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:
In a Puzzling Puzzle:
1. The pieces are not supplied; some of them have to be found, others invented.
2. These pieces usually appear obscure, not clean-cut—more like fragments.
3. These fragments rarely connect neatly.
4. With no box in sight, the fragments have to create the picture.
Our profound puzzle Pat solutions can no more resolve puzzling puzzles than can Monopoly develop entrepreneurs or chess train guerrilla fighters.
at the root of our most foreboding problems—climate change, income disparities, declining democracy, nuclear weapons in the hands of loose cannons—lies the imbalance that plagues our societies. Narrow economic forces, manifested in rampant individualism and unrestrained globalization, have been overwhelming our collective and communal needs. This is our profound puzzle, for which pat solutions, such as fixing capitalism, will not work.
Making Progress on our Puzzle
numerous studies over the past few decades have reached what seems a counterintuitive conclusion: that all psychotherapies have roughly equal effects. This is known as the ‘dodo bird verdict’ – named after a character in Alice in Wonderland (1865) who declares after a running contest: ‘Everybody has won and all must have prizes.’ That no single form of therapy has proved superior to others might come as a surprise to readers, but it’s mightily familiar to researchers in the field. ‘There is so much data for this conclusion that if it were not so threatening to specific theories it would long ago have been accepted as one of psychology’s major findings,’ writes Arthur Bohart, professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and author of several books on psychotherapy.
the deeper reason why no single psychotherapy seems to provide unique advantages over any other is that they all work because of shared elements. Chief among these is the therapeutic relationship, connected to positive outcomes by a wealth of evidence. The emotional bond and the collaboration between client and therapist – called the alliance – have emerged as a strong predictor of improvement, even in therapies that don’t emphasise relational factors. Until recently, most studies of this alliance could show only that it correlates with better mental health in clients, but advances in research methods now find evidence for a causal link, suggesting that the therapy relationship might indeed be healing. Similarly, research into the traits of effective therapists has revealed that their greater experience with or a stricter adherence to a specific approach do not lead to improved outcomes whereas empathy, warmth, hopefulness and emotional expressiveness do.
Cradled by therapy
“The world was genetically complex 50,000 to 100,000 years ago,” says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Wood suspects that three or four closely related Homo species, including Denisovans, interbred during that time.
Mysterious Denisovans emerged from the shadows in 2019
The direct descendants of the first Melanesian Homo sapiens, Papuans have conserved in their cells, more so than any other humans on the planet, the traces of mankind’s first journey to the edge of the world. Once they arrived at the end of their odyssey, these early Melanesians, with only a few exceptions, never left their remote land. Over the centuries, while other Sapiens in Asia and Europe were intermixing, blurring the traces of their migrations, the genome of the first Papuans, which is the same as that of the first Australian Aborigines, has remained essentially intact. With a unique genetic heritage incorporating 2 to 4% Neanderthal and 4 to 6% Denisovan genes, the Papuans are nothing less than the living record of our origins.
The Papuans, the Living Record of our Origins
Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. “The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
“It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”
In writing “The Peripheral,” he’d been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.
For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no futures because our present is too volatile. . . . We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.
In a hyperconnected world, patterns can repeat in different idioms. The same ripples flow across Asia and Europe, art and technology, war and television.
How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real
I generally don’t post much about current politics - although I do follow them. This is a great signal about the use of frames, narratives and metaphors through an analysis of Trump by George Lakoff - a must read cognitive scientist.
Trump has turned words into weapons and he’s winning the linguistic war
Language works by activating brain structures called “frame-circuits” used to understand experience. They get stronger when we hear the activating language. Enough repetition can make them permanent, changing how we view the world.
Even negating a frame-circuit activates and strengthens it, as when Nixon said “I am not a crook” and people thought of him as a crook.
Scientists, marketers, advertisers and salespeople understand these principles. So do Russian and Islamic State hackers. But most reporters and editors clearly don’t. So the press is at a disadvantage when dealing with a super salesman with an instinctive ability to manipulate thought by 1) framing first, 2) repeating often and 3) leading others to repeat his words by getting people to attack him within his own frame.
Language can shape the way we think. Trump knows this. Here are some of his favorite manipulation techniques.
This is a good summary of the accelerating advances in science and technology. Worth the read.
The scientific events that shaped the decade
The 2010s have seen breakthroughs in frontiers from gene editing to gravitational waves. The coming one must focus on climate change.
Scientific and technological innovation has always created social and economic transformation. But the past decade showed, as few others have, the speed and scale at which such change can happen. If it continues at the present rate, the shape of the next ten years — from information technologies to applied bioscience, energy and environment — looks ever more contingent on the discoveries made in that time.
In the 2010s, artificial intelligence (AI) finally began to reveal its remarkable power and disruptive potential. Driven mainly by the advent of deep learning — the use of neural networks to spot patterns in complex data – AI flexed its muscles by achieving reliable language translation, besting expert human players at poker, video games and the board game Go, and beginning to demonstrate its use in self-driving cars
Few fields are untouched by the machine-learning revolution, from materials science to drug exploration; quantum physics to medicine. Moreover, it now cannot be doubted that many jobs currently performed by humans could be done more cheaply and efficiently by machines — and the transition might well come sooner than we expect.
This is a concise summary of that past year’s advances in Math.
The Year in Math and Computer Science
Mathematicians and computer scientists made big progress in number theory, graph theory, machine learning and quantum computing, even as they reexamined our fundamental understanding of mathematics and neural networks.
For mathematicians and computer scientists, this was often a year of double takes and closer looks. Some reexamined foundational principles, while others found shockingly simple proofs, new techniques or unexpected insights in long-standing problems. Some of these advances have broad applications in physics and other scientific disciplines. Others are purely for the sake of gaining new knowledge (or just having fun), with little to no known practical use at this time.
Quanta covered the decade-long effort to rid mathematics of the rigid equal sign and replace it with the more flexible concept of “equivalence.” We also wrote about emerging ideas for a general theory of neural networks, which could give computer scientists a coveted theoretical basis to understand why deep learning algorithms have been so wildly successful.
Meanwhile, ordinary mathematical objects like matrices and networks yielded unexpected new insights in short, elegant proofs, and decades-old problems in number theory suddenly gave way to new solutions. Mathematicians also learned more about how regularity and order arise from chaotic systems, random numbers and other seemingly messy arenas. And, like a steady drumbeat, machine learning continued to grow more powerful, altering the approach and scope of scientific research, while quantum computers (probably) hit a critical milestone.
This is a great summary of some of the progress toward domestication of DNA.
CRISPR/Cas9 is a bacterial defense system against viruses that scientists have repurposed to make precise changes to DNA in the cells of humans and other animals. A “guide RNA” tows the DNA-cutting enzyme Cas9 to specific genes, where it slices through the DNA. In three clinical trials now under way in the United States, and one just completed, those cuts are disabling genes or snipping out problem bits of DNA.
The first U.S. trials in people put CRISPR to the test in 2019
These studies are a first step toward fulfilling the gene editor’s medical promise
When it was unveiled in 2012, people had great hopes that the gene editor CRISPR/Cas9 could treat or even cure hundreds to thousands of genetic diseases. This year, researchers in the United States began testing the gene editor in people, a crucial first step in determining whether the technology can fulfill its medical promise.
These first clinical trials are testing CRISPR/Cas9’s safety and efficacy against cancer, blood disorders and one form of inherited blindness in people who already have the disease. Many more such trials are expected to begin soon. Unlike the editing of human embryos that stirred up controversy in 2018, the genetic changes introduced in these trials would not be inherited by future generations.
CRISPR’s rise as a potential medical tool happened in remarkably short time, says Janelle Waack, an intellectual property attorney at the law firm Bass, Berry & Sims in Washington, D.C. She has been tracking the dramatic growth of CRISPR patent filings, including for health care, medical research, agriculture and chemical processing. “People are investing in the technology and think it has great commercial value,” she says.
This is a fascinating signal of an emerging understanding of how mechanical-physical actions within and between cells complement chemical actions - and also progress the domestication of DNA
Originally considered a novelty, technologists rushed to make increasingly complex shapes, such as smiley faces, snowflakes, a tiny world map, and more recently, the world’s smallest playable tic-tac-toe set. It wasn’t just fun. Along the way, scientists uncovered sophisticated principles and engineering techniques to shape DNA strands into their desired structures, forming a blueprint of DNA engineering.
As costs keep dropping, the authors believe we’ll witness even more creative and sophisticated DNA nanomachines.
DNA Nanomachines Are Opening Medicine to the World of Physics
When I imagine the inner workings of a robot, I think hard, cold mechanics running on physics: shafts, wheels, gears. Human bodies, in contrast, are more of a contained molecular soup operating on the principles of biochemistry.
Yet similar to robots, our cells are also attuned to mechanical forces—just at a much smaller scale. Tiny pushes and pulls, for example, can urge stem cells to continue dividing, or nudge them into maturity to replace broken tissues. Chemistry isn’t king when it comes to governing our bodies; physical forces are similarly powerful. The problem is how to tap into them.
In a new perspectives article in Science, Dr. Khalid Salaita and graduate student Aaron Blanchard from Emory University in Atlanta point to DNA as the solution. The team painted a futuristic picture of DNA mechanotechnology, in which we use DNA machines to control our biology. Rather than a toxic chemotherapy drip, for example, a cancer patient may one day be injected with DNA nanodevices that help their immune cells better grab onto—and snuff out—cancerous ones.
“For a long time,” said Salaita, “scientists have been good at making micro devices, hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. It’s been more challenging to make functional nano devices, thousands of times smaller than that. But using DNA as the component parts is making it possible to build extremely elaborate nano devices because the DNA parts self-assemble.”
Just as the steam engine propelled civilization through the first industrial revolution, DNA devices may fundamentally change medicine, biological research, and the development of biomaterials, further merging man and machine.
This probably shouldn’t surprise anyone - but IKEA is transforming itself from a technology company into a technology company. :)
IKEA 2.0
The Swedish furniture giant has conquered living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms — but can it hang on to the future of the home?
At first, Ikea treated smart home stuff like a hobby — testing the waters with furniture that could wirelessly charge your phone before building an ecosystem of speakers, lights, and blinds with bare-bones functionality. Those successes prompted a decision this summer to promote Home Smart to the same importance as Living Room, Bedroom, and all of the other Ikea businesses that have come to define the company.
Early reviews of the company’s Home Smart ecosystem mirror the typical Ikea experience: great price, questionable quality. It’s an inauspicious start for a company that tried and failed to take on the tech world before. Ikea now faces the challenge of teaming up with Google, Amazon, Apple, and other tech giants while also battling them for primacy in the home.
Ikea believes its advantage in the smart home stems from what at first looks like its greatest disadvantage: Ikea is not a tech company. As a furniture maker, Ikea has a thorough understanding of life at home and a unique ability to marry technology with ordinary furniture. Ikea’s unimaginable scale matches up well with Big Tech. And historically speaking, it’s been a formidable and ruthless competitor in every segment it focuses on. Ikea is now focused on the smart home.
The digital transformation of Ikea could improve the lives of billions. At stake is the democratization of the smart home — intelligent homes that improve the daily lives of everyone, not just the resident geeks who can already afford them.
This is not Iron Man yet - but it signals the emergence of new forms of augmenting human effort. The GIFs and 2 min video provide good visuals.
Sarcos Demonstrates Powered Exosuit That Gives Workers Super Strength
It won't make you look like Iron Man but the Guardian XO allows you to lift 200 pounds without breaking a sweat
One year ago, for IEEE Spectrum’s special report on the Top Tech for 2019, Sarcos Robotics promised that by the end of the year they’d be ready to ship a powered exoskeleton that would be the future of industrial work. And late last month, Sarcos invited us to Salt Lake City, Utah, to see what that future looks like.
Sarcos has been developing powered exoskeletons and the robotic technologies that make them possible for decades, and the lobby of the company’s headquarters is a resting place for concepts and prototype hardware that’s been abandoned along the way. But now, Sarcos is ready to unveil the prototype of the Guardian XO, a strength-multiplying exoskeleton that’s about to begin shipping.
The Sarcos Guardian XO is a 24-degrees-of-freedom full-body robotic exoskeleton. While wearing it, a human can lift 200 pounds (90 kilograms) while feeling like they’re lifting just 10 lbs (4.5 kg). The Guardian XO is fully electrical and untethered with a runtime of 2 hours, and hot-swappable battery packs can keep it going for a full work day. It takes seconds to put on and take off, and Sarcos says new users can be trained to use the system in minutes. One Guardian XO costs $100,000 per year to rent, and the company will be shipping its first batch of alpha units to customers (including both heavy industry and the U.S. military) in January.
Here is an important signal that fundamental science has so much more to reveal.
Discovering a new fundamental underwater force
A team of mathematicians from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Brown University has discovered a new phenomenon that generates a fluidic force capable of moving and binding particles immersed in density-layered fluids. The breakthrough offers an alternative to previously held assumptions about how particles accumulate in lakes and oceans and could lead to applications in locating biological hotspots, cleaning up the environment and even in sorting and packing.
How matter settles and aggregates under gravitation in fluid systems, such as lakes and oceans, is a broad and important area of scientific study, one that greatly impacts humanity and the planet. Consider "marine snow," the shower of organic matter constantly falling from upper waters to the deep ocean. Not only is nutrient-rich marine snow essential to the global food chain, but its accumulations in the briny deep represent the Earth's largest carbon sink and one of the least-understood components of the planet's carbon cycle.
Ocean particle accumulation has long been understood as the result of chance collisions and adhesion. But an entirely different and unexpected phenomenon is at work in the water column, according to a paper published Dec. 20 in Nature Communications by a team led by professors Richard McLaughlin and Roberto Camassa of the Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences, along with their UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Robert Hunt and Dan Harris of the School of Engineering at Brown University.
In the paper, the researchers demonstrate that particles suspended in fluids of different densities, such as seawater of varying layers of salinity, exhibit two previously undiscovered behaviors. First, the particles self-assemble without electrostatic or magnetic attraction or, in the case of micro-organisms, without propulsion devices such as beating flagella or cilia. Second, they clump together without any need for adhesive or other bonding forces. The larger the cluster, the stronger the attractive force.
A great signal for all those of us who LOVE hot sauce and hot peppers.
An interesting fact is that protection from mortality risk was independent of the type of diet people followed. In other words, someone can follow the healthy Mediterranean diet, someone else can eat less healthily, but for all of them, chili pepper has a protective effect.
Consumption of chili pepper cuts down the risk of death from a heart or cerebral attack
Chili pepper is a common ingredient in Italians kitchens, and over the centuries, it has been praised for its supposed therapeutic virtues. Now, an Italian study shows that people who consume it on a regular basis have an all-cause mortality risk 23 percent lower than those who do not consume it. The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), was conducted by the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention of I.R.C.C.S. Neuromed in Pozzilli, Italy, in collaboration with the Department of Oncology and Molecular Medicine of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, the University of Insubria in Varese and the Mediterranean Cardiocentro in Naples.
The study examined 22,811 citizens of the Molise region in Italy participating in the Moli-sani study. Following their health status for an average period of about eight years and comparing it with their eating habits, Neuromed researchers observed that in people regularly consuming chili pepper (four times a week or more), the risk of dying of a heart attack was cut by 40 percent. Risk reduction for cerebrovascular mortality was more than halved.
