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Memia 2022.23: #cryptocrash⏬// sentient Kantian?😶‍🌫️// chief future officer🔮// dynamic world🌎// Web2+Web3=Web5?🧮// think gargantuan🦑// no more flat tyres🛞// Serfdom 2.0⚠️
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Memia Newsletter

Memia 2022.23: #cryptocrash⏬// sentient Kantian?😶‍🌫️// chief future officer🔮// dynamic world🌎// Web2+Web3=Web5?🧮// think gargantuan🦑// no more flat tyres🛞// Serfdom 2.0⚠️

Mmmm tasty styrofoam

Ben Reid
Jun 14
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Memia 2022.23: #cryptocrash⏬// sentient Kantian?😶‍🌫️// chief future officer🔮// dynamic world🌎// Web2+Web3=Web5?🧮// think gargantuan🦑// no more flat tyres🛞// Serfdom 2.0⚠️
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Kia ora,

Welcome to this week’s Wednesday newsletter - scanning across emerging tech and thinking about the future from Aotearoa New Zealand.

(The usual reminder: these weekly emails are *way* too long for most email clients (sorry, not sorry😇). iOS users - you can read Memia in the Substack app (click below). Gmail users, you can click on the email title above to read online and avoid the annoying “[Message clipped]” link.)

Read Memia in the new Substack app
Now available for iOS

Last weekend’s instalment of my upcoming book in 30 Sundays, ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa (paid subscribers only) went back to fundamentals and looked at the various lenses we can use to define the concept of “Aotearoa” in 2022. There are lots. (“Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s any less complex”).

Memia
⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa #2: Defining a small country
Kia ora, hope you’ve enjoyed a relaxing weekend! Welcome to the next instalment of the book I’m writing during 2022, ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa. I hope you enjoy reading - and please feel free to add feedback in the comments section below. Today’s piece goes back to fundamentals: what are the various lenses we can use to define “Aotearoa” in 2022…
Read more
a month ago · Ben Reid

(These weekly instalments are for paid subscribers only - otherwise readers can wait for the finished book when it arrives…!) Sign up for the next instalment here:


Weekly roundup

The most clicked link in last week’s edition (6% of openers) was the supremely excellent essay on Regrowth Economics: True Wealth Flows from Environmental and Civic Regeneration. Read and read again.

Also in the last week…

Negativity bias

  • Firstly, when I’m editing together this “latest news” section each week I’m always trying not to get hijacked by emotionally heightened and generally negative slants of almost all the short-term news headlines. (Particularly toxic is domestic politics - in any country, I’m guessing, but it seems that the majority of politics headlines are designed to elicit an angry / fearful reaction...)

  • So it’s important to occasionally remind myself of the hardwired psychology which drives attention-seeking headlines and comment algorithms. There’s lots of science out there on negativity bias - here’s an accessible overview:

    So, having said that…

🇺🇦👀Staying top of mind

  • Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine continues through its fourth month with ongoing fighting in Eastern Ukraine. Western media appetite for battlefront news is fading as the ongoing fight to move a line on a map backwards and forwards shift to the background of collective consciousness… but the events and losses on the ground are no less brutal or catastrophic for the people who live there on the ground. Kia kaha from Aotearoa.✊

  • Many expect the conventional conflict to draw out…while others raise the spectre of nuclear escalation. Interpreting world events is as VUCA as it has ever been.

  • The shadow war *may* have reached US soil this week (according to the thread below, the massive Freeport LNG complex represents “over 20% of US natural gas exports, with ~80% of its shipments direct to Europe right now”.)

    Twitter avatar for @WillManidisWill Manidis @WillManidis
    Freeport, one of the largest US plants exporting liquefied natural gas, exploded on Wednesday. Freeport represents a critical piece of infrastructure in Europe's divestment from Russian oil. Yet this story is almost no where in the mainsteam news, so let's dig in.
    Image

    June 13th 2022

    2,384 Retweets7,100 Likes
  • …And many parts of the world are now facing food price increases heavily exacerbated by the Ukraine war…including Aotearoa to some extent (intrigued to know more about those underlying stats…🤔):

    Net income effect of food-price changes, % of GDP
    Net income effect of food-price changes, % of GDP Photo: The Economist via RNZ

⏬#Cryptocrash

Twitter avatar for @MylesUdlandMyles Udland @MylesUdland
Have we tried turning the stock market off and turning it back on?
Image

June 10th 2022

1,152 Retweets9,402 Likes
  • At the time of writing, financial markets around the world are crashing around our heads, with crypto in particular nosediving: total cryptocurrency market cap (as measured in US$, anyway) fell under US$1 trillion for first time since Jan 2021. (That’s down over 66% in 8 months!!). Bitcoin went under US$23K, wiping all of its gains from the past 18 months — and Ethereum fared even worse, down over 40% in less than a week to under US$1100 at one point.

  • These numbers could well go down even further, illuminating just how much of the crypto “boom” has been pure tulip mania speculation and grift… as so many commentators are only to happy to point out. This certainly feels like a mark-to-market event.

  • However… for anyone keeping the faith with the conventional financial system, the Fed money printer could still be forced to go Brrrrrrrr any time….:

“At some point, something big like Lehman Bros. breaks. Someplace there is a weakest hand in the too-big-to-fail world, and rarely do we know the garbage that hidden hand has been holding until it breaks. We’ve seen many times over the past two decades how that kind of event can materialize in just one day. Literally one day! That’s when we get one of those spectacular bear market waterfalls where the Dow plunges 2,000-3,000 points in one day and then falls another 1,500 the next and still keeps stumbling down, crying for the Fed to save it…

…So, what happens if the Fed decides that it needs to rescue stocks and bonds with a return to QE or lower interest rates… For the first time that I can think of, the red-hot market many speculators now want to dive into is not FAANG stocks or any kind of stocks and not the safety of bonds, but the assurance of great and rapid gains in commodities in a time of widespread and growing shortages. So, now where does the free Fed fuel go? Most of it piles into the commodities market…”

— David Haggith, Seeking Alpha

  • Buy dairy futures, then.😒

  • Personally I’m not completely sucked into the “Crypto’s just a big ponzi scheme” vortex. Crypto is unusual in that it’s been subject to way more hype than most any other tech. But from my viewpoint there are still reasons to be cautiously patient with the technology in the long term… as with any emerging innovation these things take several early iterations to mature and evolve to then prove themselves at scale.

  • In particular, the Ethereum economy took a big step forward this week as the oldest testnet Ropsten successfully made the transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). (The full switch to PoS should massively reduce the CO2 emissions profile by ~99.95% and improve scalability and performance overall …and gas fees, natch…… among many other advantages) The Ropsten Merge is one of the last steps before the Ethereum Mainnet’s actual transition to the Consensus Layer (formerly ETH 2.0) now slated for August this year.

  • The stakes on the Merge could not be higher for all of Crypto and Web3, tbh. If this works then expect all major cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin) to migrate to PoS over the next few years and for the technology to mount a viable challenge to the conventional global banking / money exchange system. (Also expect the “flippening” to happen sooner rather than later, albeit at an order of magnitude lower price point…)

  • As a senior Mastercard Exec recently stated: Crypto needs to become an “invisible” part of the financial system to enable mass adoption.

😶‍🌫️Sentient Kantian?

  • The other major clickbait story which hit the news wires this week:

Twitter avatar for @tomgaraTom Gara @tomgara
This discussion between a Google engineer and their conversational AI model helped cause the engineer to believe the AI is becoming sentient, kick up an internal shitstorm and get suspended from his job. And it is absolutely insane.
washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
Image
Image
Image
Image

June 11th 2022

18,286 Retweets93,759 Likes
  • So… firstly this appears to have been a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors stunt on the part of the “AI Engineer” involved - Ramez Naam has a thread on how what is presented is a highly edited transcript, pieced together and re-ordered from parts of 9 different conversations.

  • Nonetheless:

    Twitter avatar for @ramezRamez Naam @ramez
    There's every reason to believe that machines can be sentient. There's no fundamental philosophical or scientific reason they can't be. There's very little reason to believe that we're anywhere near that point today, or heading there soon, and many reasons not to. 2/2

    June 12th 2022

    34 Retweets320 Likes
  • How does biological humanity abstract current ethical / societal norms to accommodate non-biological “sentience” *when* it arrives? Recommended reading is the working paper by Nick Bostrom et al: Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society which I flagged a couple of weeks ago in Memia 2022.21.

  • More immediately challenging is the application of this soon-to-be-mainstream technology in the hands of malicious actors. I agree with John Robb below that the near future internet/metaverse is on course to become an uninterpretable cacophony and the time to start building your personal dark forest network is now.

Twitter avatar for @johnrobbJohn Robb @johnrobb
Add in visual and auditory overlays through augmented reality (2024 is when this will start to take off), which allows the AI to appear human in a human context, and the confusion will be extreme. No amount of labeling or warnings will suffice to counter it.

June 12th 2022

9 Retweets50 Likes

🔮Chief Future Officer

Thanks to my regular LinkedIn correspondent1 Rob Warner for tagging me into this article on FastCompany: Five benefits of hiring a chief futurist officer (together with clichéd stock photo of *young woman in short sleeved dress in abstract virtual reality scene*).

The post itself *isn’t that much tbh* but it did prompt me to reflect on the roles that I’ve been performing with some organisations for several years now - which could accurately be described as being a “CFO” (Chief Future Officer) on a fractional basis.

My observation is that most organisations (whether they are tech companies or… very much not) aren’t geared up with strategic or foresight antennae much beyond this year’s annual plan and budget. And they certainly aren’t big enough to be able to hire a full-time “Chief Futurist” role… and so will often engage with me / someone like me to fill that gap. Mostly it works, although it takes a while to build and diffuse capability — strategy and foresight are muscles that need regular exercise.

Another observation is cadence: some organisations like to engage on long term thinking monthly(!), some quarterly and some annually or even less… so far I’m still trying to get a read of what’s optimum for which type of organisation…mostly I think it’s a combination of the individuals involved and the rate of change in the sector they are operating in. (Eg Forestry vs. AI).

Anyway, to cut a long story short… after a bunch of LinkedIn banter on a Friday night I awarded myself a new job title, feels kinda authentic…!😇


[Weak] signals

And on to this week’s curation of tech signals from the near — and far — futures…

🌎Dynamic World

Google launched Dynamic World - an interactive, near realtime land cover dataset for our constantly changing planet. It’s pretty impressive:

🧮Web2+Web3=Web5?

Jack Dorsey’s TBD project announced Web5: an extra decentralized platform. A set of open source code libraries (still under development) which aim to enable 3rd party developers to bring decentralized identity and data storage to their applications.

@jack typically edgy:

Twitter avatar for @jackjack @jack
this will likely be our most important contribution to the internet. proud of the team. #web5 (RIP web3 VCs 🤫)
developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/

TBD @TBD54566975

Web5: An extra decentralized web platform https://t.co/LDW3MZ8tON

June 10th 2022

2,640 Retweets12,301 Likes

The reality is slightly more mundane…:

Lamina1

  • Luminary cyberpunk scifi author Neal Stephenson (noneother than the *actual* inventor of the term “metaverse”) put his name to a new “Layer 1 Blockchain”, Lamina1 to support a “free”, “provably carbon negative” metaverse.

    • Tracking this one, he’s one very smart mind decades ahead of the rest of us.

      Twitter avatar for @decryptmediaDecrypt @decryptmedia
      ‘Snow Crash’ Author Neal Stephenson Is Building a ‘Free Metaverse’ Called Lamina1 ►
      decrypt.co/102646/snow-cr…
      Image

      June 11th 2022

      18 Retweets59 Likes

🦑Think gargantuan

Forget Think Big: Japan Is Dropping a Gargantuan Turbine Into The Ocean to Harness 'Limitless' Energy.

IHI Corporation has successfully tested a 330-ton prototype, ‘Kairyu’ to generate electricity from oceanic currents, 50 metres below the surface. Although the amounts generated from this prototype were relatively modest (only 100KW at 1-2 metres per second current), IHI is planning a much larger 2MW turbine:

“IHI estimates that if the energy present in the Kuroshio current could be harnessed, it could feasibly generate around 205 gigawatts of electricity, an amount it claims is in the same ballpark as [all of Japan’s'] current power generation.”

A perennial opportunity for Aotearoa as well - currents in Te Moana-o-Raukawa / Cook Strait, with very fast tidal currents of up to 2.5 metres per second calculated back in 2008 when a similar project was investigated.

Apple RoomPlan

Despite the lack of concrete announcements on their forthcoming VR / AR offerings at their recent WWDC22 event, Apple did wow the room with their seamless 3D spatial scanning API demo. Combine this with NeRFs and you can see where this is going…

Future speedy air transport?

Mayman Aerospace revealed a prototype of their VTOL P2 Speeder, featuring a modular design for autonomous or piloted flight, aimed at “good for humanity” applications including firefighting, search and rescue, medevac… and then law enforcement and military as you scroll further down their website…

Credit: Mayman Aerospace

Future sea transport

Meanwhile on the water:

Twitter avatar for @memialabsMemia @memialabs
Artemis Technologies Launch to Market the World’s First Commercially Viable Zero-Emission 100% Electric Foiling Workboats -
Workboat365.com Artemis Technologies Launch to Market the World’s First Commercially Viable Zero-Emission 100% Electric Foiling Workboats - Workboat365.comWith a top speed of 34 knots and a range of 60 nautical miles, these vessels will transform the global workboat market as it races to decarbonise Producing zero emissions, the vessels and systems developed by Artemis Technologies are designed to make the lowest possible impact on the environment Rep…buff.ly

June 14th 2022

🛞No more flat tyres

Ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles are driving moves towards non-pneumatic tyres (NPTs) - a detailed overview of upcoming tyre technology from the BBC:

Twitter avatar for @memialabsMemia @memialabs
Could flat tyres soon be a thing of the past?
buff.ly/3xm9V8O
Image

June 14th 2022

1 Like

Full battery but no sleep

The new fold-up Shine Turbine by Canadian start-up Aurea Technologies offers "wind power that fits in your backpack" - able to collect as much as three phone charges worth of power in an hour. (Define a “phone charge”?)

Credit: Shine Turbine

Yes, you’d wake up in the morning with a fully charged battery, but…

Continuous BECs

(And thanks to Andrew for generally being my physics antennae, also flagging this significant advance in quantum physics this week):

  • Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) are “macroscopic coherent matter waves” that have revolutionized quantum science and atomic physics. A new paper in Nature describes how they can be produced continuously - opening a new roadmap to many different types of quantum sensors.

Mmmm tasty styrofoam

Finally, scientists at University of Queensland have discovered that “superworms”— Zophobas morio darkling beetle larvae — can survive on a diet of polystyrene…and their gut enzymes could hold the key to higher polystyrene recycling rates.

This handout from from the University of Queensland received on June 9, 2022 shows a Zophobas morio 'superworm'
Credit: University of Queensland via Phys.org

Mind expanding

A couple of links to tickle the neurons as usual…

⚠️Banksters + investors + rent-seeking = Serfdom 2.0?

A controversial piece by Jared A. Brock on the potential dangers of super-financialisation.

Twitter avatar for @memialabsMemia @memialabs
You Will Own Nothing by 2050 — And Here’s Exactly How It Will Happen
You Will Own Nothing by 2050 — And Here’s Exactly How It Will HappenCorporate enslavement of the masses is now inevitable unless we make this one changebuff.ly

June 13th 2022

“There is a name for an economic system in which the vast majority own nothing and have to slave their entire lives just to stay alive.

It’s called serfdom.”

Would you trust automated government?

Sharing another article by Antistatic’s Anna and Kelly Pendergrast, this time in New Public: Can New Zealanders trust an automated government? exploring the tension between increased efficiency and maintaining trust in public services:

“Automation allows for increased speed, scale, and sometimes immutability, all of which can have huge benefits—especially for people profiting from the efficiency gains as a result. But without taking steps to build trust over time and involve users and diverse teams in design, trust in digital systems will remain unevenly distributed. Privileged people will likely trust that systems will serve them while less-privileged communities have little choice but to engage with digital infrastructures they don’t trust but which define the course of their lives. 

If governments and organizations want to have trustworthy systems that truly serve a broader public, sometimes decision-making needs to be slowed down to a human scale, with the space to make adjustments to account for the needs of people affected. Because you don’t build trust with technical systems. You build trust through relationships.”

(I’m looking forward to getting into this topic in more detail in ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa… fair to say there are other perspectives that trust some technical systems more than people!).


Rollcall

Just a couple of shout-outs this week:

  • Aotearoa AI pioneers Soul Machines launched a “digital twin” of golfer Jack Nicklaus. The video below feels like SM’s animation tech (which was bleeding edge just a few years ago) isn’t quite keeping up with the latest avatar rendering tech - eg Unreal’s MetaHuman Creator)… but the use case is fascinating: hints again at a mass market for “digital immortality” in the future....

  • Dan Khan, stalwart of Aotearoa’s startup scene, is working with collaborators building a new DAO: Startup Community Next. The team are developing the DAO’s governance and operations in a cycle of “seasons”:

(Invite for folks to get involved in the link above.)


Nuggets and gems

And to end with…, mostly AI art again this week - including one to chill your heart and then a few more to warm it up again!.

[…] Starring Kermit

  • This thread of DALL-E images of Kermit the frog in the style of various movies/shows) is hilarious (and just…uncanny!).

Twitter avatar for @HvnsLstAngelHeavensLastAngel @HvnsLstAngel
“A still of Kermit The Frog in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)” #dalle
Image

May 31st 2022

2,159 Retweets9,539 Likes

Set reminder

  • Outputs from the free (but congested!) DALL-E Mini are doing the rounds on Twitter this week. Give it a try! (Nothing like the resolution or smartness of DALL-E 2 but still pretty amazing). I’m not entirely sure this one below is genuine… but this is by far the darkest AI art I’ve ever seen so far. Book into your calendar not to go out on Nov 5 2024, eh…

Two furry robot tweets

  • OK you can open your eyes now. Furry talking robots!

Twitter avatar for @Laughs_4_AllLaughs 4 All 🤟 @Laughs_4_All
Story time...😇🐶📖🔊

June 13th 2022

6,324 Retweets37,774 Likes
Twitter avatar for @annalapwoodAnna Lapwood @annalapwood
Good morning. This is my new favourite video on the internet. That is all.

June 9th 2022

700 Retweets3,040 Likes

¿Qué tal?

  • And raising the tone to finish with, Hubble is still magnificent. (Note to self: James Webb Space Telescope will release its 1st science-quality images July 12!!!)

Twitter avatar for @redditSpacePornSpace Porn @redditSpacePorn
The Sombrero Galaxy from Hubble
Image

June 6th 2022

7,921 Retweets73,128 Likes

That’s all for another week…thanks as always for getting in touch with your ideas, thoughts, feedback, links - see you next week!

Ngā mihi

Ben

1

But not on Twitter, what’s going on there? :-)

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Memia 2022.23: #cryptocrash⏬// sentient Kantian?😶‍🌫️// chief future officer🔮// dynamic world🌎// Web2+Web3=Web5?🧮// think gargantuan🦑// no more flat tyres🛞// Serfdom 2.0⚠️
memia.substack.com
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Matt Boyd
Jun 14Liked by Ben Reid

The Google sentience saga highlights some important issues in philosophy of mind, eg how will we ever know if an AGI is sentient (the ‘problem of other minds’). The Bostrom/Schulman paper (probably) rightly counts ‘substrate independence’ or ‘multiple realisability’ as features of minds, ie it’s about what’s happening experientially not what stuff it’s made of, and also accepts a processing speed ambivalence axiom, ie AIs might experience a lot more in a short time depending on clock speed. But these axioms open an immense can of worms (perhaps proving too much), eg information processing in immense fungal mycelium networks at (‘slow’) biological speeds (conscious? Experiential?) or forests? Could they be having thoughts on an intergenerational human scale? Again problem of other minds. I don’t buy the Google engineers intuitions (yet) but knowing will be almost impossible and attributing rights or beliefs or experiences to AI may lead to a revolution in attributions to other vast complex information processing systems.

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