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:
Modern military actions are highly complex encounters between hidden, distributed networks of individuals. Urban conflict, terrorist networks, cybersecurity, and peacekeeping demand new strategies, organizational structures and capabilities.
Conflicts between orderly armies lining up to face each other on the field of battle, with definite outcomes determined by defeating an enemy, seem to be a thing of the past. In the modern world, armed forces and the conflicts they engage in are more complex than ever. Under these circumstances even defining the objective has to be reevaluated. Conflicts occur within a global web of economic and social interactions and the objectives are defined by the ongoing relationships that can be achieved.
Traditional military strategies are focused on the defeat of fragile enemies by applying force to destroy their fighting capabilities, or their willingness to fight. This framing fails to take into account robust and even antifragile systems, which are actually strengthened by conflict. An attack that prompts an adversary to gain strength by mass recruiting may lead to a strengthened counter-attack rather than diminished capabilities. From the Punic wars, to the Napoleonic Invasion of Russia, to German Operation Barbarossa, to Pearl Harbor, to Vietnam and Afghanistan, this model has many historical precedents. When strategizing in a complex environment, the fragility or antifragility of opponents must be assessed. Similarly, antifragility should be cultivated among one’s own forces and allies. Furthermore, the goal of military interventions today is often achieving relationships that promote overall stability and security, rather than destroying opposing powers.
Special operations forces (SOF) have seen increasing deployment around the globe. While their value has been recognized, the reason for their relevance has not been codified. NECSI has proposed a complex systems framework for understanding the distinct and complementary role of SOF to conventional military forces. Based upon a multiscale version of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, there is a need to address both large scale challenges and fine scale ones.
In a global integrated socio-economic system, wars of conquest may seem to be relics of the past, but armed conflict is surely not. In the contemporary global theater actions and actors are complex. Potential losses, victories, and the unintended consequences of either must be considered carefully. Complex systems science can provide guidance for effective strategies for peace and security.
New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) - Military
These digital goods have three characteristics that are very different from previous goods. They're virtually free, perfect and instant. What that means is the cost of making an additional copy of a digital good is basically zero; each copy is an identical, perfect replica of the original; and they can be distributed anywhere in the world instantaneously, or at the speed of light.
Those three characteristics – free, perfect and instant – were never used to describe earlier goods like apples, or cars, or haircuts, but they're ubiquitous for digital goods. And they present lots of value creation opportunities, but also some new measurement challenges.
So, for example, photography used to be made with an expensive chemical process. It cost about 50 cents each. Now there are about 100 times as many photos being taken but they can be distributed for zero cost, so they're disappearing from GDP. Similarly, music was on vinyl records or CDs, now can be distributed as bits.
Overall, if you look at the information share of the economy, which includes music, data, software, news, all those different kinds of information goods: in 1983 it amounted to 4.6% of GDP in the United States; now, with this explosion of digital goods, it's still… 4.6%!
Basically our official GDP measures have completely missed the information explosion. So, if we want to measure it, we need a new metric and that's what we're developing with my team at MIT.
An economist explains how to value the internet
Esko Kilpi is a wonderful must read thinker. This is a 30 min video about corporations and transaction cost - with a lovely brief exploration of how the technology of the paint tube (invented in 1849) transformed the world of painting - instigated whole new ways of perception in art.
Esko Kilpi - Digital Happiness and the Future of Organizations
Esko Kilpi shared his vision with us and our clients during our event In Pursuit of Digital Happiness in Brussels on November 9-10 2017. Esko Kilpi is a senior adviser at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. His research interests have been about social complexity, the Internet as a commons for value creation and technological intelligence enabling a human centric, relational approach to work. In addition to his work as a researcher and author Esko Kilpi lectures internationally on the topics of network-based view of the firm, Internet based business models and work design based on latest interaction technologies. Esko Kilpi is frequently invited as a keynote speaker in management and technology conferences globally. As an international speaker, author and adviser he works with both public sector organisations and leading multinational companies. He has been a member of the advisory board of the World Bank on Knowledge Management. Currently he serves as an advisory board member for a select group of high tech start-ups.
This is a fascinating review of the history of kitchen design - and how it reflect social structures and institutions of living. This signals the need to imagine how future cities and living spaces will reimagine new types of persons. I have lived in a 100 year old house for the last 30 years - and now I know where the design of its kitchen originated.
You might not have heard of the Frankfurt Kitchen, but if you have neatly organized cabinets, an easy-to-clean tiled backsplash, and a colorful countertop, in a sense, you already cook in one.
The Frankfurt Kitchen Changed How We Cook—and Live
There are “dream kitchens,” and then there’s the Frankfurt Kitchen, designed by architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926.
The idea of a dedicated space to cook, which might also be stylish and even fun to spend time in, was only possible because of two major impacts of industrialization. First, mass production, along with municipal gas, water, and electricity, made modern appliances affordable, and more broadly, it triggered an enormous social upheaval that transformed social class in the western world. In other words, the 20th-century kitchen was a new kind of room designed for a new kind of person.
after World War I, women who had formerly worked in domestic service began pursuing better paying kinds of work, like teaching, nursing, retail, and factory labor. The Great Depression wiped out much of the recently accrued wealth of the 1920s, and many families learned to do without housekeepers and cooks, sometimes for good.
As if on cue, manufacturers had just the thing: appliances that were advertised, as in one especially glamorous Westinghouse print ad from 1922, as “invisible servants.” In the 1920s and ‘30s, modern appliances were sometimes seen to substitute for household staff in families that could no longer afford help, or they could make domestic life easier for families that had never had help in the first place. Julia Child would later refer to these people (which is to say, the vast majority of humanity) as “servantless”—an idea so novel in the context of gourmet cooking that it needed its own special term.
Bret Victor is an amazing inventor - if we want to think of the future of work - this is a MUST VIEW 54 min video. The future of work as it would if everyone worked based on a guiding principle and creative curiosity.
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.
And this is an awesome concept of the future of work - another must view.
Dynamicland
Dynamicland is a communal computer, designed for agency, not apps, where people can think like whole humans.
It's the next step in our mission to incubate a humane dynamic medium whose full power is accessible to all people.
The computer of the future is not a product, but a place.
A community space and possible future.
If the dynamic medium is to serve as the foundation for new modes of thought and communication, it must lift all people, not just those traditionally advantaged by technology. There is no product we can ship to achieve this goal.
Instead, we are building Dynamicland as a community space, where the people of Oakland will come to “live in the future” and shape the medium with us. We are actively drawing our community from a diverse set of people, with a focus on those who are underserved or alienated by current forms of computing.
This community space is a model for a new kind of civic institution —
a public library for 21st-century literacy.
This is a clear signal of the emerging transformation of global transportation and the politics involved.
Germany tests first eHighway autobahn
Germany's first real-time test of electrified trucks fed via overhead cables amid heavy motorway traffic has begun near Frankfurt. The Environment Ministry hopes the project could contribute to climate-neutral haulage.
A project to electrify peak-use stretches of Germany's motorway network took its next step Tuesday, with a first hybrid electric-diesel truck merging into regular four-lane traffic flows on the Autobahn (motorway) 5 between Darmstadt and Frankfurt.
The five-kilometer (3-mile) eHighway stretch will be tested in both directions until 2022 using electricity from renewable sources, according to Hesse state's transport department, Hessen Mobil, after years of off-highway trials involving the engineering giant Siemens.
Darmstadt technical university traffic researchers will assess economic and ecological data gleaned during the three-year trial phase.
If Facebook were a country? Those of us who are already very wary of the dominance of GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple - and why not add Microsoft and the Asian giants - e.g. Tencent, Alibaba, etc.) this is even more worrisome. Remember Facebook’s initiative to provide the developing world access to the Internet? Facebook Basic - The Internet in the Mall of Facebook.
The social networking site, which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, is hoping to disrupt existing networks by breaking down financial barriers, competing with banks and reducing consumer costs.
Facebook plans to launch 'GlobalCoin' currency in 2020
Facebook is finalising plans to launch its own crypto-currency next year.
It is planning to set up a digital payments system in about a dozen countries by the first quarter of 2020.
The social media giant wants to start testing its crypto-currency, which has been referred to internally as GlobalCoin, by the end of this year.
Facebook is expected to outline plans in more detail this summer, and has already spoken to Bank of England governor Mark Carney.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg met Mr Carney last month to discuss the opportunities and risks involved in launching a crypto-currency.
Facebook has also sought advice on operational and regulatory issues from officials at the US Treasury.
The firm is also in talks with money transfer firms including Western Union as it looks for cheaper and faster ways for people without a bank account to send and receive money.
Remember the ‘Information Highway?’ that was temporarily displaced by the Internet as a series of ‘tubes’ :) I remember the first World Future Society conference I attended (1999) and watched the CEO of Iridium - discuss the project of launching over 60 satellites to create a global phone system. The Iridium company went into bankruptcy within a decade. But the dream of being able to provide access to the Internet from anywhere in the world is stronger and more viable than ever.
SpaceX has launched the first 60 satellites of its space internet system
The satellite internet contest is heating up. SpaceX has launched the first 60 satellites of its internet constellation, Starlink.
The details: The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 10:30 p.m. EST on Thursday night. The 60 satellites make up SpaceX’s heaviest payload to date, weighing about 500 pounds (227 kilograms) each. You can watch a video of the launch here.
Some background: SpaceX is one of many companies attempting to build up a global broadband internet network in low Earth orbit (LEO). The firm wants to launch nearly 12,000 satellites and plans to pick up the pace of deployment. The plan right now is to continue launching batches of 60 at a time, putting one to two thousand into orbit each year. Those kinds of numbers are prompting some concerns about clogging up orbit (“Why satellite mega-constellations are a threat to the future of space”).
The first of many: Other organizations, such as OneWeb, Amazon, Telesat, and LeoSat, are also planning to use vast numbers of lower-capacity LEO satellites to provide broadband internet connections to the globe. Each will use hundreds or thousands of the satellites, which will circle the Earth and beam internet to the surface. OneWeb launched the first of its hundreds of satellites earlier this year.
There continues to be controversy about how fast self-driving, autonomous will ready for primetime public use. This is a good signal of progress.
Ultrafast Motion-Planning Chip Could Make Autonomous Cars Safer
Realtime Robotics’ motion-planning processor helps autonomous cars make better decisions
About two years ago, we covered a research project from Duke University that sped up motion planning for a tabletop robot arm by several orders of magnitude. The robot relied on a custom processor to do in milliseconds what normally takes seconds. The Duke researchers formed a company based on this tech called Realtime Robotics, and recently they’ve been focused on applying it to autonomous vehicles.
The reason that you should care about fast motion planning for autonomous vehicles is because motion planning encompasses the process by which the vehicle decides what it’s going to do next. Making this process faster doesn’t just mean that the vehicle can make decisions more quickly, but that it can make much better decisions as well—keeping you, and everyone around you, as safe as possible.
This is a vital signal for several reasons, the rapidly shrinking size of ‘bots’, the speed of change and it raises the question that if education continues to become increasingly expensive for students - who will become the scientists of the future? Free education, a wider deeper safety net and new business models could unleash creative curiosity that the future will need for survival.
USC’s penny-sized robotic bee is the most sci-fi thing you’ll see all week
When it comes to robots, it’s easy to get so caught up in the big creations that we forget about the innovation taking place at the smaller end of the spectrum. As the University of Southern California’s new Bee Plus robot proves, that’s a massive mistake.
Its insect-inspired flying bot weighs just 95 milligrams and is smaller than a penny. It’s a spiritual sequel to Harvard University’s RoboBee project from 2013, one of the tiniest flying machines ever built. Bee Plus ups the level of complexity, however — by doubling the number of wings from RoboBee’s two to four. This increased number of wings, mirroring that of a real insect, enables a more lifelike mode of flight.
“This is possible because of the innovation in actuation design,” Nestor Perez-Arancibia, a professor in the University of Southern California’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, told Digital Trends. “As stated in [our] paper, basically each of the four wings is driven by an actuator which is simpler and lighter than those employed in the original RoboBee.”
Perez-Arancibia said Bee Plus “comprises a staggering amount of knowledge collectively acquired by the micro-robotics community over the past 20 years.” In particular, it represents an impressive collaboration between four Ph.D. students — Xiufeng Yang, Ying Chen, Longlong Chang, and Ariel Calderón — who specialize in, respectively, robot design, control theory, aerodynamics, and microfabrication.
The Human capacity to sense and analyse the world is accelerating this will be vital in the digital environment filled with an atmosphere and soil of sensors that will enable our world to be queryable in ways never before imagined. A key talent in the future is less about providing answers than composing interesting questions based on deep creative curiosity.
The model will be made available through the Google Cloud Healthcare API as Google continues trials and additional tests with partner organizations.
Google’s lung cancer detection AI outperforms 6 human radiologists
Google AI researchers working with Northwestern Medicine created an AI model capable of detecting lung cancer from screening tests better than human radiologists with an average of eight years experience.
When analyzing a single CT scan, the model detected cancer 5% more often on average than a group of six human experts and was 11% more likely to reduce false positives. Humans and AI achieved similar results when radiologists were able to view prior CT scans.
When it came to predicting the risk of cancer two years after a screening, the model was able to find cancer 9.5% more often compared to estimated radiologist performance laid out in the National Lung Screening Test (NLST) study.
Detailed in research published today in Nature Medicine, the end-to-end deep learning model was used to predict whether a patient has lung cancer, generating a patient lung cancer malignancy risk score and identifying the location of the malignant tissue in the lungs.
The ultra fast maybe getting faster - at least our ability to ‘sense’ speed. The graphic is interesting - seeing a pulse of light move.
Video filmed at four trillion frames per second captures light in a flash
Super-high-speed camera produces a film consisting of 60 consecutive frames.
A new ultra-fast camera can generate a film of dozens of frames at trillions of frames per second.
High-speed cameras capture frames on light sensors composed of semiconductors. Such cameras typically save each frame of a sequence on a separate area of the sensor. But inherent limits on the sensor’s size can limit the length of a film to just a few shots.
Feng Chen of Xi’an Jiaotong University in Shaanxi, China, Lidai Wang at the City University of Hong Kong and their colleagues instead expose each frame on separate but overlapping areas of the camera sensor. Each successive frame is imprinted with a random tag before it reaches the sensor. These tags allow the image captured by the sensor to be teased apart into distinct frames.
With this technique, the camera could generate a sequence of up to 60 shots at a rate of almost 4 trillion frames per second. This allowed the team to film a light pulse as it travelled through a material.
This is a very important signal of progress in the domestication of DNA - one that will provoke the widespread ‘Frankenstein’ meme among many. Of course the vigilance principle has to be rigorously attended.
“It’s a landmark,” said Tom Ellis, director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the new study. “No one’s done anything like it in terms of size or in terms of number of changes before.”
Nine years ago, researchers built a synthetic genome that was one million base pairs long. The new E. coli genome, reported in the journal Nature, is four million base pairs long and had to be constructed with entirely new methods.
Scientists Created Bacteria With a Synthetic Genome. Is This Artificial Life?
In a milestone for synthetic biology, colonies of E. coli thrive with DNA constructed from scratch by humans, not nature.
Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology.
Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, fashioning a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created.
The bacteria are alive, though unusually shaped and reproducing slowly. But their cells operate according to a new set of biological rules, producing familiar proteins with a reconstructed genetic code.
The achievement one day may lead to organisms that produce novel medicines or other valuable molecules, as living factories. These synthetic bacteria also may offer clues as to how the genetic code arose in the early history of life.
This is a loud signal of the emergence of Do-It-Yourself biohacking - one possible accelerator of domesticating DNA.
David mixes the yeast cells together with other liquids, inducing the production of proinsulin, then places the flasks in an incubator at 30 degree centigrade.
He has to frequently check the instructions on his smartphone, because he is not too familiar with this kind of work yet.
Do-it-yourself insulin: Biohackers aim to counteract skyrocketing prices
Millions of people with diabetes don’t have access to insulin globally. In the US, many patients have to ration the vital drug due to soaring prices. Now, biohackers have come up with a plan to produce it more cheaply
David Anderson is pipetting a yellowish liquid into conical flasks, anxious not to spill anything.
The liquid contains yeast cells, which, thanks to a bit of genetic engineering, are able to produce a precursor of insulin — the hormone that people with Type 1 diabetes need to administer to themselves to survive.
"We are doing a test today with an enzyme that's going to create the insulin from the proinsulin," David explains. "The enzyme did show activity before, so we are hopeful."
It's Sunday, lab day for the biohackers from the Open Insulin Project in Oakland,California.
The group aims to develop a protocol for 'do-it yourself insulin', a manual to produce the vital drug on a small scale with quite simple means.
"It makes good economic sense," says Anthony Di Franco, founder of the Open Insulin Project.
"You don't require much in terms of equipment or labor to produce quite a substantial amount of insulin. In the corner of a room you could make enough for 50,000 to 100,000 people."
This is a fascinating new finding that signals how much remains to be learned about survival and evolution of bacteria and other life forms.
How bacteria nearly killed by antibiotics can recover — and gain resistance
A protein that pumps toxic chemicals from the microbes allows some of them to resurge
Mostly dead bacteria can sometimes be resurrected as antibiotic-resistant cells.
A protein that pumps toxic chemicals out of E. coli bacterial cells can buy time for even nearly dead microbes to become antibiotic resistant. The protein, known as the AcrAB-TolC multidrug efflux pump, doesn’t work well enough to defeat antibiotics on its own. But it can move enough antibiotic molecules out of bacterial cells to allow production of real resistance proteins, researchers report in the May 24 Science.
Bacteria often swap DNA, including some antibiotic-resistance genes. Scientists have known for decades that antibiotic-resistance genes are often carried on small circles of DNA called plasmids. Two bacteria that come in contact with each other can pass these plasmids from antibiotic-resistant cells to sensitive ones. But that was thought to happen when antibiotics aren’t around to kill sensitive cells.
Common wisdom holds that treating bacteria with antibiotics should stop bacteria in the act of swapping antibiotic-resistance genes, says Kim Lewis, a microbiologist at Northeastern University in Boston not involved in the study. At least, “yesterday, that’s what I would have told you,” he says. “Today, having read that paper, I have to change my views.”
The multidrug pump also helped bacteria stay alive long enough to develop resistance to other antibiotics. Disabling or removing that pump stopped bacteria from developing resistance. Drugs that disable that pump protein might be able to stop the spread of antibiotic resistance through plasmids. But no such drugs are safe to use in people yet, Lesterlin says.
“There’s no good news for human well-being” in the study, he says. Still, “it’s better to know your enemy and what type of weapon it has.”
This is an interesting signal of how scientific progress in the fields of biology and genetics are not only contributing to domestication of DNA for the future - but also enriching our ability to study and understand our long past.
The moment an organism dies, its body begins to decompose. Its cells rupture, and their contents spill into the environment. What scientists have realized over the past two decades is that even though the physical structure of a body disappears, its DNA can last for centuries.
Ancient DNA Yields Snapshots of Vanished Ecosystems
Surviving fragments of genetic material preserved in sediments allow metagenomics researchers to see the full diversity of past life — even microbes.
The results of the cave study, published this past April in Scientific Reports, showed that bears, roe deer and bats were present in this region at least as far back as 80,000 years ago. But finding traces of late Pleistocene animals is just scratching the surface of what can be done with environmental DNA, or eDNA, the traces of genetic molecules from long-dead organisms that survive as cell-free residues in the soil or other terrain. One of its strengths is that it can detect the remnants of organisms with soft bodies, allowing scientists to reconstruct entire ecosystems complete with plants, algae and more. Environmental genomics (or metagenomics, as it is also known) truly lets us see the ancient world in a few grains of sand.
According to Laura Parducci, an evolutionary plant ecologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved with that paper, “The big benefit [of metagenomic techniques] is that you can get DNA from species that are actually not visible in the fossil records.” Parducci studies ancient ecosystems by extracting eDNA from sediments from lake beds in Scandinavia. She hopes to understand how plant communities responded to climate change in the past. Gleaning insights into ancient plants has traditionally lagged behind that of animals because plant remnants like seeds and wood typically decay more readily than durable animal bones and can be harder to find in the geologic record. Moreover, Parducci also wants to reconstruct the past of organisms such as microbes, which leave no obvious trace.
This is a nice signal for some aspects of the future of medical services. The scary thing is how this is not part of a health care system - it’s a private business that links with Apple health products. That said - it could be transformed for use in public health care for all.
3D body scans and AI health records: Inside the doctor’s office of the future
For $149 a month, Forward Health's futuristic health center wants to replace your primary care clinic.
in Forward's "front of house," members check themselves in on tablets, where initials pop up according to what appointments are in queue. After checking in, members stand in front of a 3D body scanner that uses a variety of technologies -- infrared, bioelectrical impedance, structured light -- and a rotating platform to gather measurements that they then discuss with their physician.
Forward Health considers itself the doctor's office of the future, where tech and medicine meet to create a seamless, collaborative primary care experience. I visited Forward Health to find out how different this place really is compared to the typical doctor's office.
By the time members make it from the body scanner to their exam room, Forward's algorithms have already translated the scan data into easy-to-understand tidbits about the members' health. Member and doctor then collaboratively review the data together on a massive touchscreen.
I didn’t know this about measles.
Measles erases the immune system’s memory
Beyond the rash, the infection makes it harder for the body to remember and attack other invaders
Measles silently wipes clean the immune system’s memory of past infections. In this way, the virus can cast a long and dangerous shadow for months, or even years, scientists are finding. The resulting “immune amnesia” leaves people vulnerable to other viruses and bacteria that cause pneumonia, ear infections and diarrhea.
Those after effects make measles “the furthest thing from benign,” says infectious disease epidemiologist and pathologist Michael Mina of Harvard University. “It really puts you at increased susceptibility for everything else.” And that has big consequences, recent studies show.
This new view may help explain a larger-than-expected umbrella of safety created by measles vaccination. “Wherever you introduce measles vaccination, you always reduce childhood mortality. Always,” says virologist Rik de Swart of Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. The shot prevents deaths, and more than just those caused by measles. By shielding the immune system against one virus’s attack, the vaccine may create a kind of protective halo that keeps other pathogens at bay, some researchers suspect.
