Hello all – 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
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Articles:
Our future will be bright, fast—and full of robots. It’ll be more Asimov than Terminator: servant robots, more or less similar to us. Some will be upright androids, but most will be boxes filled with computer chips running software agents. And there will be a lot of them. Forecasts predict that, within just three years, we’ll have 1.7 million robots in industry, 32 million in our households, and 400,000 in professional offices.
Robots will begin to run our factories. Autonomous sensors will monitor infrastructure. Robots will order parts for themselves and raw materials for production. Logistics will be run by chains of unmanned vehicles stationed at autonomous bases. Factories will communicate with each other. Drone traffic control systems will request weather information from meteorological stations belonging to other companies.
All of this will be based on the exchange of information. Not just technical information—robots will need to develop and maintain economic relationships. Whether for a parts order or a service agreement with another company, many aspects of their work will revolve around currency transactions. Human operators will be too slow to oversee these transactions, which we can expect to happen at 20,000 transactions per second (assuming there is at least one robotic device per person). Therefore, for the future we are building, we will need to invent not just robots—but robot money and robot markets.
The Robot Economy Will Run on Blockchain
Building electric cars and reusable rockets is fairly easy. Building a nuclear fusion reactor, flying cars, self-driving cars, or a Hyperloop system is very hard. What makes the difference?
The answer, in a word, is experience. The difference between the possible and the practical can only be discovered by trying things out. Therefore, even though the physics suggests that a thing will work, if it has not even been demonstrated in the lab you can consider that thing to be a long way off. If it has been demonstrated in prototypes only, then it is still distant. If versions have been deployed at scale, and most of the necessary refinements are of an evolutionary character, then perhaps it may become available fairly soon. Even then, if no one wants to use the thing, it will languish in the warehouse, no matter how much enthusiasm there is among the technologists who developed it.
Here I present a short list of technology projects that are now under way or at least under serious discussion. In each case I’ll point out features that tend to make a technology easy or hard to bring to market.
Rodney Brooks Rules for Predicting Technology Commercial Success
It seems that the post-modern primitive - the cadre of people with tattoos, piercing, body modifications (including cosmetic surgeries) and implants is growing. A signal of the emerging possibilities of the cyborg and enhanced human in capability and with new senses integrated in an expanding sensorium. This is worth the consideration - surely more of our children will be drawn to incorporate some of these technologies (including DNA therapies, synthetic organs and more).
"The first thing I felt upon receiving the vibrations was a burning sensation followed by a feeling of satisfaction. It was similar to what you might feel when getting a tattooing but more intense. Then I felt happiness and pain at the same time," he added. "Cyborg technology is offering us a look into the unknown. My purpose with this project is to perceive the nonphysical or paranormal so I can find further avenues of self-development."
this artist got a piece of machinery implanted in his cheekbones
i-D meets the Spanish cyborg pushing the boundaries of body modification.
The more entrenched technology becomes in our lives, the more people are beginning to think that cyborgs are just the logical next step in the evolution of humanity. Naturally, some people are choosing to put themselves at the forefront of this, by converting parts of their bodies to machinery.
One of those guys is artist Joe Dekni, who last week got a piece of machinery implanted in his cheekbones. The artificial organ was based on the echolocation sonar used by bats to identify objects in their environment, and is meant to allow Dekni to feel the vibrations of his surroundings. The operation took place at the Transpecies Society space in Barcelona and was part of a performance piece that also included an audiovisual installation.
At 22, Joe calls himself an "artist, or perhaps an alchemist," and attributes the ability to introduce this permanent addition to his body to Neil Harbisson — the first person to have been legally recognized as a cyborg by a government. "I was intrigued by the idea of being able to perceive the paranormal or the invisible. I decided to develop my sense of echolocation, which animals like bats or dolphins already have naturally," he explained to i-D Spain after the performance. The artist decided to make his operation public in an attempt to demonstrate that furthering your senses is just another option that people can have today — "just another way of living," as he put it.
Adam Smith first used the term ‘the invisible hand’ in his first book “A Theory of Moral Sentiments” - everyone want to be praiseworthy as well as blameless - and so we ask ourselves the question (well sometimes we do) “What will others think if I should do….?” The digital environment enable the invisible hand to become a very visible ‘velvet glove’.
Spend “frivolously” and be penalized under China’s new social credit system
People who waste money on non-essentials or behave “badly” are penalized under the controversial new ranking.
In 2020, China will fully roll out its controversial social credit score. Under the system, both financial behaviors like “frivolous spending” and bad behaviors like lighting up in smoke-free zones can result in stiff consequences. Penalties include loss of employment and educational opportunities, as well as transportation restrictions. Those with high scores get perks, like discounts on utility bills and faster application processes to travel abroad.
China is currently piloting the program and some citizens have already found themselves banned from traveling or attending certain schools due to low scores. These ramifications have led to a flurry of recent criticism from both human rights groups and the press. This week alone, news outlets like Business Insider and National Public Radio weighed in on China’s social credit score and the stratified society it may foster in the communist country.
The outcry about China’s social credit score is understandable, given that the country’s authoritarian regime leaves citizens with little recourse to challenge the new system. But concerns about China’s credit system have overlooked how the US system also divides consumers along class lines — and has done so for decades. Social behaviors may not factor into US credit scores, but the idea that a person’s financial history reflects trustworthiness has long influenced employment decisions and other factors that affect Americans’ quality-of-life.
Does the boomer generation tend to trust media more or less then younger generations? Have boomers been conditioned to believe the ‘Walter Cronkite's’ of media?
Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact From Opinion
Given five facts, only 17 percent of people over 65 were able to identify them all as factual statements.
Americans over 50 are worse than younger people at telling facts from opinions, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.
Given 10 statements, five each of fact and opinion, younger Americans correctly identified both the facts and the opinions at higher rates than older Americans did. Forty-four percent of younger people identified all five opinions as opinions, while only 26 percent of older people did. And 18-to-29-year-olds performed more than twice as well as the 65+ set. Of the latter group, only 17 percent classified all five facts as factual statements.
This is a fun website with lots of signal of the emerging world of Robots and AI - worth the view for anyone interested in the accelerating of diversity - a true robot ecology.
ROBOTS
YOUR GUIDE TO THE WORLD OF ROBOTICS
Robots are a diverse bunch. Some walk around on their two, four, six, or more legs, while others can take to the skies. Some robots help physicians to do surgery inside your body; others toil away in dirty factories. There are robots the size of a coin and robots bigger than a car. Some robots can make pancakes. Others can land on Mars.
This diversity—in size, design, capabilities—means it’s not easy to come up with a definition of what a robot is.
Here’s a nice 2 min video of a diving robot.
Stanford's humanoid robot explores an abandoned shipwreck
The robot, called OceanOne, is powered by artificial intelligence and haptic feedback systems, allowing human pilots an unprecedented ability to explore the depths of the oceans in high fidelity.
A 22 page report on the Future of Work by the World Economic Forum
Eight Futures of Work: Scenarios and their Implications
Eight Futures of Work: Scenarios and their Implications presents various possible visions of what the future of work might look like by the year 2030. Based on how different combinations of three core variables—the rate of technological change and its impact on business models; the evolution of learning among the current and future workforce; and the magnitude of talent mobility across geographies—are likely to influence the nature of work in the future, the White Paper provides a starting point for considering a range of options around the multiple possible futures of work.
It is imperative that governments, businesses, academic institutions and individuals consider how to proactively shape a new, positive future of work—one that we want rather than one created through inertia. Accordingly, while the scenarios presented in this White Paper are designed to create a basis for discussion among policy-makers, businesses, academic institutions and individuals, they are not predictions. Instead, they are a practical tool to help identify and prioritize key actions that are likely to promote the kind of future that maximizes opportunities for people to fulfil their full potential across their lifetimes.
Anyone who watched Caprica a prequel television series to the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica will be familiar with the following signal - life imitating art or Science Fiction creating the imagination for invention - You gotta love the concept of augmented eternity.
While most older people haven’t amassed enough digital detritus to build a working artificial intelligence, Rahnama posits that in the next few decades, as we continue to create our digital footprints, millennials will have generated enough data to make it feasible. Even as we speak, the digital remains of the dead accumulate. Something like 1.7 million Facebook users pass away each year. Some online accounts of the dead are deleted, while others linger in perpetual silence. “We are generating gigabytes of data on a daily basis,” Rahnama says. “We now have a lot of data, we have a lot of processing power, we have a lot of storage capability.” With enough data about how you communicate and interact with others, machine-learning algorithms can approximate your unique personality—or at least some part of it.
the main complication with trying to create digital versions of the dead is that people are complicated. “We’re extremely different when we talk to different people,” she says. “We’re basically like twenty thousand personalities at once.”
Augmented Eternity will take a step toward accommodating various personalities by tailoring the conversation according to context and letting users control what data is accessible to whom.
Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever
Your family and friends will be able to interact with a digital “you” that doles out advice—even when you’re gone.
Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he’s dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it.
Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual “consultant” when the actual CEO is gone. Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyzes personal data and correspondence, might detect that the CEO had a bad relationship with the acquiring company’s execs. “I’m not a fan of that company’s leadership,” the avatar might say, and the screen would go red to indicate disapproval.
Creepy? Maybe, but Rahnama believes we’ll come to embrace the digital afterlife. An entrepreneur and researcher based at Ryerson University in Toronto, and a visiting faculty member at MIT’s Media Lab, he’s building an application called Augmented Eternity; it lets you create a digital persona that can interact with people on your behalf after you’re dead.
Here a signal of something that will inevitably become widespread - another AI application.
An AI Lie Detector Is Going to Start Questioning Travelers in the EU
A number of border control checkpoints in the European Union are about to get increasingly—and unsettlingly—futuristic.
In Hungary, Latvia, and Greece, travelers will be given an automated lie-detection test—by an animated AI border agent. The system, called iBorderCtrl, is part of a six-month pilot led by the Hungarian National Police at four different border crossing points.
“We’re employing existing and proven technologies—as well as novel ones—to empower border agents to increase the accuracy and efficiency of border checks,” project coordinator George Boultadakis of European Dynamics in Luxembourg told the European Commission. “iBorderCtrl’s system will collect data that will move beyond biometrics and on to biomarkers of deceit.”
The virtual border control agent will ask travelers questions after they’ve passed through the checkpoint. Questions include, “What’s in your suitcase?” and “If you open the suitcase and show me what is inside, will it confirm that your answers were true?” according to New Scientist. The system reportedly records travelers’ faces using AI to analyze 38 micro-gestures, scoring each response. The virtual agent is reportedly customized according to the traveler’s gender, ethnicity, and language.
We are all braced for the world of deepfake news - images and sounds modified in undetectable ways - here’s a positive signal of the ongoing honest-fake arms race. The fake video is worth the view for a laugh.
As an added layer of trust and protection, Truepic also stores all photos and metadata using a blockchain—the technology behind Bitcoin that combines cryptography and distributed networking to securely store and track information.
Deepfake-busting apps can spot even a single pixel out of place
Two startups are using algorithms to track when images are edited—from the moment they’re taken.
Falsifying photos and videos used to take a lot of work. Either you used CGI to generate photorealistic images from scratch (both challenging and expensive) or you needed some mastery of Photoshop—and a lot of time—to convincingly modify existing pictures.
Now the advent of AI-generated imagery has made it easier for anyone to tweak an image or a video with confusingly realistic results. Earlier this year, MIT Technology Review senior AI editor Will Knight used off-the-shelf software to forge his own fake video of US senator Ted Cruz. The video is a little glitchy, but it won’t be for long.
Two startups, US-based Truepic (which Farid consults for) and UK-based Serelay, are now working to commercialize this idea. They have taken similar approaches: each has free iOS and Android camera apps that use proprietary algorithms to automatically verify photos when taken. If an image goes viral, it can be compared against the original to check whether it has retained its integrity.
While Truepic uploads its users’ images and stores them in its servers, Serelay stores a digital fingerprint of sorts by computing about a hundred mathematical values from each image. (The company claims that these values are enough to detect even a single-pixel edit and determine approximately what section of the image was changed.) Truepic says they choose to store the full images in case users want to delete sensitive photos for safety reasons. (In some instances, Truepic users operating in high-threat scenarios, like a war zone, need to remove the app immediately after they document scenes.) Serelay, in contrast, believes that not storing the photos affords users greater privacy.
Imagine a Universal Basic Income - What would people do? Reflect on who created Wikimedia and the Internet itself. Imagine unleashing the innate curiosity of people with the tools, time, and empowerment to pursue the curious?
Citizen science — active public involvement in scientific research — is growing bigger, more ambitious and more networked. Beyond monitoring pollution and snapping millions of pictures of flora and fauna, people are building Geiger counters to assess radiation levels, photographing stagnant water to help document the spread of mosquito-borne disease, and taking videos of water flow to calibrate flood models. And an increasing number are donating thinking time to help speed up meta-analyses or assess images in ways that algorithms cannot yet match.
No PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research
Projects that recruit the public are getting more ambitious and diverse, but the field faces some growing pains.
As a biogeochemist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, Meysman wasn’t used to drawing so much attention. But that was before he adopted the citizens of northern Belgium as research partners. With the help of the Flemish environmental protection agency and a regional newspaper, Meysman and a team of non-academics attracted more than 50,000 people to CurieuzeNeuzen, an effort to assess the region’s air quality (the name is a play on Antwerp dialect for ‘nosy’ people).
The project ultimately distributed air-pollution samplers to 20,000 participants, who took readings for a month (see ‘Street science’). More than 99% of the sensors were returned to Meysman’s laboratory for analysis, yielding a bounty of 17,800 data points. They provided Meysman and his colleagues with information about nitrogen dioxide concentrations at ‘nose height’ — a level of the atmosphere that can’t be discerned by satellite and would be prohibitively expensive for scientists to measure on their own. “It has given us a data set which it is not possible to get by other means,” says Meysman, who models air quality.
This is a signal to definitely watch - the beginning of a world DNA sequencing census - within the next five years - which country will engage in a human genome sequencing census? As important as any species is - the vitality and viability of future life is in a robust and highly diverse gene pool. It must be remembered that genes have a promiscuity all their own - through several means including horizontal gene transfer.
“Having the roadmap, the blueprints … will be a tremendous resource for new discoveries, understanding the rules of life, how evolution works, new approaches for the conservation of rare and endangered species, and … new resources for researchers in agricultural and medical fields,”
$5bn project to map DNA of every animal, plant and fungus
International sequencing drive will involve reading genomes of 1.5m species
An ambitious international project to sequence the DNA of every known animal, plant and fungus in the world over the next 10 years has been launched.
Described as “the next moonshot for biology”, the Earth BioGenome Project is expected to cost $4.7bn (£3.6bn) and involve reading the genomes of 1.5m species.
Prof Harris Lewin of the University of California, Davis, who chairs the project, said it could be as transformational for biology as the Human Genome Project, which decoded the human genome between 1990 and 2003.
Currently, fewer than 3,500, or about 0.2%, of all known eukaryotic species have had their genome sequenced, with fewer than 100 at reference quality. The aim to sequence all known species is a major international effort, involving a US-led project to sequence the genetic code of tens of thousands of vertebrates, a Chinese project to sequence 10,000 plant genomes, and the Global Ant Genomes Alliance, which aims to sequence around 200 ant genomes.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute will lead the effort to sequence the genetic codes of all 66,000 species known to inhabit Britain, including red and grey squirrels and the European robin.
The total volume of biological data that will be gathered is expected to be on the “exascale” – more than that accumulated by Twitter, YouTube or the whole of astronomy.
Domesticating DNA and using mushrooms as a platform - what possibilities await?
Can mushrooms be the platform we build the future on?
Ecovative thinks it can use mycelia, the hair-like network of cells that grows in mushrooms, to help build everything from lab-grown meat to 3D-printed organs to biofabricated leather.
When the first bioreactor-grown “clean meat” shows up in restaurants–perhaps by the end of this year–it’s likely to come in the form of ground meat rather than a fully formed chicken wings or sirloin steak. While it’s possible to grow animal cells in a factory, it’s harder to grow full animal parts. One solution may come from fungi: Mycelia, the hair-like network of cells that grows in mushrooms, can create a scaffold to grow a realistic cut of meat.
“With our platform, we’re able to make these complex structures that have texture that you would cut with a knife and be like, wow, that actually has fibers in it, like meat structure,” says Eben Bayer, founder of Ecovative, a company that recently released a new mycelium-based “biofabrication platform.”
For the company, growing meat without livestock is just one of many applications of the platform. “It’s using nature as a molecular assembler,” Bayer says. Ecovative first launched a decade ago by making packaging, now used by Dell and Ikea, that injects farm waste products with mushroom spawn inside a mold. Days later, the mycelium completes the growth of the product, which can be used as a compostable alternative to Styrofoam. The same process can also be used to grow building materials.
The company’s new MycoFlex platform, can create higher-performing materials. The company is now beginning to license the process to other manufacturers. “Our intellectual property is in understanding the growth and the growth processes that’ll coax mycelium to create these very complex structures, do so repeatedly, and do so at scale,” Bayer says.
Is there a shortage of water? Not really - the question is about drinkable water - is there a shortage of drinkable water?
“One could imagine these shipping containers being positioned in a state of readiness throughout the world to be able to respond to disasters for both energy and water,”
A device that can pull drinking water from the air just won the latest XPrize
The winner of the Water Abundance XPrize creates enough water for 100 people every day by making an artificial cloud inside a shipping container.
A new device that sits inside a shipping container can use clean energy to almost instantly bring clean drinking water anywhere–the rooftop of an apartment building in Nairobi, a disaster zone after a hurricane in Manila, a rural village in Zimbabwe–by pulling water from the air.
The design, from the Skysource/Skywater Alliance, just won $1.5 million in the Water Abundance XPrize. The competition, which launched in 2016, asked designers to build a device that could extract at least 2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere (enough for the daily needs of around 100 people), use clean energy, and cost no more than 2¢ a liter.
“We do a lot of first principles thinking at XPrize when we start designing these challenges,” says Zenia Tata, who helped launch the prize and serves as chief impact officer of XPrize. Nearly 800 million people face water scarcity; other solutions, like desalination, are expensive. Freshwater is limited and exists in a closed system. But the atmosphere, the team realized, could be tapped as a resource. “At any given time, it holds 12 quadrillion gallons–the number 12 with 19 zeros after it–a very, very, big number,” she says. The household needs for all 7 billion people on earth add up to only around 350 or 400 billion gallons. A handful of air-to-water devices already existed, but were fairly expensive to use.
How to assess future possibles of a technology - a challenge for many of us.
The Rodney Brooks Rules for Predicting a Technology’s Commercial Success
A few key questions will help you distinguish winners from losers
Building electric cars and reusable rockets is fairly easy. Building a nuclear fusion reactor, flying cars, self-driving cars, or a Hyperloop system is very hard. What makes the difference?
It’s well worth considering what makes a potential technology easy or hard to develop, because a mistake can lead to unwise decisions. Take, for instance, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor that’s now under construction in France at an estimated cost of US $22 billion. If governments around the world believe that this herculean effort will automatically lead to success and therefore to near-term commercial fusion reactors, and if they plan their national energy strategies around that assumption, their citizens may very well be disappointed.
Here I present a short list of technology projects that are now under way or at least under serious discussion. In each case I’ll point out features that tend to make a technology easy or hard to bring to market.
A new constellation has been formulated recognizing a mythical 20th Century fictional monster-hero. The images of the constellation are worth the view.
Godzilla constellation recognized by NASA claims a corner of space
When Godzilla made his screen debut in 1954, he was, like most Japanese media of the era, designed just for Japan. But in the decades since, the King of the Monsters has expanded his dominion, appearing in theaters around the world.
That international recognition even earned the kaiju his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but now Godzilla finds himself among not just movie stars, but celestial ones as well, as NASA has announced a Godzilla constellation.
The Godzilla constellation isn’t made up of stars, though. Instead, the astronomic artwork is formed of gamma rays, as observed by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Launched in 2008, NASA is marking the satellite’s decade in service by establishing 21 gamma-ray constellations, and similar to how stargazers of yore took inspiration from ancient legends, the space agency is saluting modern mythos with constellations referencing not only Godzilla, but also "Star Trek," "The Little Prince" and "The Incredible Hulk."
