Thursday, December 10, 2020

Friday Thinking 11 Dec 2020

Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and 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 is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.

The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment - 
computational ecology - 
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence. 

To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.  

‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’

“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon



 the top with the assistance of others. In fact, the smallest male may become alpha if he has the right supporters. Most alpha males protect the underdog, keep the peace, and reassure those who are distressed. Analyzing all instances in which one individual hugs another who has lost a fight, we found that although females generally console others more often than do males, there is one striking exception: the alpha male. This male acts as the healer-in-chief, comforting others in agony more than anyone else in the community. As soon as a fight erupts among its members, everyone turns to him to see how he is going to handle it. He is the final arbiter, intent on restor­ing harmony. He will impressively stand between screaming parties, with his arms raised, until things calm down."

A TRUE ALPHA MALE




Merit arrived, so to speak, as a progressive ideal, as a way of enabling each person to go as far as talents and efforts would take them. It seemed like a welcome alternative to aristocratic societies, caste societies, societies ridden with racial prejudice and discrimination. And, of course, it represents an advance over those ways of life.

But we became so intoxicated with the ideal of a meritocracy that we came to think that if only we could remove barriers to success, then the winners would deserve their winnings. They would have a right, a claim of moral desert, to the rewards that society heaps on those who land on top. And that's where we've gone wrong.

We've seen deepening inequalities during the last four decades of globalization. And we've assumed, in the grip of the meritocratic ideal, that the only real response to that inequality is to offer individual upward mobility, the chance to rise, typically by going and getting a university degree. And this, I think, has been a woefully inadequate response to inequality. 

Meritocracy is not an alternative to inequality. If you think about it, it's a justification for inequality. That's what it's become, and the effect of this has been to generate hubris among the winners and anger, resentment, even humiliation among those left behind. Because it is not only a way of allocating income, wealth, power, prestige, and recognition; it's also a way of justifying it. And justifying it in a way that almost invites those on top to look down on those who struggle, who haven't prevailed, because they must not have the effort, the drive, the talent to succeed.

How meritocracy entrenches inequality




On April 24, 2013, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights announced it was having an auction to raise money to “carry forward Robert Kennedy’s dream of a more just and peaceful world”. Through the auction website CharityBuzz, bidders could compete for a variety of prizes: a visit to the set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a personal meeting with Ryan Seacrest, a tour of Jay Leno’s car collection.  Or a six-week unpaid internship at the United Nations, where the recipient will “gain inside knowledge of just how the UN really operates.” Current bid? $22,000. 

“This truly is the ultimate internship opportunity for any college or graduate student looking to get their foot in the door,” the ad proclaimed. For more than what many colleges cost in annual tuition, the highest bidder receives “tremendous opportunities to make invaluable connections.” 

One would suspect that a college student who can pay $22,000 to work 25 hours a week for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world needs little help making connections. But that misconstrues the goal of unpaid internships: transforming personal wealth into professional credentials. For students seeking jobs at certain policy organisations, the way to get one’s foot in the door is to walk the streets paved in gold. In the post-employment economy, jobs are privileges, and the privileged have jobs.

Meritocracy for sale




This chapter takes a different approach. Rather than attempting to minimize the disruptive impact of DFC technology, it embraces the possibility of widespread consumer flight out of bank deposits and into the DFC payments network, on the basis that such a shift would improve the safety and functioning of the financial system.

From this view, the critical question is not how to preserve the banking system as it currently exists, but rather how to preserve the socially valuable functions of banking, while jettisoning those aspects that have been rendered obsolete or inferior compared to modern alternatives, such as a dedicated public payments network. 

In particular, I argue that the core social responsibility of the banking system is not to maintain a monopoly over payments processing but to conduct credit analysis and collateral evaluation in ways that promote the capital development of the economy

 Banking in a Digital Fiat Currency Regime




The signaling of Surveillance Capitalism - may not be quite as sinister in results as the intentions coded in our AI and systems would indicate. After all we have all grown up with ubiquitous advertising and have learned how to navigate the world.

Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble

The scariest thing about microtargeted ads is that they just don’t work.
WE LIVE IN an age of manipulation. An extensive network of commercial surveillance tracks our every move and a fair number of our thoughts. That data is fed into sophisticated artificial intelligence and used by advertisers to hit us with just the right sales pitch, at just the right time, to get us to buy a toothbrush or sign up for a meal kit or donate to a campaign. The technique is called behavioral advertising, and it raises the frightening prospect that we’ve been made the subjects of a highly personalized form of mind control.

Or maybe that fear is precisely backwards. The real trouble with digital advertising, argues former Google employee Tim Hwang—and the more immediate danger to our way of life—is that it doesn’t work.

Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, lays out the case that the new ad business is built on a fiction. Microtargeting is far less accurate, and far less persuasive, than it’s made out to be, he says, and yet it remains the foundation of the modern internet: the source of wealth for some of the world’s biggest, most important companies, and the mechanism by which almost every “free” website or app makes money. If that shaky foundation ever were to crumble, there’s no telling how much of the wider economy would go down with it.


This is a signal as old as humanity - as McLuhan noted - technology is the most human part of us. Design is a master discipline and practice - incorporating all that we do and know.
The impact of bad design is massive – multiplied across the billions of people striving to flourish online, not only when we need the technology as a stop-gap measure to alleviate disruptions to everyday life, but also when we want to use it for more socially progressive purposes.
videoconferencing could also expand the development of ‘senses, imagination and thought’, ‘practical reason’ and ‘play’ through widening access to cultural and educational opportunities. 
being human as being ‘entangled’ with many diverse things, each of which has a life of its own. ...we can understand humans only through the complexity of their entanglements. Being human is a mass of entanglements. Thinking, … doesn’t take place in a perfect computer-like black-box processor within the brain, but rather happens through objects in the world. Cognition, especially creativity, is extended across and dependent upon a web of material things. This world of things doesn’t so much fit together into a totality. It temporarily aligns on journeys through time and space, snagging and slipping here and there. It’s not a perfect vehicle, but it works for us. And we can enjoy it.

Zoom and gloom

Sitting in a videoconference is a uniformly crap experience. Instead of corroding our humanity, let’s design tools to enhance it
Technology exists to expand and sustain our capabilities. Therefore, doing technology well contributes to our hopes for leading an ethically good life: developing the right capabilities in the right ways – and using them for good ends. Videoconferencing could make a significant contribution to this. However, the essential capability I’m concerned about is not videoconferencing in itself, but rather the humanisation of technologies for everyone’s benefit. This is, I argue, one of the most pressing issues we have to deal with, as technology becomes ever more entangled into our lives. But to do so successfully, we need to think more deeply and creatively, using techniques from the interdisciplinary field we call design research – applying a blend of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, engineering and aesthetics.

In this essay, I will explore how the experience of videoconferencing points, in one way, towards the limits of human adaptability and, in the other, to a liberating human capability that we must collectively cultivate and sustain – as an innovative extension to the ethical framework described by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum in Creating Capabilities (2011). As the designer Jon Kolko says in Well-Designed (2014), we should adopt an ‘optimistic stance’ and ‘seek to explore the situation space, to see multiple potentials for improvement, and to always consider what might be’ through systematic empathy and ‘integrative thinking’.


This is a very good signal of the future of our AI-ssistants - a swarm of them that will become the tools of thinking and making. This is a longish article.

Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue).

Jordan Singer is a product designer at Square, the Silicon Valley mobile-payments company. He helps design the company’s smartphone apps, building the graphics, menus, buttons and other widgets that define an app’s look and feel. When he heard about GPT-3, he wondered if this automated system could do his job.

He fed the system a simple description of a smartphone app, and the computer code needed to create the app. The description was in plain English. The code was built inside Figma, a specialized design tool used by professionals like Mr. Singer.

He did this a few more times, feeding the system several more English-language descriptions alongside the matching Figma code. And when he was done, GPT-3 could write such code on its own.

If he described a simple app for posting and viewing photos as a user would on Instagram, the system generated the code needed to build it. This code was sometimes flawed. But typically, if Mr. Singer made just a tweak or two, it worked as he wanted. “It’s not absolutely perfect,” he said. “But it is very, very close.”

This behavior was entirely new, and it surprised even the designers of GPT-3. They had not built GPT-3 to generate computer code, just as they had not built it to write like Mr. Kaufman or generate tweets or translate languages. They had built it to do just one thing: predict the next word in a sequence of words.


While we wait in vaccine purgatory - this may be good news.

Oral drug blocks SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection with a new antiviral drug, MK-4482/EIDD-2801 or Molnupiravir, completely suppresses virus transmission within 24 hours, researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University have discovered.

The group led by Dr. Richard Plemper, Distinguished University Professor at Georgia State, originally discovered that the drug is potent against influenza viruses.

"This is the first demonstration of an orally available drug to rapidly block SARS-CoV-2 transmission," said Plemper. "MK-4482/EIDD-2801 could be game-changing."

Interrupting widespread community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 until mass vaccination is available is paramount to managing COVID-19 and mitigating the catastrophic consequences of the pandemic.

Because the drug can be taken by mouth, treatment can be started early for a potentially three-fold benefit: inhibit patients' progress to severe disease, shorten the infectious phase to ease the emotional and socioeconomic toll of prolonged patient isolation and rapidly silence local outbreaks.


This may become widely available too late to help with the control of covid-19’s spread - but for the next pandemic - this will prove to be invaluable.
"One reason we're excited about CRISPR-based diagnostics is the potential for quick, accurate results at the point of need," says Doudna. "This is especially helpful in places with limited access to testing, or when frequent, rapid testing is needed. It could eliminate a lot of the bottlenecks we've seen with COVID-19."

New CRISPR-based test for COVID-19 uses a smartphone camera

In a new study published in the scientific journal Cell, the team from Gladstone, UC Berkeley, and UCSF has outlined the technology for a CRISPR-based test for COVID-19 that uses a smartphone camera to provide accurate results in under 30 minutes.

"It has been an urgent task for the scientific community to not only increase testing, but also to provide new testing options," says Melanie Ott, MD, Ph.D., director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology and one of the leaders of the study. "The assay we developed could provide rapid, low-cost testing to help control the spread of COVID-19."

The technique was designed in collaboration with UC Berkeley bioengineer Daniel Fletcher, Ph.D., as well as Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., who is a senior investigator at Gladstone, a professor at UC Berkeley, president of the Innovative Genomics Institute, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Doudna recently won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for co-discovering CRISPR-Cas genome editing, the technology that underlies this work.

Not only can their new diagnostic test generate a positive or negative result, it also measures the viral load (or the concentration of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) in a given sample.


This is a small signal of progress in restoring sight and also a good signal of the progress in domesticating DNA for addressing treatment for disease and eventually enhancement of biological capabilities.

Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice

‘Reprogramming’ approach seems to make old cells young again.
Researchers have restored vision in old mice and in mice with damaged retinal nerves by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age. The work, published on 2 December in Nature, suggests a new approach to reversing age-related decline, by reprogramming some cells to a ‘younger’ state in which they are better able to repair or replace damaged tissue.

“It is a major landmark,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a developmental biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the study. “These results clearly show that tissue regeneration in mammals can be enhanced.”

But researchers also caution that the work has so far has been carried out only in mice, and it remains to be seen whether the approach will translate to people, or to other tissues and organs that are ravaged by time.


This may be a even bigger signal of our progress in ‘treating’ aging - all the more important to have universal health care in place.
The data suggest that the aged brain has not permanently lost essential cognitive capacities, as was commonly assumed, but rather that these cognitive resources are still there but have been somehow blocked, trapped by a vicious cycle of cellular stress

Drug reverses age-related cognitive decline within days

Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists. The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome , prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer , and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.

In the new study, published December 1, 2020 in the open-access journal eLife , researchers showed rapid restoration of youthful cognitive abilities in aged mice, accompanied by a rejuvenation of brain and immune cells that could help explain improvements in brain function.

"ISRIB's extremely rapid effects show for the first time that a significant component of age-related cognitive losses may be caused by a kind of reversible physiological "blockage" rather than more permanent degradation," said Susanna Rosi , Ph.D., Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair II and professor in the departments of Neurological Surgery and of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science.


Not only is AI progress in exponential ways - but quantum computing looms - this is another good signal of the emergence of a new computational paradigm.

The researchers found that it took Jiuzhang approximately 200 seconds to provide an answer. They noted that it would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer approximately 2.5 billion years to carry out the same calculations—a clear example of quantum supremacy.

Chinese photonic quantum computer demonstrates quantum supremacy

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has built and tested a photonic quantum computer that demonstrates quantum supremacy. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their computer, which they call Jiuzhang, and how well it performed while conducting Gaussian boson sampling.

Quantum computers have been in the news lately as scientists try to determine if they can meet expectations. Quantum computers could vastly outperform conventional machines on certain tasks. The goal is to achieve what has come to be known as" quantum supremacy"—where a quantum computer can outperform conventional computers on at least one type of task. Until now, only one computer has ever achieved this feat—Google's Sycamore device. And because the field is still so new, researchers around the world are working on vastly different designs. Sycamore was based on qubits represented by superconducting materials. In this new effort, the team in China has developed a photon-based quantum computer capable of carrying out a single specific type of calculation—boson sampling.


A small signal of the emerging capabilities of AI, robotics and other applications - one has to imagine the next decade of advances - before science-fictions is simply science.
Using physically realistic simulations of Shadow's robotic hand, the researchers have been able to make two hands pass and throw objects to each other, as well as spin a pen between its fingers. The algorithms however are not limited to these tasks but can learn any task as long as it can be simulated. The 3-D simulations were developed using MuJoCo (Multi-Joint Dynamics withContact), a physics engine from the University of Washington.

Robot hands one step closer to human thanks to AI algorithms

The Shadow Robot Dexterous Hand is a robot hand, with size, shape and movement capabilities similar to those of a human hand. To give the robotic hand the ability to learn how to manipulate objects researchers from WMG, University of Warwick, have developed new AI algorithms.

Robot hands can be used in many applications, such as manufacturing, surgery and dangerous activities like nuclear decommissioning. For instance, robotic hands can be very useful in computer assembly where assembling microchips requires a level of precision that only human hands can currently achieve. Thanks to the utilization of robot hands in assembly lines, higher productivity may be achieved whilst securing reduced exposure from work risk situations to human workers.

In the paper, "Solving Challenging Dexterous Manipulation Tasks With Trajectory Optimisation and Reinforcement Learning," researchers Professor Giovanni Montana and Dr. Henry Charlesworth from WMG, University of Warwick have developed new AI algorithms—or the "brain"—required to learn how to coordinate the fingers' movements and enable manipulation.


This is a strong signal of the future of all manner of robots and sensors to ‘live’ in and with our environments - providing data and a digital sensorium for Gaia.

Robot fleet dives for climate answers in 'marine snow'

A fleet of next-generation, deep-diving ocean robots will be deployed in the Southern Ocean in a major study of how marine life acts as a handbrake on global warming.

The automated probes will be looking for "marine snow," which is the name given to the shower of dead algae and carbon-rich organic particles that sinks from upper waters to the deep ocean.

Sailing from Hobart on Friday, twenty researchers aboard CSIRO's RV Investigator hope to capture the most detailed picture yet of how marine life in the Southern Ocean captures and stores carbon from the atmosphere.

Voyage Chief Scientist, Professor Philip Boyd, from AAPP and IMAS, said it would be the first voyage of its kind to combine ship-board observations, deep-diving robots, automated ocean gliders and satellite measurements.


Alphabet (Google) has dedicated many years to perfect a means of delivering Internet services everywhere in the world - only instead of geostationary satellites - it is betting on smart balloons - this is a good signal of the next digital infrastructure that self-manages (including other forms of self-driving vehicles).
Loon says its system qualifies as the world’s first deployment of this variety of AI in a commercial aerospace system. And not only that, but it actually outperforms the system designed by humans. 

Alphabet’s Loon hands the reins of its internet air balloons to self-learning AI

The company’s new AI flight control system outperforms its human-made one
Alphabet’s Loon, the team responsible for beaming internet down to Earth from stratospheric helium balloons, has achieved a new milestone: its navigation system is no longer run by human-designed software.

Instead, the company’s internet balloons are steered around the globe by an artificial intelligence — in particular, a set of algorithms both written and executed by a deep reinforcement learning-based flight control system that is more efficient and adept than the older, human-made one. The system is now managing Loon’s fleet of balloons over Kenya, where Loon launched its first commercial internet service in July after testing its fleet in a series of disaster relief initiatives and other test environments for much of the last decade.

Loon, like many other AI labs that have turned to reinforcement learning to develop sophisticated AI programs, taught its flight control system how to pilot the balloons using computer simulation, with help from Google’s AI team out of Montreal. That way, the system could improve over time before being deployed on a real-world balloon fleet.


For the curious inventors or just the curious - this is an interesting site that may provide insight into emerging technology concepts. Each week, the illustrations accompanying the patents filed the previous week at the US Patent office are featured. 

Impeccable IP

Exploring the Best of Intellectual Property Law
Shown below are the 750 designs that were granted patents this 48th week of 2020, bringing the total design patents issued this year to 32,260.



#micropoem 


Which half -
is suffering -
 denning-kruger - 
apocalypse - 

mhm - 
is science-sing - 
an epistemological antidote to - 
dunning-kruger apoca-ellipsis

it’s the thought that counts - 
but the present is the medium -
of a-counting -
 
won’t share this -
with those who count - 
so they won’t think -
i’m a-counting -


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