Memia 2022.14🇺🇦: 9 meals from anarchy🥡// line go up📈// line go down📉// DALL-E 2🎨🤯// reasoning with PaLM😶🌫️// state of Unreal🪄// meat safari🐅🐘🥩// RIP company boards?⏏️
Cool eels
Kia ora,
Welcome to another weekly Memia newsletter, scanning across emerging tech and the unfolding future from Aotearoa New Zealand. Once again it’s a large one.
Special welcome to all the new readers who have signed up in the last week - great to have you here! Feel free to forward to a friend if you enjoy receiving the newsletter.
Weekly roundup
The most clicked link in last week’s edition (12% of openers) was the Proclaimers siren in Edinburgh.😁
The week’s vibe (if that’s not too flippant a word) is *even more unchained* than usual. More tweets and videos in the mix this week just to try to express the massive shifts going on right now around the world. Strap in.
🥡9 meals from anarchy
In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”
Covid-19 has now started spreading in China which is still attempting to enforce a “zero covid” strategy.
The 25-million-plus-population Shanghai is seeing rapid breakdown in social cohesion as the city enters its 3rd week of Covid-19 lockdown (or “area-separated and batch-separated control” as the government puts it).
Watch this 77-minute montage of 100+ video clips and still photos gleaned from Chinese social media platforms in recent days. Last-mile food supply chains appear to be collapsing and people are going without food for days on end. Building entrances are boarded up. Entire high rise neighbourhoods echo to screaming at night. Street protests and military vehicles have been seen on the streets. and one photo shows military pouring into the city. We don’t see footage like this making it outside of China too often.
Children are separated from their families and sent to quarantine. Here they each have their own barcode:
Some of the dystopian scenes are like something straight out of Bladerunner:
Pre-apocalyptic scenes. China’s authoritarian government is faced with the same imminent health system collapse in the face of Omicron as every other country worldwide has … but with a population of 1.4 billion and significantly lower vaccination rates than some countries, including Aotearoa, Covid-related deaths will likely number in the millions. The government are still dogmatically pursuing the “zero Covid” goal… but you wonder what the tipping point will be until the situation just forces a “let it rip” scenario…and how much starvation / civil unrest / state violence against its own citizens will escalate before then. Watching closely.
(Re: “watching closely”: At the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder how this unprecedented uncensored footage is suddenly making it through the Great Firewall and being amplified on Western social media…is this the latest target aimed to catch the “Swarm”’s attention after Ukraine coverage has calmed down for a week?)
📈Line go up: food prices
Overnight, US annual inflation hit 8.5%, driven by energy and food prices. (Compared to Aotearoa, 5.9% currently and forecast to go as high as 7.5% mid-year).
It’s true, global food prices have shot up to record levels and still rising:
Food import-dependent Middle Eastern countries are the most vulnerable to a global wheat shortage due to the Russo-Ukraine war (and I had no idea that Poland or Ukraine are in the Arctic circle…)
(There are signs that Lebanon may be the first country to run out of wheat due to the Ukraine war):
Closer to home. input costs for food production in Aotearoa are soaring too. Stuff heralds ‘terrifying’ food prices to come
One farmer reports that his fuel costs rose from $1.39 a litre in December to $2.16 a litre by March 11. And fertiliser:
“The price rises that we’re seeing coming through that haven’t arrived yet are terrifying. We’ve seen our fertiliser costs go up 200 to 300 per cent in a year, and some of the indications are another 50 to 100 per cent rises are just around the corner.”
(Interesting aside: co-ops Ballance and Ravensdown together account for 95% of Aotearoa’s fertiliser imports. Another structural duopoly…)
We’re going to see some rapid and painful price discovery in the next 6 months as previous household “staples” become unaffordable. But to a degree this is just the planet and the biosphere we exist within flexing back: we know that the current food production and consumption habits of of 7+ billion people are just unsustainable… watch for more automated, more resilient, less resource-intensive, less environmentally damaging food production technologies (vertical indoor farming, synthetic proteins, functional foods…) to start establishing their position in supply chains and disrupt the old ways of doing it.
(This in the same week as it emerged that NZ diplomats helped remove references to the need for "plant-based" diets from the latest IPCC report's influential summary.)🙈🙉
📉Line go down: demand
China’s Omicron nightmare is just beginning while most of the rest of the world is already through the first waves of the pandemic. Already-stretched global supply chains are bracing for even worse chaos in the months to come. But curiously ex-Shanghai shipping rates are falling from record highs last year … some analysts interpreting this as a signal of a sharp drop off in demand (=recession) in months to come.
💣🇺🇦$20,000 drone warfare
(I’ve flagged this as an imminent eventuality a few times in the past year…) Custom-made US$20,000 drones are being used successfully to drop explosive grenades on Russian tanks in Ukraine.
Inside the elite Ukrainian drone unit founded by volunteer IT experts: 'We are all soldiers now.'
Footage below, (remembering that people are inside those tanks being destroyed).
Fiduciary duty
Following on from last week’s coverage, Elon Musk’s plans to step into a director role at Twitter fell through abruptly: The Verge has a good breakdown: What is going on with Elon Musk and Twitter? Next up?
(In the same week, ICYMI, SpaceX successfully launched the first fully-private astronaut mission to the ISS. Not that Musk needed the distraction or anything…)
[Weak] signals
Some major tech developments unveiled in the last week, including mindblowing new AI models for image and text generation. We live in an age of miracle and wonder.
🤧Cough into this app
Pharma giant Pfizer offered AU$100M to buy Brisbane-based company ResApp - makers of a smartphone app which can diagnose and measure the severity of a respiratory condition using sound - and in trials is 92% effective in diagnosing Covid-19 just by listening to someone cough. (Likely this isn’t only about the app itself but more an acqui-hire to bring in a world-leading machine learning medical diagnostics team).
🎨🤯OpenAI DALL-E 2
OpenAI released the 2nd iteration of DALL-E, a generative AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.
The capabilities are mindblowing, just 2 examples from thousands more on the hashtag #dalle2. I’m on the waitlist to get access.
Implications:
The ability to illustrate any concept or piece of writing with a professional-level visual will soon be in the hands of any creator. Illustrators and visual designers have just been disrupted.
But as a creative ideation tool, the iterative text diffs feature is going to lead to wildly imaginative places...smart visual designers will just add DALL-E to their toolbox.
In some way, DALL-E incorporates humanity’s entire visual cultural inheritance up until this moment in time - everything that a human has seen fit to draw or photograph in all of history is now in there. As a result, its ability to “reimagine” is still based only upon recombination of this vast historical dataset…(but whether that is fundamentally different to how human creativity works is a philosophical debate).
It also renders belief in value inherent in digital imagery hilariously redundant: (LOL “A Bored Ape Yacht Club chimp with a pirate hat and a sardonic expression”)
😶🌫️Reasoning with PaLM
A few days earlier from OpenAI, Google AI announced their new 540-billion-parameter Pathways Language Model (PaLM):
“a single model that could generalize across domains and tasks while being highly efficient.”
(In comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters - arguably the number of parameters for large AI language models is the new “Moore’s Law”).
In particular, by combining model scale with chain-of-thought prompting, PaLM shows “breakthrough capabilities on reasoning tasks that require multi-step arithmetic or common-sense reasoning”:
It can even explain jokes:
Again, this is just the next productivity increment after autocomplete … expect this kind of functionality to start appearing in Gmail, Google Docs, Outlook and Office (Microsoft have licensed GPT-3) within a few months…
🪄State of Unreal
Epic Games formally released Unreal Engine 5. Frankly incredible technology applicable across game design, cinematography, animation and even real-world applications like architecture and digital twin modelling.
Epic’s business model is key to its success: the game designer is completely free to download and publish your own game - with a 5% royalty payable only once revenues go above US$1M.
This keynote from last week showcases the capabilities of Epic’s new platform… (interesting also for the neurodiversity if not gender diversity of senior executives).
Oligarchs in the air
Futurist design shop Lazzarini released a concept video for an “Air Yacht” recently (which may or may not violate the laws of gravity but still…)
🐅🐘🥩Meat safari
Lab-grown meat company Primeval Foods plans to bring a whole range of exotic meats to the market, including zebra, lion, elephant, panther, leopard and tiger.
(I thought this was clever from their website:)
Cool eels
A Japanese data centre has started an “eel farming side hustle” - it already uses snow for cooling to reduce its carbon footprint - the highly-valued eels are farmed in tanks heated to 33 degrees celsius by the datacentre cooling system.
Molecular robotics
Keep an eye out for DNA motors… (36 years later, the promises in Eric Drexler’s 1986 book Engines of Creation : The Coming Era of Nanotechnology may finally be just around the corner.)
🌳Better trees?
Plant more (enhanced?) trees. Scientists at Living Carbon (“Plants Enhanced for Carbon Capture and Storage“) claimed that by inserting new genes into poplar trees, they can make the plants grow 53 percent more quickly than their non-edited equivalents:
🧻Better loo roll
Alternatively / as well, reduce tree consumption: Seattle-based CloudPaper produces toilet paper made out from Bamboo. According to their marketing:
“40,0001 trees are cut down every day to meet consumer demand for toilet paper and kitchen roll, contributing to almost 20% of global deforestation…Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants in the world, growing up to 3 feet per day while absorbing massive amounts of carbon during its growth. Bamboo reaches harvest maturity in just three years, and unlike trees, bamboo does not need to be replanted after it is harvested as the bamboo will continue to grow…”
Mind expanding
Two divergent stories about achieving consensus:
⏏️RIP company boards?
As previously reported, there are moves in Australia to establish a new DAO company structure. Kevin Jenkins writes for the IoD: Will DAOs disrupt governance in New Zealand?
“…the current forms of director duties and fiduciary duties owed to shareholders don't reflect the DAO model (at least on public blockchains) where the lack of transparency in a company is not a feature in DAOs.”
In future if “companies” are governed by their owners using decentralised consensus algorithms (on-chain or off-chain)… what’s the point of appointed directors?
🐝Hive democracy
Research from 2010 I just came across, dancing honeybees use democratic process when selecting a new home. Scouts identify new sites and return with a “dance” to relay their opinion to other scouts… after a few iterations the whole swarm selects a site. Not dissimilar to how neurons work.
Rollcall
A couple of shoutouts around the motu this week:
🦾🦾Bert and Ernie
Given all the concerns around supply chain issues with China, Kirikiriroa-based agritech exporter Gallagher Animal Management has re-shored manufacturing of its “Ring Top” posts back to Aotearoa using robotics. (“Bert and Ernie” are two hi-tech vertical moulding machines which replace previous manual production techniques. Expect this trend to accelerate as the labour arbitrage incentives for offshoring are overtaken by automation…and Aotearoa will be all the more resilient for it. Now if only we had a critical mass domestic robot manufacturer…
Swooping in
Another international aerospace firm testing in the airspace around Ōtautahi: Space Aero is trialling medical supply deliveries on West Coast and urban delivery networks in Christchurch.
Hidden gems
More content than usual this week… the world gets busier every day…! Some diversions to relax the mind…
Greatest pictures in history
Go into this thread and you may never come out…amazing crowd-sourced collection of iconic historical images.
Keeping watch
@NickKleer is a South African wildlife guide, photographer and videographer. Occasionally he has some little helpers.
🧔Beardyman at the Proms
Finally, sharing an incredible performance which the YouTube algo threw up at me this weekend while I was convalescing from Covid (Yep my turn came around after doing my best to avoid… been playing catchup all week so sorry the newsletter missed the usual 7am deadline…! Coming right now but certainly knocks it out of you).
The UK’s Darren Foreman (aka “Beardyman”) is one of the world’s leading vocal “beatbox” artists and entertainers… but in this clip from 2011 he performs alongside a symphony orchestra (with Aussie comedian/pianist Tim Minchin too) at the Royal Albert Hall, uncannily imitating orchestral and jazz instruments and styles. A virtuoso musician.
Thanks as always for reading, especially to everyone who reaches out with feedback and links!🙏🙏🙏 Really appreciate it!
I’m taking a break from writing over the Easter holiday weekend - see you again next Wednesday!
Ngā mihi
Ben
If only the ute tax had been higher, and the transition to electric farm vehicles already underway (how badass is the Tesla cyber truck?), then fuel costs would not have risen. If the vision of Mangarara farm several years ago had spread more widely, then fertiliser would not be an issue (https://www.hbfuturefarming.org/news/article/1/greg-hart-looks-ahead-to-2030) If more people were producing 10,000kg fresh vegetables on 1/4 acre land in Auckland (https://tedxauckland.com/people/niva--yotam-kay/) then 'plant-based' wouldn't be an MFAT dirty word. Drain the swamp...
Re robots, manufacturing is the key, all NZ's fancy things need imported parts. We make steel, need more manufacturing, 3D printing, Marsden oil refinery to make plastics? Keep the infrastructure so it can refine crude in future if necessary. Absolute insanity to decommission and dismantle in the context of global fuel crisis. Accelerate decentralised renewables. Get rid of Rio Tinto so we can have our hydro power back (or hydrogen for West Coast milk trucks if Tesla farm equipment isn't to taste).
Is Drexler's 'grey goo' scenario also just around the corner?