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:
With 10% penetration, EVs could shift all residential peak load to night, analysis of SoCal Ed finds
As technology rapidly progresses, doomsday stories emerge just as quickly. Not a day passes without some prophecy about how technology will drive us to the depths of darkly-anonymized-crypto-fake-and-artificially-intelligent-blockchain-based mayhem.
does the abundance of data make information scarce? Does the multiplication of attention-mining interfaces make privacy scarce? Does the wide-scale adoption of end-to-end encryption and zero-knowledge models make attribution scarce? Does the proliferation of online fakes and massive disinformation make evidence scarce? Does the globalization of real-time communication make jurisdiction scarce?
All in all, does the abundance of technology create scarcities or opportunities for law enforcement?
Criminals thrive on data abundance - here's how we'll catch them
Philosophy, Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics, begins with wonder. History does too. It starts with obvious perplexities but also with our realisation of the strangeness of the everyday, making our head swim like Plato’s Theaetetus. History works to make sense of things via our crossings from the present to the past, and from the physical world to the spiritual world. It takes us from the specific to the universal and vice versa; from the habitual to the new; from understanding things to understanding ourselves; from one discipline to another; from exclusion to inclusion and thereby the unethical to the ethical. If you want to know where the cross-beams and limits of history’s blueprint are, look at wonder.
Yet wonder is sadly absent from much of our discussions on history and philosophy today. We use the word in conversations all the time but, somehow, the idea that we might feel like Theaetetus at times doesn’t seem very explicable or, worse, grown-up. History and philosophy don’t do wonder: that is for rockstar boy-scientists, children and sideshow alleys. In thinking these ways, I think we have lost something immeasurably more powerful than the racks of books....
We might have convinced ourselves, with Descartes, that we grow out of wonder. While there are now thousands of technically adept pieces on rationality in philosophy, you can count the publications on wonder on one hand. Look across to the theory of history, and you would struggle to find even one.
Wonder works
Biological evolution, on the other hand, produces endless novelty. We have bacteria and kelp and birds and people. That’s because solutions evolve, but so do problems. The giraffe is a response to the problem of the tree. Human innovation proceeds likewise. We create problems for ourselves — could we put a person on the moon? — and then solve them.
To mirror this open-ended conversation between problems and solutions, earlier this year Stanley, Clune, Lehman and another Uber colleague, Rui Wang, released an algorithm called POET, for Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer. To test the algorithm, they evolved a population of virtual two-legged bots. They also evolved a population of obstacle courses for the bots, complete with hills, trenches and tree stumps. The bots sometimes traded places with each other, attempting new terrain. For example, one bot learned to cross flat terrain while dragging its knee. It was then randomly switched to a landscape with short stumps, where it had to learn to walk upright. When it was switched back to its first obstacle course, it completed it much faster. An indirect path allowed it to improve by taking skills learned from one puzzle and applying them to another.
POET could potentially design new forms of art or make scientific discoveries by inventing new challenges for itself and then solving them. It could even go much further, depending on its world-building ability. Stanley said he hopes to build algorithms that could still be doing something interesting after a billion years.
“Decades of research have taught us that these algorithms constantly surprise us and outwit us,” he said. “So it’s completely hubristic to think that we will know the outcome of these processes, especially as they become more powerful and open-ended.”
It may also be hubristic to exert too much control over researchers.
Computers Evolve a New Path Toward Human Intelligence
Social media platforms don’t always immediately look like social media. Massive Multiplayer Online Games have enabled millions of people to experience forms of community. But they also enable a blending of offline and online ‘realities.
'Nearly All' Counter-Strike Microtransactions Are Being Used for Money Laundering
"Worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced," Valve says.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players will no longer be able to trade container keys between accounts because the trade was part of a massive worldwide fraud network. Players earned cases in Counter-Strike containing weapons and cosmetic upgrades, but had to purchase the keys to open the boxes. Developer Valve runs an internal marketplace on Steam where it allowed players to trade the boxes and the keys. Valve patched the game on October 28 and explained the problem in its patch notes.
“In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers,” the statement said. “However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced.”
This isn’t the first time Counter-Strike’s microtransactions were at the center of fraud. In September, 2017, the Federal Trade Commission settled with two YouTubers who ran popular websites that allowed fans to gamble their Counter-Strike skins. The influencers advertised the gambling site to fans on YouTube with video titles like HOW TO WIN $13,000 IN 5 MINUTES CS GO Betting without disclosing that they owned it.
Another signal in the acceleration of AI toward ever greater capacities.
AI is making literary leaps – now we need the rules to catch up
A row over the release of a new language-learning model highlights how ethics and the law are lagging behind
Last February, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research group based in San Francisco, announced that it has been training an AI language model called GPT-2, and that it now “generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language-modelling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarisation – all without task-specific training”.
If true, this would be a big deal. But, said OpenAI, “due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper.”
Given that OpenAI describes itself as a research institute dedicated to “discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence”, this cautious approach to releasing a potentially powerful and disruptive tool into the wild seemed appropriate. But it appears to have enraged many researchers in the AI field for whom “release early and release often” is a kind of mantra. After all, without full disclosure – of program code, training dataset, neural network weights, etc – how could independent researchers decide whether the claims made by OpenAI about its system were valid? The replicability of experiments is a cornerstone of scientific method, so the fact that some academic fields may be experiencing a “replication crisis” (a large number of studies that prove difficult or impossible to reproduce) is worrying. We don’t want the same to happen to AI.
The digital environment has many promises - this is another weak signal for a future in which more brains are better an one.
Scientists Demonstrate Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans
Work on an “Internet of brains” takes another step
We humans have evolved a rich repertoire of communication, from gesture to sophisticated languages. All of these forms of communication link otherwise separate individuals in such a way that they can share and express their singular experiences and work together collaboratively. In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains. Electrical activity from the brains of a pair of human subjects was transmitted to the brain of a third individual in the form of magnetic signals, which conveyed an instruction to perform a task in a particular manner. This study opens the door to extraordinary new means of human collaboration while, at the same time, blurring fundamental notions about individual identity and autonomy in disconcerting ways.
The new paper addressed some of these questions by linking together the brain activity of a small network of humans. Three individuals sitting in separate rooms collaborated to correctly orient a block so that it could fill a gap between other blocks in a video game. Two individuals who acted as “senders” could see the gap and knew whether the block needed to be rotated to fit. The third individual, who served as the “receiver,” was blinded to the correct answer and needed to rely on the instructions sent by the senders.
The team was then given a second chance to improve its performance. Overall, five groups of individuals were tested using this network, called the “BrainNet,” and, on average, they achieved greater than 80 percent accuracy in completing the task.
This will likely be coming to a surgery room near you in the next decade. The 1 minute video clearly illustrates the capability.
MediView XR raises $4.5 million to give surgeons X-ray vision with AR
MediView XR has raised $4.5 million to equip surgeons with augmented reality imagery that effectively gives them 3D X-ray-like vision.
With Microsoft HoloLens or other AR goggles, surgeons can insert an instrument into a patient and see an animation that shows exactly where the instrument is going under the skin. The AR Surgical Navigation Platform tool will help surgeons remove cancer tumors in a way that is similar to controlling a video game.
A great signal illustrating a trajectory for domestication of DNA.
A crop that feeds billions freed from blight by CRISPR
Bacteria that infect rice are thwarted by changes to rice genes involved in sugar transport.
Genome editing has made one of the world’s most important crops resistant to a devastating bacterial infection.
Bacterial blight, which is caused by Xanthomonas oryzae pathovar oryzae (Xoo), can slash farmers’ yields of rice, which is a staple food for billions of people. Seeking to lessen the blight’s impact, Ricardo Oliva at the International Rice Research Institute in Manila and his colleagues studied Xoo genes that code for proteins called TALEs. Xoo use these proteins to turn on the plant’s SWEET genes, which produce sugar-transporting molecules. This gives the bacteria access to nutrients in the plants’ leaves.
The team’s analysis of 63 Xoo strains revealed that each strain has one or more TALE variants. Each variant can activate at least one of three SWEET genes.
The researchers used CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing to modify three SWEET genes found in rice varieties that are grown across Asia and Africa. Bacterial TALE proteins could no longer activate the edited genes, and the team found that rice plants with these engineered genes were resistant to at least 95 Xoo strains.
Here’s a signal - that may bring great relief to the world.
By targeting flu-enabling protein, antibody may protect against wide-ranging strains
The findings could lead to a universal flu vaccine and more effective emergency treatments
The study, which Scripps Research conducted jointly with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, points to a new approach to tackle severe cases of the flu, including pandemics. The research is published in the Oct. 25 issue of Science.
Scripps Research's Ian Wilson, DPhil, one of three senior co-authors, says the antibody at the center of the study binds to a protein called neuraminidase, which is essential for the flu virus to replicate in the body.
The protein, located on the surface of the virus, enables infected host cells to release the virus so it can spread to other cells. Tamiflu, the most widely used drug for severe flu infection, works by inactivating neuraminidase. However, many forms of neuraminidase exist, depending on the flu strain, and such drugs aren't always effective -- particularly as resistance to the drugs is developing.
To find out whether the antibodies could be used to treat severe cases of flu, Krammer and colleagues tested them in mice that were given a lethal dose of influenza virus. All three antibodies were effective against many strains, and one antibody, called "1G01," protected against all 12 strains tested, which included all three groups of human flu virus as well as avian and other nonhuman strains.
"All the mice survived, even if they were given the antibody 72 hours after infection," Ellebedy says. "They definitely got sick and lost weight, but we still saved them. It was remarkable. It made us think that you might be able to use this antibody in an intensive care scenario when you have someone sick with flu and it's too late to use Tamiflu."
Tamiflu must be administered within 24 hours of symptoms. A drug that could be used later would help many people diagnosed after the Tamiflu window has closed.
The capacity to integrate the domestication of DNA with other technologies like 3D printing is accelerating - here is a great signal toward that end. There is good 2 min video.
Living skin can now be 3-D-printed with blood vessels included
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a way to 3-D print living skin, complete with blood vessels. The advancement, published online today in Tissue Engineering Part A, is a significant step toward creating grafts that are more like the skin our bodies produce naturally.
"Right now, whatever is available as a clinical product is more like a fancy Band-Aid," said Pankaj Karande, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and member of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), who led this research at Rensselaer. "It provides some accelerated wound healing, but eventually it just falls off; it never really integrates with the host cells."
A significant barrier to that integration has been the absence of a functioning vascular system in the skin grafts.
This is a vital - though early signal of emerging understanding of depression and anti-inflammatory agents.
Anti-inflammatory agents can effectively and safely curb major depressive symptoms
Anti-inflammatory agents, such as aspirin/paracetamol, statins, and antibiotics, can safely and effectively curb the symptoms of major depression, finds a pooled analysis of the available evidence, published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.
And the effects are even stronger when these agents are added on to standard antidepressant treatment, the results show.
Around a third of people who are clinically depressed don't respond well to current drug and talking therapies, and drug side effects are relatively common.
An emerging body of evidence suggests that inflammation contributes to the development of major depression, but the results of clinical trials using various anti-inflammatory agents to treat the condition have proved inconclusive.
The researchers therefore set out to review the available evidence and pool the data to see if anti-inflammatory agents work better than dummy (placebo) treatment either alone or when used as add-on therapy to standard antidepressant treatment.
A good signal of the emerging developments that can augment our use of antibiotics.
Scientists discover how potent bacterial toxin kills MRSA bacteria
Scientists from the University of Sheffield have discovered how a potent bacterial toxin is able to target and kill MRSA, paving the way for potential new treatments for superbugs.
New research, led by Dr. Stéphane Mesnage from the University of Sheffield, has explained how lysostaphin specifically recognises MRSA cell walls and quickly causes the breakdown of this pathogen.
The lysostaphin is able to increase the number of its molecules bound to the surface of the MRSA cell and this allows the enzyme to 'walk' along the cell walls and cause rapid breakdown.
Lysostaphin is an enzyme that has been shown to eradicate Staphylococcal infections, such as MRSA, alone or in combination with antibiotics. Although it was discovered over 50 years ago, not much has been known about how it kills these infections.
The scientists hope to use their findings to develop new treatments for MRSA and other antibiotic resistant superbugs which target the infection in a similar way.
This is a good signal for the transformation of global energy geopolitics
New kind of battery make solar, wind worth its salt
A German energy company is testing the use of salt to store heat. If successful, the system could help solve a problem posed by unreliable renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar.
The energy company, together with a Swedish start-up, is testing the use of salt – though not quite the common table variety – to store heat, the type of energy that accounts for more than half the power consumed in Germany.
If it works well, the system could help solve a problem posed by renewable energy sources like wind and solar the world over: They are unreliable, meaning they sometimes generate too much, and sometimes too little power.
"Germany currently has enough installed renewable energy capacity to produce twice as much as it needs, it's just not constant," says Hendrik Roeglin, who oversees the salt storage project for Vattenfall. Rival utility E.ON recently calculated that solar and wind power generated up to 52 gigawatt hours of electricity during peak daylight hours on Easter Monday. Germany's energy consumption at the time was just 49.5 gigawatt hours.
This is another important signal of the emerging energy environment - Electric Vehicles (EVs) will not only help a shift from carbon based fuels but could also serve as massive batteries transforming how we manage electric energy.
With 10% penetration, EVs could shift all residential peak load to night, analysis of SoCal Ed finds
Electric vehicles have the potential to act as virtual power plants that can help utilities soak up midday renewable energy and discharge in the evenings to reduce peak load, according to a study from Jackson Associates released Wednesday.
The analysis, based on 5,000 Southern California Edison (SCE) customers' hourly loads, commuting behavior and "potential electric vehicle (EV) ownership," concluded that at a 10% EV penetration, the batteries could shift the utility's entire residential peak load to nighttime hours.
Over 20 million EVs are expected on U.S. roads by 2030 — a rapid increase from the 1.26 million on the road as of June, according to a Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) report released this month. "[U]tilities need to plan ahead to minimize grid impacts" of growing EV adoption, the group concludes.
A great signal of how to be ever more efficient in our transformation of the global energy paradigm.
Three-story water battery cuts university's energy usage by 40 percent
The University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) in Queensland, Australia, is on a mission to become completely carbon neutral by 2025, and a huge early addition to its energy systems is boding well for these lofty ambitions. Switched on in September, a new three-story “water battery” is already producing enough juice to power the campus’ air conditioning systems, reducing its reliance on the grid by more than 40 percent.
In pursuit of its climate-neutral goals, USC teamed up with private company Veolia to draw up a new clean energy solution for its buildings. Looking to make the most of the region’s abundant sunshine and take a bite out of the grid energy used for air conditioning, which accounts for 40 percent of its overall usage, the two came up with solution they’ve dubbed the “water battery.”
“Air conditioning accounts for 40 percent of our daily energy usage, so by eliminating this we are taking a major step towards our carbon neutral goal,” Professor Hill said back in August when the system was first announced.
It is in essence a huge thermal energy storage system. It makes use of 6,000 solar panels installed on the campus’ rooftops and carparks that make up a 2.1-megawatt photovoltaic system. The energy generated by this solar system is then used to cool 4.5 megaliters of water resting inside a three-story tank. This cooled water is then used for the campus’ air conditioning systems, and to great effect.
This is another early signal of the emerging digital environment and our interface with it. There are several very short videos.
"This new class of electronics will not only offer robust, convenient interfaces for use in both tabletop and handheld setups, but also allow seamless integration with the skin when applied onto our bodies,"
This universal electronics platform allowed researchers to demonstrate applications that were highly adaptable and customizable, such as multi-purpose personal electronics with variable stiffness and stretchability, a pressure sensor with tuneable bandwidth and sensitivity, and a neural probe that softens upon implantation into brain tissue.
'Transformative electronics systems' to broaden wearable applications
Imagine a handheld electronic gadget that can soften and deform when attached to our skin. This will be the future of electronics we all dreamed of. A research team at KAIST says their new platform called 'Transformative Electronics Systems' will open a new class of electronics, allowing reconfigurable electronic interfaces to be optimized for a variety of applications.
A team working under Professor Jae-Woong Jeong from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST has invented a multifunctional electronic platform that can mechanically transform its shape, flexibility, and stretchability. This platform, which was reported in Science Advances, allows users to seamlessly and precisely tune its stiffness and shape.
Here’s something signaling ever more precise ways for the maintenance of physical wellbeing - especially as our work-life becomes more sedantary.
Quality over quantity: Interval walking training improves fitness and health in elderly individuals
In Japan, health-conscious folks have been known to carry around pedometers to track the number of steps they walk everyday. The target number: 10,000 steps, as a foundation for a healthy lifestyle. Conscientious walkers can now update their device from a pedometer to a smartphone and forget about ten thousand steps with the latest study from Dr. Shizue Masuki of Shinshu University who found an effective way to increase overall fitness and decrease lifestyle-related disease (LSD) through Interval Walking Training (IWT). It's not how much you walk, but how intensely you do so for a minimum amount of time to get positive results. This finding may be welcome news for those who want to save time and get the most out of their workout.
Interval Walking Training is the method of walking at 70% of the walker's maximum capacity for 3 minutes, then at 40% of their capacity for the next 3 minutes. This is continued for 5 or more sets. Dr. Masuki studied a group of 679 participants with a medium age of 65 over the course of 5 months. Every two weeks data was collected from participants at a local community office and via the internet through the data measuring device (triaxial accelerometer). The triaxial accelerometer is a device that beeps to let the walker know when they are working at at least 70% of their peak aerobic capacity (VO2peak), and at 3 minutes to switch. It recorded their walking data to the central server at the administrative center for automatic analysis.
VO2peak is the amount (volume) of oxygen (O2) the body is able to use during physical activity. It is the milliliters of oxygen used by kilogram of body weight per minute. It is determined by measuring the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the participants breath. When the VO2 number reaches a figure and plateaus during intense exercise, that is the maximum amount of oxygen the person is able to utilize, and is an indicator of fitness. The higher the number, the more they are able to use, and the more intensely they can exert their body. Endurance athletes such as cyclists can have a VO2peak in the 70s.
Here is a signal of an inevitable future.
A RUSSIAN STARTUP IS SELLING ROBOT CLONES OF REAL PEOPLE
Russian startup Promobot is now selling autonomous androids — and buyers can choose to make the robots look like any person on Earth.
“Everyone will now be able to order a robot with any appearance — for professional or personal use,” Aleksei Iuzhakov, Chairman of Promobot’s Board of Directors, said in a press release, later encouraging people to “imagine a replica of Michael Jordan selling basketball uniforms and William Shakespeare reading his own texts in a museum.
Digital Immortality
Promobot’s Robo-C can’t walk, but its neck and torso each have three degrees of freedom of movement, according to the startup’s website. Its face has 18 moving parts, which allow the robot to produce 600 micro-expressions, and its AI boasts 100,000 speech modules.
A signal of a far off future about mining in the galaxy - maybe more relevant to developing capabilities for landfill mining.
MEET THE STARTUP BUILDING ROBOT SWARMS TO MINE ICE ON THE MOON
California startup OffWorld has big plans to make resource mining a reality across the Solar System, Space.com reports.
Its plan is to send swarms of smart robots to the surface of distant moons and planets to extract resources including water, in the form of ice, and minerals. First stop: the Earth’s Moon.
“They operate in swarms, collaborating together, making decisions on their own,” CEO Jim Keravala told Space.com. For instance, “they can sense where the minerals and ore exist […] and act accordingly.”
This is just awesome - efforts initiated over 40 years ago - exploring boundaries beyond our solar system.
Voyager 2 reveals the dynamic, complex nature of the solar system’s edge
Data from two NASA spacecraft chart the boundary between the sun and the rest of the galaxy
Humanity’s second ambassador to interstellar space has reported back from the frontiers of the solar system — with the message that the border of the sun’s territory is a complex and ever-changing place.
Late last year, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft broke through the heliopause, the boundary where the solar wind gives way to the plasma that permeates the galaxy. Six years earlier, its sister probe, Voyager 1, made its own heliopause crossing. Now, the combined results of these two journeys, published online November 4 in several papers in Nature Astronomy, offer the most detailed look yet at this largely unexplored region of space.
These two robotic explorers “are taking humankind to astonishing new places that 60 years ago we never imagined doing,” says Gary Zank, a space physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who was not involved with this research.
The view outside Voyager 2’s window changed on November 5, 2018, when the craft was about 17.8 billion kilometers from the sun — 119 times farther away than Earth — and the density of the surrounding plasma jumped by about a factor of 20. The steady stream of low-energy atomic particles from the sun dropped away, replaced by a barrage of far more energetic particles known as cosmic rays. These changes told researchers that Voyager 2 had left the sun’s protective magnetic bubble, 42 years after beginning its sight-seeing expedition across the solar system.
This is a fascinating weak signal - but I can imagine a plausible new ‘dog whisperer’ training service with hardware/software. The videos are a must view.
Dog Learning to Talk By Using a Custom Soundboard to Speak: 'I'm in Constant Amazement'
Stella the dog's owner, a speech-language pathologist, says the canine already knows 29 words and can form phrases
Many dog parents already know their pets communicate with them, but what EXACTLY are they trying to say?
A speech-language pathologist with an 18-month-old dog is working to find out, and she’s already discovered that her dog Stella can literally tell her things — like she’s tired after playing and now would like a nap, or that instead of playing at this moment she would prefer to eat, and that she would like to go outside, specifically to the park.
It’s all possible through the use of an adaptive device Christina Hunger, 26, devised to help Stella communicate not only words but her thoughts and feelings too. When the Catahoula/Blue Heeler mix wants to “talk,” she steps on buttons corresponding with words Hunger recorded and programmed into the device.
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