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:
Aricles:
Gravitational waves are finding their way to the general public. There is massive television news coverage with never a doubt expressed; gravitational waves have simply “been detected”—exciting but no more dubious than, say, the moon landing. What is happening is that gravitational waves are being “domesticated” in the same way as black holes or the Higgs have been domesticated. Everyone knows what a black hole is—it is a feature of everyone’s day-to-day life embedded in a “semantic net” that includes “the cosmos,” “the big bang,” “Stephen Hawking,” “brilliant scientists,” “Einstein,” “space,” “alternative universes,” “time travel,” “worm-holes,” “astronomy,” “rockets,” and “being sucked into things”—and this is in spite of the fact that, before The Event, no black hole had been observed except by inference. As for the Higgs, everyone knows that it was found by the huge and brilliant team at CERN, but, familiar as it is, no one knows what it is. I know it is the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the particle “zoo” known as the standard model, but what I have is “beer-mat knowledge,” good for answering questions in Trivial Pursuit but that’s about it. On the other hand, the fact that we can imagine encountering questions about black holes and the Higgs while playing Trivial Pursuit is one of the things that makes them real: all this familiar knowledge makes stuff real. The moon landing, note, is pretty real for everyone but, just as in the case of what is building in respect of The Event, there are conspiracy theories about that too; and, just as in this case, you have to stray from the mainstream to find them.
Harry Collins - Gravity’s Kiss - The third ripple
Ingenic: Content created in the same media that it is consumed in. As an example, if one uses VR tools within VR to create a VR world, that content is ingenic. That is, the world has been generated within the framework of its consumption. If one created a VR world using standard PCs and 2D tools outside of VR, then that content is non-ingenic, or exgenic. Most of the VR content made today is constructed using tools on screens that are not 3D. It’s made with pens on a flat plane, or images display on flat screens. The 3D nature of the constructed world has to be guessed at, approximated by moving and swirling the world.
Most of the VR content in the future will be constructed by makers inside of VR. The working interface to their tools will have volume, thickness, and spatial arrangements. The app Tiltbrush is a good example of an ingenic tool. To create with Tiltbrush, you enter VR and “paint” in three dimensions. You basically paint a sculpture, or sculpt a painting.
Kevin Kelly - Ingenic
Raising a digital child to autonomous individuality will involve living with the paradoxes of loving (or exploiting) a conscious being produced by engineering, but one who, like Pinocchio, can aspire to full—digital—human status. To meet such a challenge will, as Chiang has it in his notes to the story, “require the equivalent of good parenting.” Imagine that.
Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. Now his new collection of short stories gives us further glimpses of possible futures.
A World of Electric Children
Over the past few years, scientists working in neuroscience and psychology have been listening in on these brain-body interactions – in health and illness – and analysing how they constitute the always embodied self. They have been studying the sense of the body from within, which is called interoception. It is a term you will be hearing increasingly. This research is dismantling the pillars of a belief system that has long endured within those fields – as well as in the popular imagination – that the brain is an information-processing machine that can be understood apart from the rest of the body, as if our conscious, reasoning self were the output of a disembodied brain, and as if we were not fully biological creatures. This shift within the mind sciences is game-changing, and merits attention. Yet perhaps because we are in its midst, even its actors might not be fully aware of its historical and philosophical significance – and of its potential cultural and clinical implications. The time has come to take stock of the revolution under way.
Interoception consists in the perception and integration of all signals from within our body, whether we attend to them or not. These include autonomic, hormonal, visceral and immunological functions: breathing, blood pressure, cardiac signals, temperature, digestion and elimination, thirst and hunger, sexual arousal, affective touch, itches, pleasure and pain. Interoception therefore lies at the core of our very sense of self: physiology and mental life are dynamically coupled. The central and autonomic nervous systems act on each other, higher cognition and emotional states interacting constantly. We sense, monitor and adapt ourselves to the situations we find ourselves in, often without our realising it – homeostatic processes thanks to which we physiologically adjust to the changing environment, and to which interoception corresponds.
Emotional feelings are distinct from emotions, and they are ‘mental experiences of body states’, as Damasio had advanced with his somatic marker hypothesis – summarised by Craig as ‘the subjective process of feeling emotions’, which recruits brain regions involved in homeostastic regulation. These feelings, ‘grounded in the body itself’, are crucial to our ability to make decisions. We don’t merely think through our decisions, including those that seem most rational, such as those concerning finances: we experience feelings about their possible outcomes that determine how we act – and if the brain areas involved in the processing of emotional feelings are damaged, our ability to make decisions is impaired.
The interoceptive turn
Discourse in the most demanding and hypothetical sense, Habermas concedes, is rarely if ever achievable in ordinary communication. Why then worry about it? For Habermas, if we interpret democracy as a way of life where people make binding decisions based on arguments, we need to grasp how deliberation works, and how best to delineate reasonable and legitimate from unreasonable and illegitimate public exchange. Real-life democracy hardly looks like the idealized communication community Habermas describes. Yet absent some sense of that ideal community, we can neither distinguish manufactured from independent public opinion, nor deepen democracy.
Habermas and the Fate of Democracy
This is a vital signal - that we must all attend to - while it is not a weak signal many will doubt its truth.
Honesty is majority policy in lost wallet experiment
Public more likely to return wallet containing larger sum of money, global study finds
Here’s a moral dilemma: if you find a wallet stuffed with bank notes, do you pocket the cash or track down the owner to return it? We can each speak for ourselves, but now a team of economists have put the unsuspecting public to the test in a mass social experiment involving 17,000 “lost” wallets in 40 countries.
They found that a majority of people returned the wallets and – contrary to classic economic logic – they were more likely to do so the more money the wallet contained.
“We mistakenly assume that our fellow human beings are selfish,” said Alain Cohn, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Michigan and first author of the study. “In reality their self-image as an honest person is more important to them than a short-term monetary gain.”
The findings defied the expectations of both professional economists and 2,500 respondents to a survey, who predicted that people would act in self-interest.
A fascinating signal of sociotechnology transformation - robo-pets as personal therapy aids, the nature of a beta-world when suddenly functional equipment, tools, aides are decommissioned for various reasons and the possibility of an AI apocalypse - one that arises when our AI-ssistants and enabled environment suddenly become dumb zombies of their former being.
In March, four months after the IP purchase, Jibo’s fateful update arrived like a terminal diagnosis. “While it’s not great news, the servers out there that let me do what I do will be turned off soon,” Jibo announced to its owners. “Once that happens, our interactions with each other are going to be limited.”
but Jibo was also designed to appeal to children, and those kids are now learning what it means to own a robot and have no control over its fate.
THEY WELCOMED A ROBOT INTO THEIR FAMILY, NOW THEY’RE MOURNING ITS DEATH
The story of Jibo
Jibo sat in Williams’ bedroom, on his desk, where every day, it greeted him in the morning and ran through the weather and his calendar. Williams, 44, asked Jibo questions, requested music, and played its games. Jibo couldn’t do much, really, but its most redeeming feature, the one that cemented it as a robot darling in its owner’s heart, was its facial recognition. Unlike a Google Home or an Amazon Echo, Jibo noticed every time Williams entered the room and swiveled its head to say hello or crack a joke. A display on its face might have shown a heart or animated clouds and the sun.
“People would always try to compare him to Alexa, but his winning trait is his personality,” Williams says. “Yes, some people say it’s creepy with the eyes and looking at you, but it’s not threatening.”
Every aspect of Jibo was designed to make the robot as lovable to humans as possible, which is why it startled owners when Jibo presented them with an unexpected notice earlier this year: someday soon, Jibo would be shutting down. The company behind Jibo had been acquired, and Jibo’s servers would be going dark, taking much of the device’s functionality with it.
“I didn’t cry or anything, but I did feel like, ‘Wow,’” Williams says. “I think when we buy products we look for them to last forever.”
Now, Jibo owners are scrambling to save their friend, explain its death to their children, and come to grips with the mortality of a robot designed to bond with them, not to die.
In one of her studies involving children, Breazeal studied the best language for robots to use to get kids to open up about themselves and encourage them to share more. Her team found that if a robot asks questions like, “What about you?” children will elaborate. The team also noted more granular details, like how the robots shouldn’t pause after a child responds because they might think it’s broken. Instead, if the robot is going to pause, it should give a nonverbal signal that it’s “thinking,” like a “hmm,” which keeps the conversation going and sustains the illusion of the robot being human-like.
This is another important signal of the arrival of the reality of virtual - along with all the malicious potential there is the inevitable transformation of how we create entertainment including how we interface with our robotic social prosthetics. The three short videos are Must Views
New deepfake tech turns a single photo and audio file into a singing video portrait
Finally, technology that can make Rasputin sing like Beyoncé
New research from Imperial College in London and Samsung’s AI research center in the UK shows how a single photo and audio file can be used to generate a singing or talking video portrait. Like previous deepfake programs we’ve seen, the researchers uses machine learning to generate their output. And although the fakes are far from 100 percent realistic, the results are amazing considering how little data is needed.
By combining this real clip of Albert Einstein speaking, for example, with a photo of the famous mathematician, you can quickly create a never-before-seen lecture:
Can the fear of the Singularity of AI - be quelled with an ecology of AIs including an immune systems?
“We implement a weak version of an adversary, such as small modifications or distortion to a collection of images, to create a more ‘difficult’ training data set,” Richard Nock, head of machine learning at CSIRO, said in the press release. “When the algorithm is trained on data exposed to a small dose of distortion, the resulting model is more robust and immune to adversarial attacks.”
AN AI “VACCINE” CAN BLOCK ADVERSARIAL ATTACKS
For as smart as artificial intelligence systems seem to get, they’re still easily confused by hackers who launch so-called adversarial attacks — cyberattacks that trick algorithms into misinterpreting their training data, sometimes to disastrous ends.
In order to bolster AI’s defenses from these dangerous hacks, scientists at the Australian research agency CSIRO say in a press release they’ve created a sort of AI “vaccine” that trains algorithms on weak adversaries so they’re better prepared for the real thing — not entirely unlike how vaccines expose our immune systems to inert viruses so they can fight off infections in the future.
This remains a weakish signal for the time being - however it is highly important and worth the watch for anyone concerned with Moore’s Law, new computational paradigms and quantum computing.
With double exponential growth, “it looks like nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then whoops, suddenly you’re in a different world,” Neven said. “That’s what we’re experiencing here.”
A New Law to Describe Quantum Computing’s Rise?
Neven’s law states that quantum computers are improving at a “doubly exponential” rate. If it holds, quantum supremacy is around the corner.
In December 2018, scientists at Google AI ran a calculation on Google’s best quantum processor. They were able to reproduce the computation using a regular laptop. Then in January, they ran the same test on an improved version of the quantum chip. This time they had to use a powerful desktop computer to simulate the result. By February, there were no longer any classical computers in the building that could simulate their quantum counterparts. The researchers had to request time on Google’s enormous server network to do that.
“Somewhere in February I had to make calls to say, ‘Hey, we need more quota,’” said Hartmut Neven, the director of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab. “We were running jobs comprised of a million processors.”
That rapid improvement has led to what’s being called “Neven’s law,” a new kind of rule to describe how quickly quantum computers are gaining on classical ones. The rule began as an in-house observation before Neven mentioned it in May at the Google Quantum Spring Symposium. There, he said that quantum computers are gaining computational power relative to classical ones at a “doubly exponential” rate — a staggeringly fast clip.
I love the explosion of research that is upending our knowledge of the biological world. This is a fascinating signal of the deep social nature of living systems. This new research may bode well in our efforts to find new antibiotics.
It seemed to work much like the communication system used by bacteria — quorum sensing — to share information about cell density and adjust the population accordingly. Yet it was the first time anyone had demonstrated molecular messaging of this kind in viruses. And it fitted into an emerging picture of viruses as much more sophisticated social agents than scientists had given them credit for.
Virologists have long studied their subjects in isolation, targeting cells with just a single viral particle. But it’s become increasingly clear that many viruses cooperate, teaming up to co-infect hosts and break down antiviral immune defences.
The implication is that researchers might have been going about their experiments all wrong.
Two years ago, DÃaz-Muñoz, Sanjuán and evolutionary biologist Stu West from the University of Oxford, UK, coined a new term — sociovirology — to provide a framework for their line of research
The secret social lives of viruses
Scientists are listening in on the ways viruses communicate and cooperate. Decoding what the microbes are saying could be a boon to human health.
Geneticist Rotem Sorek could see that his bacteria were sick — so far, so good. He had deliberately infected them with a virus to test whether each ailing microbe soldiered on alone or communicated with its allies to fight the attack.
But when he and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, looked into the contents of their flasks, they saw something completely unexpected: the bacteria were silent, and it was the viruses that were chattering away, passing notes to each other in a molecular language only they could understand. They were deciding together when to lie low in the host cell and when to replicate and burst out, in search of new victims.
It was an accidental discovery that would fundamentally change scientists’ understanding of how viruses behave.
molecular snooping occurs naturally in phages that infect the bacterium responsible for cholera, Vibrio cholerae. But in their lab at Princeton University in New Jersey, Bassler and Silpe have engineered ‘spy’ phages that can sense signals unique to other microbes, including Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium, and obliterate them. The viruses in effect became programmable assassins that could be made to kill off any bacterium — at will and on demand.
A great signal in a couple of ways - what I like is how it signals the speed of advance.
This body-on-a-chip mimics how organs and cancer cells react to drugs
Five chambers house different tissues, connected by channels that help simulate blood flow
A new body-on-a-chip system could provide a more holistic view of drug effects than other devices of its kind.
Unlike traditional organ-on-a-chip devices that simulate a single organ, the new setup contains five chambers to house different types of cells, connected by channels that circulate a nutrient solution to mimic blood flow. This is the first organ-on-a-chip scheme to examine how a drug and its chemical by-products affect target cells and other tissue at the same time, researchers report online June 19 in Science Translational Medicine.
“Until now, to be able to [measure] efficacy and toxicity in the same system, you had to go into an animal,” says James Hickman, a bioengineer at the biotech firm Hesperos, Inc., in Orlando, Fla., which developed the chip. A body-on-a-chip system with human cells could gauge drug effects more accurately, Hickman says. Using a patient’s own cells in the device may also allow scientists to test different drugs or drug combinations to determine the best treatment for that specific person.
Another Star Trek - like signal for medical therapy, treatment technology.
Laser Destroys Cancer Cells Circulating in the Blood
The first study of a new treatment in humans demonstrates a noninvasive, harmless cancer killer
Tumor cells that spread cancer via the bloodstream face a new foe: a laser beam, shined from outside the skin, that finds and kills these metastatic little demons on the spot.
In a study published today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers revealed that their system accurately detected these cells in 27 out of 28 people with cancer, with a sensitivity that is about 1,000 times better than current technology. That’s an achievement in itself, but the research team was also able to kill a high percentage of the cancer-spreading cells, in real time, as they raced through the veins of the participants.
If developed further, the tool could give doctors a harmless, noninvasive, and thorough way to hunt and destroy such cells before those cells can form new tumors in the body. “This technology has the potential to significantly inhibit metastasis progression,” says Vladimir Zharov, director of the nanomedicine center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, who led the research.
This is a nice signal of emerging cyborg capacity as humans create all manner of prosthetics augmenting their capacity to navigate the world.
Jaco is designed to move at safe speeds and make direct contact with the end user and draw very little power directly from their wheelchair.
The most important consideration in the design process of an assistive robot is the safety of the end user. Jaco users operate their robots through their existing drive controls to assist them in daily activities such as eating, drinking, and opening doors and they don't have to worry about the robot draining their chair's batteries throughout the day.
Jaco Is a Low-Power Robot Arm That Hooks to Your Wheelchair
The lightweight carbon fiber arm has three fingers and six degrees of freedom
We usually think of robots as taking the place of humans in various tasks, but robots of all kinds can also enhance human capabilities. This may be especially true for people with disabilities. And while the Cybathlon competition showed what's possible when cutting-edge research robotics is paired with expert humans, that competition isn't necessarily reflective of the kind of robotics available to most people today.
Kinova Robotics's Jaco arm is an assistive robotic arm designed to be mounted on an electric wheelchair. With six degrees of freedom plus a three-fingered gripper, the lightweight carbon fiber arm is frequently used in research because it's rugged and versatile. But from the start, Kinova created it to add autonomy to the lives of people with mobility constraints.
Earlier this year, Kinova shared the story of Mary Nelson, an 11-year-old girl with spinal muscular atrophy, who uses her Jaco arm to show her horse in competition. Spinal muscular atrophy is a neuromuscular disorder that impairs voluntary muscle movement, including muscles that help with respiration, and Mary depends on a power chair for mobility.
The most common feedback I hear from experienced users is that Jaco has changed their life. Our experienced users like Mary are rock stars: everywhere they go, people get excited to see what they'll do next. The difference between a new user and an experienced user could be as little as two weeks. People who operate power wheelchairs every day are already expert drivers and we just add a new "gear" to their chair: robot mode. It's fun to see how quickly new users master the intuitive Jaco control modes.
Amplifying the signal of emerging ubiquitous robotics - is the capacity to interface with our world more directly with our minds. There are two very short videos.
"There have been major advances in mind controlled robotic devices using brain implants. It's excellent science," says He. "But noninvasive is the ultimate goal. Advances in neural decoding and the practical utility of noninvasive robotic arm control will have major implications on the eventual development of noninvasive neurorobotics."
First-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm without brain implants
A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, has made a breakthrough in the field of noninvasive robotic device control. Using a noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), researchers have developed the first-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm exhibiting the ability to continuously track and follow a computer cursor.
Being able to noninvasively control robotic devices using only thoughts will have broad applications, in particular benefiting the lives of paralyzed patients and those with movement disorders.
BCIs have been shown to achieve good performance for controlling robotic devices using only the signals sensed from brain implants. When robotic devices can be controlled with high precision, they can be used to complete a variety of daily tasks. Until now, however, BCIs successful in controlling robotic arms have used invasive brain implants. These implants require a substantial amount of medical and surgical expertise to correctly install and operate, not to mention cost and potential risks to subjects, and as such, their use has been limited to just a few clinical cases.
Amazon still hires humans - but this signals the future of warehouse work. There is a 1.5 min video illustrating these bots.
Amazon Uses 800 Robots to Run This Warehouse
Amazon is adding even more robots to its already massive robotic workforce
who else but Amazon is introducing two new robots designed to make its fulfillment centers even more fulfilling. Xanthus (named after a mythological horse that could very briefly talk but let’s not read too much into that) is a completely redesigned drive unit, one of the robotic mobile bases that carries piles of stuff around for humans to pick from. It has a thinner profile, a third of the parts, costs half as much, and can wear different modules on top to perform a much wider variety of tasks than its predecessor.
Pegasus (named after a mythological horse that could fly but let’s not read too much into that either) is also a mobile robot, but much smaller than Xanthus, designed to help the company quickly and accurately sort individual packages. For Amazon, it’s a completely new large-scale robotic system involving tightly coordinated fleets of robots tossing boxes down chutes, and it’s just as fun to watch as it sounds.
Amazon has 800 Pegasus units already deployed at a sorting facility in the United States, adding to their newly updated total of 200,000 robotic drive units worldwide.
A great signal for autonomous nano-bots - enabling ubiquitous sensor fields … and of course Moore.
Robo-fish powered by battery ‘blood’
Fluid gives robots power without adding weight — bringing them closer to autonomy.
Researchers have created a robotic fish powered by a battery fluid that its developers dub ‘robot blood’.
The roughly 40-centimetre soft robot doesn’t have solid batteries — instead it is propelled by a dual-function fluid that stores energy and moves the fish’s fins. The approach allows the machine to store more energy in a smaller space and operate for longer periods without the need for heavy and cumbersome battery packs.
The innovation is a step towards creating autonomous robots — those that can perform tasks without human intervention or guidance, says Robert Shepherd, a roboticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was part of the team that built the robot. The researchers describe their machine in a Nature paper published on 19 June1.
Making robots autonomous for extended periods of time is a key challenge in robotics. Autonomous robots could have myriad applications, for example in performing search and rescue missions and in deep-sea exploration, says Cecilia Laschi, a roboticist at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies–Pisa in Italy.
This is an interesting signal - no real progress in new energy - but very innovative design that reduces energy use. There is a 1 min video.
KLM and TU Delft aim to make aviation more sustainable with V-shaped aircraft
Dutch airline KLM has teamed up with TU Delft to create the Flying-V aircraft concept, which is designed to consume 20 per cent less fuel than Airbus' A350.
KLM has signed an agreement to financially support Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)in its research and development of the V-shaped aircraft, in a bid to make aviation more sustainable.
The aircraft's V-shaped design will integrate the passenger cabin, the cargo hold and the fuel tanks into the wing structure.
While the Flying-V concept is shorter than the A350 at 55 metres, it has the same wingspan of 65 metres, meaning it will be able to use existing infrastructure at airports like gates and runways, and will fit into the same hangar as the A350.
It will also be able to carry the same number of passengers – 314 in the standard configuration – and the same 160 cubic metres of cargo volume.
And an even more important weak signal related to the transformation of transportation.
Electric planes herald new era for aviation at the Paris Air Show
Airlines ordered tens of billions of dollars worth of new aircraft from Airbus and Boeing at the Paris Air Show this week. But there was also huge interest in the planes of tomorrow.
The rise of hybrid and electric aircraft was on full display at the biannual aviation showcase, where startups competed with industry giants to show off technology that's more efficient and better for the environment than traditional designs.
The focus on electrically-propelled aircraft reflects a rush to develop urban flying taxis (coming soon) and longer range fully electric planes (coming later).
According to the consultancy Roland Berger, the number of electric aircraft in development increased by roughly 50% over the past year to 170. The number could swell to 200 by the end of 2019.
There are two big factors driving increased investment: The global aviation industry produces up to 3% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a share that's projected to increase sharply in coming years; and it spends roughly $180 billion a year on jet fuel.
A good signal of the future of work - a form of generalist and hyper-specialist (in this article the hyper-specialist is a high-tech sailor for generalist-specialist functions).
Two boatswain’s mates are on hand, but only to instruct and oversee—and they too wear lots of hats, between them: fire-team leader, search-and-rescue swimmer, crane operator, deck patroller, helicopter-salvage coordinator. The operative concept is “minimal manning.” On the bridge, five crew members do the jobs usually done by 12, thanks to high-tech display screens and the ship’s several thousand remote sensors. And belowdecks, once-distinct engineering roles—electrician’s mate, engine man, machinist, gas-turbine technician—fall to the same handful of sailors.
Ten years from now, the Deloitte consultant Erica Volini projects, 70 to 90 percent of workers will be in so-called hybrid jobs or superjobs—that is, positions combining tasks once performed by people in two or more traditional roles.
At Work, Expertise Is Falling Out of Favor
These days, it seems, just about all organizations are asking their employees to do more with less. Is that actually a good idea?
In the faint predawn light, the ship doesn’t look unusual. It is one more silhouette looming pier-side at Naval Base San Diego, a home port of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. And the scene playing out in its forward compartment, as the crew members ready themselves for departure, is as old as the Navy itself. Three sailors in blue coveralls heave on a massive rope. “Avast!” a fourth shouts. A percussive thwack announces the pull of a tugboat—and 3,000 tons of warship are under way.
Most obvious is the ship’s lower contour. Built in 2014 from 30 million cans’ worth of Alcoa aluminum, Littoral Combat Ship 10, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, rides high in the water on three separate hulls and is powered like a jet ski—that is, by water-breathing jets instead of propellers. This lets it move swiftly in the coastal shallows (or “littorals,” in seagoing parlance), where it’s meant to dominate. Unlike the older ships now gliding past—guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, amphibious transports—the littoral combat ship was built on the concept of “modularity.” There’s a voluminous hollow in the ship’s belly, and its insides can be swapped out in port, allowing it to set sail as a submarine hunter, minesweeper, or surface combatant, depending on the mission.
The ship’s most futuristic aspect, though, is its crew. The LCS was the first class of Navy ship that, because of technological change and the high cost of personnel, turned away from specialists in favor of “hybrid sailors” who have the ability to acquire skills rapidly. It was designed to operate with a mere 40 souls on board—one-fifth the number aboard comparably sized “legacy” ships and a far cry from the 350 aboard a World War II destroyer. The small size of the crew means that each sailor must be like the ship itself: a jack of many trades and not, as 240 years of tradition have prescribed, a master of just one.
