Mindset Is the Enemy/ Disruptive Transformations To Slash 90% Emissions/ Future of Biomanufacturing/ Depressing CAPTCHA Pictures

Mindset is the enemy. The IPCC has released this week a new report. Sadly, the core message has not much changed since the first report in 1990. The team at Quartz has made a very good job at?summarizing the 4000 pages of the report ?and extracting the key takeaways. “Global warming is happening, it’s caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, and the impacts are?very bad ?(in some cases, catastrophic). Every fraction of a degree of warming we can prevent by curbing emissions?substantially reduces this damage .” Interestingly, the very first chapter of the report concludes, with high confidence, that the measures put in place by governments to achieve the 2 degrees goal of the Paris agreement are not sufficient. These are the same governments that were required to undersign the report.?

Arrhenius,?a Swedish scientist,?claimed?in 1896 that?fossil fuel combustion ?may eventually result in enhanced global warming! The IPCC has been telling us about the greenhouse effect since 1990. The situation we are in is clearly not coming as a surprise, and we actually had more than a century to address it. So, how do we get out of the conundrum we have put ourselves in?

I don’t have the definitive answer, and people much smarter than me are working on it. But one thing that always stroke me is that climate change is a systemic problem, and it requires a non-linear approach to solving (I know, nothing new here). I am a huge fan of the late?Donella Meadows and of system thinking . For her, the two biggest leverage points to drive systemic change are mindset and the power to transcend paradigms. So, any solution to the climate change problem will require a shift in mindset and new paradigms.

It was with great pleasure that I read the?latest report on climate ?written by my friends at?RethinkX , in which they address exactly this issue (among many others). Given the importance of the topic and the power of the insight the report provides, it deserves a double feature in the Antidisciplinarian. I can only urge you to read the report and share it as widely as possible.

The point they make about the need to change the mindset around the problem of climate change and the need to stop “incrementalism” (i.e. trying to fix/patch the existing system) and instead embrace new paradigms (through eight available technologies) is one that I endorse fully.

Here are the nine key insights from the report:

1.?????We can achieve net zero emissions much more quickly than is widely imagined by deploying and scaling the technology we already have.?

2.?????We can achieve net zero emissions without collateral damage to society or the economy.?

3.?????Markets can and must play the dominant role in reducing emissions.?

4.?????Decarbonizing the global economy will not be costly, it will instead save trillions of dollars.?

5.?????A focused approach to reducing emissions is better than an all-of-the-above ‘whack-a-mole’ approach.?

6.?????We no longer need to trade off the environment and the economy against each other.?

7.?????The clean disruption of energy, transportation, and food will narrow rather than widen the gap between wealthy and poor communities, and developed and less-developed countries.?

8.?????The same technologies that allow us to mitigate emissions will also enable us to withdraw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere affordably.?

9.?????Societal choices matter, and technology alone is not enough to achieve net-zero emissions

As I mentioned previously, the last insight “societal choices matter” is as key as getting the technologies deployed. It is not only about the technologies, but also about us as society.

The Future of Biomanufacturing in Space: A Unique Opportunity

There are things you can do in microgravity that you can't back on Earth, besides?floating around . For one, you can perform certain R&D that's actually?economical?compared to its Earth counterpart - especially as launch costs decrease. For example, tissue chips, small systems with grown human cells that mimic "functional units of an organ ," can accelerate the drug testing process. Microgravity speeds up aging and disease processes in human cells, so a few weeks of tissue chip observation in low Earth orbit is the equivalent of months in an Earth lab.

At the 2020 Biomanufacturing in Space Symposium, a number of opportunities were prioritized for the coming years for biomanufacturing in space, including disease modeling via tissue chips, stem cell research, and biofabrication, with an emphasis on using automation and machine learning for analyzing the resulting data.

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Ep. 41: Complexity Science and Its Applications With Geoffrey West

This Futurati podcast features Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist whose primary interests are in fundamental questions across physics, biology, and the social sciences.

Cognition & Computing

This Is All the Connections in a Bit of Mouse Brain the Size of a Grain of Sand

"R. Clay Reid, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute and another lead scientist for the MICrONS project, says that before the program’s research was complete, he would’ve thought this level of reconstruction was impossible." - MIT Tech Review

You can now explore?the most detailed map of a mammalian brain ever ?(here's how to use the online visualizer ). The underlying dataset contains data on 200,000 mouse neurons (roughly 0.28% of the animal's total neurons) and 500M connections, which can fit inside a cube the size of a grain of sand. The five-year effort is part of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program, "which hopes to improve the next generation of machine-learning algorithms by reverse-engineering the cerebral cortex."

For the project, MICrONS researchers cut a tiny piece of mouse brain and sliced it into 25,000 ultra-thin segments, using an electron microscope to take over 150M hi-res images. The benefits of the data go beyond possibly creating more humanlike machines - it can also be used to better understand and treat brain disorders. Like?AlphaFold's protein structure database , the data is open to everybody, to explore and experiment with.

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Systems of Systems: The Next Big Step for Edge AI

SoS will allow autonomous or semi-autonomous systems to control and respond to data flows; for example, a train technology provider that delivers transportation as a service needs to unify the subsystems in a train and in a train station, expediting failure flagging and repairs to reduce costly service delays.

NEW REPORT: Disruptive Transformation of Energy, Transportation and Food Systems Can Slash 90% of Carbon Emissions by 2035, and Hit Net Zero by 2040

"We can either accelerate the energy, transportation and food disruptions and solve the climate crisis by ushering a new era of clean prosperity, or we can waste decades and trillions of dollars propping up the incumbent system." - Tony Seba, co-founder at RethinkX

RethinkX's new report ?estimates that by 2035 new tech across sectors like solar, wind, and batteries (SWB), transport-as-a-service (TaaS), and precision fermentation and cellular agriculture (PFCA) will provide energy, transport, and food 2-10x cheaper than if derived from fossil fuels. "Like the emergence of the Internet, these three disruptions will trigger a cascade of consequences that will transform the entire global economy, decimating trillions of dollars of investor value in existing industries, whilst creating trillions more in new business opportunities." The report demonstrates how these technologies are becoming cheaper than their carbon-heavy alternatives, but also that economic factors won't be the sole driver of disruption:

"The report calls on policymakers to focus strategically on deployment efforts targeting the highest-impact technologies in the energy, transportation and food sectors, rather than 'whack-a-mole' approaches of techno-fixes (like clean coal), behavior change, or carbon taxes which only treat symptoms and cannot solve the underlying problem, and in some instances can be counter-productive."

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Sensor Journalism May Have Lost Some of Its Buzz, but It’s Also Gotten Cheaper and Easier to Pull Off

Sensor journalism - the idea of using IoT-style sensors, at whatever scale, to gather data that then informs or gets turned into reporting - has lost some of the buzz it had in the mid-2010s; meanwhile, sensors have become much cheaper.

Squirrel Acrobats Are as Smart as They Are Athletic

Cognitive scientists and biomechanics experts at UC Berkley have been studying the agility and decision-making skills of wild fox squirrels (at a eucalyptus grove near the edge of the campus, by the way). The squirrels doing their parkour thing isn't anything special. What is interesting is the cross-discipline approach of the experiment: "cognitive and biomechanical minds [doing] a joint investigation was unusual." The group wanted to understand decision-making, learning, and creativity in the space of physical tests.

The researchers set up artificial branches with different springiness, changed the lengths of the jumps, and modified the height of the jumping-off points. The squirrels, attempting to get their peanut rewards, never fell during the trials, and changed their jumps depending on the various factors, adjusting mid-leap, varying speed, even springing off walls. Initial mistakes were insignificant - it was the split-second corrections that made the squirrels land every time.

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How a Deepfake Tom Cruise on TikTok Turned Into a Very Real AI Company

The?deepfake Tom Cruise ?account on TikTok was so popular that it inspired the creator to join up with others to launch a company called?Metaphysic ?in June; the company uses the same tech to make otherwise impossible ads and restore old film.

Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing

"CAPTCHA photos are a nonstop brutalist slideshow of metal and concrete. It is as if someone took you on a tour of a lovely scenic town, but strapped you into horse blinders and forced you to stare only at fire hydrants." - Clive Thompson

Author?Clive Thompson ?was filling out another frustrating CAPTCHA when a thought struck him - why are these sterile puzzles so?depressing? Dissecting this feeling, he details several reasons they make him - and so many of us - subtly uneasy. It's the crime-scene aesthetic, the lack of human life or nature, the dreary colors, the clinical little grids, but most of all we have to remember that these photos weren't taken by or meant for humans (more so human annotators).

"What has it done to humanity, to be forced us to regard these images, for years on end? Cloudfare recently calculated that we humans collectively spend 500 years,?every single day, looking at CAPTCHAs. I’ve often joked on Twitter about the strange philosophical ratholes that CAPTCHAs lead me into. ('Wait, wait, is the pole that supports a stop sign part of the sign?') And it’s now common to chuckle over the deep irony that we’re all forced by robots to prove that we’re human. But these pictures? These pictures erode the soul."

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Google Is Developing a New Superintelligent AI but Ethical Questions Remain

Jeff Dean, Google's AI chief, recently spoke at a?TED conference ?this week, where he revealed that Google is developing a nimble, multi-purpose AI that can perform millions of tasks. Called Pathways, Google’s solution seeks to centralize disparate AI into one powerful, all-knowing algorithm.