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:
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity....
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
both these cases are approximations with simplifications. The first case approximates a uniformly rough terrain, and the second case approximates a randomly rough terrain. Though we can use math to reason about them, we lose simplicity, elegance and predictive ability as the situations grow more complex. Such situations occur naturally in messier and more complex sciences like biology, psychology, sociology and human behavior. In such cases, we have to rely on large amounts of accurate data to detect trends and make probabilistic predictions — in the words of Peter Norvig, a research director at Google, and his colleagues, what we have here is the unreasonable effectiveness, not of math, but of data. Physics is generally simpler — and so the math remains tractable, and you can often make very accurate predictions. But even in physics, trying to describe the motion of multiple particles in a quantum or even classical system is hopelessly complex. Thus, the more complicated case B is somewhat reminiscent of, though nowhere near as complex as, the case of multiple particles interacting with each other in a quantum vacuum in which virtual particles are created and destroyed at random. In that situation, the math is likely to be full of nonlinearities and thus completely intractable.
Does Natural Law Need Elegant Mathematics?
Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths. “Heterodox” theories of economics do, of course, exist (institutionalist, Marxist, feminist, “Austrian,” post-Keynesian…), but their exponents have been almost completely locked out of what are considered “serious” departments
As a result, heterodox economists continue to be treated as just a step or two away from crackpots, despite the fact that they often have a much better record of predicting real-world economic events. What’s more, the basic psychological assumptions on which mainstream (neoclassical) economics is based—though they have long since been disproved by actual psychologists—have colonized the rest of the academy, and have had a profound impact on popular understandings of the world.
Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement?
Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.
Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth. This demands a different science. The “microfoundations” of current economics are precisely what is standing in the way of this. Any new, viable science will either have to draw on the accumulated knowledge of feminism, behavioral economics, psychology, and even anthropology to come up with theories based on how people actually behave, or once again embrace the notion of emergent levels of complexity—or, most likely, both.
David Graeber - Against Economics
This is another signal of our exploration of how humans and AI are currently working together and may work together … or not in the future. The report is downloadable.
New powers, new responsibilities. A global survey of journalism and artificial intelligence
The Journalism AI report is based on a survey of 71 news organisations in 32 different countries regarding artificial intelligence and associated technologies. A wide range of journalists working with AI answered questions about their understanding of AI, how it was used in their newsrooms, and their views on the wider potential and risks for the news industry.
What emerges from this research is that artificial intelligence (AI) is a significant part of journalism already but it is unevenly distributed. AI is giving journalists more power, but with that comes editorial and ethical responsibilities.
The future impact of AI is uncertain but it has the potential for wide-ranging and profound influence on how journalism is made and consumed. AI can free up journalists to work on creating better journalism at a time when the news industry is fighting for economic sustainability and for public trust and relevance. It can also help the public cope with a world of news overload and misinformation and to connect them in a convenient way to credible content that is relevant, useful and stimulating for their lives.
This report is not a manual for implementation, but rather an introduction to and discussion of journalism and AI.
Another signal of the ‘re-imagining’ of medical and psychological treatment. While there is no one cure/treatment for all - it is useful to develop and experiment alternate methods and approaches.
Medication-Free Treatment in Norway: A Private Hospital Takes Center Stage
The Hurdalsjøen Recovery Center, which is a private psychiatric hospital located about forty minutes north of Oslo, on the banks of stunning Lake Hurdal, was set up by its director, Ole Andreas Underland, to provide “medication-free” care for those who wanted such treatment or who wanted to taper from their psychiatric drugs. Norway’s health minister was urging public mental hospitals to offer such treatment, and this private hospital stepped forward before any public hospital had taken the plunge.
Hurdalsjøen opened on April 1, 2015. The first person to show up at its doors was 31-year-old Tonje Finsås, and she had a medical history that could fill volumes. She had developed an eating disorder when she was eight; she was put on antidepressants at age 11, which is when she started cutting herself; then came a prescription for a benzodiazepine; and soon she was cycling in and out of psychiatric wards with astonishing frequency. She arrived at Hurdalsjøen with prescriptions for 31 medicines, including three antipsychotics, and a record of 220 hospitalizations. She had spent most of the three previous years in isolation at a psychiatric hospital in Bergen, where she was watched over by two aides at all times, and was often restrained in a belt.
Perhaps when AI replaces humans working at the higher levels of Wall St we won’t need such economic disparities? Another signal of automation and the transformation of work.
Robots in Finance Could Wipe Out Some of Its Highest-Paying Jobs
Robots have replaced thousands of routine jobs on Wall Street. Now, they’re coming for higher-ups.
That’s the contention of Marcos Lopez de Prado, a Cornell University professor and the former head of machine learning at AQR Capital Management LLC, who testified in Washington on Friday about the impact of artificial intelligence on capital markets and jobs. The use of algorithms in electronic markets has automated the jobs of tens of thousands of execution traders worldwide, and it’s also displaced people who model prices and risk or build investment portfolios, he said.
“Financial machine learning creates a number of challenges for the 6.14 million people employed in the finance and insurance industry, many of whom will lose their jobs -- not necessarily because they are replaced by machines, but because they are not trained to work alongside algorithms,” Lopez de Prado told the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services.
Nasdaq runs more than 40 different algorithms, using about 35,000 parameters, to look for market abuse and manipulation in real time.
“The massive and, in many cases, exponential growth in market data is a significant challenge for surveillance professionals,” she said. “Market abuse attempts have become more sophisticated, putting more pressure on surveillance teams to find the proverbial needle in the data haystack.”
This is an important signal of the emerging attempts to control populations and the digital environment.
All new cell phone users in China must now have their face scanned
Customers in China who buy SIM cards or register new mobile-phone services must have their faces scanned under a new law that came into effect yesterday. China’s government says the new rule, which was passed into law back in September, will “protect the legitimate rights and interest of citizens in cyberspace.”
It can be seen as part of an ongoing push by China’s government to make sure that people use services on the internet under their real names, thus helping to reduce fraud and boost cybersecurity. On the other hand, it also looks like part of a drive to make sure every member of the population can be surveilled.
How facial recognition plays out in China might have an impact on its use in other countries, too. Chinese tech firms are helping to create influential United Nations standards for the technology, The Financial Times reported yesterday. These standards will help shape rules on how facial recognition is used around the world, particularly in developing countries.
This is a good signal of the transformation of energy geopolitics - and it’s economy.
Governments Need to Face Reality — the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Collapsing
From Saudi Arabia to Alberta, the numbers are clear. But we still shovel taxpayers’ money at oil and gas companies.
Around the world there is early evidence of a seismic shift. Capital is moving away from fossil fuels, and regions that have let their economies become dependent on oil revenues are showing signs of authoritarian abuses of power. (Sound familiar Alberta?)
Saudi Arabia, for example, planned to sell up to five per cent of state-owned oil company Aramco in what was supposed to be the largest IPO in history, raising $100 billion to improve services and diversify the economy.
Instead, the sale has been scaled back. Only 1.5 per cent of the company will be sold, and the share offering may only raise $25 billion — enough to cover the Saudi government deficit for about six months.
Even though Aramco is the most profitable company on the planet, with proven reserves of 270 billion barrels of the world’s cheapest oil, private equity investors so far have taken a pass on the IPO. Oil is a cyclical business, but their reluctance is not due to downturn slump in the sector. The reasons investors snubbed the sale seem more existential.
The market value of the U.S. energy sector is down almost nine per cent this year. The entire sector is now worth less than Apple. Exxon Mobil’s credit rating was just downgraded by Moody’s due to concerns of “substantial cash burn.”
One more good signal of the change in global energy geopolitics
At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9tn, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry’s global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6tn in assets were divesting from fossil fuels.
Coal power becoming 'uninsurable' as firms refuse cover
US insurers join retreat from European insurers meaning coal projects cannot be built or operated
The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time US companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd’s of London and Asian insurers as the “last resort” for fossil fuels, according to a new report.
The report, which rates the world’s 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal – the biggest single contributor to climate change – “is on the way to becoming uninsurable” as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance.
Ten firms moved to restrict the insurance cover they offer to companies that build or operate coal power plants in 2019, taking the global total to 17, said the Unfriend Coal campaign, which includes 13 environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Client Earth and Urgewald, a German NGO. The report will be launched at an insurance and climate risk conference in London on Monday, as the UN climate summit gets underway in Madrid.
Here is a great Canadian signal of the emerging transformation of global energy geopolitics.
It's not new — some district energy systems in Canada are more than 100 years old.
Canadian communities are tapping into greener ways to heat and cool buildings
Systems make use of local heating and cooling sources, from wood waste to geothermal to garbage
During the cold, snowy winters in much of Canada, many of us rely on furnaces, boilers and baseboard heaters to keep our homes and offices comfortable — and hope they don't suddenly quit during a cold snap.
But what if you didn't need any heating equipment in your home? What if your community provided a greener, more efficient, more reliable source of heat using locally sourced energy? What if it didn't take up space in your home or office building, you didn't have to maintain it, and it was just about guaranteed to keep running and keep you warm through big storms and power outages?
That's the promise of district energy systems — along with climate benefits that have earned them an endorsement from the United Nations Environment Program. World leaders meet Dec. 2-13 for the COP 25 UN climate conference in Madrid to discuss next steps in implementing the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and curb global warming, and district energy is one potential tool.
The idea is that instead of having an individual heating and cooling system for each building, multiple buildings are hooked up to a single, central system — similar to the idea of hooking into a municipal water service instead of each building relying on individual wells. The heating and cooling is distributed to individual buildings through pipes that typically contain heated or chilled water.
This is still a weak but very important signal for the future of the human sensorium - the extension of the individual and collective mind. There is a 2 min video.
Until now neurons have been like black boxes, but we have managed to open the black box and peer inside. Our work is paradigm changing because it provides a robust method to reproduce the electrical properties of real neurons in minute detail.
World first as artificial neurons developed to cure chronic diseases
Artificial neurons on silicon chips that behave just like the real thing have been invented by scientists—a first-of-its-kind achievement with enormous scope for medical devices to cure chronic diseases, such as heart failure, Alzheimer's, and other diseases of neuronal degeneration.
Critically the artificial neurons not only behave just like biological neurons but only need one billionth the power of a microprocessor, making them ideally suited for use in medical implants and other bio-electronic devices.
The research team, led by the University of Bath and including researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Zurich and Auckland, describe the artificial neurons in a study published in Nature Communications.
Designing artificial neurons that respond to electrical signals from the nervous system like real neurons has been a major goal in medicine for decades, as it opens up the possibility of curing conditions where neurons are not working properly, have had their processes severed as in spinal cord injury, or have died. Artificial neurons could repair diseased bio-circuits by replicating their healthy function and responding adequately to biological feedback to restore bodily function.
More and more signals are emerging about the entangled nature of our internal ecologies - what is it to be a ‘self’.
Particular microbes might not matter if a microbiome has enough diversity — just as there are many kinds of thriving forests, and one individual type of tree may not be necessary
In theory, the presence of certain microbial substances might help predict who is most vulnerable to disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder.
How Microbiomes Affect Fear
Our brains may seem physically far removed from our guts, but in recent years, research has strongly suggested that the vast communities of microbes concentrated in our digestive tract open lines of communication between the two. The intestinal microbiome has been shown to influence cognition and emotion, affecting moods and the state of psychiatric disorders, and even information processing. But how it could do so has been elusive.
The researchers performed classical behavioral training on mice, some of which had been given antibiotics to dramatically diminish their microbiomes and some of which had been raised in isolation so that they had no microbiome at all. All the mice learned equally well to fear the sound of a tone that was followed by an electric shock. When the scientists discontinued the shocks, the ordinary mice gradually learned not to fear the sound. But in the mice with depleted or nonexistent microbiomes, the fear persisted — they remained more likely to freeze at the sound of the tone than the untreated mice did.
This is a fascinating signal related to the evolution of species not based on simple ‘fitness’ but on ‘attractiveness’.
"Our research shows that hybridisation can fuel the evolution of new species which is a very novel finding. Hybridisation has traditionally been viewed as something bad because if species hybridise they can, over time, merge into a single species and you lose biodiversity or lose the local species. The melting pot of Lake Mweru gave us a rare opportunity to study interactions between evolving new species and showed that in a new environment with lots of ecological opportunity hybridisation can be a good thing that actually increases biodiversity."
Female fish can breed a new species if they aren't choosy about who is Mr. Right
Fish will mate with a species outside their own if the male's colouring is attractive enough or if the female can't see him properly, according to new research.
Such 'mistakes' in mate choice can lead to the evolution of new species, an international team of scientists found. The group studied 2000 fish and analysed the DNA of more than 400 cichlid fish from two freshwater lakes in East Africa. They discovered more than 40 new species in Lake Mweru, which formed around one million years ago.
Dr. Joana Meier, an evolutionary biologist at St John's College, University of Cambridge, and lead author of the research published today in Nature Communications, said: "We found a dazzling variety of ecologically diverse new species—called radiations—that were previously unknown.
One way to beat evolving antibiotic resistance is to evolve antibiotics faster than resistance.
Computer-generated antibiotics, biosensor Band-Aids, and the quest to beat antibiotic resistance
Imagine if a computer could learn from molecules found in nature and use an algorithm to generate new ones. Then imagine those molecules could get printed and tested in a lab against some of the nastiest, most dangerous bacteria out there—bacteria quickly becoming resistant to our current antibiotic options.
Or consider a bandage that can sense an infection with fewer than 100 bacterial cells present in an open wound. What if that bandage could then send a signal to your phone letting you know an infection had started and asking you to press a button to trigger the release of the treatment therapy it contained?
These ideas aren't science fiction. They're projects happening right now, in various stages, in the lab of Penn synthetic biologist César de la Fuente, who joined the University as a Presidential Professor in May 2019. His ultimate goal is to develop the first computer-made antibiotics. But beyond that, his lab—which includes three postdoctoral fellows, a visiting professor, and a handful of graduate students and undergrads—has many other endeavors that sit squarely at the intersection of computer science and microbiology.
Using machine learning, the researchers provide the computer with natural molecules that successfully work against bacteria. The computer learns from those examples, then generates new, artificial molecules.
This is a powerful signal for continued advances in medical treatments of cancer.
Israeli scientists find way to treat pancreatic cancer in 14 days
The tumor in one mouse that was injected with human cancer cells completely disappeared.
A new treatment developed by Tel Aviv University could induce the destruction of pancreatic cancer cells, eradicating the number of cancerous cells by up to 90% after two weeks of daily injections of a small molecule known as PJ34.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the hardest cancers to treat. Most people who are diagnosed with the disease do not even live five years after being diagnosed.
The study, led by Prof. Malka Cohen-Armon and her team at TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, in collaboration with Dr. Talia Golan’s team at the Cancer Research Center at Sheba Medical Center, was recently published in the journal Oncotarget.
Specifically, the study found that PJ34, when injected intravenously, causes the self-destruction of human cancer cells during mitosis, the scientific term for cell division.
Science progresses as our capacity to extend our sensorium to ever greater scales - either macro or micro.
“With XLEAP we can create X-ray pulses with just the right energy that are more than a million times brighter than attosecond pulses of similar energy before,” said SLAC scientist Agostino Marinelli, XLEAP project lead and one of the paper’s lead authors. “It’ll let us do so many things people have always wanted to do with an X-ray laser – and now also on attosecond timescales.”
One attosecond is an incredibly short period of time – two attoseconds is to a second as one second is to the age of the universe.
SLAC scientists invent a way to see attosecond electron motions with an X-ray laser
Called XLEAP, the new method will provide sharp views of electrons in chemical processes that take place in billionths of a billionth of a second and drive crucial aspects of life.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have invented a way to observe the movements of electrons with powerful X-ray laser bursts just 280 attoseconds, or billionths of a billionth of a second, long.
The technology, called X-ray laser-enhanced attosecond pulse generation (XLEAP), is a big advance that scientists have been working toward for years, and it paves the way for breakthrough studies of how electrons speeding around molecules initiate crucial processes in biology, chemistry, materials science and more.
“Until now, we could precisely observe the motions of atomic nuclei, but the much faster electron motions that actually drive chemical reactions were blurred out,” said SLAC scientist James Cryan, one of the paper’s lead authors and an investigator with the Stanford PULSE Institute, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford University. “With this advance, we’ll be able to use an X-ray laser to see how electrons move around and how that sets the stage for the chemistry that follows. It pushes the frontiers of ultrafast science.”
This is an amazing though still weak signal of the emergence of what is essentially ‘alchemy’ the transmutation of matter. And for the future of unlimited energy. In the longer term this is a signal of extending quantum sciences.
Fusion by strong lasers
Nuclear physics usually involves high energies, as illustrated by experiments to master controlled nuclear fusion. One of the problems is how to overcome the strong electrical repulsion between atomic nuclei which requires high energies to make them fuse. But fusion could be initiated at lower energies with electromagnetic fields that are generated, for example, by state-of-the-art free electron lasers emitting X-ray light. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) describe how this could be done in the journal Physical Review C.
During nuclear fusion two atomic nuclei fuse into one new nucleus. In the lab this can be done by particle accelerators, when researchers use fusion reactions to create fast free neutrons for other experiments. On a much larger scale, the idea is to implement controlled fusion of light nuclei to generate power—with the sun acting as the model: its energy is the product of a series of fusion reactions that take place in its interior.
For many years, scientists have been working on strategies for generating power from fusion energy. "On the one hand we are looking at a practically limitless source of power. On the other hand, there are all the many technological hurdles that we want to help surmount through our work," says Professor Ralf Schützhold, Director of the Department of Theoretical Physics at HZDR, describing the motivation for his research.
... in the near future: With X-ray free electron lasers (XFEL) it is already possible to achieve power densities of 10^20 watts per square centimeter. This is the equivalent of approximately a thousand times the energy of the sun hitting the earth, concentrated on the surface of a one-cent coin. "We are now advancing into areas that suggest the possibility of assisting these tunneling processes with strong X-ray lasers," says Schützhold.
This is a great signal of the progress in our understanding of the physical world and the fundamental nature of physics and the horizons of predetermination.
Has physics ever been deterministic?
Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna and the University of Geneva, have proposed a new interpretation of classical physics without real numbers. This new study challenges the traditional view of classical physics as deterministic.
In classical physics it is usually assumed that if we know where an object is and its velocity, we can exactly predict where it will go. An alleged superior intelligence having the knowledge of all existing objects at present, would be able to know with certainty the future as well as the past of the universe with infinite precision. Pierre-Simon Laplace illustrated this argument, later called Laplace's demon, in the early 1800s to illustrate the concept of determinism in classical physics. It is generally believed that it was only with the advent of quantum physics that determinism was challenged. Scientists found out that not everything can be said with certainty and we can only calculate the probability that something could behave in a certain way.
But is really classical physics completely deterministic? Flavio Del Santo, researcher at Vienna Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna, and Nicolas Gisin from the University of Geneva, address this question in their new article "Physics without Determinism: Alternative Interpretations of Classical Physics", published in the journal Physical Review A. Building on previous works of the latter author, they show that the usual interpretation of classical physics is based on tacit additional assumptions. When we measure something, say the length of a table with a ruler, we find a value with a finite precision, meaning with a finite number of digits. Even if we use a more accurate measurement instrument, we will just find more digits, but still a finite number of them. However, classical physics assumes that even if we may not be able to measure them, there exist an infinite number of predetermined digits. This means that the length of the table is always perfectly determined.
What is intelligence? What is consciousness? These questions still have no definitive answers - although there are many theories and viewpoints. This is an interesting signal contributing to the questions.
THIS SINGLE-CELLED CREATURE IS WEIRDLY SMART
Scientists say they’ve observed what they’re calling signs of complex decisionmaking in a single-celled organism, breathing new life into a theory that was laughed off over a century ago.
The aquatic creature, Stentor roeseli, responds differently over time to the same stimulus, which ScienceAlert reports is evidence that the critter can make decisions — or at least do whatever the single-celled equivalent of changing one’s mind might be. It’s not quite accurate to say a creature without any sort of nervous system is actively thinking, but the discovery challenges many of scientists’ assumptions about animal intelligence.
