Normal Is Dangerous/ Pondering Earth’s Distant Future/ The Metaverse is a Dystopian Nightmare/ The Moral Consideration of Artificial Entities
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale Bioyards, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
Normal is Dangerous. I have always been fascinated by mottos. I really like how they summarize in a few words a whole moral attitude or even an approach to life. “Sapere Aude!” (Dare to know!) is a good example and one that I like a lot, as it was used by Kant as the motto for the Enlightenment. Another super powerful one is “Ora et Labora” (Pray and Work), the motto of the Benedictine order, extremely succinct yet summarizing a whole moral attitude in three words.?
This is why, when my wife and I found one of those free postcards in a bar (a long time ago, when postcards were still a thing…) saying “Normal ist Gef?hrlich” (Normal is Dangerous) we immediately decided to make it our family motto! Beyond the fascination with mottos, it was its meaning that really attracted us. We both believed, and still believe, that trying to find comfort in the apparent safety of “normalness” is extremely dangerous. First, it leads to conforming with the average, second, it prevents you from experiencing things that are at the edge, usually the most interesting ones (even if not always the most comfortable ones though). That postcard is now framed and overlooking our living room, to remind us of that.
I was therefore particularly pleased when I saw that my friend Bob Goodson published an interesting?article in HBR about the Power of Anomaly. Bob, together with a few former colleagues of mine at BCG, articulates in a much more eloquent way the dangerous nature of normalness by pointing out how anomalies (i.e. things that are not “normal”) can be an incredible source of competitive advantage by fostering imagination and counterfactual thinking.
While we are now extremely good at recognizing patterns thanks to AI and vast amounts of available data, we still must rely on human intelligence to be able to decipher anomalies (not all anomalies are relevant/worth looking at) and through those connect dots that otherwise would remain disconnected, leading to fundamental new insight. In a world where complexity continues to increase, adaptive systems represent its backbone and emergence is a core dimension to master, looking at and making sense of anomalies becomes essential. Anomalies are the weak signals that point to the evolution of the system. Missing them, by relying on averages, hence what is “normal”, can have fatal consequences. Indeed, “Normal is Dangerous”.
And the other question is then, of course, what is “normal”? In this issue, we look at time and long, very long time dimensions, metaverse, “synthetic” CEO’s keynotes and moral considerations for artificial entities… some of it sounds far-fetched today, but who knows if any of it will be considered normal in the years to come?
Around 450 meters below an islet in the Baltic Sea a facility is being constructed to house spent nuclear fuel by the middle of this decade. Given that the half-life of radionuclides can stretch to hundreds of millions of years, the team at Posiva?has to think hundreds of thousands of years in advance - cycles of earthquakes, floods, and population change. Anthropologist?Vincent Ialenti, author of?Deep Time Reckoning, suggests this sort of mental time travel can help us become more responsible towards our planet today. That's a tall order to fill, given our proclivity to focus on one or two generations ahead of us, at best. Ialenti travels 33,000 years into the future, focusing not on tech innovation over the millennia but the movements of the planet:
"35,012 CE. A tiny microbe floats in a large, northern lake. It does not know that the clay, silt, and mud floor below it is gaining elevation, little by little, year after year. It is unaware that, 30 millennia ago, the lake was a vast sea. Dotted with sailboats, cruise, and cargo ships, it was known by humans as the Baltic. Watery straits, which connected the Baltic Sea to the North Sea, had risen above the water thousands of years ago. Denmark and Sweden fused into a single landmass. The seafloor was decompressing from the Weichselian glaciation—an enormous sheet of ice that pressed down on the land during a previous ice age."
News items:
MIT researchers employ machine learning to find powerful peptides that could improve a gene therapy drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Pretty much every electronic device uses the decades-old?Network Time Protocol?(NTP) to tell the time. Data centers rely on specialized time-keeping boxes like the?Stratum 1, built by a handful of companies, to keep things accurate. But getting new features for these servers is difficult - in large part because of their proprietary nature and pricey upgrades. Facebook engineer?Oleg Obleukhov?and his colleague?Ahmad Byagowi?set out to?build a better timepiece, and have now made their tech?open source.
Anyone can use the GitHub spec to build a Time Card for $300-$2,000. According to the developers: "Building a device that is very precise, inexpensive, and free from vendor lock was an achievement." A Time Card relies on a few key parts: a GNSS receiver and a high stability oscillator. "It all starts from a GNSS receiver that provides the time of day (ToD) as well as the 1 pulse per second (PPS). When the receiver is backed by a high-stability oscillator (e.g., an atomic clock or an oven-controlled crystal oscillator), it can provide time that is nanosecond-accurate. The time is delivered across the network via an off-the-shelf network card."
News items:
In the corner of an Ohio field, a laser-armed robot inches through a sea of onions, zapping weeds as it goes... The Guardian reports on the rise of weedkilling robots.
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Last April,?the term "metaverse"?saw a spike in activity on Google. Industry moguls were offering their visions of a digital universe, from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's thoughts?on the economy of the metaverse?to Roblox CEO David Baszucki?viewing it as an inevitability. Before that, the term (in one form or another) was buoyed for decades by books like Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Ready Player One. Facebook is actually working on a prototypical metaverse with Horizon, an exploratory VR world. In a recent Niantic blog, CEO John Hanke offers a slightly different perspective: the books were a warning, and we don't want to end up in a future where we prefer a closed-off digital fantasy to our reality. Nor should we ditch technology. Instead, he imagines a future where the digital supplements the physical:
"For us, it starts with a technology that connects the real world (the atoms) with the digital one (the bits). You could call it the 'real world metaverse' to distinguish it from the virtual videogame version, but honestly, I think we are just going to experience it as reality made better: one infused with data, information, services, and interactive creations. This has guided our work to date, both in terms of our first attempts to incorporate these concepts into products like Field Trip, Ingress, and Pokémon GO, and in terms of inventing critical technology to enable them."
News items:
A fascinating history of open source and free software from MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate (and sci-fi author) Cory Doctorow.
Four months after its GTC conference, Nvidia unveiled that CEO Jensen Huang's keynote was, for a brief moment completely digital. Huang, captured using a "truck full of DSLR cameras" and then animated, spent 14 seconds out of the nearly two-hour presentation in virtual form - and it's really hard to tell the two apart. In a blog post, Nvidia noted that "Digital Jensen was brought into a replica of his kitchen that was deconstructed to reveal the holodeck within Omniverse, surprising the audience and making them question how much of the keynote was real, or rendered." A recent Nvidia video demonstrated how a small team of artists were able to create Digital Jensen:
News items:
Since @images_ai launched at the end of June, it has gained a following for its constant feed of surreal, glitchy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes shocking pictures created with open-source machine-learning tools.
We usually leave it up to sci-fi luminaries to offer nuanced discussions around the consciousness of machines. But the academic literature around the subject is surprisingly far-reaching (see the 1964 paper,?Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life). In a recent Science and Engineering Ethics paper, two researchers collated a collection of hundreds of relevant studies on the subject. The widespread agreement: "That some artificial entities could warrant moral consideration in the future, if not also the present," where entities include "machines, computers, artificial intelligence, simulations, software, [or] robots created by humans or other entities." Something we found really interesting is engineers' attitude towards their creations:
"Individuals in disciplines associated with technical research on AI and robotics may be, on average, more hostile to granting moral consideration to artificial entities than researchers from other disciplines. We found that computer engineers and computer scientists had a lower average consideration score than other disciplines. Additionally, there are many roboticists and AI researcher signatories of the “Open Letter to the European Commission Artificial Intelligence and Robotics” (2018), which objects to a proposal of legal personhood for artificial entities."
News items:
In this Scientific American piece, John Horgan defends agnosticism as a stance toward the existence of God, interpretations of quantum mechanics, and theories of consciousness.