Sick. Over-worked. Illustrators, out of a job?
Questions on my mind: Longevity, AI. RSA: Do you want to be a member? Open Space: Ideas on governance. ESG = Communism [??!!] Will Illustrators will be out of a job soon?
I caught norovirus about 10 days ago, just after the meetup (thanks everyone who came!) which lingered nastily for quite a few days. (Hence the lack of letter last week). Then I’ve been landed with about the workload of a 4-person job. I often hover around the 2-person job mark but at 4-person even I have to delay some on-going projects. So, the latest podcast is a little delayed, and this letter is shorter. I’ve been promising an essay on some ESG thinking and also on OpenSpace. Those pieces are still at the note stage, but I am going to leave a summary thought on the OpenSpace topic.
I’m going to outline the thoughts I’ve been having this week to give a sense of why I’m 4x currently. If you have some good views here let me know. I’m also scheduled to pop into the EA Global conference over Easter, my first one, let me know if you are there.
Questions on my mind: Longevity, AI
RSA: Do you want to be a member?
Open Space: Ideas on governance
Mingle: Thanks for coming
ESG = Communism [??!!]
Will Illustrators will be out of a job
Chicken rice: favourite foods
Links: Personal (making hats, spotting trains, flying insects); history of art; misery of calorie labels; China lockdown; against degrowth; chess=life.
Would you like to be a RSA member? If you think you are a fit, I’d be happy to propose you and you can have a fast track to membership. It’s probably most useful if you’d like a regular London hub space and don’t have one. Also if you are interested in the RSA mission. I speak a little on the RSA history with Anton Howes here.
Micro thoughts this week:
Is automated pharmacy an inevitability and how much will hospitals view this as a cost vs an investment ?
Is there a biophysical limitation to longevity ? Could life extension to 150 years at least be a norm. (Cf Greenland sharks) My good neuroscience friends and I thought that telomere degradation of DNA was a hard problem but not theoretically unsolvable. Dementia - essentially brain degradation - also seems a very hard problem maybe not insoluble but very far off. I continue to speculate on the role of GLP-1, a diabetes medication, in dementia. The two good FAQS here are (1) Laura Deming and (2) Nintil (Jose Rincon)
Are UK universities eg Cambridge, more inefficient that US counter parts. If so, why ? Eg in procurement processes. Compare and contrast Janelia vs Cambridge for neuroscience.
I’m reflecting on the forthcoming podcast with Sophie Woolley on going from hearing to deaf to hearing. How little the average person knows about deaf culture.
Why the woke culture wars have now encompassed ESG.
The amazing advances that AI have brought in the last 2 weeks. (1) Language processing and (2) illustration.
On a macro perspective: Focusing on the major items. War, pandemics/health, environment, poverty.
I was reminded of my chicken rice essay this week. I still have a second part on condiments to come. But this is how it starts:
Sic Fan Sic Fan (looor) [Singa-lish]
Kai Fan Kai Fan !
My Mum hollers: Eat. It’s chicken rice.
Calling out the dish to be served is superfluous. A gentle aroma of sweet chicken smells have been wafting for some time.
I’ve already stolen a selection of the best pieces from the kitchen.
Namely:
a small sprinkle of crispy chicken fat crackles
the backbone of the chicken
Gloopy knuckles and scraped jellied bits
Many western friends don’t understand the joy of these edibles. The joy arises from a mix of cultural, texture and flavour.
….The dish is presented in three essential parts: Rice, Chicken and Soup.
Condiments and sauces essential accompaniments. The use of the chicken infuses all three parts. Today, western cooks speak of “nose-to-tail” eating and throughout history when food was scarce all human cultures minimised food waste. Fat, proteins, bones and marrow, all sources of high energy and useful minerals.
This kind of eating speaks to an older, slower time. Not so long ago in human history, only a few decades, but signalling now a richer, wealthier faster time.
When I eat such complete nose-to-tail food a part of me is sensitive to this cultural history, and to the sustainability implications of limited food waste. Fans of nose-to-tail food instinctively understand this.
There is an intellectual and visceral satisfaction knowing an important ingredient threads throughout the meal.
The rice is soft and rich with chicken essence.
The chicken is delicate and what my Mum would call “waat” - Smooth textured. ["waat" (滑) smooth, moist & slippery, like the belly or collars of freshly steamed fish or steamed chicken's feet.]
The soup is refreshing and cleansing.
The condiments when required are sweet, salty, ginger-spiced, savoury (umami), garlicky and chili-hot. All the flavours in any combination you might like.
A meal in itself - and we don’t really serve desserts. Maybe a piece of fruit - but no heavy sweet stodge needed to fill you up. The meal is complete in itself.
While this dish is famous in stalls and restaurants around east Asia, you can find its match or even better at home - well - at least in my Mum’s home. …
This is my tentative thinking on Openspace and governance mechanisms.
I believe that 4 adjacent systems of idea generation and decision making, namely: (1) Open Space Technology (2) Quadratic Voting (3) Polis and (4) Citizen Assemblies have the ability to unlock decision making processes that are currently log jammed. We have proved use cases led by the work of Audrey Tang (Digital Minister) in Taiwan, and many previous smaller examples. I judge the chances of success are high (68%) based on the Taiwan experience but chances of implementation in other nation states are currently low (2%). There may be higher chances at the city-state level or for moderately challenging mid sized organisations or stakeholder populations. This essay will briefly discuss the background to the challenge (stagnation, lack of institution decision making, inability to form consensus) and why this barrier is plausibly holding back substantial value (and importance for the long-term survival of humanity). I will then apply this thinking to moderately hard (and somewhat esoteric problems) of: (i) deciding the pension status of >476,000 university pension members and £80bn in assets, (ii) decision making for UK wind farms and planning in general, (iii) deciding what projects at IARPA, UK innovation agency should fund (iv) deciding and allocating what projects government funding should focus on to ensure the thriving and survival of humanity. I conclude with moderate amounts of resources (time and money) equivalent to what is already being spent or lower these process and techniques could bring significantly better outcomes and include greater amounts of the population within decision making.
AI has brought two significant advances in the last 2 weeks. First DALL E is creating art works based on key phrases which are astonishing. Here is a sample. Will this mean basic illustrators go out of a job or does it start as a basis for even more sophisticated work?
And in this thread:
And explanation:
And why experts underestimated the speed here:
Second the Google Team have a language AI which is showing emerging properties of “logic thinking”.
This is much faster than most expert observers were suggesting 10 years ago. Notable.
Noted libertarian thinker and entrepreneur investor Peter Thiel seems to have nudged towards politics of late.
Notable to be that the acronym “ESG” has joined the woke culture wars. We can add it to gammons and snowflakes.
It’s politics weaponised in a word and it highlights to me the problems of simplification and a lack of specificity of the question.
The question is not should we think communism when we think ESG but more like:
Is the trade-off acceptable that certain restrictive controls on refrigerant chemicals (that science knows is harmful to the ozone layer that will have catastrophic risks to the planet) that make it harder for business but better for humans to thrive and survive? And have the second and third order consequences of such regulation been understood ?
Or, do we think that higher employee engagement and satisfaction as measured by “best place to work” (cf Alex Edmans) or GlassDoor scores leads to higher return on assets, sales or long-term stock price outperformance ? Is the mechnanism for such an idea plausible ? Is it possible that companies are underinvested here due to measurement difficulty and is the trade-off on increased employee investment acceptable versus other use of funds.
(Oh see! I have done part of a mini essay!) But Thiel is riffing on the culture wars and signalling both sides are fighting. Thiel himself naming enemies. It’s convenient to have a simple vague enemy that goes by a three letter word…
Links this week:
Shanghai not looking good…
and more….
Stripes’ annual letter - they now employ 7000+ people.
Chess = Life
Train spotting
Ask me why this sumarises one of my life philosophies….
Branko against de-growth
On flying insects -
The misery of calorie labels:
Crafting!
The history of art: