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.’
“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon
Content
Quotes:
Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice
New Algorithm Breaks Speed Limit for Solving Linear Equations
Eight Reasons Why Inequality Ruins the Economy
Articles:
‘The ketamine blew my mind’: can psychedelics cure addiction and depression?
CodeMiko Is The Future Of Streaming, Unless Twitch Bans Her First
Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR: report
The road to electric is filled with tiny cars
Radical Reads: Exclusive Q&A with Geoffrey Hinton – A big idea for solving vision
Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show
Recycled plastic bricks stronger than concrete
Meet the swirlon, a new kind of matter that bends the laws of physics
Behind the scenes of "Right up our Alley" bowling alley drone video
another approach to securing society and the freedom of those who depend upon it: collaborative security. Collaborative security is security with other people, the kind that mass vaccination schemes provide a community that develops herd immunity. A social system secured collaboratively relies, in the default, on providing the kind of protection accomplished with and often through protection of others. This is the kind of protection we could right now develop, for example, with a successful global effort to vaccinate as widely and deeply throughout our populations as possible.
Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice
Grade school math students are likely familiar with teachers admonishing them not to just guess the answer to a problem. But a new proof establishes that, in fact, the right kind of guessing is sometimes the best way to solve systems of linear equations, one of the bedrock calculations in math.
As a result, the proof establishes the first method capable of surpassing what had previously been a hard limit on just how quickly some of these types of problems can be solved.
New Algorithm Breaks Speed Limit for Solving Linear Equations
Over several millennia and across multiple continents, early democracy was an institution in which rulers governed jointly with councils and assemblies of the people. From the Huron (who called themselves the Wendats) and the Iroquois (who called themselves the Haudenosaunee) in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America, to the republics of Ancient India, to examples of city governance in ancient Mesopotamia, these councils and assemblies were common. Classical Greece provided particularly important instances of this democratic practice, and it’s true that the Greeks gave us a language for thinking about democracy, including the word demokratia itself. But they didn’t invent the practice. If we want to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our modern democracies, then early democratic societies from around the world provide important lessons.
The core feature of early democracy was that the people had power, even if multiparty elections (today, often thought to be a definitive feature of democracy) didn’t happen. The people, or at least some significant fraction of them, exercised this power in many different ways. In some cases, a ruler was chosen by a council or assembly, and was limited to being first among equals. In other instances, a ruler inherited their position, but faced constraints to seek consent from the people before taking actions both large and small. The alternative to early democracy was autocracy, a system where one person ruled on their own via bureaucratic subordinates whom they had recruited and remunerated. The word ‘autocracy’ is a bit of a misnomer here in that no one in this position ever truly ruled on their own, but it does signify a different way of organising political power.
Lessons from all democracies
To understand whether inequality is a problem, we need to understand the sources of inequality, views of what is fair and the implications of inequality as well as the levels of inequality. Are present levels of inequalities due to well-deserved rewards or to unfair bargaining power, regulatory failure or political capture?
Inequality encourages the rich to invest not innovation but in what Sam Bowles calls “guard labour” – means of entrenching their privilege and power. This might involve restrictive copyright laws, ways of overseeing and controlling workers, or the corporate rent-seeking and lobbying that has led to what Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles call the “captured economy.” An especially costly form of this rent-seeking was banks’ lobbying for a “too big to fail” subsidy. This encouraged over-expansion of the banking system and the subsequent crisis, which has had a massively adverse effect upon economic growth.
Sir Angus Deaton
Eight Reasons Why Inequality Ruins the Economy
This is a good signal of emerging new approaches to therapy and wellness through both science and ancient plant medicines - a new perhaps more powerful and rapid approach to exploring consciousness and wellness.
Patients aren’t merely given a dose and left to their own devices; a new style of therapy was developed for the study which, Morgan says, uses principles from cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness and relapse prevention. “We designed it to go with the ketamine effects. We wanted something evidence based, a therapy that has been shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse. But also something that would work with what we know about the brain in the ketamine state.” The patient is primed for new learning, she says, and more able to view the self from an outsider’s perspective.
This week, though, with the opening of its clinic in Bristol, Awakn Life Sciences has become the UK’s first on-the-high-street provider of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The clinical-biotech company is “researching, developing and delivering evidence-based psychedelic medicine to treat addiction and other mental health conditions”. This means it will be developing its own type of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (with a focus on MDMA to treat addiction) via experimental trials. And alongside it, delivering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.
Though alcoholism is a focus, Awakn will also offer psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat depression, anxiety, eating disorders and most addictions.
‘The ketamine blew my mind’: can psychedelics cure addiction and depression?
This week sees the opening of the first UK high-street clinic offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. Could popping psilocybin be the future of mental healthcare?
In recent years, research into psychedelic-assisted mental healthcare has shed its outsider status. As far back as 2016, Robin Carhart-Harris and his team at Imperial College London published promising findings from the world’s first modern research trial investigating the impact of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) alongside psychological support, on 19 patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). This is when a person doesn’t respond to two or more available therapies; it is particularly debilitating and, recent data shows, affects about a third of all people with depression. In the study, two doses of psilocybin (10mg and 25mg, seven days apart), plus therapy, resulted in “marked reductions in depressive symptoms” in the first five weeks, which “remained significant six months post-treatment”. This new treatment proved so promising that, in 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) awarded breakthrough therapy status to psilocybin (given only to drugs that “demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapy”) as a treatment for TRD. In December 2019, a ketamine-like drug – esketamine – was licensed for use in the UK as a rapid-onset treatment for major depression: it starts working in hours, compared with weeks or months with traditional antidepressants. In April 2020, after running their own psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy study, with 24 participants who had depression, experts from John Hopkins University in the US issued a press release stating: “The magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market.”
All this, and other early-stage evidence, is fuelling larger, more ambitious investigations. The London life sciences company Compass Pathways, whose research led to the FDA award, is coordinating one of the biggest psilocybin for TRD studies in the world, involving 216 patients across Europe and North America. The aim is to develop a new style of therapy that harnesses the psychedelic experience, as well as to change these substances’ classification, so they can be licensed as medicines. This wouldn’t change the legal status of MDMA or psilocybin (banned for recreational use in the UK), but it would mean treatments using these compounds could be prescribed.
This is an amazing signal - foreseen by many science fiction - cyber-punk writers - but if we think that LGBTQ is a large spectrum of ‘orientational’ identities - then we haven’t even glimpsed the spectrum in the digital environment. Also keep in mind - the growing spectrum of ‘cos-play’ fandoms (including - Medieval, Civil War, Renaissance, Wild West, Vicking, etc enactors)
The concept that drives Miko’s stream is simple: She’s a glitchy video game character who interviews real people—specifically, famous Twitch personalities. The great strength of her act is that Miko, the character, does not know who any of these people are, and even when she does, she doesn’t give a fuck.
Some viewers have also classified Miko as part of the monolithic VTuber trend, in which real people stream as (typically anime-inspired) avatars, each with their own backstory and personality.
She went on to explain that she suffers from severe social anxiety, but when she streams in-character, at a breakneck pace with no dead air, she’s able to exist in the moment and react to what’s happening. She can just voice whatever pops into her head, and most of the time, it’s very funny. “I just go and do it,” she said. “It’s hard to feel any negative emotions when you’re streaming.”
“I think I have, like, ban PTSD,” she told Kotaku in December. “I still don’t feel completely safe on Twitch. I’m terrified of getting an indefinite suspension for something I didn’t mean to do.”
The pipeline that turns streamers into brand-friendly productions is getting faster. That’s by design.
The responsibility is on content creators to realize that over-indexing [more than] 90% of their income on a platform that will remove them for 2+ weeks at the drop of a hat is unwise. In this day and age, no creator should be oversubscribed to one platform.”
CodeMiko Is The Future Of Streaming, Unless Twitch Bans Her First
Miko does not know it yet. She is, after all, not a fortune teller, though based on her stream—a sophisticated all-digital setup she can modify using her own skills as a coder, brought to life by a full-body mocap suit—you could be forgiven for thinking she’s from the future. On stream, she is an unflappable presence, a literal video game character whose off-kilter, on-point observations pierce straight to the heart of famous streamers’ insecurities and extract lighthearted humor. But in this moment, she is just another streamer, doing her best to capitalize on a surge of career momentum that could make or break her. She has no way of knowing it will ultimately do both.
Soon, her Twitch follower count will skyrocket, from 20,000 up to more than 500,000. Soon, she will collaborate with an endless procession of Twitch and YouTube’s biggest names: Imane “Pokimane” Anys, Hasan Piker, Asmongold, Sykkuno, Moistcr1tikal, Videogamedunkey. Soon, she will get suspended from Twitch for the third time, for questionable reasons. Soon, she will have nightmares about the prospect of a fourth suspension—one that, per Twitch’s rules, she likely will not come back from. Soon, she will hire a management firm and a development team and overhaul her entire approach to being a public figure. But she does not know any of that right now.
All she knows now is that this is her first interview with a journalist, and she hopes it goes well.
“The thing is, I burned out a long time ago,” she said with a dark chuckle. “The thing that burns me out the most is when I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over and over again. Like, I don’t find my interactions with streamers and chat funny anymore. And so when I feel like I can’t change it because of all this other stuff I have to do, it’s mentally frustrating, and then that mentally drains me. And then I get stressed out, because it’s like ‘When am I gonna find the time to actually do the things I want to do?’ When I do get to start devving, I think that’s going to rejuvenate my soul again.”
And another very good signal of another phase transition in the digital environment - afford-dancing with the two previous signals.
Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR: report
Nearly 10,000 employees in the Reality Labs division
Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its division working on augmented reality and virtual reality devices, according to a report in The Information based on internal organizational data. The number means the Reality Labs division accounts for almost a fifth of the people working at Facebook worldwide.
This suggests that Facebook has been significantly accelerating its VR and AR efforts. As UploadVR noted in 2017, the Oculus VR division accounted for over a thousand employees at a time when Facebook’s headcount was 18,770 overall, indicating a percentage somewhere north of five percent.
Since then, Facebook has shifted its VR focus away from Oculus Rift-style tethered headsets by releasing the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are standalone wireless devices that don’t require a PC. The $299 Quest 2 was preordered five times as much as its predecessor, with developers seeing a boost in sales of their existing titles.
Maybe not in Canada - but many places in the world are likely to see this in their future modes of transportation
The road to electric is filled with tiny cars
Forget Tesla: Millions of people in China are embracing tiny, off-brand competitors.
In Beijing’s southwestern outskirts, past a four-lane overpass with sidewalks as wide as the streets themselves, is Zhengyang Road. It has the usual banks, small convenience stores, and noodle houses of many areas in the capital, but it is set apart by a row of about a dozen shops all selling the same thing — tiny electric cars. The cars look, variously, like small Range Rovers, golf carts, trolley cars, or rickshaws with sheet-iron sides, and they are slow. Their fundamental attraction is their price — between $600 and $2,500 — and that drivers can charge them the same way they would a cell phone. They also come with the perks of being loosely regulated. These low-speed electric cars, nicknamed “elderly transport vehicles,” have an enormous market, made up mostly of people who earn very little. And in China, there are a lot of them — more than 40% of the population, or some 600 million people, make around $150 per month.
Here’s a very good signal on the current state of AI and current systems of vision.
The brain processes images using a huge number of connections at low power. Computers have fewer connections but loads more power. Computer vision models, historically, have looked at single images where a static picture is presented at a uniform resolution. Traditional AI vision systems try to process the entirety of that uniform image.
That’s completely different from what people do. For humans, vision is really a sampling process, where the eye makes real time decisions around what information in the field of vision is going to be further deciphered.
Radical Reads: Exclusive Q&A with Geoffrey Hinton – A big idea for solving vision
AI pioneer, Vector Institute Chief Scientific Advisor and Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton published a paper last week on how recent advances in deep learning might be combined to build an AI system that better reflects how human vision works. Hinton’s system is called “GLOM” and in this exclusive Q&A with Radical partner Aaron Brindle, Geoffrey explains how it works, its implications for everything from self-driving cars to natural language processing, and why he landed on the term (or acronym?) GLOM.
A definite signal - although still a weak one on the future of quantum computing.
Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show
New optical quantum computer overcomes previous limits, looks like a winner.
There is no question that quantum computing has come a long way in 20 years. Two decades ago, optical quantum technology looked like the way forward. Storing information in a photon's quantum states (as an optical qubit) was easy. Manipulating those states with standard optical elements was also easy, and measuring the outcome was relatively trivial. Quantum computing was just a new application of existing quantum experiments, and those experiments had shown the ease of use of the systems and gave optical technologies the early advantage.
what has changed to suddenly make optical quantum computers viable? The last decade has seen a number of developments. One is the appearance of detectors that can resolve the number of photons they receive. All the original work relied on single-photon detectors, which could detect light/not light. It was up to you to ensure that what you were detecting was a single photon and not a whole stream of them.
By using photon-number-resolving detectors, scientists are no longer limited to states encoded in a single photon. Now, they can make use of states that make use of the photon number. In other words, a single qubit can be in a superposition state of containing a different number of photons zero, one, two and so on, up to some maximum number. Hence, fewer qubits can be used for a computation.
One real signal of an emerging metabolic economy.
Recycled plastic bricks stronger than concrete
A Kenyan entrepreneur has taken discarded plastic and turned it into bricks that can hold twice the weight of concrete blocks.
The same piece of plastic can only be recycled around two or three times before it becomes unrecyclable. So why don’t we recycle this plastic into something that’ll be useful for much longer?
When entrepreneur Nzambi Matee decided to start a social enterprise, Gjenge Makers, she was thinking of solutions to the plastic pollution problem in the West African country. The aim was to address the need for sustainable and affordable alternative construction materials.
Before creating her startup, Nzambi majored in material science and worked as an engineer in Kenya’s oil industry, but in 2017 she quit her job to start creating textured brick pavers through recycling plastic waste. She understood which plastics would bind better together and then created the machinery that would allow her to mass produce them.
This is a good signal of how much there remains to be known about fundamental properties of matter, passive matter and active matter - and that other basic laws of nature have yet to be uncovered.
In this swirlonic state, the particles displayed bizarre behavior. For example, they violated Newton's second law: When a force was applied to them, they did not accelerate.
"[They] just move with a constant velocity, which is absolutely surprising," Brilliantov said.
Meet the swirlon, a new kind of matter that bends the laws of physics
Researchers discover a new state of active matter.
Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state.
Physical laws such as Newton's second law of motion — which states that as a force applied to an object increases, its acceleration increases, and that as the object's mass increases, its acceleration decreases — apply to passive, nonliving matter, ranging from atoms to planets. But much of the matter in the world is active matter and moves under its own, self-directed, force, said Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia and the University of Leicester in England. Living things as diverse as bacteria, birds and humans can interact with the forces upon them. There are examples of non-living active matter, too. Nanoparticles known as "Janus particles," are made up of two sides with different chemical properties. The interactions between the two sides create self-propelled movement.
A weak signal of the possibilities of a first contact?
This study shows that S-type asteroids, where most of Earth's meteorites come from, such as Itokawa, contain the raw ingredients of life. The analysis of this asteroid changes traditional views on the origin of life on Earth which have previously heavily focused on C-type carbon-rich asteroids.
Organic materials essential for life on Earth are found for the first time on the surface of an asteroid
New research from Royal Holloway, has found water and organic matter on the surface of an asteroid sample returned from the inner Solar System. This is the first time that organic materials, which could have provided chemical precursors for the origin of life on Earth, have been found on an asteroid.
The single grain sample was returned to Earth from asteroid Itokawa by JAXA's first Hayabusa mission in 2010. The sample shows that water and organic matter that originate from the asteroid itself have evolved chemically through time.
The research paper suggests that Itokawa has been constantly evolving over billions of years by incorporating water and organic materials from foreign extra-terrestrial material, just like the Earth.
This is an interesting signal - for entertainment and surveillance - imagine everyone with three of these personal drones.
Behind the scenes of "Right up our Alley" bowling alley drone video
This video appeared in a small news site and was not posted on YouTube.
It probably deserves some wider exposure.
I have never shared a cartoon - but this seemed so appropriate for our times.
And here’s an visual to back up the perennial advice about passwords
#micropoem
Covid-space-time -
the day was long -
and now it's gone -
with barely a blink of an eye -
All knowledge is partial -
there is too much to know -
the horizons of emerging knowables -
expand exponentially -
and afford-dancing -
unfinitely manifolding -
superposition -
mhm -
one way to imagine -how an individual -
evolves into an ecology of Dividuals -
a hub of partial selfves -
in an ecology of networks -
Someone -
reaching top 1% performer -
as 10 different characters -
in 10 different MMORGs
Is the fear of -
cancel culture -
account suspension -
the fear of being banished -
from the digital environment -
retrieving the very same fear -
of banishment-from-group -
that we lived -
as hunter-gatherers?
