Monthly Wrap - August 2024

August saw the completion of the second volume of the children YES! series - YES! Touching DOT, Touching People. This volume addresses the human behavior leg of the triangle, particularly the issue of human tribalism and its relationship to conflict. This, I think, is the most difficult of the series. As I've said before, what do adults say when an innocent 6-year-old says with big eyes, "Why do people hurt each other?"

I will have it up on Amazon in the next couple of weeks, where it joins Vol. 1, the philosophy intro. As a reminder, Vol. 3 addresses technology and Vo1. 4 our social institutions. All of this is a children's perspective on what we address in "Walking a Strange Savanna.," an ultimate adult summary.

Now for the month...

TECHNOLOGY

• A perhaps unanticipated benefit of the current AI frenzy is that it has encouraged a resurgence of discussion around what it means to be human. Here is a nicely framed thought piece - The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think - NOEMA (noemamag.com)
• The "A" in AI might include more than just "artificial," which is suggested here. "AI wields the collective charm of all human history and culture with infinite seductive mimicry." - The allure of AI companions is hard to resist. Here’s how innovation in regulation can help protect people. | MIT Technology Review
• Per Mckinsey, AI, employees, and organizations - Gen AI’s next inflection point: From employee experimentation to organizational transformation | McKinsey
• A little prompt engineering help for those working on those skills - Non-Obvious Prompt Engineering Guide - by Adam Gospodarczyk (techsistence.com)
• Making proteins from fermented bacteria as one solution to food production - Is Bacteria The Future Of Farming? (noemamag.com)
• The need for data centers will only grow - The future of data centers — on land, at sea, and in space - Big Think
• Do they? Don't they? The arguments continue furiously - LLMs develop their own understanding of reality as their language abilities improve | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Never a subject we like thinking about (and my reader numbers on this piece also reflected it), but has to be done and here an excellent thought piece - The New Bioweapons: How Synthetic Biology Could Destabilize the World (foreignaffairs.com)
• For those who like to speculate on far futures, an excellent piece around energy from black holes - Professor proposes how a black hole in orbit around a planet could be a sign of an advanced civilization (phys.org)
• Useful site if you have a bit of text you want to test for AI generation - AI Article Detector - AI Phrase Finder
• Finally, what could be more esoteric than realizing that life at all levels senses and can interact via artificial embodiment via robotics - Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body | The IndependentUS

• Finding our way in our work lives - "The famous phrase “do things that don’t scale” has a silent clause: Do things that don’t scale in service of building things that do scale." - Pursuits That Can’t Scale - by Anu Atluru - Working Theorys
• A twisty take on recognizing opportunities - How the "4 Types of Luck" can enrich your work-life - Big Think
• We find so many lessons in history. We listen to so few. Some interesting perspectives here - The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: What the Bronze Age Collapse Teaches Us About Today (zmescience.com)
• And thinking of history, quite an interesting summary of Mexican history and a specific iteration of the whole Neolithic sedentary social experiment in which we are still entrenched - Mexico Before Europeans - by Tomas Pueyo
• Stone survives. We read millennia past in their inscriptions. But what of more ephemeral declarations that we were here? - The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age | MIT Technology Review
• Mental model expanding - Do future actions matter more than past deeds? It depends on time and culture (phys.org)
• Thumbs up on this useful communications tool - Boost your communication skills with the “ladder of abstraction” - Big Think
• From a colleague of Oliver Scott Curry on Morality as Cooperation theory - Do you need religion to be a moral person? - Big Think

Fascinating world this month and always. How do we manage the wonder, the threat, and the infinite combinations of variables that reward and challenge existence? Human flourishing = animal = plant = planetary flourishing in some combination we have yet to agree upon as a species. Balancing our personal species triangle of tech, institutions, and our human primate behaviors is important, but only a subset, of that larger problem. Made so our apex intelligence. Here's to hoping and working to figure it out before another has to rise and do so. ??

Till next month,

Chuck