Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” When the novelist William Gibson said this — probably in the late ’80s, though, like a lot of prophetic aphorisms, when he first said it is not exactly clear — he was describing distribution by place: iPhones arriving en masse in Steve Jobs’s United States, all-inclusive social-credit scores blanketing Xi Jinping’s China, antibiotic-resistant superbugs cropping up in India before spreading as far as the Arctic, climate change flooding the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh long before it conquers New York or Tokyo.
But the distribution is uneven in time, too, because the future never arrives all at once with the thunderclap of a brave new world suddenly supplanting the comfortable old one. Which is why future-gazers like Gibson are always talking about how their works aren’t about the future — and pointing out how terrible their records would be in predicting it — but about the world in which they were written.
They are right. Today the world has the uncanny shimmer of future weirdness, its every week stuffed with new events that seem to open up strange new realities only to be forgotten as the next wave of strangeness hits. But as the decade pulls to a close, we’re unpacking the last year of it in a timeline of crucial 2019 dates that played like premonitions of where we’ll be ten years from now. The future is present in these moments — epic, like the battle for Hong Kong; eerie, like virtual makeup; and personal, like contemplating gender-confirmation surgery.
The Weirdness Is Coming
A glimpse of the near future as seen through the recent past
How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists, political philosophers and other erudite scholars with endless explanations. One way of looking at the question is by examining something basic, and arguably essential: the emergence of a belief in the usefulness of progress.
Such a belief may seem self-evident today, but most people in the more-remote past believed that history moved in some kind of cycle or followed a path that was determined by higher powers. The idea that humans should and could work consciously to make the world a better place for themselves and for generations to come is by and large one that emerged in the two centuries between Christopher Columbus and Isaac Newton. Of course, just believing that progress could be brought about is not enough—one must bring it about. The modern world began when people resolved to do so.
Why might people in the past have been hesitant to embrace the idea of progress? The main argument against it was that it implies a disrespect of previous generations. As the historian Carl Becker noted in a classic work written in the early 1930s, “a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known.” With the great voyages and the Reformation, Europeans increasingly began to doubt the great classical writings on geography, medicine, astronomy, and physics that had been the main source of wisdom in medieval times. With those doubts came a sense that their own generation knew more and was wiser than those of previous eras.
Progress Isn't Natural
Humans invented it—and not that long ago
For several decades, mathematicians have known that when a collection, or set, of numbers is small (meaning it contains relatively few numbers), the set might not contain any polynomial progressions. They also knew that as a set grows it eventually crosses a threshold, after which it has so many numbers that one of these patterns has to be there, somewhere. It’s like a bowl of alphabet soup — the more letters you have, the more likely it is that the bowl will contain words.
Mathematicians Catch a Pattern by Figuring Out How to Avoid It
I am working on hybrid light-matter states, and am having more fun than ever before! My team and I have successfully modified the properties of matter, using nothing but quantum vacuum fluctuations. We already knew how to act on these properties using chemistry or lasers, but what we are doing is a little like alchemy in a vacuum.
It's a fairly simple procedure: I lock up molecules in an optical cavity consisting of two facing mirrors, with everything in complete darkness. There's no light, but like absolutely everywhere in the Universe, there are quantum vacuum fluctuations.
These fluctuations generate temporary electromagnetic fields. We then adjust the distance between the two mirrors (with a simple screwdriver!) until there is resonance interaction between the electromagnetic fields and the molecules. This means that they are resonating at the same frequency, rather like soldiers walking exactly at the same pace over a bridge, which starts vibrating as a result. When this happens, the two entities "communicate" and exchange "ephemeral" photons, thereby changing the properties of the molecules, especially their conductivity, chemical reactivity, etc. Light and matter (the famous vacuum fluctuations) are then said to hybridise. We posted a video online so that anyone can create the device if they want to.
I had the good fortune of always being part of interdisciplinary circles, where researchers from diverse fields of expertise closely interact. I try to maintain this synergy. In my team, there are physicists and chemists, but also biologists. Every day, I collaborate with totally different profiles, each highly specialised, such as experts in synthetic chemistry, enzymatic activity, etc. I could not have achieved these results without all these interactions. I must say I work in an extraordinary environment that combines competition and cooperation. It's very stimulating and enriching, and I find it inspiring as well as sustaining.
Thomas Ebbesen: "I Feel like an Explorer"
This is a wonderful signal for an inevitable emergence of new institutions - such as “Auditor General of Algorithms and AI” - who like other forms of vigilance will help ensure that algorithms and AI are in fact doing what they claim to do. A sort of federal AI agency monitoring the digital health of our systems.
Which systems really deserve to be built? Which problems most need to be tackled? Who is best placed to build them? And who decides? We need genuine accountability mechanisms, external to companies and accessible to populations
The Second Wave of Algorithmic Accountability
Over the past decade, algorithmic accountability has become an important concern for social scientists, computer scientists, journalists, and lawyers. Exposés have sparked vibrant debates about algorithmic sentencing. Researchers have exposed tech giants showing women ads for lower-paying jobs, discriminating against the aged, deploying deceptive dark patterns to trick consumers into buying things, and manipulating users toward rabbit holes of extremist content. Public-spirited regulators have begun to address algorithmic transparency and online fairness, building on the work of legal scholars who have called for technological due process, platform neutrality, and nondiscrimination principles.
This policy work is just beginning, as experts translate academic research and activist demands into statutes and regulations. Lawmakers are proposing bills requiring basic standards of algorithmic transparency and auditing. We are starting down on a long road toward ensuring that AI-based hiring practices and financial underwriting are not used if they have a disparate impact on historically marginalized communities. And just as this “first wave” of algorithmic accountability research and activism has targeted existing systems, an emerging “second wave” of algorithmic accountability has begun to address more structural concerns. Both waves will be essential to ensure a fairer, and more genuinely emancipatory, political economy of technology.
This is a good signal of the transformation of accounting and the emergence of distributed ledger technologies as the 21st century institution of records.
The HSBC platform will digitize paper-based records of private placements, using blockchain to reduce the time it takes investors to make checks or queries on holdings.
Records of so-called private placements are typically held on paper and lack standardization, making access tricky and time-consuming. HSBC currently looks after up to $50 billion worth of the assets, it said.
HSBC swaps paper records for blockchain to track $20 billion worth of assets
HSBC aims to shift $20 billion worth of assets to a new blockchain-based custody platform by March, in one of the biggest deployments yet of the widely-hyped but still unproven technology by a global bank.
The platform, known as Digital Vault, will give investors real-time access to records of securities bought on private markets, HSBC (HSBA.L) told Reuters, and seeks to capitalize on booming interest in such investments by yield-hungry investors.
Banks and other financial firms have invested billions of dollars into finding uses for blockchain, a digital ledger that can be instantly and transparently updated. Few, however, have come up with practical or widely-used applications.
Proponents say the blockchain will upend the financial sector by cutting out costly processes or the need for middlemen - though there have been few solid examples yet of such revolutionary use.
This is a good signal of an emerging approach to social sciences that integrates many different science frameworks - worth the view.
The social physics collective
More than two centuries ago Henri de Saint-Simon envisaged physical laws to describe human societies. Driven by advances in statistical physics, network science, data analysis, and information technology, this vision is becoming a reality. Many of the grandest challenges of our time are of a societal nature, and methods of physics are increasingly playing a central role in improving our understanding of these challenges, and helping us to find innovative solutions. The Social physics Collection at Scientific Reports is dedicated to this research.
Although we are unique and hardly predictable as individuals, research has shown that in a collective we often behave no differently than particles in matter. Indeed, many aspects of collective behavior in human societies have turned out to be remarkably predictable, and this fact has paved the way for methods of physics to be applied to many contemporary societal challenges. Examples include traffic, crime, epidemic processes, vaccination, cooperation, climate inaction, as well as antibiotic overuse and moral behavior, to name just some examples.
The Social physics Collection at Scientific Reports is dedicated to this line of research, and after only half a year in the making underlines its strong potential. Given the diversity of the topics that are covered by social physics, it is challenging to pull a common thread through, and even to select, contributions that have been published thus far in a brief editorial. Therefore, in what follows, only a few representative examples are highlighted.
This is a signal that will continue to get stronger as the boomers start thinking about how to expand their choices for their end of life.
cemeteries in the United States put more than 4 million gallons of embalming fluid and 64,000 tons of steel into the ground each year, along with 1.6 million tons of concrete.
cremation—which involves heating a furnace to close to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for up to two hours—produces about the same emissions as driving 500 miles in a car.
More people want a green burial, but cemetery law hasn't caught up
Visitors to the White Eagle Memorial Preserve in southern Washington won't find rows of headstones, manicured lawns or pathways to a loved one's final resting place. Instead, they stroll through an oak and ponderosa forest set within more than a thousand acres of wilderness.
Twenty acres of the wilderness is set aside as a cemetery. Bodies are placed in shallow graves among the trees, often wrapped in biodegradable shrouds, surrounded with leaves and pine needle mulch, and allowed to decompose naturally, returning nutrients to the soil. Grave markers are natural stones, said Jodie Buller, the cemetery's manager—"rocks that look like rocks."
"People drive their loved one out themselves, in the back of a Subaru," Buller said, summing up White Eagle's granola ethos.
Conservation cemeteries like White Eagle, which was founded in 2008, are still few and far between—only seven have been officially recognized by the Green Burial Council, the industry's certification body—but they're part of a growing movement to handle the dead in eco-friendly ways.
This is a good signal for the transformation of how we produce food.
What is responsible for pasture’s global decline? The answer is remarkably simple: increasing livestock and pasture productivity. Not only has pasture been declining, but this decline has been occurring against a backdrop of continued increases in production.
Achieving Peak Pasture
In the last 20 years, something truly remarkable has occurred, something that few predicted: the amount of land devoted to grazing animals to produce meat and milk has begun to shrink across the world.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has reported that global pasture area began to decline around the turn of the century. Between 2000 and 2016, pasture area fell an estimated 74 million hectares (Mha), roughly the size of Chile.
Despite some legitimate concerns about the accuracy of the FAO data, peak pasture is not a data artifact. The contraction of global pasture is corroborated by long term models and remote-sensing methods.
Nor is the pasture contraction outweighed by cropland expansion for animal feed. While cropland for cattle feed has increased by around 25 Mha, the total agricultural land devoted to producing meat and milk from ruminants has shrunk by approximately 50 Mha since 2000.
Between 2000 and 2013, aggregate production of meat and milk from cattle, buffalo, goats, and sheep rose by 13% and 32%, respectively. In other words, it appears that production is becoming decoupled from pastureland.
The issue of resistance to antibiotics may be more complicated than we suppose - this is an interesting signal for understanding this emerging concern.
"It is quite fascinating for us to see how the bacteria communicate and change behaviour in order for the entire bacterial population to survive. You can almost say that they act as one united organism,'
Dangerous bacteria communicate to avoid antibiotics
Researchers are now getting closer to this goal with a type of bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is notorious for infecting patients with the lung disease cystic fibrosis. In a new study, researchers found that the bacteria send out warning signals to their conspecifics when attacked by antibiotics or the viruses called bacteriophages which kill bacteria.
"We can see in the laboratory that the bacteria simply swim around the 'dangerous area' with antibiotics or bacteriophages. When they receive the warning signal from their conspecifics, you can see in the microscope that they are moving in a neat circle around. It is a smart survival mechanism for the bacteria. If it turns out that the bacteria use the same evasive manoeuvre when infecting humans, it may help explain why some bacterial infections cannot be effectively treated with antibiotics," says researcher Nina Molin Høyland-Kroghsbo, Assistant Professor at the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences and part of the research talent programme UCPH-Forward.
"This clears the way for the use of drugs in an attempt to prevent that the warning signal is sent out in the first place. Alternatively, you could design substances that may block the signal from being received by the other bacteria, and this could potentially make treatment with antibiotics or bacteriophage viruses more effective," concludes Høyland-Kroghsbo.
On the other hand this is still a weak signal - but a significant one - offering hope for the future of antibiotics.
"We have never seen anything remotely similar to that before among antibiotics,"
A new antibiotic has been hiding in the gut of a tiny worm. It may be our best weapon against drug-resistant bacteria.
Researchers at Northeastern have discovered a new antibiotic that could treat infections caused by some of the nastiest superbugs humanity is facing in the antibiotic resistance crisis.
After two years of work, a team of researchers led by Kim Lewis, University Distinguished Professor of biology, announced their discovery of darobactin, which can kill resistant microbes known as gram-negative bacteria.
The discovery, published today in Nature, promises to be a much-needed weapon in the war on drug-resistant bacteria, which are estimated to cause 700,000 deaths each year worldwide.
In experiments using mice conducted by Kirsten Meyer, also a postdoctoral research associate in Lewis' lab, darobactin cured E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae infections, with no signs of toxicity.
The newly discovered compound breathes new life into the search for a solution to the antimicrobial resistance crisis. The molecule has a unique structure and an unusual mode of action that make it particularly effective against gram-negative bacteria.
And here’s another good signal in the efforts to meet the challenges of antibiotic resistance.
“This antimicrobial has a very exciting mode of action, kind of like hitting many birds with one stone,” said Eric Brown, senior author of the paper and professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster.
This New Compound May Be Able To Battle A Common Hospital Superbug
Scientists in Canada have identified a new compound that has killed even the toughest types of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in lab tests.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a huge threat to public health, with around 120,000 blood-borne cases of one of the worst offenders, staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), affecting patients in the U.S. annually, according to the CDC. Of these, around one-in-six people will die from the infection, mostly due to strains of the bacteria such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant S.aureus), which are resistant to all available antibiotics.
The new work led by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, was published today in Nature Chemical Biology. The research team performed a “screen” of 45,000 compounds to identify any that showed promise against fighting MRSA in lab tests. The best compound they identified, MAC-545496, is particularly interesting because it doesn’t efficiently kill the bacteria or halt growth on its own like normal antibiotics, but when combined with a common class of antibiotic, it is incredibly potent.
This is a great signal for many who suffer diseases transmitted by mosquitoes.
Modified mosquitoes reduce cases of dengue fever
Insects infected with a disease-inhibiting bacterium were released in communities in Asia and South America.
Disease-carrying mosquitoes are on the defensive. Cases of dengue fever, which is transmitted by the insects, plummeted in areas of Indonesia, Vietnam and Brazil in the months after researchers released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that were modified to be resistant to dengue virus.
The findings, presented on 21 November at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in National Harbor, Maryland, come from experimental releases of mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia bacteria, which block the replication of mosquito-borne pathogens such as the dengue, chikungunya and Zika viruses. The Wolbachia infection then spreads through local mosquito populations. The efforts were led by the World Mosquito Program (WMP), a global consortium that is testing whether these releases can prevent mosquito-borne diseases.
Releases of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in 2016 near Yogyakarta City, Indonesia, led to a 76% reduction in cases of dengue fever over 2.5 years, compared with rates in areas where mosquitoes were not released. Two parts of Niterói, Brazil — a city home to around 500,000 people — experienced similar drops in dengue cases after releases in 2018. And declines also occurred after a smaller-scale 2018 release near Nha Trang, Vietnam, WMP researchers reported.
Here is a great signal for all of us with a sweet tooth.
Bacteria help make low-calorie sugar
Imagine a sugar that has only 38 percent of the calories of traditional table sugar, is safe for diabetics, and will not cause cavities. Now add that this dream sweetener is not an artificial substitute but a real sugar found in nature and it tastes like, well, sugar. You'd probably want to use that in your next cup of coffee, right?
This sugar is called tagatose. The FDA has approved it as a food additive, and there have been no reports to date of the problems that many sugar substitutes have—such as a metallic taste, or worse, links to cancer—according to researchers and the FAO/WHO, which certified the sugar as "generally regarded as safe."
researchers at Tufts University have developed a process that may unlock the commercial potential of this low-calorie, low-glycemic sugar. In a recent publication in Nature Communications, Assistant Professor Nikhil Nair and postdoctoral fellow Josef Bober, both from the School of Engineering, came up with an innovative way to produce the sugar using bacteria as tiny bioreactors that encapsulate the enzymes and reactants.
Using this approach, they achieved yields up to 85 percent. Although there are many steps from the lab to commercial production, yields this high could lead to large-scale manufacturing and getting tagatose on every supermarket shelf.
A weak but important signal of future capacity to capture carbon with domesticated bacteria.
“It’s like a metabolic heart transplantation,” says Tobias Erb, a biochemist and synthetic biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study.
E. coli bacteria engineered to eat carbon dioxide
Feat could turn bacteria into biological factories for energy and even food.
E. coli is on a diet. Researchers have created a strain of the lab workhorse bacterium — full name Escherichia coli — that grows by consuming carbon dioxide instead of sugars or other organic molecules.
The achievement is a milestone, say scientists, because it drastically alters the inner workings of one of biology’s most popular model organisms. And in the future, CO2-eating E. coli could be used to make organic carbon molecules that could be used as biofuels or to produce food. Products made in this way would have lower emissions compared with conventional production methods, and could potentially remove the gas from the air. The work is published in Cell on 27 November.
The transformation of global energy geopolitics continues the standard exponential pace of progress that many other technologies have demonstrated.
Battery Storage Costs Drop Dramatically, Making Way to a New Era
A recent report continues to confirm that clean electrification through batteries is advancing at impressive rates.
A report by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) that was published in late October confirms these advances are continuing to happen. The report is called Breakthrough Batteries Powering the Era of Clean Electrification.
The growth and development of battery technology is looking like it'll push the global energy transition more quickly, as the report stated "With more than $1.4 billion invested in battery technologies in the first half of 2019 alone, massive investments in battery manufacturing and steady advances in technology have set in motion a seismic shift in how we will organize energy systems as early as 2030."
This, in turn, will most likely place a strain on natural-gas plants, as per a Forbes article published in October. For the U.S., the RMI report states that this shift could happen as soon as 2021. This will push solar and wind power forward, and cut back the use of fossil fuels more quickly.
- Battery cost and performance improvements are quickly outpacing forecasts.
- These improvements spell trouble for natural gas and internal combustion engine vehicle markets.
- Lithium-ion, while still the leading battery technology, is likely not the universal solution of future energy storage technologies.
And a small signal of the transformation of transportation.
“We believe that it is our responsibility to do better than the current standard in the taxi industry for the environment, and for our customers,” said Current’s Dale Conway, who founded the company two years ago. “It’s our goal to revolutionize this industry one ride at a time.”
All-electric taxi fleet approved to roll on Greater Victoria streets Dec. 1
Claiming to be a Canadian first, an all-electric taxi company will start driving passengers around Greater Victoria next month.
Kelowna-based Current Taxi has been given the go-ahead to operate a fleet of 15 Tesla electric vehicles in the region starting Dec. 1.
Citing a need for an all-electric-vehicle taxi service, the Passenger Transportation Board, which regulates and licenses the taxi industry in B.C., gave the company the green light to operate on the Island.
The board also approved an expansion of Current’s Kelowna fleet to 13 vehicles from seven.
The company said it will upgrade the level of service passengers can expect, with drivers who have been hired in part because of their customer service skills in addition to clean driving records.
This is a fascinating signal in a number of respects. It signals the continuing vitality of crowdsourcing as a form of value creation (imagine what it could be if there was a universal basic income). It signals the capacity for humans and AI to create more value (the future of work may not be about displacing humans with AI but transforming work so that humans become more able to create value).
"AI is changing the way that we produce knowledge, and Wikipedia is the perfect place to study that," said Jeffrey Nickerson, a professor in the School of Business at Stevens and one of the study's authors. "In the future, we'll all be working alongside AI technologies, and this kind of research will help us shape and mold bots into more effective tools."
Rise of the bots: Research team completes first census of Wikipedia bots
Since launching in 2001, Wikipedia has evolved into a sprawling repository of human knowledge, with 40 million collaboratively-written articles and almost 500 million monthly users. Maintaining that project requires more than 137,000 volunteer editors—and, increasingly, an army of automated, AI-powered software tools, known as bots, that continually scour the website to eliminate junk, add and tag pages, fix broken links, and coax human contributors to do better.
Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, N.J., have now completed the first analysis of all 1,601 of Wikipedia's bots, using computer algorithms to classify them by function and shed light on the ways that machine intelligences and human users work together to improve and expand the world's largest digital encyclopedia. The work, published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, could inform the development and use of bots in commercial applications ranging from online customer service to automated microchip design.
In total, bots play nine core roles on Wikipedia, accounting for about 10 percent of all activity on the site, and up to 88 percent of activity on some sub-sections such as the site's Wikidata platform. Most of that activity comes from more than 1,200 fixer-bots, which have collectively made more than 80 million edits to the site. Advisor-bots and protector-bots, by contrast, are less prolific, but play a vital role in shaping human editors' interactions with Wikipedia.
A great signal of the medical uses of gaming and Virtual Reality.
Lenovo pilots VR as an alternative to general anesthesia for kids
Whether you’re an adult or a child, medical procedures can be intimidating or uncomfortable enough to cause panic — one reason patients might need to be knocked out with general anesthesia. But Lenovo and the Starlight Children’s Foundation have been pilot testing virtual reality headsets as an alternative to general anesthetics for kids, alleviating panic and pain by distracting critically ill pediatric patients from what’s actually happening around them.
Starlight’s pilot has been underway at hospitals for the last year, and just as doctors have found VR highly useful in medical training, practitioners have realized that the clinical potential of VR-based distraction therapy for kids is profound. As illustrated in Lenovo’s recently premiered short film, New Realities, doctors have successfully performed even invasive procedures such as endoscopy with only local anesthetic, while other procedures require no anesthetic when coupled with VR.
