Layer 2: A Holiday Tour Through Future Present Country
A quick tour through the future present in a few places which caught my eye.
Summer has come. Cool water is a thing of beauty. Star Wars style Tatooine water farming looks real thanks to a Berkeley trial in Arizona:
“the water harvester can extract drinkable water every day/night cycle at very low humidity and at low cost, making it ideal for people living in arid, water-starved areas of the world.”
“There is nothing like this,” said Omar Yaghi, who invented the technology underlying the harvester. “It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert.”
Holiday entertainment includes outdoor activities, and sharing (or imposing) them on friends and family, and professional outdoor activities are now delivered through our devices. What happens if the two ever merge?
A “future of TV” scenario, that builds on social networks. Social network effect as screenplay:
“when “skam” débuted on NRK’s Web site, in September, 2015, it arrived without advertising or publicity. “We were terrified they would hear their mothers say that NRK had recently made an awesome show for young people,” Andem explained to Rushprint, a Norwegian film magazine. The ploy worked: teens found “skam” by word of mouth. By the end of Season 2, ninety-eight per cent of Norwegian teens between fifteen and nineteen knew about the show — more than knew about “Game of Thrones.””
““skam” ran for four seasons, and became a worldwide phenomenon. Four thousand fan fictions were written about the characters. France, Germany, and Italy produced their own versions of the show. On Weibo, the Chinese counterpart to YouTube, subtitled clips of the Norwegian “skam” were viewed a hundred and eighty million times.”
“In terms of popular times to tip, people tip the most on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they tip the most at 8:12pm
on Thursday, 10:33pm on Saturday and 5:17am on Sunday.”
Another potential massive “gig” market, English tutoring, is a big business in China and Asia, enough to merit some serious VC funding:
” VIPKID, based out of Beijing, today announcedthat it has raised $500 million in funding — a Series D+ round that values the startup at over $3 billion.”
“it was in August 2017 that VIPKID raised $200 million on a $1.5 billion valuation. It has now raised some $850 million in financing since being founded in 2013. The company’s size has soared in that time, too. Last year VIPKID said that it had 20,000 teachers and 200,000 paying students from 32 countries. Now those numbers are at over 40,000 teachers and 300,000 students across 35 markets.”
A platform emerges and fortunes are invested so that larger ones can be made. In another case, a platform that is being restricted may have had the side-effect of also restricting incomes being earned. Banning a messaging app has had an effect on business activity in Iran, according to Foreign Policy:
““Businesses small and big were using it as a way to communicate, advertise, and actually do deals,”
At a medical training business: ““We had a problem with older doctors who didn’t use the internet but when we started using Telegram, many of them signed up and began using it for information, registering for classes and sending receipts, which before was done by hand because they didn’t know how to email.”
Hard to stop using something which has become useful, easy and scalable.
But not all change is necessarily innovative. Some of it, is to put it charitable terms, iterative but not necessarily indispensable.
One E-Bike company also mines crypto… as you ride:
“Toba, a new line of electric bicycles that mine cryptocurrency while in motion. An experiment by the UK retailer 50cycles, these smart e-bikes would generate “LoyalCoin” — a digital asset like Bitcoin, but modeled after customer rewards programs — at a rate of about $26.50 for every 1,000 miles ridden.
“This is not only the first electric bike of its kind, but it will also be the first product ever to be tokenized and which issues reward for use,” 50cycles founder and CEO Scott Snaith told Cycling Industry News.”
Making virtual money as your ride.
Let’s consider a company that is our tourguide through the “uncanny valley”:
AS SOON as you see one, you get a chill down your spine,” says Will Jackson at Engineered Arts, the UK firm behind these spookily realistic androids.
Thespian Robots but also stunt robots from Disney Imagineering:
Speaking of drama, there is also the cosmic drama of something huge and fast happening in TWO galaxies far far (far) away:
“two huge galaxies that are physically colliding and merging (the more oval one above and to the left is IC 694, and the rounder one to the lower right is NGC 3690).”
“…over time it became clear that something more extraordinary was going on. After a few years, the source of the radio waves could be seen to be moving quite rapidly.”
“And I mean rapidly: It was initially screaming across space away from the galactic center at 99.5% of the speed of light!”
“an event only a black hole could trigger: The tidal disruption of a star. Meaning, it tore an entire star literally to shreds.”
Such power. Let’s take it down a few orders of magnitude to just Earth and 2050. From the EIA May 2018 report:
Autonomous Vehicles:Uncertainties and Energy Implications (May 2018) Independent Statistics & Analysis www.eia.gov
Issue in Focus from the Annual Energy Outlook 2018
” Energy use from higher light-duty vehicle miles traveled are partially offset by greater fuel efficiency from rising sales of more energy efficient battery electric and hybrid electric vehicles.”
In summary, there might be more energy demand but its more efficient. And in matters of efficiency, tradeoffs are a factor.
The “neural network” replicator, which seems like a scary phrase, has a trade-off in between its ability to learn vs. replicate to improve. One paper from the Data Science Institute at Columbia, on a “Neural Network Quine”:
“In the context of programming language theory, quines are computer programs that print their own source code”
and the researchers’ research “work is the first to attempt the task of selfreplication in neural networks”
“there is a trade-off between the network’s ability to classify images and its ability to replicate, but training is biased towards increasing its specialization at image classification at the expense of replication. This is analogous to the trade-off between reproduction and other tasks observed in nature. We suggest that a self replication mechanism for artificial intelligence is useful because
it introduces the possibility of continual improvement through natural selection.”
And now for something less scary, A.I. as artist.
“Artist Mario Klingemann has produced many works using code, data and AI, but his latest project is perhaps his most stunning so far… [he] has developed an AI bot which “watches” video clips, and then remakes the video in real time using similarly-looking archive footage”
The future is ours to bring closer and closer to the present.
Originally published at big-stack.com on July 2, 2018.
