Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
The management consultancy report constitutes the contemporary stand-out genre through which automation is imagined.The possible ‘futures of work’ put forward in this genre often play out in relation to perceived risks, with a proportion of workforce or sector defined as being at risk of displacement or replacement by automation. There is no mitigation offered, merely adaptation and readiness for which the management consultancy can help you prepare. These reports produce a ‘common sense’ understanding of jobs lost and ‘humans’ set aside on the scrapheap of history. In this way, as Sturdy and Morgan argue, consultancies move mere ‘matters of concern’ into the realm of certainty.
Articulations of possible futures of work shape discourse less out of the accuracy of the visions they project than the confidence placed in them. This shaping of discourse constitutes a ‘politics of anticipation‘. To paraphrase Bismarck, it is an art of conditioning the possible. More specifically, following Barbara Adam and Chris Groves we might argue that of the possible is conditioned by positioning the future in relation to the present in two particular ways. In one, “present futures” function as predictions and stand separate from the ‘now’. In another, “future presents” function as mechanisms to bring desirable outcomes into our current present(s).
“Future presents” are efforts to bring a ‘future’ into ‘the present’ to make it happen. “Present futures” are a way to hold a future at a distance in order to form the idea of a threatening risk or an attractive utopian goal.
These apparently opposing positions can be in play at the same time. They attain agency in enacting the worlds that are predicted, becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. In the view of the consultants espousing the opportunities and risks of automation, for instance, jobs are certainly going to be lost to automation processes. Therefore it follows that the companies they advise and influence should invest in automation strategies and technologies themselves, producing the job losses foreseen.
PRESENT FUTURES: AUTOMATION & THE POLITICS OF ANTICIPATION
...if one considers how parties do when facing uncertainty and repeatedly undertaking risky activities through time. … such conditions greatly expand the scope for pooling and sharing resources to be beneficial to all parties. From a basic point of view, pooling resources provides all parties with a kind of insurance policy protecting them against occasional poor outcomes of the risks they face. If a number of parties face independent risks, it is highly unlikely that all will experience bad outcomes at the same time. By pooling resources, those who do can be aided by others who don’t. Mathematically, it turns out that such pooling increases the grow rate of resources or wealth for all parties. Even those with more resources do better by cooperating with those who have less. This insight needs further development, but suggests that the scope for beneficial cooperation is much greater than previously believed.
How ergodicity reimagines economics for the benefit of us all
Viewing humans in the same way that we view single-celled organisms or insects risks treating them that way. Malthus argued against Poor Laws, in the belief that they only incentivised the poor to reproduce. Ehrlich argued against food aid for poor countries for similar reasons, and inspired population-control measures of enormous cruelty. Today, demands to impose planetary boundaries globally are couched in redistributive and egalitarian rhetoric, so as to avoid any suggestion that doing so might condemn billions to deep agrarian poverty. But they say little, specifically, about how social engineering of such extraordinary scale would be imposed in a democratic or equitable fashion.
Ultimately, one need not advocate the imposition of pseudo-scientific limits on human societies to believe that many of us would be better off consuming less. Nor must one posit the collapse of human societies to worry deeply that growing human consumption might have terrible consequences for the rest of creation.
But threats of societal collapse, claims that carrying capacity is fixed, and demands for sweeping restrictions on human aspiration are neither scientific nor just. We are not fruit flies, programmed to reproduce until our population collapses. Nor are we cattle, whose numbers must be managed. To understand the human experience on the planet is to understand that we have remade the planet again and again to serve our needs and our dreams. Today, the aspirations of billions depend upon continuing to do just that. May it be so.
The Earth’s carrying capacity for human life is not fixed
The new medium would spread half-truths, propaganda and lies. It would encourage self-absorption and solipsism, thereby fragmenting communities. It would allow any amateur to become an author and degrade public discourse.
Sound familiar? Such were the anxieties that the invention of printing unleashed on the world as 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century authorities worried and argued about how print would transform politics, culture and literature. The ‘printing revolution’ was by no means universally welcomed as the democratiser of knowledge or initiator of modern thought.
Reddit, with wigs and ink
The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The universe is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi Paradox.
One proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.
Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.
It makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.
The Fermi Paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet.
Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.
Hundreds of years ago, my kind was so plentiful that the Río Abajo Forest resounded with our voices. Now we’re almost gone. Soon this rain forest may be as silent as the rest of the universe.
The Great Silence
A parrot has a question for humans.
BY TED CHIANG
For anyone who’s read the book or seen the movie “The Circle” this should feel very familiar. Fake news is as old as rumour - and as ubiquitous as advertising imbued in all broadcast media. The emergence of ‘influencers’ carries the concept further.
“I suffer from depression too, and at one point I wanted to quit Amazon,” she wrote. “But I realized it was my fault for the problems I was dealing with, and not Amazon’s. I’m allowed to talk to people, but sometimes I don’t want to. Now I have some great coworkers to pass the nights with.”
Amazon Uses a Twitter Army of Employees to Fight Criticism of Warehouses
They love working there. It’s great. They love it. It’s great. They love it. It’s great. They love it. It’s great. They love it. It’s great. They love it.
On Wednesday evening, a phalanx of Amazon employees known as “FC ambassadors” began tweeting again about how great it is to work at Amazon.
When the ambassadors see others on social media discussing the brutal working conditions at Amazon fulfillment centers, its anti-union actions or anything else unflattering about the company, they step in to offer an on-the-ground perspective.
They are, at once, warehouse workers and public relations representatives. One ambassador, going by the name Hannah, responded to a thread on Thursday that described poor treatment of Amazon’s workers.
This is a strong and dark signal of Big Data fueling the development of craven architectures of choice that nudge us all toward addictive consuming behavior. This does not have to be the case.
While their lending algorithms are closely guarded secrets, industry insiders suggest an ambitious effort to track everyday behavior and social relations. In line with the belief that “all data is credit data,” these firms seek to analyze everything from whether you call your family regularly, go to the same workplace every day, and have an extensive network of contacts.
Crucial to the fintech business model are the endless nudges and incitements to borrow. Unsolicited text messages arrive throughout the day, enticing people to borrow at extraordinary rates.
Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah
Kenya's poor were among the first to benefit from digital lending apps; now they call it slavery.
Across conversations in Kenya’s pubs and WhatsApp groups, debt is on everyone’s mind. The speed and ease of access to credit through new mobile apps delivers cash to millions of Kenyans in need, but many struggle to repay. Despite their small size, the loans come with a big cost—sometimes as much as 100 percent annualized. As one Nairobian told us, these apps “give you money gently, and then they come for your neck.”
Relations of credit and debt are nothing new to Kenya. For ages, friends, family, and colleagues have lent and borrowed from each other, but what differs today is a lack of reciprocity. In peer-to-peer credit, everyone is eventually likely to be a debtor and a creditor; terms can be reworked according to timelines and margins that are subject to negotiation. In contrast, the fintech industry envisions ordinary Kenyans as first and foremost borrowers, leading many Kenyans to describe their predicament as a form of servitude. One Kenyan argued the apps are “enslaving” people—from the working poor to the salaried classes—by making claims on their future labor.
Another strong and dark signal related to the possibility of being captured by the ‘walled gardens’ of proprietary platforms.
I started to realize just how far-reaching the effects of Apple disabling my account were. One of the things I love about Apple’s ecosystem is that I’ve built my media collection on iTunes, and can access it from any of my Apple devices. My partner and I have owned numerous iPods, iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, iMacs, Apple Watches, Apple TVs, and even a HomePod, over the years. Apple plays a big part in my professional life too: I’m the IT manager for Quartz, and we use Apple hardware and publish on Apple platforms.
But when Apple locked my account, all of my devices became virtually unusable.
Apple locked me out of its walled garden. It was a nightmare
Technology has always been a huge part of my life, but I recently was forced to find out what happens when the technology you’ve built your life around is suddenly taken away from you.
A few months ago, I purchased an iTunes gift card off of a popular discount website. This is something I’ve done for years to manage my spending on the platform—it also helps my partner and me buy things for one shared iTunes account. I’ve been buying gift cards every so often, particularly during sale periods, when retailers sell iTunes and App Store gift cards at a discount.
When I received the card and loaded it into my iTunes account, I purchased some music over the next few days, as I’ve often done since my first iTunes purchase in 2005. I bought a few songs, streamed a new movie, and marveled at the magic of Apple’s seamless integration of hardware and services. Or so I thought.
An interesting signal that crowdsourcing is not dead.
Who Maps the World?
Too often, men. And money. But a team of OpenStreetMap users is working to draw new cartographic lines, making maps that more accurately—and equitably—reflect our space.
“For most of human history, maps have been very exclusive,” said Marie Price, the first woman president of the American Geographical Society, appointed 165 years into its 167-year history. “Only a few people got to make maps, and they were carefully guarded, and they were not participatory.” That’s slowly changing, she said, thanks to democratizing projects like OpenStreetMap (OSM).
OSM is the self-proclaimed Wikipedia of maps: It’s a free and open-source sketch of the globe, created by a volunteer pool that essentially crowd-sources the map, tracing parts of the world that haven’t yet been logged. Armed with satellite images, GPS coordinates, local community insights and map “tasks,” volunteer cartographers identify roads, paths, and buildings in remote areas and their own backyards. Then, experienced editors verify each element. Chances are, you use an OSM-sourced map every day without realizing it: Foursquare, Craigslist, Pinterest, Etsy, and Uber all use it in their direction services.
This particular signal should be considered a weak signal - but also signals an inevitable trajectory for the evolving interface with the digital environment. This has been the stuff of sci-fi and many predictions.
Sony Patent: Contact Lenses Taking Pictures and Recording Videos When You Blink – With Nicola Tesla Technology
We can probably all agree on one thing: that technological gadgets are becoming smaller and smaller by the day. Now, contact lenses are getting smarter – well soon – and all thanks to nanotechnology.
The tech giant Sony has ramped up their technology from something that we’ve only seen in James Bond movies, to now being our reality. The company has filed for a patent that reveals how their smart contact lenses will take pictures and record videos just with a simple blink, storing them in a small memory space on the lens – or on the user’s eyeballs.
Not only is Sony striving for this, but other tech giants such as Samsung and Google have made plans for their smart contact lenses, going public with their ideas of taking pictures, making videos and monitoring sugar intake; gamers will also experience enhanced gaming, and other possibilities are endless.
However, Sony’s patent doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing them anytime soon. Nevertheless, Sony’s release of the lens will contain a picture-taking unit, a central controlling unit, the main unit along with an antenna, a storage area and a piezoelectric sensor.
Here is another signal of ever better enhancement technologies - this will inevitably serve many markets - but I’m thinking of the over 65 cohort that now forms the larger top of the age pyramid.
These bionic shorts help turn an epic hike into a leisurely stroll
Forget the Thighmaster. Someday you might add a spring to your step when walking or running using a pair of mechanically powered shorts.
Step up: The lightweight exoskeleton-pants were developed by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Nebraska, Omaha. They are the first device to assist with both walking and running, using an algorithm that adapts to each gait.
Making strides: The super-shorts show how wearable exoskeleton technology might someday help us perform all sorts of tasks. Progress in materials, actuators, and machine learning has led to a new generation of lighter, more powerful, and more adaptive wearable systems. Bulkier and heavier commercial systems are already used to help people with disabilities and workers in some factories and warehouses.
In step: The new “exosuit” is made of soft materials that attach around the waist and thighs and an actuator that attaches to the lower back. Its function is controlled by an algorithm that detects the transition from walking to running, motions that are significantly different and require different actuation. Details of the system appear in the journal Science today.
Take a load off: The powered pants, which weigh 5 kilograms (11 pounds), reduce a person’s metabolic work rate 9.3% when walking and and 4% when running (equivalent to removing 12 to 17 pounds from the waist). “While the metabolic reductions we found are modest, our study demonstrates that it is possible to have a portable wearable robot assist more than just a single activity,” says Conor Walsh, a Harvard professor who specializes in lightweight exoskeletons.
This is a strong signal of the inevitable transformation of the transportation industry.
Oil Needs To Be Below $20 To Compete With Electric Cars
The long-term breakeven oil price needs to be as low as $9 or $10 a barrel so that gasoline cars can remain competitive as a means of transportation in the future, BNP Paribas Asset Management said in new research this month.
The research report—authored by Mark Lewis, Global Head of Sustainability Research at BNP Paribas Asset Management—introduces the concept of Energy Return on Capital Invested (EROCI) to measure how much a given capital outlay on oil and renewables translates into useful or propulsive energy at the wheels: “in other words, for a given capital outlay, how much mobility can you buy?”
According to BNP Paribas Asset Management’s analysis, at present, for the same capital investment, wind and solar energy will already produce significantly more useful energy for EVs than oil at $60 a barrel will for cars and other light-duty vehicles (LDVs).
This is a significant signal - well worth watching for anyone interested in the future of blockchain and intellectual property.
Video Game Publisher Planet Digital Partners Putting “Cooking Mama” on the Blockchain
Key blockchain components for “Cooking Mama: Coming Home to Mama” include:
Unique Blockchain Private-Keys – Each purchased copy of the game will have unique IDs which will be managed directly through the game’s internal wallet storage. Players will be able to focus on Cooking Mama’s user experience rather than cryptographic key management.
Private-Key Enabled Balanced DRM – Traditional DRM limits the ability to copy games, while private-keys on blockchain protocols allows easy registration. These combined items provide greater proof of ownership to legitimate owners of a game, while also allowing them to resell games both digitally and in traditional retail outlets.
Enhanced Multiplayer Experience with Dual Expression – This feature, when enabled, makes every copy of a game subtly different and personal to a user. It utilizes the private-key to change expression algorithms for characters, ingredients and cooking methods.
Securing Online Events – For promotional events, player records and participation can be tracked while maintaining privacy. In addition, hashes of the running game can be recorded to ensure the game has not been altered to create an unfair advantage.
Digital Assets, Rewards, Recognition – Users will be rewarded with in-game currency (or points, experience, and other items) or earn recognition and certificates. These could be provided by the game, other players, or third parties that host tournaments or other promotions.
A weak signal for the possible restoration and perhaps even enhancement of human hearing.
"Scientists in our field have long been looking for the molecular signals that trigger the formation of the hair cells that sense and transmit sound," says Angelika Doetzlhofer, Ph.D., associate professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "These hair cells are a major player in hearing loss, and knowing more about how they develop will help us figure out ways to replace hair cells that are damaged."
Researchers find proteins that might restore damaged sound-detecting cells in the ear
Using genetic tools in mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have identified a pair of proteins that precisely control when sound-detecting cells, known as hair cells, are born in the mammalian inner ear. The proteins, described in a report published June 12 in eLife, may hold a key to future therapies to restore hearing in people with irreversible deafness.
An estimated 90% of genetic hearing loss is caused by problems with hair cells or damage to the auditory nerves that connect the hair cells to the brain. Deafness due to exposure to loud noises or certain viral infections arises from damage to hair cells. Unlike their counterparts in other mammals and birds, human hair cells cannot regenerate. So, once hair cells are damaged, hearing loss is likely permanent.
A signal of the increasing precision of the trend toward the ‘quantified self’ as well as new ways for ongoing medical diagnosis.
"The goal of the project is not just to make the sensors but start to do many subject studies and see what sweat tells us—I always say 'decoding' sweat composition," said Ali Javey, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and senior author on the paper.
Wearable sensors detect what's in your sweat
A team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, is developing wearable skin sensors that can detect what's in your sweat.
They hope that one day, monitoring perspiration could bypass the need for more invasive procedures like blood draws, and provide real-time updates on health problems such as dehydration or fatigue.
In a paper appearing today in Science Advances, the team describes a new sensor design that can be rapidly manufactured using a "roll-to-roll" processing technique that essentially prints the sensors onto a sheet of plastic like words on a newspaper.
They used the sensors to monitor the sweat rate, and the electrolytes and metabolites in sweat, from volunteers who were exercising, and others who were experiencing chemically induced perspiration.
"Roll-to-roll processing enables high-volume production of disposable patches at low cost," Jussi Hiltunen of VTT said. "Academic groups gain significant benefit from roll-to-roll technology when the number of test devices is not limiting the research. Additionally, up-scaled fabrication demonstrates the potential to apply the sweat-sensing concept in practical applications."
The death of Moore’s Law is close when we consider the traditional computer chip that has dominated the world form many decades. However, new forms of computation are enabling new forms of exponential increases in computational price-performance.
Imagine if, 15 years ago, the cloud services AWS, Azure, Box, Dropbox, and GCP all came to market within 12 to 18 months. Their mission would have been to lock in as many businesses as possible—because once you’re on one platform, it’s hard to switch to another. This type of end-user gold rush is about to happen in AI, with tens of billions of dollars, and priceless research, at stake.
Specialized AI Chips Hold Both Promise and Peril for Developers
In the next few years, chipmaking giants and well-funded startups will race to gain market share
When it comes to the compute-intensive field of AI, hardware vendors are reviving the performance gains we enjoyed at the height of Moore’s Law. The gains come from a new generation of specialized chips for AI applications like deep learning. But the fragmented microchip marketplace that’s emerging will lead to some hard choices for developers.
The new era of chip specialization for AI began when graphics processing units (GPUs), which were originally developed for gaming, were deployed for applications like deep learning. The same architecture that made GPUs render realistic images also enabled them to crunch data much more efficiently than central processing units (CPUs). A big step forward happened in 2007 when Nvidia released CUDA, a toolkit for making GPUs programmable in a general-purpose way.
Now, the trend toward microchip specialization is turning into an arms race. Gartner projects that specialized chip sales for AI will double to around US $8 billion in 2019 and reach more than $34 billion by 2023. Nvidia’s internal projections place the market for data center GPUs (which are almost solely used to power deep learning) at $50 billion in the same time frame. In the next five years, we’ll see massive investments in custom silicon come to fruition from Amazon, ARM, Apple, IBM, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qualcomm. There are also a slew of startups in the mix. CrunchBase estimates that AI chip companies, including Cerebras, Graphcore, Groq, Mythic AI, SambaNova Systems, and Wave Computing, have collectively raised more than $1 billion.
This is an interesting signal of emerging nano-bio-AI technologies that will enable significant increases in the speed of certain types of research and other medical and other uses.
"We can bring a single molecule into a fluidic channel where it can then be analyzed using integrated optical waveguides or other techniques," Schmidt said. "The idea is to introduce a particle or molecule, hold it in the channel for analysis, then discard the particle, and easily and rapidly repeat the process to develop robust statistics of many single-molecule experiments."
Optofluidic chip with nanopore 'smart gate' developed for single molecule analysis
A new chip-based platform developed by researchers at UC Santa Cruz integrates nanopores and optofluidic technology with a feedback-control circuit to enable an unprecedented level of control over individual molecules and particles on a chip for high-throughput analysis.
In a paper published August 16 in Nature Communications, the researchers reported using the device to control the delivery of individual biomolecules—including ribosomes, DNA, and proteins—into a fluid-filled channel on the chip. They also showed that the device can be used to sort different types of molecules, enabling selective analysis of target molecules from a mixture.
The capabilities of the programmable nanopore-optofluidic device point the way toward a novel research tool for high-throughput single-molecule analysis on a chip, said Holger Schmidt, the Kapany Professor of Optoelectronics at UC Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the paper.
This is an old signal - but increasingly important.
The extension was built in concert with cryptography experts at Stanford University to ensure that Google never learns your usernames or passwords
Hundreds of Thousands of People Are Using Passwords That Have Already Been Hacked, Google Says
New ‘Password Checkup’ Chrome extension found 1.5 percent of all website logins use compromised credentials, a figure that’s higher for porn websites.
A new Google study this week confirmed the obvious: internet users need to stop using the same password for multiple websites unless they’re keen on having their data hijacked, their identity stolen, or worse.
It seems like not a day goes by without a major company being hacked or leaving user email addresses and passwords exposed to the public internet. These login credentials are then routinely used by hackers to hijack your accounts, a threat that’s largely mitigated by using a password manager and unique password for each site you visit.
Sites like "have I been pwned?" can help users track if their data has been exposed, and whether they need to worry about their credentials bouncing around the dark web. But it’s still a confusing process for many users unsure of which passwords need updating.
To that end, last February Google unveiled a new experimental Password Checkup extension for Chrome. The extension warns you any time you log into a website using one of over 4 billion publicly-accessible usernames and passwords that have been previously exposed by a major hack or breach, and prompts you to change your password when necessary.
This is an interesting search engine to help writers get better.
What is Ludwig?
Ludwig is the first sentence search engine that helps you write better English by giving you contextualized examples taken from reliable sources.
