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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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In 2013 I wrote an essay titled ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, which turned out to be the most successful thing I’ve written. It was based on a very common experience. I don’t really go to cocktail parties, but when I do, I tend to run into at least one person who doesn’t like to talk about their job. So I explain, that I’m an anthropologist, and I do fieldwork in Madagascar, and they’re all very interested, but when we start talking about their work, they quickly change the subject. And finally, after they’ve had a few drinks, they say ‘don’t tell my boss, but I kinda don’t do anything.’ They’re these mid-level managers who present charts at meetings, but actually nobody wants to attend these meetings, and nothing really changes as a result. So I call these kinds of jobs ‘bullshit jobs’.
It’s very interesting that nobody considers this to be a social problem. Partly because the free market ideology says this cannot exist. These kinds of bullshit jobs were able exist in the Soviet Union, where you hired five people to sell a piece of pork, but not in the capitalist West, and particularly not in large profit-oriented companies. Efficiency is one of the biggest advantages of capitalism. So how could this even happen?
I also wanted to know how many people are out there who feel that their jobs are bullshit jobs. I was astonished that two weeks after the essay was published, it had been translated into thirteen languages, the website was constantly down, because it was getting millions of hits per day. This made me realize, oh my God, this thing is more common than I thought! Finally, YouGov, one of the big UK polling firms, ran a survey, which directly used my language, and it showed that 37 per cent of the labour force does not think they contribute meaningfully to society. Fifty per cent thinks that their work is useful, and 13 per cent are not sure.
Anarchism, work and bureaucracy
what makes the Internet possible: a protocol.
A protocol is a code of etiquette for diplomatic exchanges between computers. A form of handshake.
What the Internet’s protocol does is give all the world’s digital devices and networks a handshake agreement about how to share data between any point A and any point B in the world, across any intermediary networks.
Oddly, none of this is especially complicated at the technical level, because what I just described is pretty much all the Internet does. It doesn’t concern itself with what’s inside the data traffic it routes, who is at the ends of the connections, or what their purposes are—any more than gravity cares about what it attracts.
Beyond the sunk costs of its physical infrastructure, and the operational costs of keeping the networks themselves standing up, the Internet has no first costs at its protocol level, and it adds no costs along the way. It also has no billing system.
In all these ways the Internet is, literally, neutral. It also doesn’t need regulators or lawmakers to make it neutral. That’s just its nature.
The Internet’s protocol called is called TCP/IP, and by using it, all the networks of the world subordinate their own selfish purposes.
even though phone and cable companies of the world now make trillions of dollars because of it, they never would have invented it - Two reasons for that. One is because it was too damn simple. The other is because they would have started with billing.
all TCP/IP says is that this is a way for computers, networks, and everything connected to them, to get along. And it succeeded, producing instant worldwide peace among otherwise competing providers of networks and services. It made every network operator involved win a vast positive-sum game almost none of them knew they were playing. And most of them still don’t.
Authority must still be earned, but there are now countless non-institutional ways to earn it. Credentials still matter, but less than they used to, and not in the same ways. Ad hoc education works in ways that can be cheap or free, while institutions of higher education remain very expensive. What happens when the market for knowledge and know-how starts moving past requirements for advanced degrees that might take students decades of their lives to pay off?
For one example of that risk already at work, take computer programming.
Which do you think matters more to a potential employer of programmers—a degree in computer science or a short but productive track record? For example, by contributing code to the Linux operating system?
the problem for educational institutions in the digital world is that most were built to leverage scarcity: scarce authority, scarce materials, scarce workspace, scarce time, scarce credentials, scarce reputation, scarce anchors of trust. To a highly functional degree we still need and depend on what only educational institutions can provide, but that degree is a lot lower than it used to be, a lot more varied among disciplines, and it risks continuing to decline as time goes on.
I’ve given Linux as one example of Commons Based Peer Production. Others are Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. We’re also seeing it within the academy, for example with Indiana University’s own open archives, making research more accessible and scholarship more rich and productive.
Every one of those examples comports with Lin Ostrom’s design principles:
- clearly defined group boundaries;
- rules governing use of common goods within local needs and conditions;
- participation in modifying rules by those affected by the rules;
- accessible and low cost ways to resolve disputes;
- developing a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior;
- graduated sanctions for rule violators;
- and governing responsibility in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.
The 5G-enclosed Internet might be faster and more handy in many ways, the range of freedoms for each of us there will be bounded by the commercial interests of the phone companies and their partners, and subject to none of Lin’s rules for governing a commons.
Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
Well, in fact, MMT is almost entirely a descriptive project. There is a prescriptive policy piece as well. But MMT is mostly about helping people get a better understanding of the nature of the monetary system we have today. That is we’re not on a gold standard. We have something called a fiat currency, flexible floating exchange rate. So MMT says, let’s talk about the monetary system that we have today. Let’s try to understand it. Let’s understand what that affords a government that issues its own, let’s say sovereign currency, how much policy space is opened up around us? Because we’re no longer on a gold standard. We don’t have fixed exchange rates and how can we best take advantage of the monetary system of the policy space to build a better economy? That’s essentially what MMT is about.
HOW TO SAVE THE U.S. ECONOMY, WITH ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ AND STEPHANIE KELTON
Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life. That is the nature of emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger. Entire countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments. What happens when everybody works from home and communicates only at a distance? What happens when entire schools and universities go online? In normal times, governments, businesses and educational boards would never agree to conduct such experiments. But these aren’t normal times.
In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.
A self-motivated and well-informed population is usually far more powerful and effective than a policed, ignorant population.
But to achieve such a level of compliance and co-operation, you need trust. People need to trust science, to trust public authorities, and to trust the media.
Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus
This is one signal of impending and emergent global change in systems of governance, economic paradigm and global power status-politics. Changes that seemed like impossible fantasies - may be enacted unimaginably quickly.
The Coronavirus Could Reshape Global Order
China Is Maneuvering for International Leadership as the United States Falters
Global orders have a tendency to change gradually at first and then all at once. In 1956, a botched intervention in the Suez laid bare the decay in British power and marked the end of the United Kingdom’s reign as a global power. Today, U.S. policymakers should recognize that if the United States does not rise to meet the moment, the coronavirus pandemic could mark another “Suez moment.”
It is now clear to all but the most blinkered partisans that Washington has botched its initial response. Missteps by key institutions, from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have undermined confidence in the capacity and competence of U.S. governance. Public statements by President Donald Trump, whether Oval Office addresses or early-morning tweets, have largely served to sow confusion and spread uncertainty. Both public and private sectors have proved ill-prepared to produce and distribute the tools necessary for testing and response. And internationally, the pandemic has amplified Trump’s instincts to go it alone and exposed just how unprepared Washington is to lead a global response.
The status of the United States as a global leader over the past seven decades has been built not just on wealth and power but also, and just as important, on the legitimacy that flows from the United States’ domestic governance, provision of global public goods, and ability and willingness to muster and coordinate a global response to crises. The coronavirus pandemic is testing all three elements of U.S. leadership. So far, Washington is failing the test.
An interesting video presentation by David Graeber and David Wengrow about the primal dual nature of human society based on seasonal changes in the conditions of production.
David Graeber and David Wengrow: Palaeolithic Politics and Why It Still Matters
Talk given to the Radical Anthropology Group at Daryll Forde Seminar Room, Anthropology Building, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW on 13 October 2015. Anthropologist David Graeber and Archaeologist examine ethnographic and palaeolithic findings to challenge assumptions about development of hierarchical political structures in human society. Lecture based on their paper Ritual Seasonality and the Origins of Inequality.
This is an interesting signal of humans and AI working to understand the probabilities of certain kinds of future events - such as inevitable surprises. This is very similar to the Good Judgments project ( https://goodjudgment.com/insights/ ) except that it includes AI.
Can humans and artificial intelligence come together to predict the future?
It could be argued that scientists create superpowers in their labs. If Aram Galstyan, director of the Artificial Intelligence Division at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI) had to pick just one superpower, it would be the ability to predict the future. What will be the daily closing price of Japan's Nikkei 225 index at the end of next week? How many 6.0 or stronger earthquakes will occur worldwide next month? Galstyan and a team of researchers at USC ISI are building a system to answer such questions.
For the past two years, Galstyan has led a group of researchers at ISI on a project named Synergistic Anticipation of Geopolitical Events, or SAGE, to attempt to predict the future using non-experts. The SAGE project relies on human participants to interact with machine learning tools to make predictions about future events. Their goal is for the forecasts borne from the combination of human + AI to be more accurate than those of humans alone.
Their research has proved quite useful and people's predictions largely on target. ISI's Fred Morstatter, a USC Viterbi research assistant professor of computer science, said that non-experts accurately predicted in April that North Korea would launch its missile test before July; North Korea launched in May.
This is an excellent signal pointing to the outmoded constraints of the nature-nurture debate. There is more to reality than duality. And sensitivity to initial conditions can provide robust forms of adaptation.
“The genome is not a blueprint,” Mitchell said. “It doesn’t encode some specific outcome. It only encodes some biochemical rules, some cellular algorithms by which the developing embryo will self-organize.” Molecules bounce around and interact in a cell, binding and pulling apart and diffusing at random. The processes that make proteins and turn genes on and off are subject to this “molecular jitter in the system,” — which leads to some degree of randomness in how many protein molecules are made, how they assemble and fold, and how they fulfill their function and help cells make decisions.
Nature Versus Nurture? Add ‘Noise’ to the Debate.
Common sense tells us that if it’s not nature, it’s nurture: environmental influences that interact with an animal’s genome to generate different outcomes for various traits. But that’s not the whole story. New research on crayfish and scores of other organisms is revealing an important role for a third, often-overlooked source of variation and diversity — a surprising foundation for what makes us unique that begins in the first days of an embryo’s development: random, intrinsic noise.
Nature Versus Nurture Versus Noise
Scientists typically consider the phenotype of a cell or organism — the traits it expresses in its form, physiology and behavior — to be the complex sum of genetic and environmental factors, or “nature” and “nurture.” A great deal of research is dedicated to identifying the contributions of the former: to pinning down, for instance, how given mutations might determine the shape of a limb or the onset of a disease. “That’s certainly a very powerful paradigm,” said Arjun Raj, a systems biologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’ve learned an enormous amount from that, [and] it’s really easy to tell a story about it.”
Everything not chalked up to genetic control tends to get attributed to diverse environmental factors, ranging from nutrition to stress to idiosyncratic social interactions.
By definition, noise is not systematic or predictable, and as a result, it’s almost prohibitively difficult to isolate and measure. “It’s the most difficult [factor] to actually control, to play with,” said Bassem Hassan, a neurobiologist at the Paris Brain Institute. “You can play with the genome, you can play with the environment, you can play with physiology, you can activate certain cells and not others. … It’s a lot harder to manipulate the variation” and prove it to be the cause of differences in a trait of interest.
Equally fascinating as ‘noise’ can be this is another signal of how small a difference that will make a difference - can be.
The growth of an organism rides on a pattern of waves
When an egg cell of almost any sexually reproducing species is fertilized, it sets off a series of waves that ripple across the egg's surface. These waves are produced by billions of activated proteins that surge through the egg's membrane like streams of tiny burrowing sentinels, signaling the egg to start dividing, folding, and dividing again, to form the first cellular seeds of an organism.
Now MIT scientists have taken a detailed look at the pattern of these waves, produced on the surface of starfish eggs. These eggs are large and therefore easy to observe, and scientists consider starfish eggs to be representative of the eggs of many other animal species.
In each egg, the team introduced a protein to mimic the onset of fertilization, and recorded the pattern of waves that rippled across their surfaces in response. They observed that each wave emerged in a spiral pattern, and that multiple spirals whirled across an egg's surface at a time. Some spirals spontaneously appeared and swirled away in opposite directions, while others collided head-on and immediately disappeared.
This has to be a weak signal - but one consistent with the concept of tacit knowledge and also hinted at in a variety of science fiction TV series and novels.
Researchers say the findings provide new evidence that animals can lean on feedback from the senses to aid the interplay of the brain, body and stimulus from their external environment in guiding locomotor movement, rather than depending on precise tuning of brain circuits to the mechanics of the body's muscles and skeleton. The team also says the findings reinforce the case for the future design of advanced robotics that employ robust sensory feedback control systems; such systems may better adapt to unexpected events in their environment.
Simulated 'Frankenfish brain-swaps' reveal senses control body movement
Plenty of fictional works like Mary Shelly's Frankenstein have explored the idea of swapping out a brain from one individual and transferring it into a completely different body. However, a team of biologists and engineers has now used a variation of the sci-fi concept, via computer simulation, to explore a core brain-body question.
How can two people with vastly different-sized limbs and muscles perform identical fine-motor tasks equally well, such as hitting a baseball or sending a text? Is it a unique tuning between our brain and nervous system with the rest of our body that controls these complex motions, or is feedback from our senses taking charge?
In a new study featured in the journal eLife, researchers have computationally modeled the various brains and bodies of a species of weakly electric fish, the glass knifefish (Eigenmannia virescens), to successfully simulate "fish brain transplants" and investigate.
The team's simulations, which involved swapping models of the fishes' information processing and motor systems, revealed that after undergoing a sudden jump into the different body of their tank-mate, the "Frankenfish" quickly compensated for the brain-body mismatch by heavily relying on sensory feedback to resume control of fine-motor movements required for swimming performance.
Another weak signal of an inevitable national gene sequencing census - to be eventually followed by environmental gene sequencing census.
When this DNA is found in the environment, it's known as environmental DNA, or eDNA
eDNA provides researchers with 'more than meets the eye'
Researchers from Curtin University have used next generation DNA sequencing to learn more about the different species of plants, insects and animals present in the Pilbara and Perth regions of Western Australia.
Lead researcher Curtin Ph.D. candidate Mieke van der Heyde, from the ARC Centre for Mine Site Restoration said that DNA metabarcoding is a growing field in the biological monitoring space, with the potential to provide fast, accurate, and cost effective assessments of biodiversity.
"As animals and organisms interact with their environment, they leave behind traces of their DNA through things like droppings, skin cells, saliva, and pollen. When this DNA is found in the environment, it's known as environmental DNA, or eDNA.
"Our research looked into the feasibility of using this eDNA as an additional tool for biomonitoring. Not only to see if this type of analysis could potentially make things a bit easier for biologists out in the field, but as well as providing researchers with more accurate field information then what they can visually identify."
The Babel Fish device from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe seems to be getting closer and closer.
Google introduces real-time extended voice translation
Google has announced a new real-time transcription feature for its free Translate app for Android phones. An IOS version is planned for the future, the company says.
The feature will allow users to obtain instantaneous text translations of ongoing speeches, lectures or monologues into any of eight languages, including English.
The only requirements are having only one speaker talking at a time in a quiet room (other voices or noises will diminish accuracy) and an Internet connection, necessary for interaction with Google's cloud-based Tensor Processing Units.
The rollout begins today (March 18) and should be available to all users by the end of the week at Google's Play Store.
The ongoing progress in domesticating matter at the nanoscale is producing astounding tools.
"The picture we got this way was very rich," said Philip Bucksbaum, a professor at SLAC and Stanford and investigator with the Stanford PULSE Institute, who led the study with PULSE postdoctoral scientist Matthew Ware. "The molecules gave us enough information that you could actually see atoms move over distances of less than an angstrom—which is about the width of two hydrogen atoms—in less than a trillionth of a second.
An advance in molecular moviemaking shows how molecules respond to two photons of light
Over the past few years, scientists have developed amazing tools—"cameras" that use X-rays or electrons instead of ordinary light ¬- to take rapid-fire snapshots of molecules in motion and string them into molecular movies.
Now scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have added another twist: By tuning their lasers to hit iodine molecules with two photons of light at once instead of the usual single photon, they triggered totally unexpected phenomena that were captured in slow-motion movies just trillionths of a second long.
The first movie they made with this approach, described March 17 in Physical Review X, shows how the two atoms in an iodine molecule jiggle back and forth, as if connected by a spring, and sometimes fly apart when hit by intense laser light. The action was captured by the lab's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) hard X-ray free-electron laser. Some of the molecules' responses were surprising and others had been seen before with other techniques, the researchers said, but never in such detail or so directly, without relying on advance knowledge of what they should look like.
This is a good signal of where we were and how far we have come to be here.
Basic Science is the Best Protection Against Epidemics
We were not starting from scratch. Coronaviruses have been known since the 1950s but the scientific community only started to produce significant results following the advent of molecular biology in the 1990s. In my area, the first three-dimensional structure of a protein was obtained by Rolf Hilgenfeld in 2002. It went totally unnoticed as the virus (TGEV), which causes gastroenteritis in farmed pigs, was not popular with the media. On the other hand, his findings very rapidly enabled Rolf Hilgenfeld to establish the structure of the first protein, and principal protease, of the SARS virus, in 2004. As it happens, this type of enzyme (viral protease) is an interesting target for drug design. On our side, we generated the first original structure of a SARS protein a few months later, still in 2004.
One significant difference for the scientific community today is that it can now monitor an epidemic in real-time by high-throughput sequencing, in particular via the Nextstrain website, which is an open source project. It makes it possible to follow an individual who is infected in the field and within hours obtain the sequence of the virus in order to determine its phylogenesis. More generally, research teams are collaborating instantaneously to find a balance between disseminating knowledge – which is more essential than ever – and protecting their discoveries.
For example, following publication of the viral sequence by Chinese teams, scientists working with me – Étienne Decroly and Bruno Coutard (who is now at Aix-Marseille Université) – focused among other features on the specific dynamics of the virus. They detected a change in the Spike protein, which causes the contagiousness of the disease and its high capacity for transmission, compared with the 2003 infection. Our knowledge is improving, but there is much still to discover.
A weak signal, from efforts to enable quantum computing and science fiction.
A new form of potentially entangled communication technology - instantaneous regardless of distance?
Researchers demonstrate the missing link for a quantum internet
A quantum internet could be used to send unhackable messages, improve the accuracy of GPS, and enable cloud-based quantum computing. For more than twenty years, dreams of creating such a quantum network have remained out of reach in large part because of the difficulty to send quantum signals across large distances without loss.
Now, Harvard and MIT researchers have found a way to correct for signal loss with a prototype quantum node that can catch, store and entangle bits of quantum information. The research is the missing link towards a practical quantum internet and a major step forward in the development of long-distance quantum networks.
"This demonstration is a conceptual breakthrough that could extend the longest possible range of quantum networks and potentially enable many new applications in a manner that is impossible with any existing technologies," said Mikhail Lukin, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics and a co-Director of Harvard Quantum Initiative. "This is the realization of a goal that has been pursued by our quantum science and engineering community for more than two decades."
The research is published in Nature.
A weak signal of a possible replacement of our current use of plastic. A signal as well of a metabolic design principle. Any product we design should be capable of being metabolized into other products at the end of their life.
"The effective use of low-cost biomass, which is what is afforded by our technique, will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas (e.g., CO2) emissions, thereby positioning this technology among the key environmental technologies emerging from Japan for the ratification of the Paris agreement."
Researchers create water-degradable plastic combining starch and cellulose
A group of researchers led by Associate Professor Taka-Aki Asoh and Professor Hiroshi Uyama of the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, has, in collaboration with Nihon Shokuhin Kako Co., combined the ubiquitous biomasses starch and cellulose to develop a marine biodegradable plastic. Starch is the main component of the carbohydrates found in corn, tubers, and roots such as potatoes; cellulose is the main component of plants and commonly known as cotton fiber. Using their unique technology, the researchers improved the water resistance of starch significantly, and the resultant composite sheet material demonstrated excellent water resistance and high strength in addition to its high levels of biodegradability in seawater.
Associate Professor Asoh says, "Because these materials are cheap, and the manufacturing process is simple, we can expect that the developed material will be put to practical use soon. We have great expectations that our material will help solve the growing global problem of marine debris accumulation and have a major societal impact."
This product is expected to not only contribute significantly to a reduction in the amount of new marine debris deposited globally, but also to a more efficient and sustainable material cycling process and to the reduction of greenhouse gases
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