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:
getting deep learning to work beyond flatland also has deep connections to physics. Physical theories that describe the world, like Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, exhibit a property called “gauge equivariance.” This means that quantities in the world and their relationships don’t depend on arbitrary frames of reference (or “gauges”); they remain consistent whether an observer is moving or standing still, and no matter how far apart the numbers are on a ruler. Measurements made in those different gauges must be convertible into each other in a way that preserves the underlying relationships between things.
For example, imagine measuring the length of a football field in yards, then measuring it again in meters. The numbers will change, but in a predictable way. Similarly, two photographers taking a picture of an object from two different vantage points will produce different images, but those images can be related to each other. Gauge equivariance ensures that physicists’ models of reality stay consistent, regardless of their perspective or units of measurement. And gauge CNNs make the same assumption about data.
An Idea From Physics Helps AI See in Higher Dimensions
The latest in a long line of evidence comes from scientists’ discovery of a new type of electrical signal in the upper layers of the human cortex. Laboratory and modeling studies have already shown that tiny compartments in the dendritic arms of cortical neurons can each perform complicated operations in mathematical logic. But now it seems that individual dendritic compartments can also perform a particular computation — “exclusive OR” — that mathematical theorists had previously categorized as unsolvable by single-neuron systems.
The discovery marks a growing need for studies of the nervous system to consider the implications of individual neurons as extensive information processors. “Brains may be far more complicated than we think,” said Konrad Kording, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who did not participate in the recent work. It may also prompt some computer scientists to reappraise strategies for artificial neural networks, which have traditionally been built based on a view of neurons as simple, unintelligent switches.
Hidden Computational Power Found in the Arms of Neurons
The high-powered incentives offered to bosses can backfire. They can incentivize rent-seeking, office politics and jockeying for the top job rather than getting on with one’s work. They can crowd out intrinsic motivations such as professional pride. And they can divert managers towards doing tasks that are easily monitored rather than ones which are important to an organization but harder to measure: for example, cost-cutting can be monitored and incentivized but maintaining a healthy corporate culture is less easily measured and so can be neglected by crude incentive schemes.
Empowering management can increase opposition to change. As McAfee and Brynjolfsson have shown, reaping the benefits of technical change often requires organizational change. But well-paid bosses have little reason to want to rock the boat by undertaking such change. The upshot is that we are stuck in what van Ark calls the “installation phase” of the digital economy rather than the deployment phase. As Joel Mokyr has said, the forces of conservatism eventually suppress technical creativity.
Neoliberalism Was Supposed to Make Us Richer: Three Reasons Why It Didn’t
This is a great signal about the emerging orientation related to increasing uncertainty. The quest for meaning and the capacity to offer meaning as a platform of well being or power or hope.
The podcast 1/2 hour - well worth the listen.
The opposite of faith is certainty. :)
BROADER SPECTRUMS OF MEANING a New Game of Hope
This is an excerpt from noted IFTF futurist Bob Johansen's book, Full-Spectrum Thinking, which goes beyond skills and competencies to propose five new leadership literacies—combinations of disciplines, practices, and worldviews — that will be needed to thrive in a VUCA world of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
This book shows how to (1) forecast likely futures so you can “look back” and make sure you’re prepared now for the changes to come, (2) use low-risk gaming spaces to work through your concerns about the future and hone your leadership skills, (3) lead shape-shifting organizations where you can’t just tell people what to do, (4) be a dynamic presence even when you’re not there in person, and (5) keep your personal energy high and transmit that energy throughout your organization.
This is a complexity podcast from the Santa Fe Institute. Part One is 1 hour.
W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics
From its beginnings as a discipline nearly 150 years ago, economics rested on assumptions that don’t hold up when studied in the present day. The notion that our economic systems are in equilibrium, that they’re made of actors making simple rational and self-interested decisions with perfect knowledge of society— these ideas prove about as useful in the Information Age as Newton’s laws of motion are to quantum physicists. A novel paradigm for economics, borrowing insights from ecology and evolutionary biology, started to emerge at SFI in the late 1980s — one that treats our markets and technologies as systems out of balance, serving metabolic forces, made of agents with imperfect information and acting on fundamental uncertainty. This new complexity economics uses new tools and data sets to shed light on puzzles standard economics couldn’t answer — like why the economy grows, how sudden and cascading crashes happen, why some companies and cities lock in permanent competitive advantages, and how technology evolves. And complexity economics offers insights back to biology, providing a new lens through which to understand the vastly intricate exchanges on which human life depends.
This week’s guest is W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Visiting Researcher at Xerox PARC. In this first part of a two-episode conversation, we discuss the heady early days when complex systems science took on economics, and how biology provided a new paradigm for understanding our financial and technological systems. Tune in next week for part two...
This is a good signal of the vital role that multi- and trans-disciplinary research will play in the future of our built environments.
Report: The future of urban science: integrating the social and natural sciences
In a new report submitted to the National Science Foundation, a large group of collaborators from many fields, led by Jose Lobo, spell out a vision for the future of urban science. From the preface:
"Urban science seeks to understand the fundamental processes that drive, shape and sustain cities and urbanization. It is a multi/transdisciplinary approach involving concepts, methods and research from the social, natural, engineering and computational sciences, along with the humanities. This report is intended to convey the current “state of the art” in urban science while also clearly indicating how urban science builds upon and complements (but does not replace) prior work on cities and urbanization in many other disciplines. The report does not aim at a fully comprehensive synopsis of work done under the rubric of “urban science” but it does aim to convey what makes urban science different from discipline-based examinations of cities and urbanization. It also highlights novel insights generated by the inherently multidisciplinary inquiry that urban science exemplifies."
The report is an outcome of a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in May, 2019
Apprehending the world around as a digital environment through the technologies that enable augmented or mixed reality has been a vision for a few decades - this is a good signal of ongoing aspiration to ‘make it so’.
I had no idea that displays not much bigger than a grain of sand even existed. But there it was, under the view of a microscope, displaying an image of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at me. Mojo’s newest and smallest display, it squeezes 70,000 pixels into a space that’s less than half a millimeter across.
The making of Mojo, AR contact lenses that give your eyes superpowers
Using a display the size of a grain of sand to project images onto the retina, this startup could help everyone from firefighters to people with poor vision.
Instead of offering the pretty holograms of the Magic Leap and HoloLens headsets, Mojo aims to place useful data and imagery over your world—and boost your natural vision—using tech that can barely be seen. The startup named the lenses “Mojo” because it wants to build something that’s like getting superpowers for your eyes.
In the coming decade, it’s likely that our computing devices will become more personal and reside closer to—or even inside—our bodies. Our eyes are the logical next stop on the journey. Tech giants such as Apple and Facebook are just now trying to build AR glasses that are svelte enough to wear for extended periods. But Mojo is skipping over the glasses idea entirely, opting for the much more daunting goal of fitting the necessary microcomponents into contact lenses.
The company’s been at this since 2015, based on research dating back to 2008. And while it doesn’t expect to bring a finished product to market for another two or three years, some smart people in Silicon Valley venture-capital circles are betting it’ll all work. Mojo Vision has attracted $108 million in venture capital investments from Google’s Gradient Ventures, Stanford’s StartX fund, Khosla Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), among others.
Another good signal of the Science Fiction of the 50s is emerging ever closer.
Toyota investing $400 million in flying car company
car giant Toyota said Thursday it is investing nearly $400 million in a company working on commercialising electric flying cars for "fast, quiet and affordable air transportation services".
The investment in Joby Aviation comes as the automaker looks to expand into new sectors as the industry rapidly transforms, with president Akio Toyoda pledging to move the firm "from a car manufacturer to a mobility company".
"Air transportation has been a long-term goal for Toyota, and while we continue our work in the automobile business, this agreement sets our sights to the sky," Toyoda said in a statement announcing the investment.
Founded in 2009, Joby Aviation is developing a four-passenger electric aircraft that takes off and lands vertically, like a helicopter, though it has multiple rotors.
The firm envisions the aircraft as a mode of commercial transport, rather than for sale to individuals, with its pilots ferrying commuters around.
This is a very important signal about the transformation of energy geopollitics and non-sustainable economics.
“The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance,”
631 investors from around the world, representing some $37 trillion in assets, signed a letter last month calling on governments to step up their efforts against climate change, the biggest American firms were conspicuously absent.
BlackRock C.E.O. Larry Fink: Climate Crisis Will Reshape Finance
In his influential annual letter to chief executives, Mr. Fink said his firm would avoid investments in companies that “present a high sustainability-related risk.”
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion in investments, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit.
Mr. Fink’s annual letter to the chief executives of the world’s largest companies is closely watched, and in the 2020 edition he said BlackRock would begin to exit certain investments that “present a high sustainability-related risk,” such as those in coal producers. His intent is to encourage every company, not just energy firms, to rethink their carbon footprints.
“Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” Mr. Fink wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. “The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.”
This is a great small signal of the emerging possibilities of bio-manufacturing - domesticating bacteria to build things.
These living bricks use bacteria to build themselves
A new living substance can transform from a wet sand mixture into a solid brick, and even help to reproduce copies of itself.
How it was created: Researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, used a type of photosynthetic bacteria that absorbs carbon dioxide, sunlight, and nutrients and produces calcium carbonate—a rigid compound found in rocks, pearls, and seashells. They grew the bacteria in a warm mixture of salt water and other nutrients and combined it with sand and gelatin. The mixture was poured into a mold, and as it cooled the gelatin set, forming a “scaffold” able to support further bacterial growth. The bacteria deposited calcium carbonate throughout the scaffold, turning the soft sludge into a harder substance after about a day. The mixture looks green initially, but the color fades as it dries. The research was published in the journal Matter and was funded by DARPA, the US military's research arm.
Testing: The team cut the material into two-inch cubes and found they were strong enough for someone to stand on without shattering, although the material isn’t as strong as conventional concrete. Shoe-box-size blocks could potentially be strong enough for use as bricks in construction.
The potential: A major benefit of the new material, the researchers say, is that the whole process revolves around bacteria: they help build the bricks, and are kept alive so they are able to produce more bricks later on. The material could be useful for construction in inhospitable environments like the desert, or even space. It’s also a low-carbon alternative to concrete that could be used to make buildings that absorb greenhouse gases rather than releasing them.
This is totally inspiring - a signal of the transformation of both energy geopolitics and the production of food.
Nebraska retiree uses earth's heat to grow oranges in snow
Winter temperatures in Alliance, Nebraska can drop to -20°F (the record low is -40°F/C), but retired mailman Russ Finch grows oranges in his backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. Instead, he draws on the earth's stable temperature (around 52 degrees in his region) to grow warm weather produce- citrus, figs, pomegranates - in the snow.
Finch first discovered geothermal heating in 1979 when he and his wife built it into their 4400-square-foot dream home to cut energy costs. Eighteen years later they decided to add a 16'x80' greenhouse in the backyard. The greenhouse resembles a pit greenhouse (walipini) in that the floor is dug down 4 feet below the surface and the roof is slanted to catch the southern sun.
To avoid using heaters for the cold Nebraska winter nights, Finch relies on the warm underground air fed into the greenhouse via plastic tubing under the yard and one fan.
This is a fascinating signal of our ability to see the small in both picture and video - plus the 18 sec video illuminates the dynamic nature of matter.
A dance of two atoms reveals chemical bonds forming and breaking
Two rhenium atoms approach and retreat from one another in an electron microscope video
Scientists have now captured video of the intimate dance of two atoms as they bond with one another, break apart and come back together again.
In a sequence of images from an electron microscope, two atoms of the metal rhenium, bound together to create a molecule, shimmied around one another, moving closer and then farther apart. In videos of such molecules, this atomic do-si-do revealed the bond order, or the number of chemical bonds between the two atoms, and how that bond order changed over time. The closer the atoms were to one another, the greater the number of bonds. At their closest approach, the atoms had four bonds tethering them together.
Entanglement - may be the zeitgeist meme of the 21st century. Humans are inevitably entangled with each other, their history of technology and the environment. But this is a signal of progress in fundamental science and the emerging computational paradigm.
"When we think about quantum entanglement, we think about small things," Si said. "We don't associate it with macroscopic objects. But at a quantum critical point, things are so collective that we have this chance to see the effects of entanglement, even in a metallic film that contains billions of billions of quantum mechanical objects."
"Quantum entanglement is the basis for storage and processing of quantum information," Si said. "At the same time, quantum criticality is believed to drive high-temperature superconductivity. So our findings suggest that the same underlying physics—quantum criticality—can lead to a platform for both quantum information and high-temperature superconductivity. When one contemplates that possibility, one cannot help but marvel at the wonder of nature."
Study finds billions of quantum entangled electrons in 'strange metal'
In a new study, U.S. and Austrian physicists have observed quantum entanglement among "billions of billions" of flowing electrons in a quantum critical material.
The research, which appears this week in Science, examined the electronic and magnetic behavior of a "strange metal" compound of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon as it both neared and passed through a critical transition at the boundary between two well-studied quantum phases.
The study at Rice University and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) provides the strongest direct evidence to date of entanglement's role in bringing about quantum criticality, said study co-author Qimiao Si of Rice.
Another interesting signal related to quantum computation.
AlphaZero is good alone—but better with researchers
The research group at Aarhus University has, via computer simulations, demonstrated the broad applicability by applying AlphaZero on three different control problems that could each potentially be used in a quantum computer. Their work was recently published in Nature Quantum Information.
AlphaZero learns to rule the quantum world
The chess world was amazed when the computer algorithm AlphaZero learned, after just four hours on its own, to beat the best chess programs built on human expertise. Now a research group at Aarhus University in Denmark has used the very same algorithm to control a quantum computer.
All across the world, numerous research groups are attempting to build a quantum computer. Such a computer would be able to solve certain problems that cannot be solved with current classical computers, even if we combined all these computers in the world into one.
At Aarhus University, researchers share the ambition of building a quantum computer. For this reason, a research group under the direction of Professor Jacob Sherson has just used the computer algorithm AlphaZero to learn to control a quantum system.
This is another good signal of the emerging capabilities of using AI to create ever better computational capabilities.
Google claims its 'nowcast' short-term weather predictions are more accurate than advanced models
A team of researchers working at Google's Mountain View research center has developed a deep-learning-based weather forecasting tool for predicting short-term weather events. They have written a paper describing their "nowcasting tool," and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. They have also published a news piece describing their work on the Google AI Blog.
Google's new tool makes use of machine learning—a convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained to recognize weather patterns and then makes predictions based on current weather conditions. The resulting tool provides what Google describes as "precipitation nowcasting"—locally based, nearly instantaneous, short-term weather predictions.
The type of CNN Google used is called a U-Net—a system that works by sorting data into layers that are arranged by encoding phase to increase processing speed—iteration is used to decrease image resolution and then decoding is used to restore the images back to their original resolution. The system analyzes radar data from the past N hours to predict weather events in the coming N hours—where N ranges between zero and six hours. The entire process takes just a few minutes. The system is able to return answers more quickly than conventional forecasting systems because it ignores the physics involved—instead, it relies on image processing.
This is a good signal of an emerging need for a new global institution - comparable to the Law of the Sea - the law of satellite space. Humans are reaching the tipping point in terms of colonizing and containing the earth’s space envelop.
Do satellite mega-constellations really have to be so big?
Maybe we need a cap on how many satellites internet firms are allowed to send into orbit.
“There are no rules in space,” Greg Wyler said at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last Thursday. His company, OneWeb, wants to launch 2,000 satellites into space—practically doubling the number of satellites currently orbiting Earth—in order to deliver internet connectivity to unconnected places. As long as he has permission to access the radio frequency spectrum he’s requested, there’s no one to really stop him. Nor is there anyone to stop SpaceX from launching a whopping 12,000 satellites over the next several years in order to operate its Starlink internet service.
The rise of these satellite mega-constellations is creating concern that we’re heading toward the debacle known as the Kessler syndrome (named after the NASA scientist who first proposed the possible scenario), where Earth’s orbit becomes polluted by dangerous debris as a result of numerous satellite collisions. The debris would threaten every piece of equipment that’s zipping around the planet and render space unsafe for any new spacecraft. Recent near-misses have only exacerbated those fears, and the lack of current rules means there’s nothing stopping any companies from arbitrarily launching more objects into the sky. Which raises a question—do these companies really need to send tens of thousands of these things into space?
All technologies can be weaponized, all technologies will inevitably have unintended consequences regardless of how careful they are monitored - but we must also hold technologies accountable for ongoing misuse. This signal a bunch of companies that we should be holding to account.
The Evil List
Which tech companies are really doing the most harm? Here are the 30 most dangerous, ranked by the people who know.
The tech industry doesn’t intoxicate us like it did just a few years ago. Keeping up with its problems—and its fixes, and its fixes that cause new problems—is dizzying. Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook really the danger to democracy it looks like? Is Uber really worse than the system it replaced? Isn’t Amazon’s same-day delivery worth it? Which harms are real and which are hypothetical? Has the techlash gotten it right? And which of these companies is really the worst? Which ones might be, well, evil?
Slate sent ballots to a wide range of journalists, scholars, advocates, and others who have been thinking critically about technology for years. We asked them to tell us which tech companies they are most concerned about, and we let them decide for themselves what counts as “concerning.” We told them to define the category of technology companies as narrowly or broadly as they liked, which is how, say, Exxon Mobil made the list. Each respondent ranked as many as 10 companies—subsidiaries counted as part of parent corporations—with more points going to the choices they placed at the top. Then we added up their votes and got this.
What did we find? While the major U.S. tech companies topped the vote—read on to find out which came in at No. 1—our respondents are deeply concerned about foreign companies dabbling in surveillance and A.I., as well as the domestic gunners that power the data-broker business. No one thinks Twitter is the worst thing that could happen to a planet, but a lot of people worry about it a little. Companies with the potential to do harm can be as distressing as those with long records of producing it. Privacy people care a lot about misinformation, but misinformation people might not be so worried about privacy. Almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel. And some people don’t have a problem with Amazon or Apple or even Facebook at all—which is why we included dissents for many of the top companies on our list.
This is a fascinating sight signally the poverty of translation.
Eunoia
Words That Don't Translate
Some examples
