Readings

“Science Isn’t Broken” by CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN

Article from fivethirtyeight.com:

“If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately.

(..) International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently accepted for publication a paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,” whose text was nothing more than those seven words, repeated over and over for 10 pages. Two other journals allowed an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper, “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.”

Revolutionary findings? Possibly fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad students discovered irregularities in Michael LaCour’s influential paper suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper shortly after, when LaCour’s co-author could find no record of the data.

Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.Continue reading→

“You Have a Notification: Welcome to the 24/7 Work Culture” by VIVEK WADHWA

Article featured in Singularity Hub‘s series ‘Future of Work’

“Netflix recently announced an unlimited paid-leave policy that allows employees to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption. It is trying to one-up tech companies that offer unlimited vacation as a benefit. These are all public-relations ploys and recruiting gimmicks. (…)

Urgent or not, the emails continue for 24 hours a day—even on weekends. (…)

The reality is that there is no 9 to 5 any more. We are always connected, always on, always working— (…) as we became chained to the Internet. (…) There is no longer an excuse for not working.” read full article

Interspecies organ transplant

It is now long awaited that some day humans will be able to raise human spare parts in other species.  Pigs are among the favored donors – perhaps due to the similar diet habits.

As this story by Antonio Regalado reports, researchers are presenting impressive progress in swapping hearts and kidneys among pigs and baboons (that would be us).  Get me a new liver and a double dry martini to celebrate, please.

And then we know as well that (other) scientific experiments made mice smarter by inserting human brain cells in them.

Now we just have to be careful how to mix (shake, don’t stir) these practices.  Make the pig too smart and I bet it won’t give away a heart so easily.

“When Machines Can Do Most Jobs—Passion, Creativity, and Reinvention Rule” by VIVEK WADHWA

story from Singularity Hub:

“(…) Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years(…)  within a decade (…)  five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. (…)

 Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. (…) 

 English, psychology, history, and arts majors have been at a financial disadvantage over the past few decades. Parents have encouraged their children to go into fields such as finance, engineering, law and medicine, because they’re where the big money has been. But that is changing.(…) . It doesn’t matter whether they want to be artists, musicians, or plumbers; the key is for children to understand that education is a lifelong endeavor and to be ready to constantly reinvent themselves.

We will all need to be able to learn new skills, think critically, master new careers, and take advantage of the best opportunities that come our way.

Technology is now as important a skill as are reading, writing, and mathematics. (…)

But this too is changing (…)  design and the soft sciences will gain increasing importance.

(…) Education will always be a platform on which to build success, but it really doesn’t matter what you study. (…) ”  Read full story

Artificial Intelligence tackles the Internet of Things

In “Connecting artificial intelligence with the internet of things” Andy Meek discusses some pros and cons in the future of merging Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things.  Reasons to be optimist, pitfalls and debate on its fears.

And Stephen Brennan’s “The Next Big Thing Is The Continuum” story is on how tech is the trends and challenges tech industry faces in trying to merge A.i. and I.O.T. in one new environment.

Suspicion smells

Reading newspaper used to wrap fish may be useful to read news with less bias.  Your own bias.

“Something smells fishy: Olfactory suspicion cues improve performance on the Moses illusion and Wason rule discovery task” indicates that exposure to fish smells may bring people to have less memory illusion and reduced confirmation bias.

One of the researchers, Eunjung Kim, of above paper has also studied this topic in his previous “Fishy Smells Improve Critical Thinking: Explorations of the Embodiment of Suspicion” work.

 

“Leisure, the Basis of Culture” review by Maria Popova

Posted on Brain Pickings “Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher’s Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism“:

” …In 1948 (…) German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) penned Leisure, the Basis of Culture(public library) — (…) triply timely today, in an age when we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.(…)

The Greek word for “leisure,” σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school (…)Pieper writes:

The original meaning of the concept of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”: in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on that world of work.

 

(..) But the question is this: can the world of man be exhausted in being “the working world”? (…)

Echoing Kierkegaard’s terrific defense of idleness as spiritual nourishment, Pieper writes:

The code of life in the High Middle Ages [held] that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work’s-sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanaticism should take its rise form the absence of a will to accomplish something.”  go to original post

 

 

“How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions” by Will Knight

From MIT Tech Review:

“Fully self-driving vehicles are still at the research stage, but automated driving technology is rapidly creeping into vehicles. (…)

As the technology advances, however, and cars become capable of interpreting more complex scenes, automated driving systems may need to make split-second decisions that raise real ethical questions.

(…) a child suddenly dashing into the road, forcing the self-driving car to choose between hitting the child or swerving into an oncoming van.

(…) “If that would avoid the child, if it would save the child’s life, could we injure the occupant of the vehicle? (…)

Others believe the situation is a little more complicated. For example, Bryant Walker-Smith (…) says plenty of ethical decisions are already made in automotive engineering. “Ethics, philosophy, law: all of these assumptions underpin so many decisions,” he says. “If you look at airbags, for example, inherent in that technology is the assumption that you’re going to save a lot of lives, and only kill a few.”

(…) “The biggest ethical question is how quickly we move. We have a technology that potentially could save a lot of people, but is going to be imperfect and is going to kill.”  read full article

 

Transhumanist Free Will

Even if you think debate over human free will has been conclusive (to say the least) or not agree in aphorisms as definitive judgements on the matter, Hank Pellissier’s “Free Will Does Not Exist – Should it be a Transhumanist Enhancement?” brings a refreshing debate on what would ‘enhanced’ human beings do about their possibility of free will.

“(…) We don’t have free will because human physiology isn’t wired that way. (…)

It is true that certain factions still believe in free will – Religionists and Libertarians – but I’m not in either camp. I’m an atheist social progressive.

Having established my opinion on free will, let’s proceed…(…)  Should 100% Free Will be a Transhumanist Goal? (…)  I believe free will isn’t available,but it could be attained, at least partially, perhaps through excruciating disciplines… or – definitely – via emerging transhuman technologies.

Returning to the present time, let’s examine the suffering caused by our enslavement to our outdated neurochemistry, which evolved to protect us from pre-civilization menaces. Let’s divide our investigation of the consequences into three categories:

Body –  Many people (…) enslaved to physical addictions that render them helpless. (…)

Emotion  – Humanity is cursed with negative feelings that injure us with internal pain and agony. (…)

Thought  – Our minds often flit spasmodically from one obsession to another, exhausting us with their randomness and superficiality. (…)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all these problems were eradicated?

Imagine an existence as Free-Will Transhumans, who decided 100% of the time what we wanted to think, feel, and do.. (…)

We’ll begin with options presently available, and continue from there into futuristic, far-out, fantastical possibilities.

Today’s Techniques and Technology  – Control of one’s thoughts and feelings can be improved via meditation. (…)

Pharmaceutical Control of our Biochemistry –  “Paradise engineering”, advocated by philosopher David Pearce of HedWeb.com, has “abolition of suffering” as its goal. (…)

Memory Erasure and Alteration + Injection of Joyful Invented Memories  – Our neurological response to situations is largely determined by memories of similar events. (…)

Rewiring Our Brains, with Wires – Our mental activity currently depends on largely-out-of-our-control neurochemical reactions….”  read full article