Hydrogen as Swiss Army Knife/ Brains of Social Animals Synchronizing/ CRISPR 10 Years On/ DALL-E2, AI and Art Disruption
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale Bioyards, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
Still slowly recovering after being one-week covid-positive, luckily with only mild symptoms, yet more taxing than I expected it to be… so, no introduction today again, I will be back next week with the full format. Happy Independence Day to everybody who is US-based.?
According to Bill Gates, clean hydrogen could be the “Swiss Army Knife” of decarbonization. “It’s pure, reactive chemical energy,” Gates says. “If we can bring the cost down far enough, and make enough of it, we can use it to replace fossil fuels in all sorts of… industrial processes, including making plastic and steel, liquid fuels, and even food.”
Hydrogen can also help balance supply and demand for clean energy by storing energy from renewable sources like wind and solar using electrolysis.
For clean hydrogen to become part of “a prosperous net-zero economy,” Gates concludes: “It’s going to take a big push for collaboration between business and governments, which, together, can make innovation happen much faster than usual by being aggressive with investments and policies.”
News items:
Microplastics are “one of the 21st century’s biggest environmental problems. They are very hard to get rid of, making their way into drinking water, produce, and food, harming the environment, and animal and ?human health.” Researchers at Sichuan University ?recently developed?a self-healing,13mm long robo-fish that can “accurately collect and sample detrimental microplastic pollutants from the aquatic environment.”
According to study co-author ?Yuyan Wang: “Nanotechnology holds great promise for trace adsorption, collection, and detection of pollutants, improving intervention efficiency while reducing operating costs.”
For hundreds of years, scientists have struggled to understand how social animals - like rhesus monkeys and fruit bats - “retain information about the structure of the society” they’re embedded in. An emerging paradigm called collective neuroscience?“proceeds from the idea that brains have evolved primarily to help animals exist as part of a social group.” This overview from Aeon summarizes much of the published research. It looks at where the field may be headed - including the implications for understanding human society and what the theories might mean for AI.
According to ?Julia Sliwa, CNRS Investigator in Neuroscience at Paris Brain Institute, she and other like-minded researchers are trying to upend the orthodoxy that “intelligence, and in this case social intelligence of a species, derives solely from the workings of the single brain.”
News items:
BLOOM is architecturally similar to GPT-3 and other LLMs - that’s not what “arguably” makes it “the most important AI model of the decade.” Instead, the open-source LLM, developed by BigScience Research Workshop, is the “starting point of a socio-political paradigm shift in AI that will define the coming years on the field - and break the stranglehold big tech has on the research and development of LLMs.”
This overview of the first decade of ?CRISPR?gene-editing tech surveys how it’s changed our lives already - and how that’s likely just the start. CRISPR has revolutionized?medical?research?and may have a similar impact on agriculture.
However, many thorny ethical concerns about CRISPR remain: “The most profound ethical question about CRISPR is how future generations might use the technology to alter human embryos.” In 2018, this notion became a reality when Chinese biophysicist ?He Jiankui?created the first ?CRISPR babies.
According to David Liu, Professor at the Broad Institute: “The era of human gene editing isn’t coming. It’s here.”
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News items:
Wildfires have already burned over 3.3M acres of US land in 2022. The fires are now so intense that little natural regeneration occurs. DroneSeed “claims it can begin to restore thousands of acres of wildfire-ravaged land just 30 days after the fire is out.” Droneseed’s operations are partly funded by companies - like Shopify - purchasing carbon offset credits.
“A robot hand drawing.” Credit:?Sam Altman
Text-to-image AIs like ?DALL·E 2?and Google Brain’s ?Imagen?have been flooding the web with digital “art” for months. When access to this tech becomes widespread, how will it affect human-made art (and artists)?
This think piece looks at photography’s ?historical impact?on visual art, which “effectively displaced artists, who had to reinvent themselves by searching in the unexplored corners of art.” But unlike DALL·E 2, “cameras don’t learn.”
According to the author: “Artists can escape a camera because it’s static in its abilities. It can take pics and nothing else. Photography replaced a single art style and became an art in itself. But DALL·E 2 can chase down artists wherever they go in the vast space of uncharted creative territory. AI wouldn’t replace just one style, it would replace all styles… And that’s scary.”
News items:
Google’s Powerful AI Spotlights a Human Cognitive Glitch: Mistaking Fluent Speech for Fluent Thought
Large language models (LLM) like ?GPT-3?and Google’s ?PaLM?and ?LaMDA?are so good at predicting what words come next after a prompt that even a ?Google engineer is convinced?LLMs are sentient. This fallacy spotlights a common “human cognitive glitch… a persistent tendency to associate fluent expression with fluent thought.” This bias extends not only to LLMs but to other humans: “People with a foreign accent are often perceived as less intelligent… [and] similar biases exist against speakers of dialects?that are not considered prestigious, ?such as Southern English?in the US.
China is by far the world’s most surveilled country. Increasingly, police and security forces are using the voluminous data collected on China’s citizens to predict who might commit a crime, participate in a protest, or petition the government. AI startups like ?Megvii?provide the police with “a multidimensional database that stores faces, photos, cars, cases and incident records… to dig out ordinary people who seem innocent… [and] stifle illegal acts in the cradle.”
The NY Times says, “At the most bleeding edge, the systems raise perennial sci-fi conundrums: How is it possible to know the future has been accurately predicted if the police intervene before it happens?” According to ?Maya Wang, Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch: “This is an invisible cage of technology imposed on society, the disproportionate brunt of it being felt by groups of people that are already severely discriminated against in Chinese society.”
News items:
The recent ?Supreme Court decision?in ?Dobbs v Jackson?overturning Roe v. Wade had an immediate impact on reproductive rights and women’s access to abortion. With several states introducing bills?that “define a fetus as a person,” what are the potential consequences for assisted reproductive technologies?(ART) like IVF? According to WaPo: “Defining life as beginning at conception has major implications for infertility care, an estimated ?$8B industry that aided in the births of over ?83,000 children in 2019 alone.”