How Human Augmentation Becomes Imperative for Defense

This interesting article ‘Space Force scientist warns it’s ‘imperative’ the US military experiment with human augmentation and AI to stay ahead of Russia and China‘ expose how military competition leads into human augmentation. And what happens in the military will undoubtedly spread later in civilian usage.

“[this Space Force scientist] announced we are entering the age of ‘human augmentation,’ which is crucial to the US’s national defense in order to not ‘fall behind our strategic competitors.‘

It proposes in particular to use self-learning algorithms to develop innovative strategies (such as AlphaGo algorithm that has self-taucht how to play go). This would lead to a battlefield combining human and IA agents (including probably drones). Therefore, human agents will need to be augmented to be able to fully work together with AI and fully participate in the battlefield.

This development was expected but we can now anticipate that it may go faster due to increased competition in the arms race between nations.

The challenge I believe will be to effectively combine the virtual battlefield with the real battlefield conditions: in effect the twin battlefield will have to reflect actual conditions on the ground and this will certainly be a major challenge in the years to come.

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How Copyright Trolls Now Spread to Modern Creative Common Licenses

This excellent article ‘Beware the Copyleft Trolls‘ explains how certain organisations are now suing systematically material used under modern Creative Common licenses.

Creative Commons licenses are a new approach to copyrights that provide lighter protection and usage rights. They have developed with the development of collaborative approaches on the internet, where images, sounds and other resources are shared widely. They are not free-for-all licenses, however they do allow a lot of non-commercial usage of material.

Still, some organisations seem to sue abusively users of material under those licenses, as soon as some conditions are not strictly followed such as attribution etc.

“Verch’s scam is a profitable one. He posts stock photography he savvily generates to meet market demand, such as images of “face coverings, test tubes and people wearing masks” that he put on his website at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Then, he waits for someone to slip up on the CC-BY-2.0 attribution. And he pounces.”

This is the behavior of trolls (other exist in the field of patent law – see for example our older post ‘Patent trolls and the end of conventional intellectual property‘ ) and judges seem to be reluctant to follow suit, however this creates a lot of disturbances.

Another proof that even when one tries to develop a benevolent and collaborative approach, some trolls do try to take advantage of the situation. Therefore one should be careful however I am certain society and law will act to make sure this remains marginal and the general intent of collaboration remains.

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How Economic Growth Definitely Reduces Poverty

The site ourworldindata.org is always an excellent reference about worldwide statistics, and their page on economic growth is particularly instructive. The historical perspective is quite instructive.

Global economic wealth production is quite exponential when looked upon a long time frame, since the Agricultural Age through the Industrial Age. Lately, it has spread to many more countries and people, sustaining this exponential growth.

GDP per capita follows the same exponential growth, particularly in developed countries, but also – albeit at a lesser level – in developing countries.

As the page shows, conversely, extreme poverty has been decreasing significantly in the recent decades globally, which is excellent news (even more taking into account the significant growth in world population) – going down from a historical 75% of world population down to less than 10%.

Hence economic growth is definitely a major component of human well-being. Solutions to the current climate crisis should take it into account, looking at means to pursue growth – in a more sustainable manner – so as to continue raising the well-being of more people.

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How Long Lasting Internet Memory Can Be

In this Wired article ‘I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget‘ we get reminded how internet can maintain memories of past events (even if they did not really happen at the end). And how this will impact the choices provided today by internet services.

“Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped. It’s been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons. In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere. Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.”

Facebook memories, or advertisements for stuff we consumed years ago (I still see on my screens adverts for camper vans in New Zealand where we vacationed years ago…) are reminders that internet does not forget anything. And through AI those memories may emerge in the weirdest ways.

On the opposite, curiously, everything which happened before the advent of social networks (2005-2010 approximatively) does not exist in Internet memory, which creates a substantial gap.

The only exit from this situation is to delete it all, but that may not even be possible. We have to live knowing that the internet has in memory everything we posted and wrote all those years – and that some may come back to haunt us one day.

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How to Deal with the Challenge of Regulating GAFA Algorithm Updates

Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘Social Media Bubbles‘ reminds us that “Social media algorithms determine what you see when you search and scroll the platforms. Not your friends.” Therefore, we at the mercy of an algorithm update. Hence the idea by some governments to regulate those updates.

We all know that Google or Facebook algorithm updates create substantial disruptions in the way search results or screen results are displayed, creating considerable dismay to all those that depend on this natural or paid advertising for their enterprise. It also funds a coterie of search gurus and naturally increases GAFA revenues as people finally end up paying to get better visibility.

The Australian government has been particularly at the forefront of trying to regulate the GAFA. “If the bill passes in one form or another, which seems likely, the digital platforms will have to give the media 14 days’ notice of deliberate algorithm changes that significantly affect their businesses. Even that, some critics argue, is not enough for Big Tech.”

It is interesting to recognize that this shows that GAFA are increasingly seen as a sort of public service with real-life implications on the life of people and companies. Of course this is a bit contradictory with the commercial nature of those companies.

This tension between public service and the nature of the GAFA as commercial enterprises will only increase in the coming years as we become increasingly dependent on their services.

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How To Improve National Infrastructure Protection Against Hacking

This interesting post ‘The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and the SolarWinds hack were all but inevitable – why national cyber defense is a ‘wicked’ problem‘ shows how difficult it can be to protect national infrastructure against hacking, in particular in a context of globalization of IT outsourcing.

One of the important observations from the post is the realization that security threats are created through widespread subcontracting of IT work to external parties, often in developing or emerging nations. For example “SolarWinds, driven by its growth strategy and plans to spin off its managed service provider business in 2021, bears much of the responsibility for the damage, according to cybersecurity experts. I believe that the company put itself at risk by outsourcing its software development to Eastern Europe, including a company in Belarus. Russian operatives have been known to use companies in former Soviet satellite countries to insert malware into software supply chains.”

In addition, national agencies in charge of defending essential infrastructure are not always coordinated or integrated, and it is extremely difficult to check out all the various services used to manage IT infrastructure.

Resilience to hacking requires solving an issue in a complex situation, and this requires novel approaches are that more systemic than the ones applied currently. Moreover it is important to increase infrastructure resilience to events which may be up to some level unavoidable.

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How Many Unicorn Founders are Actually Repeat-Entrepreneurs

We discover in this interesting post ‘The Founders of Clubhouse, Spotify, Stripe, and 42% of Unicorns Have One Thing in Common‘ that most highly successful entrepreneurs are actually serial entrepreneurs.

It shows that unicorn founders are quite likely to be founders with a history of small scale success and having exited from previous ventures.

“Among the founders of billion-dollar startups, almost 60% were not first-time founders. In a randomly selected group of startups that had raised a minimum of $3 million in venture capital funding but didn’t reach unicorn status — the typical picture for a seed-funded startup — about 40% were not first-time founders. The statistic shows that repeat founders were more likely to start a billion-dollar company.”

Thus, “It turns out that the best preparation for starting a wildly successful company is founding a startup. If you have never started a company, the best preparation for doing so is to start something, maybe a club, a side hustle, or simply selling something online.”

From those considerations we can infer interesting observations for the business angel that I am: repeat entrepreneurs with a history of growing and selling their startups are interesting candidates for investment. I am aware that this statement reverses in terms of causality the simple observation of the paper, but at the same it demonstrates the possibility of overcoming an emotional attachment to a venture, as well as experience through the entire lifecycle of a startup, and hence this inspires greater confidence in the new project.

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How to Visualize Trance Experiences through Narcosis Visions

Following up on the previous post ‘How Apnea Diving Leads to a Form of Trance‘ as well as our series on trance (see ‘What Does Trance Feel Like?‘ which contains reference to the series of posts on this subject), a leading French apneist provides an interesting visualization of the kind of visions he experiences in a short film ‘Narcose’ (narcosis).

Those visions give an idea of what some people may experience in certain trance states. Those visions are always very personal and not all trances lead to visions. However it is a short insight into this type of experience that is interestingly shared in this film. The director, the wife of the professional apneist, is also a practitioner of that sport, which may have helped produce a film closer to the experience.

Here is the Youtube link to watch the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldgxr4f6pWI

Hat-tip to Laurent Coulon for the discussion on apnea diving and trance.

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How Apnea Diving Leads to a Form of Trance

Following up on our series on trance (see the post ‘What Does Trance Feel Like?‘ which contains reference to the series of posts on this subject), one interesting practice that appears to be quite similar is what happens when one does apnea diving (also called freediving), because it requires brain adaptations.

Efficient apnea diving requires careful management of oxygen; the brain being the main oxygen consumer even basic apnea management requires to learn how to deplete the oxygen flow to the brain, and in particular the frontal cortex. This practice will significantly increase the time before breathing becomes absolutely necessary.

At the same time, this brain exercise necessarily leads to an alternate form of consciousness. Therefore, apneists are quickly in a form of trance state, focused on their performance of avoiding the urge to breathe again. Hypoxia then leads also to all sorts of visions and possibly dangerous behaviors.

Hat-tip to Laurent Coulon for the discussion on apnea diving and trance.

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How We Need to Be Able to End Things Gracefully

In this post ‘Ending it gracefully‘, Seth Godin reminds us how it is important to anticipate that most initiatives will end and probably “fail” at some stage. And it is typically at those moments that we need to be able to remain graceful.

“You can pull out every stop, fight every step of the way, mortgage your house and your reputation–and still fail. Or, perhaps, you can quit in a huff at the first feeling of frustration. The best path is clearly somewhere between the two. And yet, too often, we leave this choice unexamined. Deciding how and when to quit before you begin is far easier and more effective than making ad hoc decisions under pressure.” 

However, more importantly I believe is the capacity to be grateful to what happened before the end, and be graceful to all of those that have supported and participated to the adventure. The worst is when the end is the start of a long-winded drama.

Most initiatives we take will end eventually, and not always in the best of situations. Let’s learn the skill of ending gracefully and moving on.

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How Silent and Listen Go Hand in Hand

I just realized by reading the post ‘Listening Skills Need Exercise‘ that ‘Silent’ is the anagram of ‘Listen’ in English. This is actually quite a powerful statement.

I am a great believer in the power of active listening. And this requires an absolute openness.

“Only when we’re able to quiet what is going on in our head we can truly listen.” Active listening is powerful as a change agent, and it requires a discipline and a practice from the listener.

Silence can be more full and powerful than noise, in particular obviously than random noise.

Inner and outer silence is the key to real listening and change.

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How Languishing is the Dominating Emotion of the Covid Times

In this excellent New York Times column ‘There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing‘ the author makes the point that languishing may be the dominating emotion of the Covid times.

As we increasingly don’t get excited by anything as we are confined in our homes, “it wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.”

And indeed personally I have been caught by languishing in particular during the toughest periods of confinement, not coming out of my home offices weeks at a time.

Languishing seems to be a precursor of more serious disorders in the future according to some studies, hence the need to overcome this state. The article proposes that “flow” could be the antidote. “People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic happiness.” This, of course, requires that one has a project that keeps occupied. Another approach is to ensure to keep uninterrupted time to oneself, which allows to concentrate on something of interest.

Languishing seems to be quite the descriptor of the mood of many people at this moment. As vaccination increases and we are able to have more and more social relationships, we need to be able to escape this mind state. What are you doing against languishing?

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