Thursday, July 22, 2021

Friday Thinking 23 July, 2021

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 claim that capitalism is being toppled by a new economic model comes on the heels of many premature forecasts of capitalism’s demise, especially from the left. But this time it may well be true, and the signs that it is have been visible for a while.

This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.

Perhaps the clearest sign that something serious is afoot appeared on August 12 last year. On that day, we learned that, in the first seven months of 2020, the United Kingdom’s national income had tanked by over 20%, well above even the direst predictions. A few minutes later, the London Stock Exchange jumped by more than 2%. Nothing comparable had ever occurred. Finance had become fully decoupled from the real economy.

after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.

That central banks’ balance sheets, not profits, power the economic system explains what happened on August 12, 2020. Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: “Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us. Time to buy shares!” All over the West, central banks print money that financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their shares (whose prices have decoupled from profits). Meanwhile, digital platforms have replaced markets as the locus of private wealth extraction. For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free the capital stock of large corporations. That is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps.

Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over




Modernist architecture and town planning bolstered this new obsession, doing away with what architects saw as dark, filthy, disease-infested city centres to replace them with open squares and light-infused, gleaming white buildings both public and private. The 19th-century’s dust-filled carpets, heavy curtains and intricately carved furniture were ousted from interiors to be replaced with low-maintenance, easy-clean linoleum and furniture that was functional and sculptural.

By the early 1920s, the visual and written language of architecture was directly reflecting current medical practice. Without antibiotics, and with viruses barely understood, the millions of tuberculosis and influenza sufferers could only pin their hopes on the contemporary belief that exposure to sunlight and fresh air would save them. Pure white, light-reflecting, visibly sterile walls, sun-drenched balconies, big windows and sleeping porches replaced the dingy closed wards of the Victorian infirmaries; even their name, ‘sanatoriums’, held promise of health and recuperation. Their design features were echoed in domestic dwellings and holiday resorts.

The sink in the hall: how pandemics transform architecture




the brain may be more like a musical instrument. When you play the piano, how often you hit the keys matters, but the precise timing of the notes is also essential to the melody.

Neurons Unexpectedly Encode Information in the Timing of Their Firing





In his magnum opus Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger used the notion of ‘projection’ (Entwurf) to describe the two dimensions to self-confidence we distinguished in patients receiving DBS. In ordinary German usage, the noun Entwurf and the verb entwerfen refer to the sketching of some project to be carried out (for instance, an architect drawing a new building in a sketchbook). Heidegger points out that projection is not a matter of thinking up and carrying out a plan. Instead, it refers to the freedom a person has to press forward into a range of possibilities; it means taking a stand on who we are. With Entwurf, Heidegger hoped to capture a forward momentum to the living of life.

Human beings can seize hold of possibilities and embark on projects that shape their self-understanding – the person’s understanding of who they are. For Heidegger, a person’s self-understanding of who they are comes from an openness to the world and its possibilities. 

World wide open




Unfortunately, Bayesian theory and its statistical underpinnings also fall into the same trap of truth via authority. Certainly, humans perform hypothesis generation and empirical testing, but to label this and the scientific method Bayesian borders on the absurd. Because Bayesianism adopts methods we’ve created to predict games of chance and made it gospel. The bait in the scientific method is essential, the switch is that Bayesian theory depicts the scientific method therefore Bayesian method must be valuable.

Unfortunately, Bayesian theory is the flat earth theory of the scientific method. As an analogy, AI believed that formulating programs that played chess would lead to AI. But like games of chance, games of chess are closed problems. Reality in contrast is open-ended.

The scientific method works because there are many minds that criticize the hypotheses that are made. A key cognitive bias of humans is that we are very poor at criticizing our own thoughts. We are however very good at criticizing other thoughts. The scientific method works because it is a collective method. It took 9,700 generations to accept it because you needed to convince a majority in society to shun the hierarchical structure of civilization and to embrace an alternative.

To convince all of humanity requires scalable technology. That was writing and scaled further with the invention of the printing press. The scientific method would not be so prevalent without a mechanism for the distribution of information.

One cannot formulate intelligence that is in vats. That is because intelligence requires learning and learning demands engagement with an environment that can change independently of the mind that interacts with it. Therefore, if we are to reverse engineer minds, we have to understand environments that lead to learning and not to stagnation.

Collective deliberative thinking is an innate capability in humans. However, hierarchical organizations were invented to effectively coordinate civilizations at scale.

The scientific method is a civilization-scale learning method that rests on decentralized criticisms of existing practices.

Goodhart’s law reminds us that the hierarchical structure that we invented to scale civilization for our benefit will be reimagined to protect the hierarchy and not the living beings in the hierarchy.

The Tragedy of Hierarchy and Authority




*Artificial Intelligence isn't what science fiction writers called artificial intelligence and the machines called "robots" aren't what science fiction writers called robots either

*You marry those two fantasies and hope for some clarity, it'll cost ya

Bruce Sterling - Tweet




Wilbur Wright
No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses no element of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error, he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some errors with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so both can see clearly…

reason didn’t evolve to help individuals reach truths, but to facilitate group communication and co­operation. Reasoning makes us smarter only when we practise it with other people in argument.

A good scrap





This is a great signal of a turn in Tech policy thinking and implementation. We must all understand this concept to better shape the future of our - of-by-for Internet.
interoperability can enhance privacy by giving users more choice and making it easier to switch away from services that are built on surveillance.

The New ACCESS Act Is a Good Start. Here’s How to Make Sure It Delivers.

The ACCESS Act is one of the most exciting pieces of federal tech legislation this session. Today’s tech giants grew by taking advantage of the openness of the early Internet, but have designed their own platforms to be increasingly inhospitable for both user freedom and competition. The ACCESS Act would force these platforms to start to open up, breaking down the high walls they use to lock users in and keep competitors down. It would advance the goals of competition and interoperability, which will make the internet a more diverse, more user-friendly place to be.

We’ve praised the ACCESS Act as “a step towards a more interoperable future.” However, the bill currently before Congress is just a first step, and it’s far from perfect. While we strongly agree with the authors’ intent, some important changes would make sure that the ACCESS Act delivers on its promise.


One of the inevitables is the digital city - the smart city. The question is - Are we going to let tech companies colonize our digital future the way we are letting urban, for-profit developers colonize the architecture of our future cities? The focus on renewing our infrastructure should include a fiber-optic strategy for every home and business as part of our public infrastructure - to prevent a future where for-profit rent-seeking corporations determine what is possible. 
in Kolkata, India, a startup has provided postal addresses to more than 120,000 slum residents using geocoding technology, helping them obtain documentation to access government services, open bank accounts, and register to vote.
Smart city initiatives that shift from being technology-centric to citizen-centric put engagement and inclusion at the center. Using this framework, cities have more tools to engage diverse stakeholders in solution creation and share the benefits of smart cities—quality of life, economic growth, and sustainability—with all residents. Six enablers work around these core principles to bring smart cities to life: data and security, digital and technology, ecosystem, finance and funding, internal organization, and policy and regulation.

Inclusive smart cities

Delivering digital solutions for all
​As inclusion becomes integral to urban centers, how can it be extended to smart city programs? And how can technology better enable inclusion across city services, public engagement, and economic opportunities?

Moving from technology-centric to citizen-centric smart cities
AS urban populations grow increasingly diverse, many cities are turning to technology and smart city solutions to build more livable environments and improve the delivery of public services.1 These initiatives have the potential to expand access to city services, improve public engagement, and spur economic growth. However, smart city design and implementation shortcomings, coupled with the digital divide between different population segments, might unintentionally leave some communities behind. This is forcing cities to confront the question: How can digital solutions advance, rather than impede, inclusion?

This article explores the relationship between technological innovation and inclusion in today’s cities. Based on research, interviews, and engagement with city leaders around the world, we outline approaches that municipal governments can apply to make digital solutions more accessible and useful for their residents.


This is a good signal of two things the continued emergence of the quantified self - and the willingness of the MAGA-F (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al) companies to use everything about our lives to make themselves more money.

Amazon Gets the Go-Ahead to Track Your Sleep With Radar

As you might expect, it's all about piling on more ads.
 On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission gave the e-commerce giant clearance to create bedside radar devices meant to track how we toss and turn at night. And while Amazon’s putting the best face possible on the innovation, it’s still all about those ad dollars.

Bloomberg was first to notice the agency had quietly filed a memo that authorized the ecommerce giant to develop and deploy an “unlicensed radar device” meant to track any nearby movement. This was in response to an initial request that Amazon filed with the agency nearly three weeks ago, where the company described its vision for “Radar Sensors”. These devices, Amazon said, would fire high-frequency radio waves to map out movements from anyone nearby.

And because the FCC is the federal body responsible for policing the airwaves, Amazon was legally obligated to get their go-ahead before they began marketing this yet-to-be-licensed radar device.


When considering complex and living systems in the light of sensitivity to initial conditions - we can’t know how small a difference will make a difference (and if it does we won’t know when and what difference it will make). Nor do we know how big a difference will be that makes no difference. 

Only a tiny fraction of our DNA is uniquely human

The result underscores how big of a hand interbreeding among ancient hominids had in shaping us
Only 1.5 percent to 7 percent of the collective human genetic instruction book, or genome, contains uniquely human DNA, researchers report July 16 in Science Advances.

That humans-only DNA, scattered throughout the genome, tends to contain genes involved in brain development and function, hinting that brain evolution was important in making humans human. But the researchers don’t yet know exactly what the genes do and how the exclusively human tweaks to DNA near those genes may have affected brain evolution.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to say what makes us uniquely human,” says Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, a population geneticist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who was not involved in the study. “We don’t know whether that makes us think in a specific way or have specific behaviors.” And Neandertals and Denisovans, both extinct human cousins, may have thought much like humans do.


Everything that can be automated will be - and now the protein folding game played by thousands of humans called FoldIt may face a different future.

DeepMind’s AI for protein structure is coming to the masses

Machine-learning systems from the company and from a rival academic group are now open source and freely accessible.
It’s protein-structure prediction for the people. Software that accurately determines the 3D shape of proteins is set to become widely available to scientists.

On 15 July, the London-based company DeepMind released an open-source version of its deep-learning neural network AlphaFold 2 and described its approach in a paper in Nature. The network dominated a protein-structure prediction competition last year.

Meanwhile, an academic team has developed its own protein-prediction tool inspired by AlphaFold 2, which is already gaining popularity with scientists. That system, called RoseTTaFold, performs nearly as well as AlphaFold 2, and is described in a Science paper also published on 15 July.

The open-source nature of the tools means that the scientific community should be able to build on the advances to create even more powerful and useful software, says Jinbo Xu, a computational biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in either effort.


Covid has accelerated some aspects of medical treatment - new forms of vaccine and treatment - perhaps this is a next phase.

‘Super-antibodies’ could curb COVID-19 and help avert future pandemics

Companies are designing next-generation antibodies modeled on those taken from unique individuals whose immune systems can neutralize any COVID-19 variant—and related coronaviruses, too.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in late May to sotrovimab, providing a new therapeutic weapon in the fight against SARS-CoV-2—and future coronaviruses with pandemic potential.

According to analysts and researchers alike, so-called super-antibodies such as sotrovimab should have an edge over first-generation monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies for COVID-19 because of their broad neutralization capacity in the face of emerging virus variants. “Physicians aren’t going to sequence what version of the virus people have, so they’ll go for the antibodies that have the higher barrier to resistance or the ones that work on [known] variants,” says Phil Nadeau, an analyst at Cowen.

The antibody therapy from Vir Biotechnology and GlaxoSmithKline, a recombinant human immunoglobulin G1 mAb, is now the third mAb-based treatment marketed for individuals with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who are at high risk for progression to severe disease. (Eli Lilly and Regeneron each have a two-mAb cocktail with EUAs for the same indication.) And although sales opportunities should diminish for all these products as vaccination rates increase worldwide, Nadeau anticipates there will be a sustained market for COVID-19 mAbs to help treat individuals who, for medical reasons, can’t mount an appropriate immune response to vaccination or, for whatever reason, elect not to get the shot.


This is a very exciting signal of the progress being made in understanding cancer.

New research finds common denominator linking all cancers

All cancers fall into just two categories, according to new research from scientists at Sinai Health, in findings that could provide a new strategy for treating the most aggressive and untreatable forms of the disease.

In new research out this month in Cancer Cell, scientists at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), part of Sinai Health, divide all cancers into two groups, based on the presence or absence of a protein called the Yes-associated protein, or YAP.

Rod Bremner, senior scientist at the LTRI, said they have determined that all cancers are present with YAP either on or off, and each classification exhibits different drug sensitivities or resistance. YAP plays an important role in the formation of malignant tumours because it is an important regulator and effector of the Hippo signaling pathway.

"Not only is YAP either off or on, but it has opposite pro- or anti-cancer effects in either context," Bremner said. "Thus, YAPon cancers need YAP to grow and survive. In contrast, YAPoff cancers stop growing when we switch on YAP."


Another small signal of progress in quantum computing.

Chinese achieve new milestone with 56 qubit computer

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China, working at the University of Science and Technology of China, has achieved another milestone in the development of a usable quantum computer. The group has written a paper describing its latest efforts and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

Back in 2019, a team at Google announced that they had achieved "quantum supremacy" with their Sycamore machine—a 54 qubit processor that carried out a calculation that would have taken a traditional computer approximately 10,000 years to complete. But that achievement was soon surpassed by other teams from Honeywell and a team in China. The team in China used a different technique, one that involved the use of photonic qubits—but it was also a one-trick pony. In this new effort, the new team in China, which has been led by Jian-Wei Pan, who also led the prior team at the University of Science and Technology has achieved another milestone.


This is an interesting signal of a plant recently legalized. :)
Cannabis has been used for millennia for textiles and for its medicinal and recreational properties.
The evolution of the cannabis genome suggests the plant was cultivated for multipurpose use over several millennia.

Cannabis first domesticated 12,000 years ago: study

Cannabis was first domesticated around 12,000 years ago in China, researchers found, after analyzing the genomes of plants from across the world.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, said the genomic history of cannabis domestication had been under-studied compared to other crop species, largely due to legal restrictions.

The researchers compiled 110 whole genomes covering the full spectrum of wild-growing feral plants, landraces, historical cultivars, and modern hybrids of plants used for hemp and drug purposes.

The study said it identified "the time and origin of domestication, post-domestication divergence patterns and present-day genetic diversity".



#micropoem



most singular of experien-sense - 
is the wayfinding -
we do with our e-motions - 
nano moments of -
‘taking account’ - 
for response-ability - 
width the -
faith of one step -


in-sighting - 
any part-whole relationship - 
requires - 
both anticipathory 
-and -
empathory -
quality or mode - 
response-ability - 
to what is whole - 
through -
webs and scales -
of local contexts -
 - no - empathy no interaction - 


no empathy no interaction - 
even to the extent that -
a metal gear must have -
an ‘empathy’ for -
the metal cog -
and vice versa -
that determines -
the degree of -
interaction that can -
 occur - 


some thing magical -
 in money as anonymous - 
‘impartial’ exchange - 
that intends to support -
the stewarding and the growing -
of community - 

anonymity is the -
absence of community - 
 depending on social presence -
 of unknown others -
to experience it - 

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