markjgsmith

2023/09/13 #

• cat << EOF > Last Man Standing Tech

  Eventually there will be AI that will be so powerful they will be able to decide who will be the winner in a death match between 2 humans. They will be able to do it with accuracy and precision comparable to chess players playing chess.

  Except they will be able to basically see infiniti number of moves into the future, in infinite dimensions. And people simply won’t interact with those that the AI tells them that they can’t beat. It could very well be something that we don't consciously choose.

  Last man standing tech will be a very big sector indeed.

  I make no judgement here as to whether I believe this to be a good or bad thing, only that it's a possible scenario we need to consider.

  This post was originally published as a note, but I decided to put it out as a blog post. Notes tend to be off the cuff, less well thought out.

  EOF

• cat << EOF > The Mental Health Deception

  When I was young we simply never spoke about mental health. There were normal people, and there were a very small amount of people that had mental disorders, and those people usually got locked away in mental asylums. That’s just how it was pretty much. It’s horrible to think that it was like that, but it was. In some places it might still be like this.

  We’ve progressed a long way from those days. People realise that mental health is something that can affect everyone. Folks that used to bully others, calling them crazies and mental, are now understanding that the way they treated people before wasn’t very nice. They have seen friends or family members be affected by these issues, or indeed have experienced something similar themselves.

  In part this is because the modern world is ever more complicated and this is reflected in the stress experienced by the average person. In the modern world people have more mental health issues.

  We are due another step forward in how we view such conditions, and it’s around the realisation that the notion of mental health issues is still very antiquated way of looking at it. The problem is that it is implicit in the term that the fault is the person with the mental health issues. That somehow they have brought this condition on themselves by the way they lived their life. That’s the unspoken piece, the unspoken belief that’s never said. It’s something ‘they’ have.

  If you spend a little bit of time thinking about it, this notion is absurd. There are a very very small amount of people that perhaps have a physical abnormality in the brain, but the vaste majority do not, yet there are many many people with mental health issues.

  The fact is that by definition these people that have no physical disability and have mental health issues, have these issues because of the people they interact with. It must be the case that these interactions are causing the so called mental health issues. In short we must realise that mental health issues are really issues of the group bullying individuals. The environment creates the mental health issues not the individual.

  Even if they have substance abuse problems, why do they have these problems in the first place?

  Mental health issues is really a failure of the group.

  It’s likely that it’s a system level problem where to the total information processing capacity of the system is being reached, and for whatever reason these folks always find themselves as the pressure cooker release valve. It’s not a coincidence. One day we will look back at our primitive understanding of group dynamics and realise that groups can turn into a mob and they might not even realise they are doing it, though they also might. Ultimately it doesn’t matter though. What matters is noticing it is happening and course correcting collectively in a way that de-escalates and moves the unhealthy dynamics to a safer configuration.

  In the present day, "mental health issues" is a euphemism for someone that the group systematically and relentlessly bullies. We need to evolve this understanding into a more truthful and effective model.

  This post was originally published as a note, but I decided to put it out as a blog post. Notes tend to be more off the cuff, perhaps less well thought out.

  Personal note: I wasn't particularly happy with the title. Specifically I feel like the word 'deception' might not convey the right message. I'm not saying there's some big conspiracy, it's more like a sort of emergent group deception. Anyway rather than get too hung up on writting the perfect piece, I just want to get it out there, it's the general idea of the piece that's important.

  EOF

• It occurs to me that many people that behave with hypocracy, not only don't see their own hypocracy but believe it to be something good, like that's just how one does business effectively. We need more examples of doing business effectively that don't require hypocracy. Even better would be examples where non hypocracy is demonstrably better. #

• cat << EOF > Where might the Vision Pro make a big impact?

  I previously wrote about the real opportunity for the Vision Pro. From that piece:

  Perhaps the opportunity with the Vision Pro isn't with consumer apps, but with industrial apps. Sectors like construction, interior design, synthetic biology, materials science, big pharma, supply chain management and many others, have money to spend and a need to process large amounts of data in new ways. I see the Vision Pro less as a way to watch movies and more like a welding mask, a speciality device that you use in specific parts of your workflow to accomplish previously impossible data analysis and manipulation tasks.

  I had been thinking something along these lines from the moment I read the descriptions of the device. I spent my undergrad amidst science and engineering departments. I myself studied Materials Science but when you are at a science and engineering university you are immersed in the culture of all the various disciplines, from biology to aerospace, from civil to mechnical engineering to chemistry and all the rest. So I have a pretty intuitive understanding how such a device could make a big impact in these areas.

  The Bankless Nation podcast had a really fascinating episode talking to among others Drew Endy, the father of modern synthetic biology. I've transcribed some of what he was saying here, as it really crystalises why the Vision Pro could make a huge difference in science. He is asked What is synthetic biology? to which he replies:

  I think of it as wetware. There’s hardware, there’s software, there’s wetware. A cell is a cell, let’s just let a cell be a cell (no metaphors required).

  Let’s say I took a bacterium that’s microscopic, 1 millionth of a meter long, a micron. And I’m just going to have a magic wand and make it 100 million times bigger. So now it’s 100 meters long, and I’m not adding more atoms, I’m just magically making everything bigger. So we can see it, it’s like the size of a building.

  Now we can say, what does it look like? Let’s say I have a protein, a green fluorescent protein that makes a green light. That protein is the size of a basketball. And the ribosome, which is a collection of molecules that makes proteins, is 2 meters tall. And then the genome, the DNA, it’s going back and forth in this building 1600 times.

  It’s a really thin thread and so it’s cross sectional area is like 4 square meters. And there are many other molecules in this building, all about basketball size, and they fill 30% of the space of the building. We call that volume fraction, it’s 30% packed with molecules.

  Now we are just building this instantaneous mental image of what a cell is, and of course it’s alive. And what that means is that it’s self mixing. Brownian energy is causing all the molecules to jostle around through collisions with water, so that soccer ball, that green fluorescent protein, is moving…this is where it gets crazy…

  It’s moving with an average velocity of 500 meters per second. It’s just instantaneous velocity is faster probably. What that means is that the molecular - molecular collision time is a nanosecond.

  So I’ve got this self mixing milieu that’s 30% solid, 70% water, with a gigahertz collision rate, and what it’s doing is being encoded by the genome, instantiated as a physical mixture, it’s receiving energy from the environment.

  Within the period of 10-20 minutes it could make a physical copy of itself. That’s wetware.

  Doesn't that sound awesome? Doesn't it sound like the sort of thing that could be revolutionised by the Vision Pro?

  And guess what, the whole of science and engineering disciplines are full of these types of visualisation problems.

  EOF

Today’s links:

• Nasa says distant exoplanet could have rare water ocean and possible hint of life - The planet is 9 times the size of earth, might have oceans, and they have detected some hints of molecules that on Earth are emmitted by phytoplankton. The discovery was made by the James Webb telescope, which was able to capture light from the planet's star that had passed through it's atmosphere. And that all happened 120 light years away. Mindblowing. Some other cool examples of JWT detections listed at the end of the article. www.theguardian.com #

• From zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds - This caught my eye because I had the opportunity many years ago to be driven on the back of a very fast motorbike. I think it was 0-100 in around 3 seconds and it totally freaked me out. I just can't imagine there could be anything 3 times faster than that. Anyhow interesting story, the cigar shaped car was built by students and has a vacuum suction device to keep it on the ground before it's aerodynamics kick in. ethz.ch #

• 🚀 New Post: Last Man Standing Tech - It seems like powerful AI could become a bigger part in mediating how we interact with each other. What might this look like? markjgsmith.com #

• 🚀 New Post: The Mental Health Deception - How we view mental health issues has changed a lot in my lifetime. We didn't really even have non-derogatory ways of talking about it. It's a lot better these days but I think we still need to evolve our understanding of the topic. markjgsmith.com #

• Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition - Scientists have been able to not only entangle constellations of many particles simultaneously, but by measuring their state in a clever way, stochastically, use the measuring as a way to have some control over the entanglement, since measurement causes entanglement collapse. And by doing that they were able to explore the entire entanglement space. Similar to how many materials go through phase transitions, say from liquid water to solid ice, there appears to be phase transitions in the quantum world. The weird thing is that it's not a material per se it's literally a phase transition in information, where the information shared between two things undergoes an abrupt change. As well as cool science, it's a tale of multiple reasearch groups discovering each other and combining forces. The story mixes in quantum computers, entanglement entropy and even time crystals in what is defo one of the best science writeups I've read this year. www.quantamagazine.org #

• 🚀 New Post: Where might the Vision Pro make a big impact? - I make the case for why the really exciting opportunities for the Vision Pro might not be as a consumer media watching device but as an information welding mask for those working in science and engineering. markjgsmith.com #