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
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Quotes:
Articles:
The fake news that doesn’t catch on may have simply been mishandled, but the fake news that does catch on has some plausibility that tells you an awful lot about the world we live in and how our fellow humans perceive that world.
Take the anti-vax movement. It proceeds from two observations about the world: first, that the pharma industry (like so many other industries) has become concentrated to the point where executives no longer fear meaningful competition. Second, its execs are part of a cozy club that is small enough that its key members can fit around a single boardroom table and undertake conspiracy with one another.
Second, anti-vaxers believe that the regulators who are supposed to be keeping industry honest are instead willfully blind to the misdeeds of the giants that make up the industry. The regulators are largely drawn from the executive ranks of the industry, and/or they expect to find work in those industries when they leave government service. The regulatory process – nominally a truth-seeking exercise driven by evidence – has become an auction, with regulatory outcomes available to the highest bidder. What’s more, the auction has so few serious bidders (thanks to industry concentration) that they’re able to collude to get stellar bargains out of the people’s watchdogs.
So anti-vaxers say, “Pharma is corrupt and will literally murder you to earn an extra dollar. Regulators let them get away with literal murder, and that’s why we find the idea that vaccines are unsafe to be so eminently plausible.” What’s more, evaluating the safety of vaccines is an esoteric, highly technical matter, one that combines the statistical literacy to evaluate studies with the media literacy to understand the difference between reputable journals and disreputable ones, and that’s before you get to the microbiology, chemistry, and epidemiology. The truth is that none of us are qualified to understand the evidentiary basis for almost everything we believe, so we evaluate the process by which the evidence is weighed by people who are qualified.
The anti-vaxers have a point. Not about the safety of vaccines. I believe they are 100% wrong about vaccines and that everyone who can should get a full schedule of vaccines for themselves and their children.
But anti-vaxers have a point about the process.
What is it that makes some people vulnerable to anti-vax messages?
I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exercises can’t be trusted. That’s a genuinely scary idea, because if the truth is open to the highest bidder, then we are facing a future of chaos and terror, where you can’t trust the food on your plate, the roof over your head, or the school your child attends.
Fake news is an instrument for measuring trauma, and the epistemological incoherence that trauma creates – the justifiable mistrust of the establishment that has nearly murdered our planet and that insists that making the richest among us much, much richer will benefit everyone, eventually.
Cory Doctorow: Fake News Is an Oracle
“Barricelli immediately figured out that random mutation wasn’t the important thing; in his first experiment he figured out that the important thing was recombination and sex,” Dyson says. “He figured out right away what took other people much longer to figure out.” Indeed, Barricelli’s theory of symbiogenesis can be seen as anticipating the work of independent-thinking biologist Lynn Margulis, who in the 1960s showed that it was not necessarily genetic mutations over generations, but symbiosis, notably of bacteria, that produced new cell lineages.
Cyberspace now swells with Barricelli’s progeny. Self-replicating strings of arithmetic live out their days in the digital wilds, increasingly independent of our tampering. The fittest bits survive and propagate. Researchers continue to model reduced, pared-down versions of life artificially, while the real world bursts with Boolean beings. Scientists like Venter conjure synthetic organisms, assisted by computer design. Swarms of autonomous codes thrive, expire, evolve, and mutate underneath our fingertips daily. “All kinds of self-reproducing codes are out there doing things,” Dyson says. In our digital lives, we are immersed in Barricelli’s world.
The Computer Maverick Who Modeled the Evolution of Life
In early 2019, Lipson’s lab revealed a robot arm that uses deep learning to generate its own internal self-model completely from scratch — in a process that Lipson describes as “not unlike a babbling baby observing its hands.” The robot’s self-model lets it accurately execute two different tasks — picking up and placing small balls into a cup, and writing letters with a marker — without requiring specific training for either one. Furthermore, when the researchers simulated damage to the robot’s body by adding a deformed component, the robot detected the change, updated its self-model accordingly, and was able to resume its tasks.
It’s a far cry from robots that think deep thoughts. But Lipson asserts that the difference is merely one of degree. “When you talk about self-awareness, people think the robot is going to suddenly wake up and say, ‘Hello, why am I here?’” Lipson said. “But self-awareness is not a black-and-white thing. It starts from very trivial things like, ‘Where is my hand going to move?’ It’s the same question, just on a shorter time horizon.”
Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines
A great signal of the major paradigm shift in our economic frameworks - changing how we value our values.
New Zealand Ditches GDP For Happiness And Wellbeing
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest leader to adopt the Happiness Index metric, announcing a new budget that focused on improving the prosperity of local communities. Ardern hoped that it would: “(lay) the foundation for not just one well-being budget, but a different approach for government decision-making altogether.” As part of the budget, there will be an increase of NZ$200 million (US$131 million) in services aimed at helping victims of domestic and sexual violence as well as housing programs for the nation’s homeless population. Described as a “game-changing event” by London School of Economics Dr. Richard Layard, New Zealand’s budget has set a new standard for progressive policy “no other major country that has so explicitly adopted well-being as its objective.”
After unveiling New Zealand’s new economic framework, the center-left government also explained the basis behind their shift in focus. All new spending must advance one of five government priorities: improving mental health, reducing child poverty, addressing the inequalities faced by indigenous Maori and Pacific island people, thriving in a digital age, and transitioning to a low-emission, sustainable economy. New Zealand’s change in policy represents a shift that economists have long theorized could be a more effective use of government spending .
This is a great article signaling a couple of things - the most obvious is one that most people already know - people treat each other differently in the workplace depending sex and gender (among other differences). But the more interesting signal of the change in research methods that are enabled by the use of sociometric badges to track real-time behavior - rather than relying on reports of past behavior (of the traditional social sciences.
We collected this data, anonymized it, and analyzed it. Although we were not able to see the identity of individuals, we still had data on gender, position, and tenure at the office, so we could control for these factors. To retain privacy, we did not collect the content of any communications, only the metadata (that is, who communicated with whom, at what time, and for how long).
A Study Used Sensors to Show That Men and Women Are Treated Differently at Work
Gender equality remains frustratingly elusive. Women are underrepresented in the C-suite, receive lower salaries, and are less likely to receive a critical first promotion to manager than men. Numerous causes have been suggested, but one argument that persists points to differences in men and women’s behavior.
Which raises the question: Do women and men act all that differently? We realized that there’s little to no concrete data on women’s behavior in the office. Previous work has relied on surveys and self-reported assessments — methods of data collecting that are prone to bias. Fortunately, the proliferation of digital communication data and the advancement of sensor technology have enabled us to more precisely measure workplace behavior.
We decided to investigate whether gender differences in behavior drive gender differences in outcomes at one of our client organizations, a large multinational firm, where women were underrepresented in upper management. In this company, women made up roughly 35%–40% of the entry-level workforce but a smaller percentage at each subsequent level. Women made up only 20% of people at the two highest seniority levels at this organization.
We collected email communication and meeting schedule data for hundreds of employees in one office, across all levels of seniority, over the course of four months. We then gave 100 of these individuals sociometric badges, which allowed us to track in-person behavior. These badges, which look like large ID badges and are worn by all employees, record communication patterns using sensors that measure movement, proximity to other badges, and speech (volume and tone of voice but not content). They can tell us who talks with whom, where people communicate, and who dominates conversations.
So many people think of the ‘natural’ world as an opposite to the world of technology - that the digital environment is the latest of human created ‘unnatural’ world. This article is a fascinating very early signal of the E-merging of a ‘natural digital environment’.
"Through cyborg botany, we power some of our digital functions with the natural abilities of plants."
the second project, Planta Digitalis, the researchers grew a conductive "wire" inside the plant by sitting it in the water-soluble polymer ProDOT. They could then connect this wire to other instruments, turning the plant into an antenna or sensor.
"Plants are self-repairing, self-regenerating organisms available at scale," they said. "Through Cyborg Botany, we envision a convergent design world in which we reappropriate our natural capabilities for a new bio-interaction design."
MIT researchers engineer "cyborg" plants for motion-tracking and sending notifications
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "cyborg botany" researchers have turned plants into sensors and displays, suggesting we use them as a gentle alternative to electronic screens.
Harpreet Sareen and Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group have been researching how to merge plants and artificial electronics to create new interfaces.
"Plants are normally thought of as passive creatures in the environment," said Sareen. "Contrary to this, they can not only sense what's happening around them, but respond and display naturally."
The team's two new projects, titled Phytoactuators and Planta Digitalis respectively, focus on human interaction. They use plants for sensing and display — the two essential elements that complete an interaction loop.
This means that a person can tell a plant to do something, and the plant can also communicate some information back. … with this functionality, the plant could be an inconspicuous motion sensor, sending an alert to people when it detected intruders or wayward pets.
The potential E-merging natural digital environment will also feature many species of digital agents - guided by ‘artificial and natural agents’. There is a 1 min video demonstrating these bots.
Tiny robot leaps around carrying its own battery, electronics
Less than 100 millimeters across, a trefoil-shaped robot can walk, hop, or leap.
The team calls its creation Tribot, for reasons that are obvious from its photo above. Tribot looks like a tiny circuit board because that's what it largely is, but there are some significant additions to the circuitry. One is a small lithium polymer battery, which means all the power for its motions and circuits are carried on board. The motions are powered by what's called a shape-memory alloy, which can be deformed at one temperature but snap back into place once the temperature is changed. Flexible hinges and a polymer core allow these "muscles" to move any of the three legs either gradually or with a sudden snap, all enabled by tiny heaters embedded in the hardware.
Another interesting feature of the robot is its construction. The circuit board and polymer are originally made as a flat, triangular unit. A couple of folds are all that's needed to convert this shape into the Tribot's trefoil design.
The authors say they were inspired by trapjaw ants, which can hurl their bodies around by making sudden movements with their mandibles. Based on the energy involved in these motions, the researchers say that Tribot is about as energy-efficient as an insect.
Games still enable players to compete with ‘the computer’ - giving human players the change to ultimately beat the game - this may be nearing the end. And games enabling human vs human - may be bring artificial agents into play that exceed human capabilities. There’s some ‘Black Mirror’ episodes lurking in these signals.
DeepMind's 'StarCraft II' AI Will Soon Take on Regular Players Without Telling Them
OpenAI's 'Dota 2' bots took on the public in April, and it went poorly for the humans.
European StarCraft II players will finally be able to test their might against DeepMind's StarCraft II-playing AI called AlphaStar.
An "experimental version" of AlphaStar will be queuing into the European StarCraft II server's competitive ladder—where players participate in ranked matches—"soon," the developer said in a blog post today. Anyone who wants to participate will have to opt into the chance to play against the StarCraft II program, an option that will soon become available as an in-game pop-up window triggered by a "DeepMind opt-in" button on the one-on-one menu.
Here's the catch: European players that do opt-in won't know if they've been matched up against AlphaStar—these are blind test matches. DeepMind decided to run the test this way to ensure that players aren't tailoring their strategies specifically for AlphaStar; instead, they want StarCraft II users to play normally. Blizzard said AlphaStar will be matched up against players on a "small number" of games, but didn't specify exactly how many.
Ray Kurzweil notes that the longer we live - they longer we will be able to live - based on his observations of the progress being made in medical sciences. This is an amazing signal - at that may at minimum help people with brain and other trauma recover.
Cellular Life, Death and Everything in Between
The discovery that apparently dead cells can sometimes resurrect themselves has researchers exploring how far they can push the point of no return.
When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity,” Bill Bryson wrote in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The received wisdom has long been that this march toward oblivion, once sufficiently advanced, cannot be reversed. But as science charts the contours of cellular function in ever-greater detail, a more fluid conception of cellular life and death has begun to gain the upper hand.
Perhaps the most dramatic proof of this emerged last April, when a team at the Yale School of Medicine drew global attention for briefly restoring cellular activity in dead brains. The neuroscientists Nenad Sestan, Zvonimir Vrselja and their colleagues developed a system called BrainEx that can perfuse a brain with a hemoglobin-based solution to nourish cells while promoting their recovery from oxygen deprivation, a condition that is usually lethal for neurons after 10 minutes or so. They tested it on brains extracted from slaughtered pigs, deprived of blood and kept at room temperature for as long as four hours — making them quite thoroughly dead by any conventional standard.
Most studies of cellular resurrection have involved cells considered to be in the process of dying or only recently “dead” by the usual criteria; the Yale group’s work on slaughtered pig brains that had been dead and unpreserved for hours was an extreme case. But some researchers are not afraid to go much further: They have attempted to revive cellular components from an extinct animal that died more than 20,000 years ago.
Would you prefer today’s hot dog or tomorrow’s cultured hot dog? Certainly we are likely to be more sure of ‘what’s in a cultured hot dog’ than we are of the hot dogs we eat today - but taste is not a simple objective condition - how we frame our meal can have a lot to do with how much we’ll enjoy it. Remember the ad - don’t tell them it’s good for them’. :)
Lab-Grown Meat Still Faces a Huge Hurdle, but It's No Longer Taste or Costs
The cost is falling precipitously. But burger lovers remain skeptical.
Lab-grown meat: techno-wizardry, societal savior, or an impressive imitation of the real thing? As it turns out, which of those three phrases you use to describe lab-grown meat may make a big difference as to encouraging people to actually eat it.
This is according to researchers at two universities who recently looked at how framing changes people’s perceptions of meat grown in a lab. The groundbreaking technology, which hit the headlines when Mark Post first ate a burger in 2013, could save animals and reduce the consumption of agricultural resources.
The eco-friendly meat could hit shelves by 2025. But the results suggest that cost and accessibility won’t be enough to convince people to actually eat it. The paper, “The Impact of Framing on Acceptance of Cultured Meat,” published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, suggests that lab-grown meat will also have to solve its branding problems in order to enter the mainstream.
“As most people have so far heard little or nothing of cultured meat, this is a crucial time to assess how the framing of this innovation can impact consumer perceptions,” lead author Christopher Bryant of the University of Bath said in a statement.
One of the ‘Inevitable’ forces driving the future (according to Kevin Kelly) is cognification - the embedding AI in everything. This is an amazing signal of this. The world of ‘magic’ technology is getting every so close.
"We could potentially use the glass as a biometric lock, tuned to recognize only one person's face" says Yu. "Once built, it would last forever without needing power or internet, meaning it could keep something safe for you even after thousands of years."
Simple 'smart' glass reveals the future of artificial vision
The sophisticated technology that powers face recognition in many modern smartphones someday could receive a high-tech upgrade that sounds—and looks—surprisingly low-tech.
This window to the future is none other than a piece of glass. University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have devised a method to create pieces of "smart" glass that can recognize images without requiring any sensors or circuits or power sources.
"We're using optics to condense the normal setup of cameras, sensors and deep neural networks into a single piece of thin glass," says UW-Madison electrical and computer engineering professor Zongfu Yu.
Yu and colleagues published details of their proof-of-concept research today in the journal Photonics Research.
Embedding artificial intelligence inside inert objects is a concept that, at first glance, seems like something out of science fiction. However, it's an advance that could open new frontiers for low-power electronics.
Now, artificial intelligence gobbles up substantial computational resources (and battery life) every time you glance at your phone to unlock it with face ID. In the future, one piece of glass could recognize your face without using any power at all.
A weak signal yet significant contribution to ongoing work. This is worth watching.
Producing graphene from carbon dioxide
A working group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has now reported on this unusual application in the ChemSusChem journal. They are using carbon dioxide as a raw material to produce graphene, a technological material which is currently the subject of intense study.
An example can be found in nature. During photosynthesis in the leaves of plants, the combination of light, water and carbon dioxide creates biomass, closing the natural material cycle. In this process, it is the job of the metal-based enzyme RuBisCo to absorb the carbon dioxide from the air and make it usable for the further chemical reactions in the plant. Inspired by this metal enzyme-based natural conversion, researchers at KIT are now presenting a process in which the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide together with hydrogen gas is converted directly into graphene at temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius with the help of specially prepared, catalytically active metal surfaces.
In further experiments the researchers were even able to produce graphene several layers thick, which could be interesting for possible applications in batteries, electronic components or filter materials. The working group's next research goal is to form functioning electronic components from the graphene thus obtained. Carbon materials such as graphene and magnetic molecules could be the building blocks for future quantum computers, which enable ultra-fast and energy-efficient calculations but are not based on the binary logic of today's computers.
Another weak signal related to graphene and bioproduction of materials.
Left out to dry: A more efficient way to harvest algae biomass
A team at the University of Tsukuba introduced a new procedure of harvesting energy and organic molecules from algae using nanoporous graphene and porous graphene foams. By developing a reusable system that can evaporate water at high rate without the need for centrifugation or squeezing. This research has a great potential for the application of producing cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient biofuels, vitamins, and chemicals.
In the fight against global climate change, algae biomass is a very exciting field of research, because they are photosynthetic microorganisms that convert light energy from the sun into energy-rich biomolecules. When algae are grown and harvested on an industrial scale, these molecules can be converted into a wide array of important compounds, including biofuel, medicines, omega-3 dietary supplements, and many other valuable bio-products. Algae are also able to absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, switching from traditional fossil fuels to biofuels holds the promise of slashing net greenhouse gas emissions. However, micro-algae cultures consist primarily of water at low solid content (0.05—1.0 wt%) and harvesting the organic material due to solid-liquid separation techniques usually requires multiple dehydration steps.
Now, scientists at the University of Tsukuba introduced a new method for removing water from algae biomass that does not damage the fragile compounds to be harvested. In contrast with previous methods which rely on mechanical centrifugation or squeezing, while this approach uses solar irradiation and reusable, nanostructured support materials. The fabrication of hierarchically-structured nanoporous graphene and porous graphene foams creates tiny channels for water to be pulled upwards from deep inside the sample.
This is another signal from DARPA - important for its potential impact on emerging technologies - but also it signals the powerful role that government funding plays and has played in creating wealth and innovations.
DARPA’S $1.5-Billion Remake of U.S. Electronics: Progress Report
Agency is adding security and AI design to a mix meant to boost U.S. industry
About a year ago, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency pulled back the covers on its five-year, $1.5-billion scheme to remake the U.S. electronics industry. The Electronics Resurgence Initiative included efforts in “aggressive specialization” for chip architectures, systems that are smart enough to reconfigure themselves for whatever data you throw at them, open-source hardware, 24-hour push-button system design, and carbon-nanotube-enabled 3D chip manufacturing, among other cool things. As always with DARPA, this is high-risk research; but if even half of it works out, it could change the nature not just of what kinds of systems are designed but also of who makes them and how they’re made.
The future of self-driving vehicles is getting ever closer.
THIS LIDAR IS SO CHEAP IT COULD MAKE SELF-DRIVING A REALITY
EVERY TECHNOLOGY HAS its weakness. Maybe it’s too big or slow or not versatile. Critics of lidar, Tesla’s Elon Musk being, perhaps, the loudest among them, focus on the cost that the laser-based system adds to a self-driving vehicle. The spinning, rooftop lidar produced by industry leader Velodyne runs about $75,000. That’s enough to trouble the companies developing robotaxis, the fully autonomous vehicles that hope to amortize their costs by ferrying passengers. For personally owned vehicles, anything near that cost is a nonstarter.
“Anyone relying on lidar is doomed,” Musk said at Tesla’s inaugural “Autonomy Day” in April. “It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them.”
The vast majority of self-driving developers, however, consider the laser sensor not vestigial but a crucial element of a safe, capable system. That’s why many of those outfits have developed their own systems (like Waymo) or acquired lidar makers (like Cruise, Aurora, and Argo). It’s also why everyone who hasn’t taken such steps should welcome Luminar’s announcement Thursday that it has developed a production-ready lidar that will cost as little as $500—cheap enough to make it work not just on robotaxis, but on consumer vehicles.
This is another great signal of the emerging power and role of AI.
AI analyzed 3.3 million scientific abstracts and discovered possible new materials
A new paper shows how natural-language processing can accelerate scientific discovery.
The context: Natural-language processing has seen major advancements in recent years, thanks to the development of unsupervised machine-learning techniques that are really good at capturing the relationships between words. They count how often and how closely words are used in relation to one another, and map those relationships in a three-dimensional vector space. The patterns can then be used to predict basic analogies like “man is to king as woman is to queen,” or to construct sentences and power things like autocomplete and other predictive text systems.
New application: A group of researchers have now used this technique to munch through 3.3 million scientific abstracts published between 1922 and 2018 in journals that would likely contain materials science research. The resulting word relationships captured fundamental knowledge within the field, including the structure of the periodic table and the way chemicals’ structures relate to their properties. The paper was published in Nature last week.
Because of the technique’s ability to compute analogies, it also found a number of chemical compounds that demonstrate properties similar to those of thermoelectric materials but have not been studied as such before. The researchers believe this could be a new way to mine existing scientific literature for previously unconsidered correlations and accelerate the advancement of research in a field.
This is an amazing signal. The growing popularity of graphic novels deserves to be embraced - not only for fiction but any form of writing (for example - I highly recommend the graphic novel “Logicomix” for anyone interested in Burtrand Russel’s quest for the foundation of Logic). If science is going to overcome the hurdle of proliferating disciplines while remaining accessible to a wider public - it is worth considering this signal. Plus anyone interested in the current flavor of drama politics - this makes the Mueller Report accessible and possibly entertaining.
We hired the author of 'Black Hawk Down' and an illustrator from 'Archer' to adapt the Mueller report so you'll actually read it
It feels as if nobody read the Mueller report. That's a shame, because it's an important document, depicting possible crimes by a sitting US president.
But not reading it makes sense. As a narrative, the document is a disaster. And at 448 pages, it's too long to grind through. For long stretches, it reads less like a story and more like a terms-of-service agreement. The instinct to click "next" is strong.
And yet, buried within the Mueller report, there is a narrative that reads in parts like a thriller, like a comedy, like a tragedy — and, most important — like an indictment. The facts are compelling, all the more so because they come not from President Donald Trump's critics or "fake news" reports, but from Trump's own handpicked colleagues and associates. The story just needed to be rearranged in a better form.
So we hired Mark Bowden, a journalist and author known for his brilliant works of narrative nonfiction like "Black Hawk Down," "Killing Pablo," and "Hue 1968."
Our assignment for him was simple. Use the interviews and facts laid out in the Mueller report (plus those from reliable, fact-checked sources and published firsthand accounts) to do what he does best: Tell a story recounting Mueller's report that's so gripping it will hold your attention (and maybe your congressional representative's).
We also hired Chad Hurd, an illustrator from the art department of "Archer." We asked him to draw out scenes from the report to bring them to life.
This 17 min TED Talk, is an important signal of a shift in our understanding of the benefits of psychedelics as therapeutic and wellness tools.
The future of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
Could psychedelics help us heal from trauma and mental illnesses? Researcher Rick Doblin has spent the past three decades investigating this question, and the results are promising. In this fascinating dive into the science of psychedelics, he explains how drugs like LSD, psilocybin and MDMA affect your brain -- and shows how, when paired with psychotherapy, they could change the way we treat PTSD, depression, substance abuse and more.
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