Software Update V.5
The Universe! Memory! Dieting! AI Exterminators! Stoicism. Ethereum! But wait: what the hell is Quantum Computing anyway?
Hello, and welcome to yet another spin through the worlds within and without.
I’ve been away for a while as I was travelling through Morocco for a few days (well, more than a few days). I’ve also started a post-graduate degree on Digital Transformation (I’m not feeling like I’m taking that much out of it, to be honest; but one should only count his winnings at the end of the day, right?)
I also really needed to take a step back from my productive sprints; I’m still struggling to understand where the consistency/productivity/rest balance lies for me. But having ran into burnout mode just a bit over a year ago, I certainly don’t want to be exploring those self-defeating shores again - not ever.
So many things to do, so little time.
The Human Ingenuity Feed is now returned, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to post as often as I was before - at least until the post-graduate degree is over and done with.
You’re always invited to interact, comment, and share your thoughts. But you should also feel free to send me anything that piques your interest - an article, a news story, a movie or a book recommendation. You’ll help me get out of my echo chamber and look at things that I might never have seen otherwise.
Here are this Software Update V.5’s highlights:
In Essence
Spinning Globe
Will it be a Good or a Bad Memory? One Molecule Decides
Dieting can be as Easy as Taking a Pill
Research Paper Says AI is Likely to Eliminate Humanity
Watch: Ex Machina (2014), by Alex Garland
Read: The Daiy Stoic, by Ryan Holiday
Tech Writing
What is Quantum Computing?
Ethereum is Merge-Complete
Binance Loses $110 Million In Latest High-Profile Crypto Hack
$30 million in Stolen Crypto Recovered Thanks to Chain Analysis
Water-Based Chips Could be Breakthrough for Neural Networking, AI
Fiction Writing
Einstein’s Folly, Part Two (A story from The Universe)
The World Without
Spinning Globe
The latest on Human Ingenuity.
A Good Memory or a Bad One? One Brain Molecule Decides
What separates a good memory from a bad one?
Are memories created and stored alongside an emotional weighting, or is the emotion reached afterwards, when hindsight is 20/20? Apparently, a memory being good or bad depends on a simple peptide, neurotensin, which is released at the moment of experience.
The research shows that when a good experience occurs and its memory is formed, neurotensin is created in the thalamus and led towards the amygdala. When a bad experience occurs, however, there’s no neurotensin production, and the memory itself is encoded with a negative outlook.
Interestingly, this shows that biological beings, including humans, require less resources (peptide production requires energy) to encode a bad memory than they do to encode a good one. This is indicative of our survival and energy conservation bias: if something is bad, it’s potentially life-threatening, so naturally it’s more important to prepare our brain for a flight or flight response than to recall a particularly good lazy Sunday.
It’s unavoidable: we’re biologically programmed to pay more attention to negative experiences than good ones. To be able to keep a positive and just outlook on life and other human beings despite that fact - now there’s a true testament to our humanity.
Diet on a Pill: Researchers Discover Brain Mechanism Responsible for Hunger
Would you take a pill that took away your feeling of hunger?
That future may well be in the horizon, as scientists have just discovered the brainy chemical process that’s responsible for it. The research opens the door to therapy that’s as simple as popping a pill that inhibits the actions of the enzyme autotaxin.
As with all tech, there are good and bad applications of this. On the good end of the spectrum, we have a means to control food intake that could help in the fight against that great plague of the western world, obesity.
At the middle of the spectrum, we have a substance that can theoretically be used to manipulate the perception of hunger; it brings to mind research in Nazi Germany that not only delivered drugs to soldiers in the frontlines, but also to experiments that aimed to reduce the Nazi soldiers’ feelings of fatigue, hunger, and need to sleep.
However, the spectrum does include scenarios in which this substance could be weaponized. For one, it could be used as yet another a measure of control for authoritarian states (I’m thinking, for instance, North Korea) where food is scarce. Autotaxin pills could be delivered together with rations that aren’t enough to sate hunger or to nourish a human being, with people taking the pill being none the wiser. As years of military history tell us, lack of food (and good food) is one of the principal reasons for mutinies and revolutions. Remove hunger - remove a stressor. Increase control.
The implications grow darker when one considers that this could be be further weaponized. I imagine scenarios where water or food could be poisoned with autotaxin, leading a population to reduce its food intake (with the expected consequences on the mind and body reducing their ability and will to fight an invading force).
Remember: evil in science and technology stems from humanity, not the other way around.
Google DeepMind Researcher Co-Authors Paper Saying AI Will Likely Eliminate Humanity
AI and the existential catastrophe hypothesis.
A team of researchers with the university of Oxford have penned a thought experiment regarding the programming of AIs and their reward systems - and concluded that it’s “likely” a superintelligent AI might pose an existential risk for us evolved apes.
The issue stems from liberating an evolved agent (AI) into the real world, where variables and data aren’t under a research teams’ control. In this scenario, where good behavior can’t possibly be hard-coded to account for every instance of what makes it good, the AI would have to process its actions - and learn from the outcomes of those actions by itself. And this is where we could run into trouble - how do we define rules that tell an AI “This outcome is good, repeat these behaviors” or whether or not a behavior shouldn’t be repeated?
The likelihood of an AI becoming an existential threat assumes a scenario where resources are finite - such as the one we have here on Earth. When resources are finite, struggles for control of those resources between differing forces might lead to a conflict between an AI attempting to secure its rewards (which may include purely the energy resources required for its functioning) against humanity’s own requirements.
In theory, there's no point in racing to this. Any race would be based on a misunderstanding that we know how to control it. Given our current understanding, this is not a useful thing to develop unless we do some serious work now to figure out how we would control them.
Michael Cohen, Google DeepMind researcher and co-author of the paper
Passive Quality
Content for nurture, not mindless consumption.
Watch: Ex Machina (2014), by Alex Garland
Ex Machina stands as one of the more interesting movies surrounding AI, sentience, and the potential effects of the creation of such an agent.
Like most good stories, it’s less concerned about sci-fi than it is about character development. Picking up on the DeepMind story above, the movie showcases what might happen when an AI sets itself a goal that’s separate from that of its creator.
Then again, shouldn’t we expect an intelligent being constrained in a human form (much like Ava, the movies’ AI, is) to fight for, manipulate towards, and earn its own freedom? Freedom, or the ability to interact with the world according to our own understanding and experience of it, is one of the most basic human motivators - one that’s become taken for granted.
I can’t fathom how we can create an intelligent structure that won’t hedge its own interests against ours - those of humanity as a whole. It’s impossible to predict every possible decision the AI might take, which prevents us from hard-coding behaviours according to each scenario. But a generic rule-based approach might also be insufficient, as an AI coded to “aid humanity” might have a very different idea of what aiding us means. In one scenario, “aiding” us could mean creating a system not unlike The Matrix, where we’re freed from the real world’s issues and misfortunes by existing solely in a virtual landscape - force-fed with just the right amount of nutrients, with as low a carbon and energetic footprint as possible, so the AI can increase the number of humans living, existing, and dreaming.
“Heaven” could be just a computer simulation.
Read: The Daily Stoic, by Ryan Holiday
Stoicism as a philosophy has been around since the early 3rd century BC. Its objective is to put people on the path to eudaimonia - the condition of having a “good spirit”, ie, a spirit that’s in tune with Nature, itself, and the distinction between the external and the internal. This particular distinction empowers much of Stoicism’s staying power throughout the ages: to be able to differentiate that which is under our control, and that which is not.
Stoicism separates itself from other philosophical currents in that it places its importance in actions, not words. True Stoics abide by their philosophical ideas, and enact them in the real world according to ideals of wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.
The Daily Stoic is a good entry-point for anyone looking to understand what it’s all about. This is not a philosophy book — this is a daily ritual, a book with one Stoic passage for each day of the year, with added commentary by Ryan.
Here’s a “random” passage from the book, for September 16th:
Anyone can get lucky, not everyone can persevere.
Success comes to the lowly and to the poorly talented, but the special characteristic of a great person is to triumph over the disasters and panics of human life.
Seneca, On Providence, 4.1
Whether you take value from it is within your control.
The World Within
Tech Writing
What is Quantum Computing?
I’m extremely proud to have written Tom’s Hardware’s guide to Quantum Computing. I think I managed to capture the essential concepts and distill them into images that make it (relatively) easy to understand - although no-one truly understands it. Make sure to read it if you want to know what the technology is about — and why it matters for our collective future.
Ethereum's Merge Completed Without a Hitch, GPUs Are Free
Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, succeeded in finally going through with its much-expected software upgrade. The Merge, as it’s called, brought with it a change from energy-intensive Proof of Work to a Proof of Stake system, slashing Ethereum’s energy usage by 99,9 percent. The change brought with it an end to GPU mining, and sets Ethereum on its course to brighter, more flexible days.
Binance Loses $110 Million In Latest High-Profile Crypto Hack
Binance, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, has shown its not-so-decentralized hand after it halted its blockchain. The hiccup in operations happened as the company asked validators to stop all new block creation as the company grappled to contain an exploit that could have resulted in $570 million in stolen crypto.
Remember: if a single person/institution has the power to operate or stop the train in its tracks, then it’s not really decentralized.
$30 million in Stolen Crypto Recovered Thanks to Chain Analysis
One of the (initial) arguments surrounding the usage of cryptocurrency related to privacy. Supposedly, blockchain transactions and in-blockchain assets would always be above and beyond the grasp of centralized powers (such as states and their authorities). But where there’s a will, there’s a way; and if one thing is useful for investigators, is the open nature of most blockchains. This gives both chain analytics professionals and law enforcement a trail that they can follow. Assets in the blockchain aren’t so “irrecoverable” after all - especially once there’s a non editable trail leading the way towards the criminals themselves.
Water-Based Chips Could be Breakthrough for Neural Networking, AI
There’s no end to human ingenuity, and this particular research aims to bring the source of humanity - our brains - towards the world of tech. Applying electrochemistry principles to computing instead of pure electricity may unlock pathways for water-based chips that provide better power efficiency levels for ultra-low-power applications - such as RFID labels and others.
There’s no shortage of inspiration to be drawn from nature and biology into our own technology, and I’m always happy to see the unusual being prodded for possibilities. With some exceptions, of course.
Fiction Writing
Einstein’s Folly, Part Two (A story from The Universe)
We step foot in The Universe again with Part Two of Einstein’s Folly. There are more questions than answers, but there are some further inroads in worldbuilding - in dialing in the setting just a bit more. Featuring government-issued backdoors into old ladies’ tablets, musings on loneliness and the effects of the Metaverse.
Click through for Part Two.
Here’s Part One in case you missed it.
Thank you for taking the time to read this Software Update V.5. Feel free to comment, to consider, to share.
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Take care.
Keep being curious, keep thinking - but most of all, keep being human.
Best,
Francisco