for the purposes of creating produce that may be significant to the human capacity to ‘change our minds’.
Scientists brew cannabis using hacked beer yeast
Researchers modify microbe to manufacture cannabis compounds including the psychoactive chemical THC.
The yeast that people have used for millennia to brew alcoholic drinks has now been engineered to produce cannabinoids — chemicals with medicinal and sometimes mind-altering properties found in cannabis.
The feat1, described on 27 February in Nature, turns a sugar in brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) called galactose into tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive compound in cannabis (Cannabis sativa). The altered yeast can also produce cannabidiol (CBD), another major cannabinoid that’s attracted attention lately for its potential therapeutic benefits, including its anti-anxiety and pain-relief effects.
The hope is that this fermentation process will enable manufacturers to produce THC, CBD and rare cannabinoids that are found in trace amounts in nature more cheaply, efficiently and reliably than conventional plant-based cultivation.
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