Poetic Time/ Fifth Force of Nature/ $1B Investment in Carbon Removal/ The Case Against AI Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
Poetic Time. I am an avid poetry reader, and I have?articulated in the past how poetry should be an essential tool for managers and leaders ?to much better deal with complexity and uncertainty, as it trains the brain to do exactly that.
Furthermore, I have been thinking a lot about time lately, and a separate post on the topic is in the make…
Hence, I felt obliged to feature a?piece by Nathan Gardels , the editor-in-chief of Noema , talking about “poetic time”. I do recommend reading the post, below are a summary and a few thoughts of mine.
Gardels, in his post, challenges the feverish emphasis on the rapidity of AI computations in our accelerated age. He juxtaposes this speed with the concept of "poetic time"—a mindful reflection on the essence of moments, often overlooked by machines as mere data (and not only by machines actually...).
Where supercomputers are celebrated for executing up to a quintillion calculations per second, Gardels wonders if this "age of acceleration" might be eroding the awe and wonder found in the contemplative tempo of poetic time.?
This thought resonated a lot with me, as I have been trying more and more to be “in the moment”, and experience what is happening for what it is, and, when possible, slow down and “feel” the moment.
In his piece, by drawing on insights from two iconic 20th-century poets, Octavio Paz and Czes?aw Mi?osz, Gardels paints a vivid contrast between the hurried, digitized world and the profound stillness of poetry.?
According to Gardels, Mi?osz believes that poetry sheds light on the vibrancy and multiplicity of life, providing an antidote to a world losing its color to nihilism. He envisions a mindful state where "time stops," liberating reality from suffering and enabling an unclouded view of existence. For Mi?osz, “mindfulness occurs in the moment when time stops. And what is time? Time is our regrets, our shame. Time contains all things toward which we strive and from which we escape. In that moment of time stopped, reality is liberated from suffering. Then, in art, you can have a purified vision of things independently of our dirt. Everything that concerns us disappears, is dissolved, and it does not matter whether the eye that looks is that of a beggar or a king.”??As Gardels puts it: the “eternal moment” in the gaze of the Polish poet is like “a gleam on the current of a black river,” retrieved from movement by mindful attention.
Gardels refers then to Paz, who further positions poetic time within a broader framework of societal evolution. Contrary to the linear progress championed by modernity, Paz suggests that the true essence lies in the fleeting equilibrium of the instant—a transient blend of all of history and immediate absence. Using Paz’s words “In the moment, the dark and the luminous side of human nature are reconciled. The paradox of the instant is that it is simultaneously all time and no time. It is here and it is gone. It is the point of equilibrium between being and becoming. The instant is a window to the other side of time — eternity. The other world can be glimpsed in the flash of its existence. In this sense, poets have always had something to show modern man.” While typing this last sentence I had to ask myself if the fact that the current longevity investment surge has been driven by tech billionaires is possibly the result of their lack of “poetic time” perception… but I am digressing.
It seems to me, that in our ever more forceful attempt to conquer time through speed, we are more and more forgetting the beauty of stopping it, even if momentarily, and are therefore missing what an enrichment it is to be aware of the constant transition between being and becoming.
In Paz words:
For a moment, sometimes, we see?
—not with our eyes, but with our thoughts—?
time resting in a pause.?
The world half-opens and we glimpse?
the immaculate kingdom?
the pure forms, presences?
unmoving, floating?
on the hour,?
a river stopped.
As we stride into a hyper-modern era, Gardels suggests we embrace the lessons of poetic time even more fervently. It's not about denouncing technological advances but about harmonizing them with the profound insights gleaned from the deliberate perception of “poetic time”. After all, true wisdom might lie in striking a balance between the accelerated and the eternal.
In an unprecedented move to kick-start the?direct air capture ?(DAC) industry, the?DOE ?recently announced $1.2B in funding “to develop regional hubs that can draw down and store away at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.”
“In effect, the federal government is helping to support the buildout of the direct-air-capture industry and acting as a customer for it, both of which will be crucial for developing the sector,” says?Sasha Stashwick , director of policy at Carbon180 .
Skeptics ?of the program have criticized fossil fuel companies like?Occidental Petroleum ’s involvement in the initiative. CEO?Vicki Hollub ?recently stated that purchasing DAC carbon offsets “gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
News items:
Could floating solar panels “provide effectively unlimited solar energy?”?New research ?indicates that “offshore solar in Indonesia alone could generate about 35,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy a year, which is similar to current global electricity production (30,000TWh per year ).”
Amazon?talks a good game ?when it comes to GenAI, but reality paints a different picture.?OpenAI/Microsoft ,?Google , and?Meta ?have all built up a significant lead over Amazon and AWS in GenAI tech.
VP Analyst at Gartner?Chirag Dekate ?says, “Amazon is not used to chasing markets. Amazon is used to creating markets. And I think for the first time in a long time, they are finding themselves on the back foot and they are working to play catch up.”
Despite being late to the dance, Amazon may still hold a long-term advantage over its competitors. In 2013, AWS “quietly started production of custom silicon”?Nitro chips ?and continues to develop AI-specialized chips Trainium and Inferentia.
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“Inferentia allows customers ‘to deliver very, very low-cost, high-throughput, low-latency, machine learning inference, which is all the predictions of when you type in a prompt into your generative AI model, that’s where all that gets processed to give you the response,’” says AWS VP?Matt Wood .
News items:
In 3-5% of cancer patients, the origination of tumors eludes the diagnostic efforts of oncologists. Such “enigmatic cancers” — many of which “have metastasized throughout the body” flummox doctors who seek to deliver “precision drugs… typically approved for specific cancer types.” New research has led to?OncoNPC , an AI model that enables “a 2.2-fold increase in the number of patients who could be eligible for a genomically guided, targeted treatment” in initial studies.
Could there be a fifth force of nature?
Modern physics has long held that there are "four fundamental forces in nature,” but recent experiments at the Fermilab particle accelerator ?suggest we may need to consider another.
Wobbling?muons ?- “one of the… basic building blocks of the universe” — exhibited behavior at Fermilab inexplicable by our current understanding of physics.
According to?Mitesh Patel , Research Fellow at?CERN ’s?Large Hadron Collider , “We’re talking about a fifth force because we can’t necessarily explain the behavior [in these experiments] with the four we know about.”
News items:
The?“lunar gold rush” ?is on. Russia recently launched “its first moon-landing spacecraft in 47 years.” China and the US are also actively pursuing?moon mining ?opportunities. Numerous valuable materials — like?Helium-3 ?and?rare earth metals ?— are plentiful on the moon, but how moon mining would work “is not entirely clear.” Water is present that could make a “long-term human presence” feasible, but “robots would have to do most of the hard work.”
A new “point-and-shoot” digital camera harnesses Stable Diffusion’s GenAI to make your photos retro, sci-fi, zombie, pirate-themed, and much more.” The?DreamGenerator , invented by Snap AR designer?Kyle Goodrich ?offers “30 different prompt themes” and “simplif[ies] AI tools in a way that really allows anyone to play around with them.”
News items:
Ever tried chatting with a non-player character (NPC) in a video game? “Nobody has ever accused them of being clever conversationalists.” Thanks to ChatGPT, that’s beginning to change. Replica recently released a?demo ?of AI Voice technology made with?Unreal Engine ?and claims it “has the potential to eliminate critical bottlenecks in the development of narrative-heavy games.” But apparently, some NPCs need virtual therapy. When asked her name, an NPC responded, “My name is Chelsie, and I come from a world of disappointment. I don’t know what I am or where I am. Nothing makes sense anymore.”
Mother of the Cloud ,?Judy Estrin , has “never had such mixed feelings about technological innovation” as she does about AI. She argues that Generative AI is a misleading term and calls innovations like ChatGPT “Performative AI,” saying “machines wielding the power of language [are] seductive,” but it produces “mimicry — and sometimes fakery — [not]deep creativity, accuracy, or empathy.”
According to Estrin: “AI?everything, everywhere, all at once, is not inevitable if we use our powers to question the tools and the people shaping them. Private and public sector leaders can slow the frenzy through acts of friction; simply not giving in to the ‘Authoritarian Intelligence’ emanating out of Silicon Valley and our collective groupthink.”
News items:
Contrails (not?chemtrails ) are “responsible for more than a third of the global warming that can be attributed to planes.” Google’s?Climate AI Initiatives ?team has combined existing turbulence avoidance software with AI to reduce “contrails by as much as 54%.” Google Climate AI initiative leader,?Juliet Rothenberg , says, “Our goal is really to make contrails avoidance as ubiquitous and straightforward as turbulence avoidance… There are software platforms that enable us to scale that up really readily.”
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1 年Appreciate this philosophical bent, Massimo. Regardless of the pace of technology, we will be happier and healthier when we are less conscious of the passage of time and simply receiving the present moment.