Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and 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 is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
By Losing Genes, Life Often Evolved More Complexity
The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur
Art, entrepreneurship and the future of work
Articles:
I’m compelled to treat consciousness as a process to be understood, not as a thing to be defined. Simply put, my argument is that consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than a natural process such as evolution or the weather. My favourite trick to illustrate the notion of consciousness as a process is to replace the word ‘consciousness’ with ‘evolution’ – and see if the question still makes sense. For example, the question What is consciousness for? becomes What is evolution for? Scientifically speaking, of course, we know that evolution is not for anything. It doesn’t perform a function or have reasons for doing what it does – it’s an unfolding process that can be understood only on its own terms. Since we are all the product of evolution, the same would seem to hold for consciousness and the self.
‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’: the insight that it’s possible to have design in the absence of a designer, competence in the absence of comprehension, and reasons (or ‘free-floating rationales’) in the absence of reasoners.
...natural selection doesn’t have a mind, doesn’t itself have reasons, but is nevertheless competent to perform this “task” of design refinement.’
the weather and atoms – like all natural processes – are not reliably determined by their initial conditions, but by the system’s own behaviour as it feeds back into the interactions of its component parts. In other words, they are complex systems.
The mathematics of mind-time
More generally, the pervasiveness of gene loss in the tree of life points to an inversion of a classic theme in evolutionary developmental biology. In the 1970s and ’80s, “the big shock was to find that flies and humans use the same genes,” CaƱestro said. Replace the fly Pax6 gene with the human version, and the fly can still make an eye. “Now we are finding that sometimes the structures [that grow] are the same, but the genes responsible for making the structures have many differences,” he said. “How is it possible that there are so many different genes, and still the structures are the same? That’s the inverse paradox of evo-devo.”
By Losing Genes, Life Often Evolved More Complexity
Creative entrepreneurship, to start with what is most apparent, is far more interactive, at least in terms of how we understand the word today, than the model of the artist-as-genius, turning his back on the world, and even than the model of the artist as professional, operating within a relatively small and stable set of relationships. The operative concept today is the network, along with the verb that goes with it, networking. A Gen‑X graphic-artist friend has told me that the young designers she meets are no longer interested in putting in their 10,000 hours. One reason may be that they recognize that 10,000 hours is less important now than 10,000 contacts [or the 1,000 true fans].
A network, I should note, is not the same as what used to be known as a circle—or, to use a term important to the modernists, a coterie. The truth is that the geniuses weren’t really quite as solitary as advertised. They also often came together—think of the Bloomsbury Group—in situations of intense, sustained creative ferment. With the coterie or circle as a social form, from its conversations and incitements, came the movement as an intellectual product: impressionism, imagism, futurism.
...one of the most conspicuous things about today’s young creators is their tendency to construct a multiplicity of artistic identities. You’re a musician and a photographer and a poet; a storyteller and a dancer and a designer—a multiplatform artist, in the term one sometimes sees. Which means that you haven’t got time for your 10,000 hours in any of your chosen media. But technique or expertise is not the point. The point is versatility. Like any good business, you try to diversify.
The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur
For an artist, everything you do feeds into everything you do. In this kind of iterative learning the task is to know what you should keep and develop and what you should let go. The process of creation is experimental and continuous. It is about learning and searching. All artists are eager students.
Curiosity shapes their work as much as any tool. It is very action oriented, artists do things, artists make things, and the only person from whom you need permission is yourself. It is a world where you don’t work for a company, but you may work with a company. Incentive systems are also changing. The tokenized financial systems of the future are going to recognize and reward the creative majority and not mainly the executive minority.
Creativity is a social and political tool. As it is about expressing ourselves, it gives a voice and a form to democracy. As it is a platform for ideas, it is an agent of change. As it raises new questions, it is about the very thing that makes us human — imagination.
Art, entrepreneurship and the future of work
Given the social function of beliefs, it’s little surprise that delusions usually contain social themes. Might delusion then be a problem of social affiliation, rather than a purely cognitive issue? Bell’s team make just this claim, proposing that there is a broader dysfunction to what they call ‘coalitional cognition’ (important for handling social relationships) involved in the generation of delusions. Harmful social relationships and experiences could play a role here. It is now widely acknowledged that there is a connection between traumatic experiences and symptoms of psychosis. It’s easy to see how trauma could have a pervasive impact on a person’s sense of how safe and trustworthy the world feels, in turn affecting their belief systems.
‘It has not in fact been sufficiently noted how often schizophrenic delusions involve not belief in the unreal but disbelief in something that most people take to be true.’
It is hopeless to try to study individual beliefs in isolation, when they exist inside the vibrantly populated minds of people with whole lifetimes of experience. Instead of becoming preoccupied by the extraordinary things the deluded individual believes, we should turn our attention instead to the ordinary things they no longer believe, the absence of which have allowed the bizarre to flourish.
Deluded, with reason
At the time, there were few with the eyes to see and ears to hear him. The industrial age was booming, manifesting the insights of the scientific revolution. It was a tangibly, visibly changing society, fostering an almost irresistible focus on the physical aspects of reality. The narrowing of outlook is captured in one of Blake’s best-known images, entitled ‘Newton’ (1795-1805). It depicts the natural philosopher on the seabed, leaning over a scroll, compass in hand. He draws a circle. It’s an imaginative act. Only, it’s imagination rapt in the material world alone, devoted to studying what’s measurable. For Blake, Isaac Newton represents a mentality trapped within epicycles of thought. While claiming to study reality, it isolates itself from reality, and so induces, as he wrote in a letter to his patron Thomas Butts, ‘Single vision and Newton’s sleep’.
Blake could see more because he had realised that he saw the sunrise (and everything else) not with his eyes, but through them.
Eternity’s secret weapon is a new type of friendship, which Blake captures in a line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Opposition is true Friendship’. Moreover, the opposing friend opposes themselves as well. They embrace what Blake called ‘Self-Annihilation’: the mental fight with oneself, which isn’t about dissolving the ego but routing the desire to possess life and control others.
‘Every kindness to another is a little Death,’ writes Blake, not just because kindness might cost, but because such sacrificial acts can be experienced by the giver as moments in which to realise that they never possessed life to start with. Rather, they live because life pours itself into us. The nature of being alive is revealed as a ‘comingling’ of mutual self-sacrifice.
The four-fold imagination
This is a good signal of the emerging efforts to re-imagine how we create homes and communities. Institutional solutions like long term care - may never go away - but most people don’t want an institution to provide care to them - they want communities and people who care about them. This is important not only for the elders, but for the many with wide ranges of ability and neuro-diversity. Community and Families of choice.
Beyond long-term care: The benefits of seniors’ communities that evolve on their own
The global COVID-19 pandemic has shown Canadians that we need to think differently about how we support older adults. The media and all levels of government have focused heavily on long-term care, and rightly so. However, the vast majority of older adults live at home and plan to remain there for as long as possible.
It had been clear well before the pandemic that long-term care is costly and woefully inadequate to meet the needs of Canada’s aging population. It is crucial to expand the conversation to consider what other housing solutions exist and how they can be implemented.
Essential to the success and acceptability of any housing alternative is the need for older adults to maintain a sense of autonomy and independence, be actively engaged in decisions affecting themselves and their community and have the opportunity to build social networks that can ultimately support one another.
Villages and co-housing are two examples of how we can think differently. In the village model found in the United States, older adults living in a neighbourhood of single dwelling homes come together as a group to organize paid and volunteer services.
Originating in Europe, co-housing brings together younger and older adults in clusters of homes or apartments built around shared spaces. Members work together to manage common spaces and support each other through group activities such as communal dining.
Naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) offer a third example with enormous potential. Unlike the village or co-housing models, NORCs are unplanned communities that have a high proportion of older residents.
This is a wonderful 13 min video by Stuart Kauffman - for anyone (including children) who is interested in the complexity of how evolution creates-seizes affordances of reality as opportunity for novel ways to co-create for survival.
The origins of life and its continuing wonder
Scientist and MacArthur Fellow Stuart Kauffman explains how life evolved from its earlier origins some 3,700 million years ago through the story of four protocells - Patrick, Rupert, Sly and Gus. He explains why our knowledge of the origins and early evolution of life can greatly help us understand our true place in the world. Our human species is part of nature, not above it.
This is a great presentation - Well worth the view for anyone interested in the unfolding future.
The best part of this excellent presentation is the concise illumination of formal cause - the core of complex-living-systems.
The tragic flaw is the closing sections - that fail to extend to the emergent paradigms of 'entanglement' as the 'fourth sphere'
Strategic Uncertainty, Digital Technology and Formal Cause
Are technologies really as “neutral”, psychologically and sociologically, as science usually assumes?
Can the new matrix of causal factors which digital technologies bring about – a new structure for our choices – really be ignored?
Is a “One world” or “Global order” paradigm of future international relations getting more or less likely?
Is it time to start thinking about “Strategic uncertainty under digital conditions”?
This is a very important signal - will we democratize the discovery and development of life saving drugs - or will we let privateers decide which drugs can be profitably developed - of course remembering that treatments are more profitable than cures.
The antibiotic paradox: why companies can’t afford to create life-saving drugs
Paratek Pharmaceuticals successfully brought a new antibiotic to the market. So why is the company’s long-term survival in question?
Paratek Pharmaceuticals had spent more than 20 years developing and testing an antibiotic named omadacycline (Nuzyra), which went on sale in the United States in 2019 for use against bacterial infections. Although antibiotics can’t fight the virus that causes COVID-19, almost 15% of people hospitalized with the disease go on to develop bacterial pneumonias, some of which are resistant to existing antibiotics.
Before COVID-19, antibiotic resistance was estimated to kill at least 700,000 people each year worldwide. That number could now climb as more people with the viral disease receive antibiotics to treat secondary infections, or to prevent infections that come from being on a ventilator. That’s where a drug such as omadacycline might help — if it can be delivered to people in time to save lives.
In a bitter paradox, antibiotics fuelled the growth of the twentieth century’s most profitable pharmaceutical companies, and are one of society’s most desperately needed classes of drug. Yet the market for them is broken. For almost two decades, the large corporations that once dominated antibiotic discovery have been fleeing the business, saying that the prices they can charge for these life-saving medicines are too low to support the cost of developing them. Most of the companies now working on antibiotics are small biotechnology firms, many of them running on credit, and many are failing.
In just the past two years, four such companies declared bankruptcy or put themselves up for sale, despite having survived the perilous, decade-long process of development and testing to get a new drug approved. When they collapsed, Achaogen, Aradigm, Melinta Therapeutics and Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals took out of circulation — or sharply reduced the availability of — 5 of the 15 antibiotics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 2010
This is a wonderful must view 1 hour video where David Graebor is interviewed by Cory Doctorow on the subject of Graebor’s book “Bullshit Jobs”.
This is an important signal of the shadow of managerial feudalism currently under assault by the artist currently called “Covid-19”.
David Graeber died this week.
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber talked about jobs that he says qualify as employment but are pointless and unnecessary.
This is a related - original short ‘rant’ by Graebor that led to the book.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes' promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the '60s—never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's reflection shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the '20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
This is a very real signal of natural consequence of unfettered enabling of monopolies and oligopolies - This clearly signals the need to create consumer protections - to maintaining the right to own and the possibilities of competitive interoperability. This is vital for the emerging digital environment were everything is connected, has sensors, software and all manner use-repair data. - To be clear - the auto industry and increasingly other industries and corporations are seeking to create a monopoly enclosure from which it can hold customers hostage to their rent-seeking.
Auto Industry TV Ads Claim Right to Repair Benefits 'Sexual Predators'
The auto industry is running a highly misleading and fearmongering ad campaign in Massachusetts in an attempt to hinder independent car repair.
A camera slowly stalks a woman walking to her SUV in a desolate, empty parking garage. “If question 1 passes in Massachusetts, anyone could access the most personal data stored in your vehicle,” a narrator says. “Domestic violence advocates say a sexual predator could use the data to stalk their victims. Pinpoint exactly where you are. Whether you are alone …” The woman’s keys jingle as she approaches her car. The camera gets closer. The woman whips her head around. The stalker has found her. The screen flashes to black. “Vote NO on 1,” the narrator says.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents nearly every major auto manufacturer in the United States, is funding this and a series of other TV ads like it to scare Massachusetts residents into voting against a ballot measure that would expand the state’s already existing right to repair law to ensure that you can continue to get your car fixed by anyone you want. The ads heavily imply—and at times state outright—that the legislation would somehow lead women to be stalked and sexually assaulted, a charge that cybersecurity experts say has no grounding in reality. Instead, the auto industry wants to ensure that when your car breaks, you have to take it to a manufacturer “authorized” mechanic or the dealer itself.
The legislation is an update to an already-existing law passed by Massachusetts voters in 2012 that has become a national standard for auto repair and a model piece of legislation for other right to repair bills that would make it easier to fix all sorts of electronics. The 2012 law enshrines the ability for independent mechanics (meaning, anyone who is not a car dealer) to repair the vast majority of cars, because it requires manufacturers to use a nonproprietary diagnostic interface to diagnose problems. This means that anyone can buy an OBD reader (called a "scanner," a "dongle," a "computer"), hook it up to a port beneath their steering wheel, and determine what's wrong with their car. The law also makes repair information available to independent repair professionals.
This is a longish but MUST READ piece by Cory Doctorow that discusses the history of software copyright - and how it is transforming the commons into and privateered enclosures to the shift economics from creation to rent-seeking.
What is “interoperability,” anyway?
The term is nerdy, technical, obscure. It’s closely related to the slightly more familiar “compatability,” but the two aren’t quite equivalent.
In a technical sense, “interoperability” describes two products or services that can somehow work together with one another. From opening your Word documents in Google Docs, to using third-party ink cartridges in your printer to replacing your watch band, to changing the stereo that came with your car, interoperability is a broad, universal, essential characteristic of all of our technology.
Interoperability is the default state of the world.
The thicket of anti-interoperability rules that has sprung up around interoperability has a catch-all name: “intellectual property.”
Cory Doctorow: IP
Some background: “free software” had its origins with AI researcher-turned-activist Richard Stallman who started his GNU project in 1983, leading to the creation of the first “GNU Public License” (GPL). This is a copyright license for computer programmers who want to share their work. If you release a program’s underlying source code under the GPL, anyone else is free to:
* Run your program
* Study your code
* Improve your code
* Share their improved code with others (provided that the same license is applied to that new code).
The GPL – a copyright license for software – arrived just as copyright for software itself arrived. Prior to 1983, software was generally viewed as a “functional work” and thus ineligible for copyright, but 1983’s Apple v. Franklin suit, combined with some 1980 amendments to the Copyright Act, established that software could be copyrighted.
Some 40 years later, the world is a very different place. Between software copyrights, anti-circumvention rules, software patents, enforceable terms of service, trade secrecy, non-compete agreements, and the pending (at the time of this writing) Oracle/Google dispute over API copyrights, any attempt to interoperate with an existing product service without permission from its corporate master is a legal suicide mission, an invitation to almost unlimited civil – and even criminal! – litigation. That is to say: if you dare to modify, improve, or replace an existing, dominant software-based product or service, you risk bankruptcy and a long prison sentence.
Forty years ago, we had cake and asked for icing on top of it. Today, all we have left is the icing, and we’ve forgotten that the cake was ever there. If code isn’t licensed as “free,” you’d best leave it alone.
This is a good signal of the progress being made in another computational paradigm.
Chinese scientists say their neuromorphic computer Darwin Mouse has the same number of neurons as a real mouse
Neuromorphic computers that mimic real brains could have a big impact on the development of artificial intelligence
Darwin Mouse has 120 million artificial neurons, equivalent to the brain of a mouse
A group of scientists in China say they have created the world’s largest brain-like computer by number of neurons. Darwin Mouse has 120 million artificial neurons and 100 billion synapses – equivalent to the brain of a mouse.
The team responsible for the computer from Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Lab officially unveiled it on Tuesday. Darwin Mouse is said to run on 792 chips that host millions of artificial neurons needed to mimic nerve cells found in real brains.
Neuromorphic computing is a nascent discipline in computer science. Neuromorphic literally means “taking the form of the brain.” In this case, that means trying to get computers to imitate the fine-tuned physiological structure that allows us to process information by using neurons, synapses, neural circuits and more.
This remains a weak - but significant signal - of the domestication of matter
LHC creates matter from light
The Large Hadron Collider plays with Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy—in the form of electromagnetic waves.
Last year, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons. This year, they've taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay.
This research doesn't just illustrate the central concept governing processes inside the LHC: that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. It also confirms that at high enough energies, forces that seem separate in our everyday lives—electromagnetism and the weak force—are united.
A good signal of progress in domesticating DNA.
Inheritance in plants can now be controlled specifically
A new application of the CRISPR/Cas molecular scissors promises major progress in crop cultivation. At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), researchers from the team of molecular biologist Holger Puchta have succeeded in modifying the sequence of genes on a chromosome using CRISPR/Cas. For the first time worldwide, they took a known chromosome modification in the thale cress model plant and demonstrated how inversions of the gene sequence can be undone and inheritance can thus be controlled specifically. The results are published in Nature Communications.
For the first time, researchers from the Chair for Molecular Biology and Biochemistry held by Puchta at KIT's Botanical Institute have now succeeded in undoing natural inversions. "We considerably extended the applications of the CRISPR/Cas molecular scissors," Puchta says. "We no longer use the scissors for exchanging arms between chromosomes, but also for recombining genes on a single chromosome. For the first time, we have now demonstrated that it is possible to directly control inheritance processes. We can achieve genetic exchange in an area, in which this has been impossible before. With this, we have established chromosome engineering as a new type of crop cultivation."
A great signal of emerging metabolic-metamorphic economy - progress in creating unimaginable new material.
"With this project, we have shown that not only can we recycle wool but we can build things out of the recycled wool that have never been imagined before," said Kit Parker, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at SEAS and senior author of the paper. "The implications for the sustainability of natural resources are clear. With recycled keratin protein, we can do just as much, or more, than what has been done by shearing animals to date and, in doing so, reduce the environmental impact of the textile and fashion industry."
Wool-like material can remember and change shape
As anyone who has ever straightened their hair knows, water is the enemy. Hair painstakingly straightened by heat will bounce back into curls the minute it touches water. Why? Because hair has shape memory. Its material properties allow it to change shape in response to certain stimuli and return to its original shape in response to others.
What if other materials, especially textiles, had this type of shape memory? Imagine a t-shirt with cooling vents that opened when exposed to moisture and closed when dry, or one-size-fits-all clothing that stretches or shrinks to a person's measurements.
Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a biocompatible material that can be 3-D-printed into any shape and pre-programmed with reversible shape memory. The material is made using keratin, a fibrous protein found in hair, nails and shells. The researchers extracted the keratin from leftover Agora wool used in textile manufacturing.
A good signal of possible new antibiotics.
Scientists develop new compound which kills both types of antibiotic resistant superbugs
Researchers at the University of Sheffield have developed a new compound that is able to kill both gram-positive and gram-negative antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria have different cell wall structures, but the new antibiotic compound is able to pass through the cell wall of both forms of bacteria and then bind to the DNA.
The findings, published in Chemical Science, pave the way for developing new treatments for all kinds of antibiotic resistant bacteria, including the gram-positive MRSA and gram-negative E.Coli.
The team from the University of Sheffield has previously developed new compound leads that specifically target gram-negative bacteria, but this new compound is a broad spectrum antimicrobial which means it is just as effective in both types of bacteria.
A very good signal of implementing renewable energy storage.
Prototype gravity-based energy storage system begins construction
As renewable energy generation grows, so does the need for new storage methods that can be used at times when the Sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. A Scottish company called Gravitricity has now broken ground on a demonstrator facility for a creative new system that stores energy in the form of “gravity” by lifting and dropping huge weights.
If you coil a spring, you’re loading it with potential energy, which is released when you let it go. Gravitricity works on the same basic principle, except in this case the springs are 500- to 5,000-tonne weights. When held aloft by powerful cables and winches, these weights store large amounts of potential energy. When that energy is needed, they can be lowered down a mineshaft to spin the winch and feed electricity into the grid.
Gravitricity says that these units could have peak power outputs of between 1 and 20 MW, and function for up to 50 years with no loss of performance. Able to go from zero to full power in under a second, the system can quickly release its power payload in as little as 15 minutes or slow it down to last up to eight hours.
To recharge this giant mechanical battery, electricity from renewable sources power the winches to lift the weights back to the top. In all, the system has an efficiency of between 80 and 90 percent.
Ultimately, this kind of system should be able to store energy at a lower cost than other grid-scale energy storage systems, such as Tesla’s huge lithium-ion battery in Australia. The concept sounds very similar to the one behind Energy Vault, which uses a crane to hoist concrete blocks into a tower.
