Smart tech! - and how to allocate your well-targeted philanthropy

Tis the season for giving, right? We are all getting emails from philanthropic entities… and I am all in favor! But can some basic principle guide your choice? How about a strategic approach?  Start with a list of things you care about in the world. I’ll bet every one of your concerns has some NGO dedicated to making it happen. So why not, once a year, pay dues to a dozen or so? That way, through the magic of “proxy activism,” you can know you’re doing the basic minimum… hiring others to make the world better for you!  

For example combine the Sierra Club and Greenpeace with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU, plus The Planetary Society and Oxfam— six modest checks and voila! You’re a participant in eco, liberties and hunger shifts for the better and helping us move forward exploring the cosmos. Sure, it’s good to do more than that! By all means pick a political party and a candidate. A local library and food bank. A local high school robotics team. But here’s the deal; if you are doing less than a dozen such memberships - chosen by your own standards - then it’s pretty clear what kind of person you aren’t. 

Proxy activism says: “I know I’m cheap and lazy and distracted by other things.  But at least I can give my support to a dozen NGOS who will hire dedicated people to be active, saving the world in ways that I — in my lazy-distracted way — think it needs saving!” Learn more about this approach, which I have been promoting for two decades.  

A final note to those of you who believe in singularities or life extension.  Okay so you've got your cryonics contract and all that. What makes you think future people will want to revive you, just to spend money you squirreled away in investments?  Bah.  They will be choosy who they want to revive and share their world!  And they'll take into account whether any of the frozen folks truly did try to make it a better world.

Come to think of it, that's a reasonable-better standard for getting into classic Heaven.

== Interesting! ==

The new season of Xploration Earth2050 started last week. It's good to be back. You can watch both seasons on Hulu or Amazon. And yes, I give good blather.

And  now a holiday season run-down of cool items.

How can we fight back against the War on Science?  Billionaire Yuri Milner, who established the Breakthrough Institute’s new endeavor to re-invigorate SETI, now leads a group of his peers in establishing a set of big-time, Hollywood-style awards for top scientists, hopefully leading to some of the burnished prestige that comes from red-carpet treatment.  With his friends Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, 23andMe founder Ann Wojcicki and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, Milner wants the world to celebrate the great research being done in fundamental physics, life sciences and math.  Each of the seven winners gets $3 million and a chance to stand onstage before a crowd of Silicon Valley’s leading lights, in a ceremony broadcast live on the National Geographic channel.

An interesting rumination on “algocracy”… our incipient trend toward leaving some kinds of decisions – even policy – to be decided by algorithms. John Danaher writes, “Public decision-making processes ought to be legitimate. Most people take this to mean that the processes should satisfy a number of proceduralist and instrumentalist conditions. In other words, the processes should be fair and transparent whilst at the same time achieving good outcomes. The problem with algocratic systems is that they tend to favour good outcomes over transparency and fairness.” Someone watch the source material and report back here? 

U.S. shale oil producers shocked everyone by innovating to remain efficient and profitable when prices fell below $50 a barrel, despite Saudi efforts to flood the market and drive them out of business.  Now though, at $40 or so, U.S. producers are finally pulling back... which should not be taken as bad news!  Let our oil sit in the ground when it’s this cheap, if the Saudis are willing to sell at a loss.  Now is the time to invest in re-filling the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.. exactly opposite to the Republican strategy of always selling our national resources low (to pals) and buying high. (You should see the travesty that traitors did with our Helium Reserve.)  

Merrill-Lynch projects investment opportunities in artificial intelligence, in general robotics, drones… and – well – killer robots.  Ironic, given how Wall Street is busy funding the biggest chunks of AI research, all of it aimed at developing “skynet” intelligences that will be designed from go to be predatory, parasitical, amoral and insatiable. 

== Tech Advances ==

Moore’s Law ain’t done yet?  Shrinking transistors even further… probably sometime after the beginning of the next decade, reducing the contact point between the two materials to just 40 atoms in width, the researchers said.  By simply swapping carbon nanotube transistors for conventional ones in a simulated IBM microprocessor, they were able to increase speeds by as much as seven orders of magnitude or, alternatively, achieve almost as significant power savings.

Smart LEDs will help us save the planet.  They will also communicate with the house, with each other and you phone.  Introducing “Li-Fi” — 100x as fast and capable as Wi-fi and just in time for the Internet of Things.  The good news is obvious. More info!  Faster!  Can we get all that without the bad? Smart bulbs spying on us for hackers or The Man?  

Li-Fi presents one more example of the utter impossibility of the “solution” suggested by most well-meaning civil libertarians… endless legislation to reduce info-flows. That will not protect freedom or even privacy.  Not at all.  Not even a little bit.  It never has and never, ever will. But if we can catch the voyeurs, we might prevent them from actually using the info to harm us.  Why, oh why is that so counter-intuitive?

== The point is driven home ==

They will be able to see through walls.... A team from MIT has invented "RF-Capture" – which can discern and identify persons by analyzing the reflections from ambient WiFi signals, even through walls as they reflect off the moving human body, parsing heart rate and breathing patterns. Creeped out yet? But this is only one more out of a near infinite number of examples of how futile is the routine and reflex prescription offered by modern activists recommending that we all "hide!" 

That reflex is becoming pathetic, distracting folks from the only thing that can can possibly, even conceivably, defend freedom and (some) privacy. Forget the cowardly and hopeless goal of hiding. Be militant, insisting that average citizens share the elite's unstoppably rising power to see. Our hope lies in demanding and developing the power to supervise those in power. If they are going to be able to peer at us through walls, then we must seize our right to look back.

== Future Tech Miscellany ==

How will we enhance bio-security? The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas. This state-of-the-art maximum biocontainment facility will offer leading-edge capabilities to help protect our food supply and the nation’s public health. They are beginning with a $100,000 prize/challenge for unique ideas how to do this.  

Huh. The X-Prize methodology has been really taking off.  Its advantages are huge and manifold. (1) it stimulates imaginative thinking from a wide variety of outside competitors who feel incentivized to think outside the box. (2) In most such contests, the teams each spend much more than the prize purse, in (very realistic) hope of followup patents and contracts and publicity for outside customers, even for second or third placers. (3) the prize-givers do not have to spend much till they get results dropped into their laps. (4) It is a creativity-stimulating methodology that is inherently difficult for closed or despotic societies to emulate.

Perhaps overly optimistic... Super-fast hyperloop transportation could arrive in about five years! 

Researchers have developed a method to produce the highly-sought after graphene that is 100 times cheaper than the traditional method.

Heard of “Gorilla Glass?” Get ready for "Godzilla Glass." 

People call bright flashlights "tactical" ... this one might be subject to arms treaties.  1000-Watt LED Flashlight: 90,000 Lumens

== Preparing for change ==

The first map showing the world's hidden groundwater brings us closer to estimating how much there is, and when it will run out if we over-use the resource. 

Science is offering paleontological perspective on climate change.  At one extreme is the “Green Sky” catastrophe that (we now think) drove the worst extinction of them all, at the end of the Permian, which a methane-flooded atmosphere, joined by sea-bottom hydrogen-sulfide - became acidic, killing most of life on Earth.  Let’s try not to set off a methane-release calamity of our own, as ever more of that powerful greenhouse gas fizzes out of hydrate ices long buried under the now-warming seas.

Milder but important-to-understand swings happened when earlier greenhouse eras suddenly swung negative, leading to ice ages.  In the Journal of Geology there is a new paper that describes how dust in Paleozoic times resulted in plankton blooms and reduction of CO2 levels in the air that were many times present day levels to such low levels as ice ages were initiated. 

Only note that this particular article originates from a controversial figure who was involved in the “rogue experiment” a few years ago – sponsored by a native American tribe – to dump iron dust into currents off the Pacific Northwest.  While I share a belief that experiments in ocean fertilization have been improperly blocked and should proceed, I cannot actually condone rogue and unvetted and rather unscientific “experiments” of this kind. 

The dust thing is of course related to why -- in my novel Earth -- I portray tide powered bottom-stirrers that send up plumes of ocean bottom muck into fast currents, thus fertilizing vast stretches that are now almost lifeless deserts.  This would be better than the iron-dumping experiments, since stirring simply emulates what nature already does in rich fishery zones like Chile and the Grand Banks.

== Biotechnology advances ==

The latest Great Life Hope for those who want to live forever?  An experimental drug targeting Alzheimer’s disease shows anti-aging effects in animal tests. “We did not predict we’d see this sort of anti-aging effect, but J147 made old mice look like they were young, based upon a number of physiological parameters.” Oh, but there are many ways to get such effects in mice. And any such drug… that our ancestors could have evolved to synthesize themselves … classifies as “low hanging fruit.” The effects on ameliorating specific syndromes of aging may be fine.  But it will not (I predict) affect even slightly the "wall" of 100 to 120 years.

A new test detects virtually any virus that infects people and animals. Subtypes can be identified easily. To develop the test, the researchers targeted unique stretches of DNA or RNA from every known group of viruses that infects humans and animals.  “It also may be possible to modify the test so that it could be used to detect pathogens other than viruses, including bacteria, fungi and other microbes, as well as genes that would indicate the pathogen is resistant to treatment with antibiotics or other drugs.”  

An artificial retina can be implanted and restore some sight to certain kinds of blindness. And cataracts, known to be the leading cause of blindness in humans, may soon be cured via a simple eye drop.

Scientists would like to understand what the genetic basis is for humans' apparently special capacity for logic, abstract thought, complex emotions and language. Humans and chimpanzees have DNA that's remarkably similar — researchers say our genetic code is about 95 percent identical. “Scientists would like to be able to make a genetic change and show that it really makes a difference. "But we're talking about humans and chimpanzees here, and you cannot experiment on either of those," she notes. "And so it's very challenging to prove causation."  

I guess the future is (almost) here. Take this title of a talk at USC: “Engineering Memories:  A Neural Prosthesis for Cognitive Function.”  Yes a microchip implant in the hippocampus to get around damaged areas that destroyed memory function. They aim at creating: “a biomimetic model of hippocampal nonlinear dynamics that can perform the same function as part of the hippocampus.  Through bi-directional communication with other neural tissue that normally provides the inputs and outputs to/from a damaged hippocampal area, the biomimetic model can serve as a neural prosthesis.”  Woof.

The PCS - paracingulate sulcus - is one of the last structural folds to develop in the brain before birth, and varies in size between individuals. It is linked to the ability to distinguish real from imagined information, a process known as ‘reality monitoring.’ In people diagnosed with schizophrenia, a 1 cm reduction in the fold’s length increased the likelihood of hallucinations by nearly 20%.

In an example of rapid evolution in action, three new species of wasps are turning into three new species, in real-short time.  Let's hope they don't become as terrifying as in Joe Wallace's creepy novel Invasive Species.

And finally...

"Cli Fi" Maven Dan Bloom offers the following observation: "In Isaac Asimov’s 1941 short story “Nightfall,” a journalist in the distant future on a far away imaginary planet named Lagash strikingly resembles the cynical columnists on the planet Earth. Asimov’s story deals with a kind of climate denialists. A Lagash scientist lashes out at a newspaper editor who could be someone like Marc Morano or Anthony Watts of today:
         “You have led a vast newspaper campaign against the efforts of myself and my colleagues to organize the world against the menace which it is now too late to avert.”
        That quote from a 1941 sci fi story offers a chilling forecast of a modern journalism that gives equal time to climate change deniers. Scary."