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
Contents
Quotes:
Articles:
In the book, when you write about the present day — you talk about climate, you talk about resources, but you also talk about the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. It may be kind of a foolish question to ask, but … how do you rank those threats?
I’m repressing a chuckle because I know how people react when I answer that. Whenever somebody tells me, “How should we prioritize our efforts?” My answer is, “We should not be prioritizing our efforts.” It’s like someone asking me, “Jared, I’m about to get married. What is the most important factor for a happy marriage?” And my response is, “If you’re asking me what is the most important factor for a happy marriage, I’d predict that you’re going to get divorced within a few years.” Because in order to have a happy marriage you’ve got to get 37 things right. And if you get 36 right but you don’t get sex right, or you don’t get money right, or you don’t get your in-laws right, you will get divorced. You got to get lots of things right.
So for the state of the world today, how do we prioritize what’s going on in the world? We have to avoid a nuclear holocaust. If we have a nuclear holocaust, we’re finished, even if we solve climate change. We have to solve climate change because if we don’t solve climate change but we deal with a nuclear holocaust, we’re finished. If we solve climate change and don’t have a nuclear holocaust but we continue with unsustainable resource use, we’re finished. And if we deal with the nuclear problem and climate change and sustainable use, but we maintain or increase inequality around the world, we’re finished. So, we can’t prioritize. Just as a couple in a marriage have to agree about sex and children and in-laws and money and religion and politics. We got to solve all four of those problems.
Jared Diamond: There’s a 49% Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050
Unlike habitat destruction, carbon emissions and other signatures of the Anthropocene epoch, the technologies being tested today are designed for consciously taking control of some of the key physical processes that shape our world. The bedrock laws of nature don’t disappear, of course, but they become subject to a deeper kind of manipulation. You could think of these as not simply ‘cosmetic’ changes but ‘metabolic’ ones. Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and the conventions of atmospheric physics become subject to a delicate kind of renegotiation.
The crossing of this line represents radically new territory for both our species and for the planet. Nature itself will be shaped by processes redesigned and ‘improved’ by geneticists and engineers. We should call this transition the beginning of a ‘synthetic age’, a time in which background constants are increasingly replaced by artificial and ‘improved’ versions of themselves. This remaking of the metabolism of the Earth strikes at the very core of how we understand our surroundings and our role in them.
An Anthropocene epoch requires one kind of psychological adjustment. A synthetic age demands something considerably more.
Forget the Anthropocene: we’ve entered the synthetic age
People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.
Knowledge workers are often put in a position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face. The same event means different things to different people and just getting more information will not help them. What will help is a setting where they could negotiate and construct fresh ideas that would include their multiple interpretations of what they experience. The challenge is that managers often treat the existence of multiple views as a symptom of a weakness rather that as an accurate and needed barometer of uncertainty.
Confusion and ambiguity
This is an important signal - which may be much stronger than most people assume. A 5 min read that is worthy of consideration.
The Underpopulation Bomb
While the global population of humans will continue to rise for at least another 40 years, demographic trends in full force today make it clear that a much bigger existential threat lies in global underpopulation.
That worry seem preposterous at first. We’ve all seen the official graph of expected human population growth. A steady rising curve swells past us now at 7 billion and peaks out about 2050. The tally at the expected peak continues to be downgraded by experts; currently UN demographers predict 9.2 billion at the top. The peak may off by a billion or so, but in broad sweep the chart is correct.
But curiously, the charts never show what happens on the other side of the peak. The second half is so often missing that no one even asks for it any longer. It may be because it is pretty scary news. The untold story of the hidden half of the chart is that it projects a steady downward plunge toward fewer and fewer people on the planet each year — and no agreement on how close to zero it can go. In fact there is much more agreement about the peak, than about how few people there will be on the planet in a 100 years.
A lower global population is something that many folks would celebrate. The reason it is scary is that the low will keep getting lower. All around the world the fertility rate is dropping below replacement level country by country so that globally there will soon be an un-sustaining population. With negative population growth each generation produces fewer offspring, who producer fewer still, till there are none. Right now Japan’s population is way below replacement level; indeed Japan is losing total population; every year there are fewer and fewer Japanese. Most of Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and some Asia countries are running below replacement levels. It goes further than Japan. Today Germany and Ukraine have absolute population decline; they are already experiencing the underpopulation bomb.
We all know that there are now more people over 65 than under 15 (in many developed countries). This is an very important signal - not just related to elders - but to all forms of designs aimed and making things adult-tamper-proof. :) In fact there are too many design crimes against humanity to count.
I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me
The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.
Despite our increasing numbers the world seems to be designed against the elderly. Everyday household goods require knives and pliers to open. Containers with screw tops require more strength than my wife or I can muster. (We solve this by using a plumber’s wrench to turn the caps.) Companies insist on printing critical instructions in tiny fonts with very low contrast. Labels cannot be read without flashlights and magnifying lenses. And when companies do design things specifically for the elderly, they tend to be ugly devices that shout out to the world “I’m old and can’t function!” We can do better.
WHAT OLDER CONSUMERS WANT AND NEED
As we age, we have more experience with life, which can make us better decision-makers and managers. Crystalized intelligence, it is called, and it gets better with experience. A caveat is that we often face physical changes that designers fail to account for into their work.
This is a good signal - a 3 min read by Kevin Kelly on the future of film - at least certainly animated film.
Virtual Live-Action in a Virtually Real Film
The new Disney movie Lion King marks a threshold for a new way of making a film, another step erasing the line between artifice and reality, between the virtual and the natural.
The entire set of the film — all the background and characters –are virtual, that is, computer created. The entire movie was shot in what we would today call VR. As this article makes clear, the director John Favreau says “We’ve basically built a multiplayer VR filmmaking game just for the purposes of making this movie.” This is a method that will be ordinary, if not normal, for many movies in the future.
Lion King is the cumulation of four strands of new filming: 1) CGI, computer special effects, 2) wholly animated movies like Pixar’s Coco or Up, and 3) the “previs” multiplied by a 1,000 and 4) VR and video games. The special effects guru Robert Legato says “Everybody does VFX movies, everybody does animated movies, everybody does live-action movies — but to mix all of them together to make something that belies how it was done is, I think, the game-changing portion of all this.”
Drones are appearing everywhere and soon maybe very small indeed. But more than small they maybe ever more difficult to spot. The 6 min video is very illustrative.
This Robot Hummingbird Is Almost as Agile as the Real Thing
Purdue roboticists have built a bio-inspired micro air vehicle that flies much like a real hummingbird
Hummingbirds are some of the most nimble fliers on Earth. Their speed and agility are spectacular, driven by the complex muscles that control their wings. This is a difficult system for robots to emulate, and in general, the small winged robots that we’ve seen have relied on compromises in control in order to be able to use flapping wings for flight.
At Purdue University’s Bio-Robotics Lab, Xinyan Deng and her students are taking a very deliberately bio-inspired approach towards winged robotic flight that has resulted in one of the most capable robotic hummingbirds we’ve ever seen. It’s just about the same size and shape as the real thing, and the researchers hope it will be able to perform the same sorts of acrobatic maneuvers as an actual hummingbird. And more importantly, it’s robust enough that it can use its wings as sensors to navigate around obstacles, meaning that it has a shot at being useful outside of a lab.
This is an amazing signal of a potentially transformative computational paradigm - it is still far from primetime - but could be a technology that will seem like magic in the future.
The temperature of the magnet did not increase at all as this process requires energy of only one quantum of the terahertz light—a photon—per spin.
Energy-free superfast computing invented by scientists using light pulses
The invention uses magnets to record computer data which consume virtually zero energy, solving the dilemma of how to create faster data processing speeds without the accompanying high energy costs.
Today's data centre servers consume between 2 to 5% of global electricity consumption, producing heat which in turn requires more power to cool the servers.
The problem is so acute that Microsoft has even submerged hundreds of its data centre services in the ocean in an effort to keep them cool and cut costs.
an international team publishing in Nature has solved the problem by replacing electricity with extremely short pulses of light—the duration of one trillionth of a second—concentrated by special antennas on top of a magnet.
This new method is superfast but so energy efficient that the temperature of the magnet does not increase at all.
Here’s a signal that may reach commercial applications in the next decade transforming the world with cheaper, larger and ubiquitous screens.
Smallest pixels ever created could light up color-changing buildings
The smallest pixels yet created—a million times smaller than those in smartphones, made by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold—could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings.
The colour pixels, developed by a team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.
The pixels are the smallest yet created, a million times smaller than typical smartphone pixels. They can be seen in bright sunlight and because they do not need constant power to keep their set colour, have an energy performance that make large areas feasible and sustainable.
The pixels could enable a host of new application possibilities such as building-sized display screens, architecture which can switch off solar heat load, active camouflage clothing and coatings, as well as tiny indicators for coming internet-of-things devices.
The future of hearing enhancement is also entangled with AI, sensors and monitoring our physical and psychological well being. This is a longish article but a nice summary of the current state of hearables.
Hearables Will Monitor Your Brain and Body to Augment Your Life
Devices tucked inside your ears will make technology more personal than ever before
The ear is like a biological equivalent of a USB port. It is unparalleled not only as a point for “writing” to the brain, as happens when our earbuds transmit the sounds of our favorite music, but also for “reading” from the brain. Soon, wearable devices that tuck into our ears—I call them hearables—will monitor our biological signals to reveal when we are emotionally stressed and when our brains are being overtaxed. When we are struggling to hear or understand, these devices will proactively help us focus on the sounds we want to hear. They’ll also reduce the sounds that cause us stress, and even connect to other devices around us, like thermostats and lighting controls, to let us feel more at ease in our surroundings. They will be a technology that is truly empathetic—a goal I have been working toward as chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories and an adjunct professor at Stanford University.
the abilities of AI-based virtual assistants have, of course, blossomed in recent years. Your smart speaker is much more useful than it was even six months ago. And by no means has its ability to understand your commands finished improving. In coming years, it will become adept at anticipating your needs and wants, and this capability will transfer directly to hearables.
What might we expect from early offerings? Much of the advanced research in hearables right now is focusing on cognitive control of a hearing aid.
This kind of device will be attractive to pretty much all of us, not just people struggling with some degree of hearing loss. The sounds and demands of our environments are constantly changing and introducing different types of competing noise, reverberant acoustics, and attention distractors. A device that helps us create a “cone of silence” (remember the 1960s TV comedy “Get Smart”?) or gives us superhuman hearing and the ability to direct our attention to any point in a room will transform how we interact with one another and our environments.
Within five years, a new wave of smart hearing aids will be able to recognize stress, both current and anticipatory. These intelligent devices will do this by collecting and combining several kinds of physiological data and then using deep-learning tools to tune the analysis to individuals, getting better and better at spotting and predicting rising stress levels. The data they use will most likely include pulse rate, gathered using optical or electrical sensors, given that a rising heart rate and shifts in heart rate variability are basic indicators of stress.
Science Fiction isn’t what it used to be - as everyday the future seems closer than ever. Here’s another Star Trek and Galaxy Hitchhiker’s technology looming on the horizon.
Google’s Translatotron converts one spoken language to another, no text involved
Every day we creep a little closer to Douglas Adams’ famous and prescient Babel fish. A new research project from Google takes spoken sentences in one language and outputs spoken words in another — but unlike most translation techniques, it uses no intermediate text, working solely with the audio. This makes it quick, but more importantly lets it more easily reflect the cadence and tone of the speaker’s voice.
Translatotron, as the project is called, is the culmination of several years of related work, though it’s still very much an experiment. Google’s researchers, and others, have been looking into the possibility of direct speech-to-speech translation for years, but only recently have those efforts borne fruit worth harvesting.
This is an excellent signal of the emerging digital environment.
Korea’s New 5G Futuristic Hospital
Hologram visitors, indoor navigation, facial recognition security, and voice-controlled rooms are coming to a hospital in South Korea
When Yonsei University Health System opens its newest hospital next year, in Yongin, about 25 miles outside of Seoul, it will be decked out with some of tech’s hottest gadgets.
Very sick patients in isolation rooms can visit with holograms of their loved ones. Visitors will find their way around the hospital using an augmented reality (AR)-based indoor navigation system. Authorized medical workers will use facial recognition to enter secure areas. Patients can call a nurse and control their bed, lights, and TV with an Alexa-style voice assistant.
That’s the vision, at least. Yonsei and Korean telecommunications company SK Telecom, last week jointly announced that they had signed a memorandum of understanding to build technology for the futuristic hospital, scheduled to open in February 2020. SK Telecom will support the technology with a 5G network, and is considering securing it with quantum cryptography, according to the announcement.
Here’s a growing signal of the emergence of how combinations of sciences including the domestication of DNA are advancing.
Genetically engineered phage therapy has rescued a teenager on the brink of death
It’s a remarkable story of recovery, but it’s unclear how useful this sort of therapy could become.
The background: Isabelle Holdaway had been given less than a 1% chance of survival after a lung transplant, carried out to combat the symptoms of cystic fibrosis, left her with an antibiotic-resistant infection. She had been sent home and was in a terrible physical condition: underweight, with liver failure, and with lesions on her skin from the infection.
A breakthrough: Her consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London worked with a team at the University of Pittsburgh to develop an untested phage therapy. This treatment used a cocktail of three phages, which are viruses that solely attack and kill bacteria. Two of the three phages, selected from a library of more more than 10,000 kept at the University of Pittsburgh, had been genetically engineered to be better at attacking the bacteria. The therapy was injected into her bloodstream twice daily and applied to the lesions on her skin, according to Nature Medicine.
Now: Holdaway is not fully cured, but her infection is under control. Virtually all her lesions have cleared. She is still having twice-daily injections of the therapy, and her treatment team is planning to add a fourth phage to try to clear her of the infection entirely.
The promise: Antibiotic resistance is a growing emergency, and phage therapy is being held up as a potential treatment for antibiotic-resistant superbugs. It’s a promising avenue, but it’s a deeply personalized form of therapy, and we must be careful extrapolating too much from this single case study alone, which was not a full clinical trial.
The domain of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) is mature and spreading to many new areas. There’s been ongoing weak signals about DIY genome hacking - I think the signals are getting stronger.
From DIY editing to matchmaking by DNA: how human genomics is changing society
In the past, the target markets for businesses working on human genomics were the academic sphere (universities, research institutions) and pharmaceuticals. Over the last decade, a new target audience has emerged: the general public. This was facilitated by the drop in the price of molecular biology techniques able to read complete genomes to around $100. Many old and new companies, including start-ups, have taken advantage of this opportunity: by 2022, the genomics business is expected to grow into a $24 billion industry.
What are these new companies offering?
1. Gene therapy:
2. Direct to consumer genetic testing (DTC-GT)
3. Equipment and reagents for do-it-yourself biology (DIY bio)
4. Buying and selling genetic data
What is the role of citizens on human genomics?
For more than half of these new businesses, the target audiences are citizens, and by the use of powerful social media and marketing campaigns, they can reach large numbers of people worldwide. In the report Omics in Society: Social, Legal and Ethical aspects of Human Genomics we note that the booming business in human genomics has opened many opportunities for development, but also that it sometimes overlooks ethical and legal considerations. It is imperative we bring non-scientific groups into this debate, in order to discuss moral issues such as:
A small signal of the emerging change in energy geopolitics.
Britain passes one week without coal power for first time since 1882
Landmark follows government pledge to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2025
Britain has gone a week without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since Queen Victoria was on the throne, in a landmark moment in the transition away from the heavily polluting fuel.
The last coal generator came off the system at 1.24pm on 1 May, meaning the UK reached a week without coal at 1.24pm on Wednesday, according to the National Grid Electricity System Operator, which runs the network in England, Scotland and Wales.
Coal-fired power stations still play a major part in the UK’s energy system as a backup during high demand but the increasing use of renewable energy sources such as wind power means it is required less. High international coal prices have also made the fuel a less attractive source of energy.
The latest achievement – the first coal-free week since 1882, when a plant opened at Holborn in London – comes only two years after Britain’s first coal-free day since the Industrial Revolution.
Here’s another signal of the inevitable transformation of our energy geopolitics.
Chile just signed the cheapest unsubsidized power in the world at ¢2.91/kWh.
Solarpack Corp. Tecnologica, a firm from Spain, won an auction for a 120 megawatts solar power plant at a cost of $29.10 per megawatt-hour. There are absolutely no subsidies which means this is the cheapest power plant in the world.
Previously, Dubai’s Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) accepted a 2.99$c/kWh bid for an 800-megawatt plant. At the time this was the lowest asking bid for energy ever but the auction in Chile just beat it by 0.08 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Hello everyone, I am a co-founder and board member of theSpace - a Non-Profit Social Enterprise whose aim is to enable adults on the autism spectrum (and others with cognitive disability apprentice for creative self-employment and life-long self-development. This year we have initiated our 3rd Kickstarter Campaign. We are seeking additional funds to acquire new computer equipment and to offer financial support for our members who lack the funds but wish to learn.
Please consider supporting this effort - any amount will help.
theSpace Creative Hub: Next Phase
We're growing and ready to bring our social initiative to a next level!
We're happy to say that we've had great success AND recognition offering a place that truly understands lifelong learning and authentic opportunities for developing identity, self-advocacy skills and generative community. Each member artist is already developing a network of peers and becoming recognized for a body of work which, in turn, is being lauded by community partners. Each is evolving a sense of enhanced value and place, as they learn amazing skills and apprentice for creative self-employment and belonging.
Over the past three years, we've established ourselves as an innovative and groundbreaking central hub for creative engagement and entrepreneurship here in Ottawa! We've accomplished our goals and we're ready for more!
It's hard to believe that it's only been a few short years since you helped theSpace to realize our dream! Beginning as a social initiative lead by community advocates, parents, academics and artists, to address post-graduation gaps in Autism and intellectual disability resources in our community--we're well on our way to doing what we set out to do! Thank you!
We're happy to say that we've had great success AND recognition offering a place that truly understands lifelong learning and authentic opportunities for developing identity, self-advocacy skills and generative community. Each member artist is already developing a network of peers and becoming recognized for a body of work which, in turn, is being lauded by community partners. Each is evolving a sense of enhanced value and place, as they learn amazing skills and apprentice for creative self-employment and belonging.
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