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:
Carol Gilligan’s original formulation of the “care model” is also called the “responsibility model” because taking responsibility for others’ welfare is essential to care. “Responsibility to self,” however, is also an important part of this model because you cannot have a relationship with others if you do not have a self.
Mothers Who Care Too Much
Most philosophers and scientists who see reason as some sort of inferential ability involving abstract representations will allow that experiments with ‘higher’ animals can yield evidence of some low-level reason-like faculty: for example when apes hide stones in anticipation of future conflicts. But researchers almost always draw the lower limit for such ability in a way that excludes species whose behaviour is not observably similar to ours. The search for reason beyond the bounds of the human species always ends up as a search for beings that remind us of ourselves.
But what if reason is not so much an inferential ability, as simply the power to do the right thing in the right circumstances? Furthermore, what if this power flows automatically, from simply being the sort of creature one is?
If reason exists without deliberation, it cannot be uniquely human
the track record of expert forecasters—in science, in economics, in politics—is as dismal as ever. In business, esteemed (and lavishly compensated) forecasters routinely are wildly wrong in their predictions of everything from the next stock-market correction to the next housing boom. Reliable insight into the future is possible, however. It just requires a style of thinking that’s uncommon among experts who are certain that their deep knowledge has granted them a special grasp of what is to come.
Tetlock decided to put expert political and economic predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing, he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from true skill. The project lasted 20 years, and comprised 82,361 probability estimates about the future.
The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
The best forecasters, by contrast, view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. This is called, in a word, learning.
The Peculiar Blindness of Experts
Here is how fast America is changing: By the time today’s teenagers hit their 30s, there will be — for the first time ever — more minorities than whites, more old people than children, and more people practicing Islam than Judaism.
The big picture: The slow demographic shifts we've watched over decades will finally reach a tipping point in the 2040s. They'll transform what America looks like, where we live and what we fear.
Future foretold: A new America in 2040
This is definitely a weak signal - but significant for pointing toward new business models that are more appropriate for the digital environment and the advent of increased automation and AI augmented processes.
Richer Sounds founder hands over control of hi-fi and TV firm to staff
Chain joins John Lewis in employee ownership as staff get £1,000 for each year they have worked
The founder of Richer Sounds is handing control of the hi-fi and TV retail chain to staff, in a move that will also give employees large cash bonuses.
Julian Richer will announce to staff on Tuesday that he has transferred 60% of his shares into a John Lewis-style trust. Richer, who recently turned 60, said the “time was right” to pass the baton to the chain’s 531 employees.
With annual sales of nearly £200m, Richer Sounds is one of the biggest UK companies to embrace employee ownership in recent years.
The Employee Ownership Association (EOA) says more than 350 businesses have now adopted the model, with at least 50 more preparing to follow suit. Recent converts include Riverford, the organic vegetable box company and Aardman, the Bristol-based animation studio behind Wallace & Gromit.
An unorthodox business figure, with his long hair and sideline as the drummer in funk band Ten Millennia, Richer is lauded for the success of Richer Sounds which he founded in 1978 at the age of 19. His business philosophy, set out in his 2001 management book The Richer Way, champions providing secure, well-paid jobs with a happy workforce as being key to business success over the long term.
Preston is becoming increasingly viewed as an important signal of how political-economies can change business models - to enable new forms of flourishing.
A British Town’s Novel Solution to Austerity
Preston, in the north of England, is prioritizing public spending on local businesses.
Here in Preston, in northern England, local officials are trying something different: The authorities are prioritizing their public spending on businesses based and run here and encouraging the creation of worker-owned co-operatives. It is an effort—already under way in places as disparate as Ohio and Spain—that aims not just to limit the fallout of the funding cuts, but also, its proponents argue, to reshape how business is done.
Preston’s move, born out of necessity, has been seen by some as the extension of a protectionist agenda that starts with Brexit and ends with Britain turning into an island of city-states. But councils, teetering on bankruptcy, are desperate for solutions. The Labour Party has seized on the so-called Preston model and formed a unit to work on rolling out the experiment across the United Kingdom. Many are watching to see whether Preston provides answers to the question of how government will be organized, should public spending remain permanently lower.
The council teamed up with five other institutions, including the police and the local university, to split big procurement contracts—in one case, Brown told me, a £1.6 million catering contract was broken up into smaller ones, to advantage local farmers.
Over time, spending began to shift. The institutions that signed up increased how much they spent in Preston from £38 million in 2012–13 to £112 million in 2016-17. In the same period, spending in the wider district of Lancashire increased from £289 million to £489 million, and the Preston council doubled the proportion of the money it spent locally to 28 percent, despite a shrinking overall pool of funds.
From understanding the role of epigenetic, to horizontal gene transfer and more - the advances in biological and genetic sciences are illuminating that there is much more to evolution than simple selection.
“We thought that the way we conceptualize these viruses must be wrong,” said Stéphane Blanc, a plant virologist at INRA and the senior author of the new study. They decided to verify the key assumption that all the segments must be together within a cell for the infection to work. “It was not done before because it was so evident that they have to be together that no one actually tested it,” he said.
Asking how viruses operate as populations rather than individual virion particles is going to end up being important for lots of different viral systems.
Viruses Can Scatter Their Genes Among Cells and Reassemble
Some viruses can replicate without passing all their genes into any one cell.
A classical tenet of virology is that viruses fully infect individual cells and replicate within them. But recent work shows that some viruses instead scatter their genes among many cells. The cells then make new complete viruses by sharing the products of the genes.
A new study recently published in eLife, however, overturns that assumption.
Not only are some viruses split into multiple segments that infect host cells separately, but as researchers in France have now discovered, those fractured viruses can flourish with their genomes scattered like puzzle pieces across a multitude of host cells. Something — presumably, the diffusion of molecules among the infected cells — allows complete viral particles to replicate, self-assemble and infect anew.
in the case of this “multipartite” virus that she and her colleagues examined, “it seems that this is not true. The segments infect cells independently and accumulate independently in the plant host cells.” She added, “It really shows that the virus doesn’t work at a single-cell level, but at a multicellular level.”
What they found when they scrutinized FBNSV infections blew them away. By tagging two viral segments at a time with different colored fluorescent probes, the team could see that the full complement of viral segments was absent from the vast majority of individual host plant cells they examined. Furthermore, the researchers showed that a protein required for viral replication was present in cells that did not have the genome segment coding for it.
This is a great signal of how domesticating DNA can help us meet the challenges of climate change. A must see 14 min TED Talk
How supercharged plants could slow climate change
Plants are amazing machines -- for millions of years, they've taken carbon dioxide out of the air and stored it underground, keeping a crucial check on the global climate. Plant geneticist Joanne Chory is working to amplify this special ability: with her colleagues at the Salk Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, she's creating plants that can store more carbon, deeper underground, for hundreds of years. Learn more about how these supercharged plants could help slow climate change. (This ambitious plan is a part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)
The future of domesticating DNA and other advances in AI and nanotechnology are already accelerating how humans are shaping themselves and the environment. Here’s an interesting book review about Philip Ball’s recent book exploring the future of human becoming.
Brain in a dish, babies by design: what it means to be human
Natalie Kofler is engrossed by a book that examines what cutting-edge biotechnology means for our sense of self.
Ostensibly, How to Grow a Human examines how scientific advances from genomics to assisted reproduction influence human identity. Ball starts by introducing us to his “mini-brain”; a collection of signalling neurons grown from his own reprogrammed skin cells by researchers at University College London. His observation of “part of himself” in a Petri dish begins a journey that spans centuries, giving context to a not-so-distant future in which organs are grown to order and gene editing steers human evolution. Faced with technologies that cheat death and circumvent reproduction, Ball forces us to reassess what being human actually means.
The book’s main thrust, however, is that the concept of pure, objective science is a farce. Ball reminds us that scientific progress does not occur in a vacuum: questions, results and conclusions are shaped by their cultural milieu. Patriarchal biases of the seventeenth century steered early theories of human reproduction; histories of colonialism continue to influence descriptions of infectious disease, among many other aspects of life. This goes for the scientists who create the stories, the language that gives context to their research and the public that must find ways to accommodate advances into an evolving world view. Perception of science is inexorably linked to culture. It always has been — with implications for both.
Ball pushes back, for instance, against the familiar narrative that genes are the ‘blueprint’ of life. We are much more than this, he argues. Our bodies are made up of multiple genomes; for example, genetic material is often exchanged between mother and fetus during pregnancy. And the trillions of microorganisms lodging in our guts, skin and noses — the microbiome — express their own sequences. Thanks to epigenetic controls (cellular mechanisms that affect how genes are expressed), even genetically identical organisms can display very different characteristics. I learnt that the fur of cloned cats can be a different colour from their genetic donor’s. At best, we are patchworks of genomic expression, and identity isn’t as straightforward as many assume. In the era of consumer genetic-sequencing services, that is cause for caution.
And here’s another signal of organs grown on a chip.
"The major paradigm shift in medicine over the past decade has been the recognition of the huge role that the microbiome plays in health and disease. This new anerobic Intestine Chip technology now provides a way to study clinically relevant human host-microbiome interactions at the cellular and molecular levels under highly controlled conditions in vitro,"
Human gut microbiome physiology can now be studied in vitro using Organ Chip technology
The human microbiome, the huge collection of microbes that live inside and on our body, profoundly affects human health and disease. The human gut flora in particular, which harbor the densest number of microbes, not only break down nutrients and release molecules important for our survival but are also key players in the development of many diseases including infections, inflammatory bowel diseases, cancer, metabolic diseases, autoimmune diseases, and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Most of what we know about human-microbiome interactions is based on correlational studies between disease state and bacterial DNA contained in stool samples using genomic or metagenomic analysis. This is because studying direct interactions between the microbiome and intestinal tissue outside the human body represents a formidable challenge, in large part because even commensal bacteria tend to overgrow and kill human cells within a day when grown on culture dishes. Many of the commensal microbes in the intestine are also anaerobic, and so they require very low oxygen conditions to grow which can injure human cells.
A research team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering led by the Institute's Founding Director Donald Ingber has developed a solution to this problem using 'organ-on-a-chip' (Organ Chip) microfluidic culture technology. His team is now able to culture a stable complex human microbiome in direct contact with a vascularized human intestinal epithelium for at least 5 days in a human Intestine Chip in which an oxygen gradient is established that provides high levels to the endothelium and epithelium while maintaining hypoxic conditions in the intestinal lumen inhabited by the commensal bacteria. Their "anaerobic Intestine Chip" stably maintained a microbial diversity similar to that in human feces over days and a protective physiological barrier that was formed by human intestinal tissue. The study is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
This is an interesting signal - one that should have been researched a long time ago. Essentially calorie counting is an inadequate measure for dieting but could contribute if one considers the nature of the food involved - is the food highly processed or less processed and more whole-food based.
First strict test shows why a junk-food diet packs on weight
A steady repast of pancakes, packaged snacks and processed meats prompted people to consume more calories.
To determine how processed foods affect health, Kevin Hall at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and his colleagues fed study participants ultra-processed foods for two weeks. The same participants also spent two weeks eating unprocessed foods, such as fish and fresh vegetables. Both types of meal had the same number of calories, and the same levels of nutrients such as sugar and fat. Participants chose how much to eat.
When offered ultra-processed foods, people ate more quickly and took in an average of 500 more calories per day than when they were offered unprocessed foods. Participants gained roughly 1 kilogram during the trial’s junk-food phase and lost roughly the same amount during the whole-foods phase.
This is another significant signal of a potential phase transition in social attitudes and clinical uses of psychedelic and other traditionally ‘mind changing medicines’.
EMBRACING ECSTASY
Can efforts to bottle MDMA’s magic transform psychiatry?
On a chilly spring morning in 2017, Boris Heifets took the podium to talk about MDMA in an Oakland, California, hotel ballroom packed with scientists, therapists, patients, and activists. If he noticed the occasional whiffs of incense and patchouli oil coming from the halls of the Psychedelic Science meeting, he didn’t let on. After all, anyone studying the therapeutic benefits of the drug that sparked an underground dance revolution 30 years ago knows that ravers, Burners, and old hippies flock to this meeting. It’s the world’s largest gathering on psychoactive substances.
Ecstasy enthusiasts and university professors alike heard several research teams report that MDMA helped patients recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other disabling psychiatric conditions after conventional treatments had failed. Meeting rooms buzzed with excited chatter about the prospect of MDMA getting approved as a prescription therapy for PTSD. That could come as early as 2021 if it proves safe and effective in large clinical studies that are just getting underway. For many advocates of this work, regulatory approval can’t arrive too soon.
For many at the meeting and in the reemerging field of what some call psychedelic medicine, there’s no reason to look further than MDMA. A few hours after Heifets spoke, two therapists who used MDMA in sessions with 28 PTSD patients in Colorado reported that 19 participants no longer met the criteria for their diagnoses a year after treatment. MDMA helps melt the walls people hide behind to protect themselves, said Marcela Ot’alora, the principal investigator of the study. That allows patients to explore the coping strategies that have failed them for so long. Other teams reported encouraging results from small studies using MDMA to alleviate severe anxiety in adults with autism and in people confronting life-threatening illnesses.
I remember when the original Google Glass came out and I knew that workplace information management would change in very significant ways - of course sometimes the future takes longer than you expect. This next generation of Google Glass a $999 headset designed for businesses and is primed for wider application in many domains.
Glass Enterprise Edition 2: faster and more helpful
Glass Enterprise Edition has helped workers in a variety of industries—from logistics, to manufacturing, to field services—do their jobs more efficiently by providing hands-free access to the information and tools they need to complete their work. Workers can use Glass to access checklists, view instructions or send inspection photos or videos, and our enterprise customers have reported faster production times, improved quality, and reduced costs after using Glass.
Glass Enterprise Edition 2 helps businesses further improve the efficiency of their employees. As our customers have adopted Glass, we’ve received valuable feedback that directly informed the improvements in Glass Enterprise Edition 2.
Over the past two years at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, we’ve collaborated with our partners to provide solutions that improve workplace productivity for a growing number of customers—including AGCO, Deutsche Post DHL Group, Sutter Health, and H.B. Fuller. We’ve been inspired by the ways businesses like these have been using Glass Enterprise Edition. X, which is designed to be a protected space for long-term thinking and experimentation, has been a great environment in which to learn and refine the Glass product. Now, in order to meet the demands of the growing market for wearables in the workplace and to better scale our enterprise efforts, the Glass team has moved from X to Google.
This is a good but weak signal of the inevitable blend of AI and neurotechnologies - for restoring capabilities and enhancing human abilities with brain-system interfaces.
At present, this is just a neat tech demo. However, as Vanthornhout suggests, long-term, this be used to create some fascinating consumer-facing products. Imagine, for example, smart hearing aids or cochlear implants which adjust their signal based on how well you are understanding a particular speaker.
This hearing aid will read your brain to help you understand what’s being said
One common complaint from people who wear a hearing aid is that, while they can hear speech, they are unable to make out its meaning. That is because, while the two things are related, hearing and understanding aren’t the same thing. A new technique developed by researchers from KU Leuven in Belgium, in collaboration with the University of Maryland, may offer an alternative solution, however.
They have developed an automatic test involving an EEG brain cap, in which scientists can look at a person’s brainwaves to see not only whether they have heard a particular sound, but whether they have actually understood it. The test involves using 64 electrodes to measure a patient’s brainwaves while they listen to a sentence. Based on the brain waveform response, this can then be used to reveal whether or not a patient understands what has been said to them.
“Our method is independent of the listener’s state of mind,” Jonas Vanthornhout, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends. “Even if the listener doesn’t pay attention, we can measure speech understanding. We can do this because we directly measure speech understanding from the brain. We reconstruct the speech signals from your brainwaves. When the reconstruction succeeds, this means that you have understood the message. When the reconstruction fails, you didn’t understand the message. Our method will allow for a more accurate diagnosis of patients who cannot actively participate in a speech understanding test because they’re too young, for instance, or because they’re in a coma.”
And another weak signal of what will also be inevitable in the future digital dust as part of both the digital environment and enabling a more direct brain-environment interface.
Wireless Network Brings Dust-Sized Brain Implants a Step Closer
Engineers have designed a scheme to let thousands of brain implants talk at up to 10 megabits per second
Wireless brain implants called neurograins would form a network that can sense neural activity and send to an external computer for interpretation.
At the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, engineers from Brown University, Qualcomm, and the University of California San Diego presented the final part of a communications scheme for these implants. It allows bidirectional communication between the implants and an external device with an uplink rate of 10 megabits per second and a downlink rate of 1 Mb/s.
Brain-computer interfaces have managed some amazing feats: allowing paralyzed people to type words and move a robot using only their minds, to name two examples. Brown University neuroengineering professor Arto Nurmikko has had a hand in some of those developments, but even he says the technology is at only a rudimentary stage—the equivalent of the computer understanding the brain’s intention to bend a single finger.
Nurmikko calls the 0.25-square-millimeter implants “neurograins.” They each consist of a chip capable of harvesting RF energy; that chip powers an electrode that senses spikes of voltage from individual neurons, as well as the wireless communications. An antenna set outside of the skull provides the RF power, transmits to the implants, and receives data from them.
I remember when I first saw the Sony Walkman. I had a typical reaction - why would anyone need to listen to music while walking around? While a lot of media is focused on how social media and our ‘screens’ are displacing our ‘face-to-face’ interactions - there seems little media discussion about how ubiquitous immersing ourselves in our personal ‘sound bubbles’ is. Even more, interesting is how music has become a prosthetic for emotional self-regulation. This is an interesting discussion of life lived in a personal sound chamber.
To those who lived before headphones, it might seem as though I want to exist in the world without actually being part of it. And to some extent, that’s true.
What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones
I decided to noise-cancel life.
I own three pairs of noise-canceling headphones. Two go over my ears, enveloping them in cozy tombs of silence. One pair consists of earbuds, one of which I jam into my ear to block out the world while I use my other ear for phone interviews. Besides the noise-canceling kind, I have headphones for basically every activity I do. In fact, I recently came to the disturbing realization that there’s rarely a moment of my day when my ears are not filled with or covered by something.
Like many other Americans, I now wear AirPods all day at my desk to combat the awful tyranny of the open office. Since they don’t cancel noise, they provide me with writing music while allowing me to listen up for my bosses. I don’t like exercise classes and their preselected, generic playlists, so instead I work out with headphones and listen to my own special running mix, the contents of which can be disclosed only upon my death. (Let’s just say the dream of the ’90s is alive on my Spotify.) I like to listen to podcasts while I cook, so the earbuds come in handy while I chop and sauté. And I can hook up headphones to a Roku when I want to watch a depressing foreign TV show and my boyfriend wants to do literally anything else.
A key theme of the digital environment is that whatever can be automated will be. That doesn’t mean everything - but it does imply that every job and activity will face change because of new forms of ‘prosthetic’ help. This article signals the emerging transformation of agriculture.
you have to manage disease on a farm. Just as if I picked with my own hands, there’s a risk of spreading around mold, viruses or insects with a robot. That’s why you want these to be washable. It is part of the work you do to keep the plants safe.”
This robot can pick tomatoes without bruising them and detect ripeness better than humans
Farmers spend more than $34 billion a year on labor in the U.S., according to the USDA. And many would like to hire more help. But the agriculture industry here faces labor shortages, thanks in part to the scarcity of H2B visas, and an aging worker population. Older workers can’t necessarily handle the hours or repetitive physical tasks they once might have.
That’s where Root AI, a start-up in Somerville, Massachusetts, comes in. The company’s first agricultural robot, dubbed the Virgo 1, can pick tomatoes without bruising them, and detect ripeness better than humans.
The Virgo is a self-driving robot with sensors and cameras that serve as its eyes. Because it also has lights on board, it can navigate large commercial greenhouses any hour of the day or night, detecting which tomatoes are ripe enough to harvest. A “system-on-module” runs the Virgo’s AI-software brain. A robotic arm, with a dexterous hand attached, moves gently enough to work alongside people, and can independently pick tomatoes without tearing down vines.
A similar signal the 4 min video is fascinating.
Amazon’s new fulfillment center machines pack boxes up to 5x faster than humans
From drone deliveries to checkout-free brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon has made no secret of its desire to automate as many parts of the retail experience as possible. While Amazon employs thousands of people in its fulfillment centers, it may be because it hasn’t yet figured out a way to automate their role. Until now, that is. Things could be about to get even more dicey for human workers as Amazon is reportedly rolling out machines capable of boxing up customer orders.
According to Reuters, Amazon has considered using machines at dozens of warehouses, removing at least 24 roles at each one. Because each machine costs $1 million plus operational expenses, it would likely take Amazon a little under two years to recoup the cost of installing the machines. The machines are manufactured by Italian firm CMC Srl, and are called CartonWrap. They are able to pack up to 700 boxes per hour, which is four to five times the rate of a human packer. Each machine requires a human operator to load customer orders, another to stock cardboard and glue, and a technician to fix jams when and where required.
A personal Appeal - Our 3rd Kickstarter Campaign
Seeking to raise $2000 - we are 60% there with 14 days left
Any contribution will help.
theSpace Creative Hub: Next Phase
We're growing and ready to bring our social initiative to a next level!
we've had great success AND recognition offering a place for Adults on the Autism Spectrum 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.
Your support enables us to steward our members as they build their portfolio of work and skills, including the ability to engage in a variety of social platforms to share their work in ways that build their confidence as creatives.
We are ready to move to the next level. Your help will enable us to have more time to promote projects and work, assisting members to build their careers and professional identity!
Directly sponsor an individual in the community
Each month we would like to provide subsidized workshops to a member who may not have access to financial resources which would enable them to attend even one or more times in a week, for example. Stretch goal: For each additional $500.00 we raise, above our funding goal, we can do just that---for a period of up to 4 months with!
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