Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning. Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works. Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
In the last two decades, we've come up with a whole rich vocabulary for talking about synthetic digital realities. Many popular terms today date to the 1999 Matrix movie: red pills, blue pills, glitches, and of course matrix itself. Other terms, like filter bubble and context collapse come from researchers. Steve Jobs contributed reality distortion field. Karl Rove contributed we make our own reality, while Kellyanne Conway introduced us to the wonderful world of alt facts. Other terms like social object, abstraction leak, legibility, and narrative violation get at the how information itself shapes the space it induces for people to live in. My own contributions to the lexicon include refactored perception, escaped reality, circled wagons, and manufactured normalcy field.
Revealingly, one term we don't seem to use as much as we used to is information overload. In a way it is because we actually solved that problem with social media, to the point where we now suffer from FOMO instead of IO. We just don't like any of the solutions.
So do we need more words and phrases? Well of course we do! The world is getting complicated faster than we can come up with terms to describe what's happening. I made up a new term: context vortex. A context vortex is a headspace where almost every thought you think is similar to, and has a similar effect as, one you've thunk before. A context vortex is a memetic Groundhog Day world featuring its own circular timeline.
Eddies in the Informational Continuum
Even more intriguingly, and perhaps controversially, research by Dussutour and others suggests that slime molds can transfer their acquired memories from cell to cell, said František Baluška, a plant cell biologist at the University of Bonn. “This is extremely exciting for our understanding of much larger organisms such as animals, humans and plants.”
Slime Molds Remember — but Do They Learn?
Experiences make their mark on the brain
Professional musicians, golfers or chess players, for example, have particular characteristics in the regions of the brain which they use the most for their skilled activity. However, events of shorter duration can also leave behind traces in the brain: If, for example, the right arm is kept still for two weeks, the thickness of the brain’s cortex in the areas responsible for controlling the immobilized arm is reduced. “We suspected that those experiences having an effect on the brain interact with the genetic make-up so that over the course of years every person develops a completely individual brain anatomy,” explains Jäncke.
Every Person Has a Unique Brain Anatomy
The future is often also used in vague, implicit ways, such as (Gough 1990; Hicks 2008):
● Tacit, silent futures: The future is never directly addressed but expected to unfold on its own. Expectations about the future might exist but they are never discussed or brought out into open.
● Rhetorical, token futures: The future is addressed through stereotypes and clichés, but these have very little explicit or true meaning. The future might be used as grounds for changes that rise from other motives.
● Taken-for-granted futures: The future is addressed as if there existed no alternatives. The fu-ture is often just colonized with familiar thought patterns from the past.
In order to be able to use future more creatively one must be aware of her own anticipatory assumptions, thought patterns that affect an individual’s ideas regarding why and how to imagine the future, and how these assumptions have an effect on her present-day perceptions and behavior (Miller 2018, 2-6). When you are a futures literate person, you have the capacity to identify, design, target and deploy anticipatory assumptions (Miller 2018, 24). A futures literate person can answer the question: “What is the future and how do I use it?” (Miller 2018b, 6).
FUTURES LITERACY LAB FOR EDUCATION
The future does not exist in the present but anticipation does. The form the future takes in the present is anticipation. Thus, the integration of the later-than-now, be it a millisecond or a millennium, into the present is achieved through various kinds of anticipatory systems and processes. Taking an anticipatory systems (AS) perspective on the integration of the future into the present is the starting point for the formulation of a framework for connecting the theories and practices of ‘using-the-future’. And this in turn is the foundation for defining and exploring the capability to ‘use-the-future’, for different reasons and in a variety of ways, called here Futures Literacy (FL).
A better understanding of FL depends on advances in both the theory and practice of anticipation. Developments in the theory of anticipatory systems (AS) lead to hypotheses about different kinds of anticipation. Developments in anticipatory practices put AS to use and thereby enable the testing of hypotheses about such systems. As is typical of this kind of gradual and fragmented process of coalescence around a set of shared ideas and observations, the process does not follow a linear sequential path. What it means to be ‘futures literate’, or capable of understanding and applying AS, is also emergent. People’s fictions about the later-than-now and the frames they use to invent these imaginary futures are so important for everyday life, so ingrained and so often unremarked, that it is hard to gain the distance needed to observe and analyse what is going on.
Futures Literacy as a capability is not about the accuracy of predictions or determining the success or failure of efforts to impose, colonial fashion, today’s idea of tomorrow on tomorrow.
Futures Literacy (FL) is a capability. A futures literate person has acquired the skills needed to decide why and how to use their imagination to introduce the non-existent future into the present. These anticipatory activities play an important role in what people see and do. Developing a detailed description of this capability to ‘use-the-future’ calls for an analytical framework that can clarify the nature of different anticipatory systems and guide both research into FL and its acquisition as a skill.
Transforming the Future Anticipation in the 21st Century
Our very understanding of the world changes the conditions of a changing world; and so do our wishes, our preferences, our motivations, our hopes, our dreams, our phantasies, our hypotheses, our theories. Even our erroneous theories change the world, although our correct theories may, as a rule have a more lasting influence. All of this amounts to the fact that determinism is simply mistaken: all of its traditional arguments have withered away and indeterminism and free will have become part of the physical and biological sciences.
‘Two New Views of Causality’, Popper, 1990, p. 17
This is a great article that could signal the need to deeply rethink the world of work and how we navigate a life well lived, well discovered and well valued.
“We need a new model,” Carstensen says of the current norms around career pacing. The current one “doesn’t work, because it fails to recognize all the other demands on our time. People are working full-time at the same time they’re raising children. You never get a break. You never get to step out. You never get to refresh. . . .We go at this unsustainable pace, and then pull the plug.”
a life’s work should be redistributed across the longer time frame many people can reasonably expect. Education and apprenticeships could stretch longer, she says, through the years when many people are starting their families and have young children at home. Full-time ideally would begin around the age of 40, rather than in our early 20s. Careers would be longer, with a gradual transition to part-time work in the later years before full retirement around age 80.
A Stanford researcher says we shouldn’t start working full time until age 40
A woman who is 40 years old today can expect to live another 45 years, on average, while 5% will live to see their 100th birthday. The average 40-year-old man will live another 42. For many people, most of those years will be healthy enough to continue work that doesn’t involve intense physical labor. So why are we still packing all of our career and family obligations into a few frantic decades?
Rather than a four-decade professional sprint that ends abruptly at 65, Carstensen argues, we should be planning for marathon careers that last longer but have more breaks along the way for learning, family needs, and obligations outside the workplace.
Longevity, as Carstensen sees it, is not about the biohacked immortalism popular in other parts of Silicon Valley. Her work focuses instead on redesigning institutions to accommodate the lives that people actually have—lives that are longer and in many cases healthier than at any time in human history.
This is an important signal of the potential integration of AI and human systems - note the emphasis on on EQ. A 3000 word read. But remember the Tom Hanks movie “Castaway”? What saved his sanity? Wilson - the volleyball.
The quantified heart
Artificial intelligence promises ever more control over the highs and lows of our emotions. Uneasy? Perhaps you should be
In September 2017, a screenshot of a simple conversation went viral on the Russian-speaking segment of the internet. It showed the same phrase addressed to two conversational agents: the English-speaking Google Assistant, and the Russian-speaking Alisa, developed by the popular Russian search engine Yandex. The phrase was straightforward: ‘I feel sad.’ The responses to it, however, couldn’t be more different. ‘I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug,’ said Google. ‘No one said life was about having fun,’ replied Alisa.
This difference isn’t a mere quirk in the data. Instead, it’s likely to be the result of an elaborate and culturally sensitive process of teaching new technologies to understand human feelings. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just about the ability to calculate the quickest driving route from London to Bucharest, or to outplay Garry Kasparov at chess. Think next-level; think artificial emotional intelligence.
‘Siri, I’m lonely’: an increasing number of people are directing such affective statements, good and bad, to their digital helpmeets. According to Amazon, half of the conversations with the company’s smart-home device Alexa are of non-utilitarian nature – groans about life, jokes, existential questions. ‘People talk to Siri about all kinds of things, including when they’re having a stressful day or have something serious on their mind,’ an Apple job ad declared in late 2017, when the company was recruiting an engineer to help make its virtual assistant more emotionally attuned. ‘They turn to Siri in emergencies or when they want guidance on living a healthier life.’
This should be good news for all of us - ever wary of looming eavesdroppers on our lives. Except - it not so easy to know who and how eavesdropping can happen.
Sorry, conspiracy theorists: They found no evidence of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or sending audio out when not prompted to do so. Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but they didn’t find a single instance of it happening. Instead, they discovered a different disturbing practice: apps recording a phone’s screen and sending that information out to third parties.
In other words, until smartphone makers notify you when your screen is being recorded or give you the power to turn that ability off, you have a new thing to be paranoid about.
These Academics Spent the Last Year Testing Whether Your Phone Is Secretly Listening to You
It’s the smartphone conspiracy theory that just won’t go away: Many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. Vice recently fueled the paranoia with an article that declared “Your phone is listening and it’s not paranoia,” a conclusion the author reached based on a 5-day experiment where he talked about “going back to uni” and “needing cheap shirts” in front of his phone and then saw ads for shirts and university classes on Facebook.
(For what it’s worth, I also frequently see ads for shirts on Facebook, but I’m past the age of the target audience for back-to-school propaganda.)
Some computer science academics at Northeastern University had heard enough people talking about this technological myth that they decided to do a rigorous study to tackle it. For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular apps on Android to find out whether any of them were secretly using the phone’s mic to capture audio. The apps included those belonging to Facebook, as well as over 8,000 apps that send information to Facebook.
The strange practice they started to see was that screenshots and video recordings of what people were doing in apps were being sent to third party domains. For example, when one of the phones used an app from GoPuff, a delivery start-up for people who have sudden cravings for junk food, the interaction with the app was recorded and sent to a domain affiliated with Appsee, a mobile analytics company. The video included a screen where you could enter personal information—in this case, their zip code.
It’s also possible that the researchers could have missed audio recordings of conversations if the app transcribed the conversation to text on the phone before sending it out. So the myth can’t be entirely killed yet.
This is another good signal in the proliferation of distributed ledger and cryptocurrency projects.
Crypto and venture’s biggest names are backing a new distributed ledger project called Oasis Labs
A team of top security researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and MIT have come together to launch a new cryptographic project that combines secure software and hardware to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts under the banner of Oasis Labs.
That vision, which is being marketed as the baby of a union between Ethereum and Amazon Web Services, has managed to attract $45 million in pre-sale financing from some of the biggest names in venture capital and cryptocurrency investing.
The chief architect of the project (and chief executive of Oasis Labs) is University of Berkeley Professor Dawn Song, a security expert who first came to prominence in 2009 when she was named one of as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35. Song’s rise in the security world was capped with both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award for her work on security technologies. But it’s the more recent work that she’s been doing around hardware and software development in conjunction with other Berkeley researchers like her postdoctoral associate, Raymond Cheng, that grabbed investors attention.
This is a great signal of a great potential of the emerging ‘metabolic economy’ - an economy that fully metabolizes everything it produces - all outputs become inputs elsewhere or niche opportunities for transformation.
"Economic modelling shows the cost of around $500,000 Australian dollars (£280,000) for a micro-factory pays off in two to three years, and can generate revenue and create jobs," "That means there are environmental, social and economic benefits."
E-waste mining could be big business - and good for the planet.
Many millions of tonnes of televisions, phones and other electronic equipment are discarded each year, despite them being a rich source of metals. But now e-waste mining has the potential to become big business.
Professor Veena Sahajwalla's mine in Australia produces gold, silver and copper - and there isn't a pick-axe in sight.
Her "urban mine" at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) is extracting these materials not from rock, but from electronic gadgets.
a typical cathode-ray tube TV contains about 450g of copper and 227g of aluminium, as well as around 5.6g of gold.
While a gold mine can generate five or six grammes of the metal per tonne of raw material, that figure rises to as much as 350g per tonne when the source is discarded electronics.
The figures emerged in a joint study from Beijing's Tsinghua University and Macquarie University, in Sydney, where academics examined data from eight recycling companies in China to work out the cost for extracting these metals from electronic waste.
This is a good article - summarizing the looming phase transition in energy geopolitics - including the world of finance speculation and investment.
“It requires institutions to properly reassess the risk in their portfolios,” he said. “This transparency needs to start to happen, because they need to know what their money is ultimately invested in. This really reminds us a lot of what happened in 2008 with the financial crisis, where there was a lot of repackaging of assets, and people didn’t really know what they owned until they realized those assets weren’t paying off.”
What’s remarkable is that fossil fuels are likely to go bust whether or not countries take climate change seriously.
Fossil Fuels’ Dirty Secret: Climate Action or Not, Things Look Bad
“There is no walking out from the energy transition.”
Ten years ago Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes said he wasn’t worried about digital streaming. “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix,” he said. Blockbuster’s head of digital strategy echoed this sentiment, asserting the company was “strategically better positioned than almost anybody out there.” Not long after, Blockbuster went the way of the butter churn, while Netflix became a household fixture. Today, the movie streaming service is worth almost as much as Disney.
To most people, that’s a funny story about the hubris of a technological dinosaur. Imagine, however, if Blockbuster had been a cornerstone of the U.S. economy, that millions of people had been employed in the manufacture and sales of Jurassic Park DVDs, that there were hundreds of cities dotting the South and Midwest where brick-and-mortar video rental was the only job in town. Then, the collapse of Blockbuster wouldn’t be so funny. It would be a catastrophe.
This, experts warn, could be the future of fossil fuels.
Wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles are getting cheaper and more abundant by the day, which is hurting demand for coal, oil and natural gas. As demand falls for conventional fuels, so will prices. Companies that laid claim to coal mines or oil wells, won’t be able to turn a profit by digging up that fuel. They will default on their loans, pushing banks to the brink of failure. Prices are likely to crash before 2035, costing the global economy as much as $4 trillion, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
This is a scary development, if true - the article presents some skepticism. Whether it is true or not - it is a worthy signal to think about and perhaps a weapon that could easily be applied in space.
According to the researchers, the weapon is generally non-lethal, but the pain it causes is "beyond endurance". Its beam is invisible and it fires silently.
"Nobody will know where the attack came from," says one researcher. "It will look like an accident."
China claims to have developed long-range laser gun that can burn flesh
Researchers from China's Academy of Sciences claim to have developed a stealth laser weapon capable of burning targets nearly a kilometre away.
Renderings of the ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle appeared this week in the South China Morning Post, where the weapon was described as firing an invisible energy beam that could cause "instant carbonisation" of human skin and tissues at a range of 800 metres.
The article details the weapon's potential use in covert military operations, hostage situations and to counter "illegal protests".
It attributes the information to anonymous researchers who worked on the project at the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, a part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). CAS, a government institution, is one of the largest and top-performing research organisations in the world.
These specs have been met with scepticism by some scientists, who argue that it would take a much larger, more intensely powered weapon to sustain a laser beam strong enough to inflict damage over a long range.
This is a very interesting signal - for the increasing ‘readiness’ of the general population to use technologies (pharmaceutical and others) to enhance their abilities and performance.
Use of ‘smart drugs’ on the rise
European nations see biggest increases in use of stimulants such as Ritalin by people seeking brain-boosting effects.
The use of drugs by people hoping to boost mental performance is rising worldwide, finds the largest ever study of the trend. In a survey of tens of thousands of people, 14% reported using stimulants at least once in the preceding 12 months in 2017, up from 5% in 2015.
The non-medical use of substances — often dubbed smart drugs — to increase memory or concentration is known as pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE), and it rose in all 15 nations included in the survey. The study looked at prescription medications such as Adderall and Ritalin — prescribed medically to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — as well as the sleep-disorder medication modafinil and illegal stimulants such as cocaine.
The work, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in June, is based on the Global Drug Survey — an annual, anonymous online questionnaire about drug use worldwide. The survey had 79,640 respondents in 2015 and 29,758 in 2017.
US respondents reported the highest rate of use: in 2017, nearly 30% said they had used drugs for PCE at least once in the preceding 12 months, up from 20% in 2015.
But the largest increases were in Europe: use in France rose from 3% in 2015 to 16% in 2017; and from 5% to 23% in the United Kingdom (see ‘Quest for cognitive enhancement’). An informal reader survey by Nature in 2008 found that one in five respondents had used drugs to boost concentration or memory.
More evidence is emerging about a key driver of evolution - Horizontal Gene Transfer.
"Jumping genes, properly called retrotransposons, copy and paste themselves around genomes, and in genomes of other species. How they do this is not yet known although insects like ticks or mosquitoes or possibly viruses may be involved—it's still a big puzzle," says project leader Professor David Adelson, Director of the University of Adelaide's Bioinformatics Hub.
Cross species transfer of genes has driven evolution
Published today in the journal Genome Biology, in collaboration with the South Australian Museum, the researchers found horizontal gene transfer was much more widespread than had been thought.
Far from just being the product of our parents, University of Adelaide scientists have shown that widespread transfer of genes between species has radically changed the genomes of today's mammals, and been an important driver of evolution.
In the world's largest study of so-called "jumping genes", the researchers have traced two particular jumping genes across 759 species of plants, animals and fungi. These jumping genes are actually small pieces of DNA that can copy themselves throughout a genome and are known as transposable elements.
They have found that cross-species transfers, even between plants and animals, have occurred frequently throughout evolution. For example, Professor Adelson says, 25% of the genome of cows and sheep is derived from jumping genes.
This may be a significant signal of anti-aging treatment and may also help to improve other forms of chemo-therapies by boosting immune system strength
Trial of anti-ageing drugs that rejuvenate immune system hailed a success
Most middle aged adults could benefit from a short term treatment to revitalise the immune system and organs that deteriorate with age, say researchers
Scientists have hailed the success of a clinical trial which found that experimental anti-ageing drugs may protect older people from potentially fatal respiratory infections by rejuvenating their immune systems.
In a trial involving people aged 65 and over, those who received a combination therapy of two anti-ageing compounds reported nearly half the number of infections over the following year as a control group who received only placebos.
The experimental drugs, known as mTOR inhibitors, also appeared to boost people’s responses to the flu vaccine, with tests revealing 20% more flu-fighting antibodies in the blood a month after the vaccination was given.
The six week trial investigated the effects of two different mTOR inhibitors. The 264 volunteers who took part received one or both of the drugs, or joined a control group that was given only placebos. All were then monitored for a year to see how their immune systems reacted, and how many respiratory infections they picked up. Those who had low doses of both drugs reported an average of 1.49 infections per year, compared with 2.41 in the placebo group.
Here’s an interesting signal - the world has eradicated smallpox - perhaps we may be able to eradicate some other truly virulent diseases.
"The invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito is one of the world's most dangerous pests," said CSIRO Director of Health and Biosecurity Rob Grenfell in a statement, describing the experiment as a victory.
"Although the majority of mosquitoes don't spread diseases, the three mostly deadly types -- the Aedes, Anopheles and Culex -- are found almost all over the world and are responsible for around (17%) of infectious disease transmissions globally."
Australian experiment wipes out over 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes
In an experiment with global implications, Australian scientists have successfully wiped out more than 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes in trial locations across north Queensland.
The experiment, conducted by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and James Cook University (JCU), targeted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread deadly diseases such as dengue fever and Zika.
In JCU laboratories, researchers bred almost 20 million mosquitoes, infecting males with bacteria that made them sterile. Then, last summer, they released over three million of them in three towns on the Cassowary Coast.
The sterile male mosquitoes didn't bite or spread disease, but when they mated with wild females, the resulting eggs didn't hatch, and the population crashed.
This is a signal to watch as a new paradigm for treatment of damaged organs and perhaps will contribute to longevity.
Within two days, the baby had a normal heart, strong and beating quickly. “It was amazing,” Dr. Emani said.
The scientists have now treated 11 babies with mitochondria, and all but one were able to come off Ecmo, Dr. Emani said. Still, three of them ultimately died, which Dr. Emani attributes to a delay in treatment and other causes.
Dying Organs Restored to Life in Novel Experiments
An unusual transplant may revive tissues thought to be hopelessly damaged, including the heart and brain.
The baby had had a heart attack, most likely while she was still in the womb. Her heart was profoundly damaged; a large portion of the muscle was dead, or nearly so, leading to the cardiac arrest.
Doctors kept her alive with a cumbersome machine that did the work of her heart and lungs. The physicians moved her from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was born, to Boston Children’s Hospital and decided to try an experimental procedure that had never before been attempted in a human being following a heart attack.
They would take a billion mitochondria — the energy factories found in every cell in the body — from a small plug of Georgia’s healthy muscle and infuse them into the injured muscle of her heart.
In animal studies at Boston Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, mitochondrial transplants revived heart muscle that was stunned from a heart attack but not yet dead, and revived injured lungs and kidneys.
Infusions of mitochondria also prolonged the time organs could be stored before they were used for transplants, and even ameliorated brain damage that occurred soon after a stroke.
In the only human tests, mitochondrial transplants appear to revive and restore heart muscle in infants that was injured in operations to repair congenital heart defects.
This is a short article with a 1.5 min video that demonstrates the whole point - amazing the progress being made with visualizing.
This A.I. goes against the grain, cleans noisy images with a single shot
Low-light images are often plagued by grain, small dots created by increasing the camera’s sensitivity or ISO that obscure the image’s finer details. But researchers from Nvidia, Aalto University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have trained a computer to eliminate the grain using nothing but the original photo and software.
While earlier artificial intelligence programs can clean up a noisy image, these programs required two photos, one full of grain and one without. The new Nvidia research, published on Monday, July 9, only needs one grainy photo to create a cleaner image using A.I.
This is another signal in the revolution in imaging - this may be accessible to all of us soon.
First 3D colour X-ray of a human using CERN technology
What if, instead of a black and white X-ray picture, a doctor of a cancer patient had access to colour images identifying the tissues being scanned? This colour X-ray imaging technique could produce clearer and more accurate pictures and help doctors give their patients more accurate diagnoses.
This is now a reality, thanks to a New-Zealand company that scanned, for the first time, a human body using a breakthrough colour medical scanner based on the Medipix3 technology developed at CERN. Father and son scientists Professors Phil and Anthony Butler from Canterbury and Otago Universities spent a decade building and refining their product.
Medipix is a family of read-out chips for particle imaging and detection. The original concept of Medipix is that it works like a camera, detecting and counting each individual particle hitting the pixels when its electronic shutter is open. This enables high-resolution, high-contrast, very reliable images, making it unique for imaging applications in particular in the medical field.
