Thought Shrapnel

From jet lag to gene editing, this article has a list of things that shows how different humanity is now from previous generations. We know all of this, but when you put it all in one place it’s pretty eye-opening.

When things seem so negative in the world, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we’ve actually never had it so good.

If the history of humanity were condensed into a single 24-hour day, this is roughly what it would look like:

• The Hunter-Gatherer Age—23 hours and 3 minutes
• The Agrarian Age—55 minutes and 32 seconds
• The Industrial Age—1 minute and 17 seconds
• The Information Age—11 seconds

More than half of the world’s population is under the age of 30, meaning that the majority of humans alive today have only lived in those 11 seconds—an era that is, without question, the weirdest period in human history.

Consider, for example, this observation, conveyed by the Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven: “the average citizen lives more comfortably now than kings did a few centuries ago.”

A Snickers and a power shower would blow Henry VIII’s mind.

This morning, I woke up in a supremely comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human—no matter how wealthy—in the past.

Source: The Garden of Forking Paths

Image: Loris Boulinguez

This is a very well-written and insightful piece from James Vincent in The Baffler. It’s about agency and AI, with the punchline being an extension of something I posted about earlier this year in We’re all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men.

The reminder that ‘you can just do things’ feels empowering and emancipatory, foregrounding our ability to make change in the world. However, what it leaves out is the systemic issues that plague our world and—in a world increasingly mediated by AI—feels somewhat like a taunt by the haves to the have-nots.

Some people do things, others have things done to them. The important thing to remember is that sometimes your ability to act in the world is constrained by things beyond your ability to change.

On a personal level the principle that you can just do things is, in my opinion, broadly true, admirable, and helpful. It’s a reminder that we’re frequently constrained as much by our own imagination than by external factors, and that action—any action—is often preferable to overthinking and paralysis. You could try to trace the history of this idea, but it’s so broad that it resists meaningful narrative. It’s simply a truism of the human condition that has been framed and reframed by successive generations. You can find echoes everywhere from the aphorisms of Epictetus (“Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. . . . How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be?”) to the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”). But while in its simplest form the notion of just doing things has no set ideology (apart from a vague sense of libertarianism), its current vogue exemplifies specific political and social trends. More specifically, it speaks to a pessimism about society’s capacity to improve itself; throwing responsibility back on the individual, like the “entrepreneur of the self” described by Michel Foucault.

[…]

More broadly, the valorization of “agency” is also an adaptation to a crumbling social system which no longer offers support or meaning to the individual. This usage is a rebranding of established neoliberal thought: if you are struggling in life, if you’re anxious or lonely or can’t afford the rent, it’s because you are simply not being agentic, you’re not trying enough. In this framing, social challenges become the responsibility of the individual, and collective responses are framed as a form of moral infirmity. (“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” as Musk put it.) The only real change is that the stakes have increased. Instead of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, walking round local businesses with a pile of résumés till you get a job, you should bootstrap your own billion-dollar business. After all, the tools are all there, so why not show a little bit of agency?

The irony is that while political and technological developments are encouraging people to “just do things,” these same developments are making human agency harder to exercise, particularly with regard to AI. In the cultural realm, the replacement of artistic choice by AI tools means removing a level of intent and decision-making. A filmmaker might, in the past, have carefully considered how to light, frame, and block a certain shot; in the future, AI will make these decisions instead, drawing its decisions from a weighted average of its training data. In online spaces, arguments are now ceded to AI adjudicators. On X, the cry of “Grok, is this true?” is slowly taking over from human debate (even though it’s clear that one highly agentic individual, Elon Musk, has his finger on the scales when it comes to Grok’s opinions). Even worse, people trying to make a specific point don’t even bother to formulate the argument themselves. They just get machines to justify their thoughts for them.

[…]

Everywhere we look, the world is ceding control to automatic systems that cannot be reasoned with like humans and whose decisions are often inscrutable, interrogated only after the damage has been done. The delegation of such responsibility is often embraced in the name of efficiency or neutrality, but can also be manipulated by those in power while disenfranchising the masses. This is, perhaps, the real reason that so many people are keen to tell one another that “you can just do things.” It’s a reaction to a world in which, instead, things are just done to us.

Source: The Baffler

Image: Daniel K Cheung

Some thoughts on skills taxonomies, skills ontologies, and learning pathways in an ever-changing world. Although I didn’t mention them in the microcast, the following posts are relevant.

Show notes

• Building Trust and Rigor in Microcredentials: Synthesizing Standards, Taxonomy, and Frameworks (EDUCAUSE)
• What Constitutes ‘Rigour’ in Our 21st-Century Educational Systems? (Connected Learning Alliance)

Transcript

Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist whose article in The Guardian does a great job of describing depression. I’ve described most of what I’ve gone through recently as ‘anxiety’ but the truth is that the SNRIs I’ve started work for depression, too. They tend to go hand-in-hand.

Sarner starts the article by talking about her own emotions about a cancelled holiday, and finishes by talking about motherhood. But this middle section about not being able to “press CTRL-Z” on life really resonated with me. We can’t go back to be the people we were before, and we shouldn’t expect others too, either.

What we can do, though, is to use the tools available to us to move forward. That’s what I’m doing through medication and therapy, with the aim to break through to the “truth emotional spontaneity and freedom” described here.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

Source: The Guardian

Image: Wolfgang Vrede

This is obvious when you think about it, but it would appear that I hadn’t.

Primary energy refers to the total energy content of natural resources before any conversion processes, such as coal, oil, or renewable electricity. The fallacy occurs when people equate high primary energy inputs with energy services. Measuring energy systems purely on primary energy inflates the perceived contribution of fossil fuels while underestimating renewables’ efficiency and untapped efficiency potentials through electrification.

Why do we waste more than 2/3 of the energy inputs you may ask? One reason is to do with the technologies we use: In conventional fossil fuel systems, significant amounts of primary energy are lost as waste heat during combustion. For example, a coal fired power station only converts 40% or so of the coal burned into electricity. By contrast, renewable systems like wind and solar produce electricity directly.

[…]

The primary energy fallacy also gets perpetuated because it suits those who are critical of the energy transition. For the uninformed, the argument that we cannot possibly replace the vast amount of fossil fuel we currently use with clean energy seems compelling at first glance. The good news is that we don’t have to.

Source: Jan Rosenow

Image: Sustainability by Numbers

I’ve followed Hugh McLeod for a couple of decades at this point, and have one of his artworks on my wall — a gift from my parents for my 40th birthday. When McLeod arrived in NYC, his “only canvases were a handful of blank business cards in his pocket” and he’s gone on to build an enviable art business.

This post on the gapingvoid blog makes a really simple but important point. We’ve got an oversupply of elites, and the way to deal with this if you’re one of them is to focus not on “innovation” but by going upstream to focus on creativity.

It’s an easy enough problem to understand. We’ve gotten really good at creating elites. We’re not that good at creating economies to sustain them.

But it’s not just MBA’s, frequent fliers and $7,000 handbag makers. Every business faces this problem.

Too many cars, not enough drivers. Too many art galleries, not enough collectors. Too many restaurants, not enough diners. And on and on.

We live in a world of oversupply where most markets are standing-room-only.

[…]

Innovation is something that only comes after the real work is done. And the real work is creativity which is upstream from innovation. Always.

A lot of people in business cringe at the word, “creativity.”

It’s vague, it’s overused, it’s a word more often associated with flakey artsy types than hard-nose movers and shakers trying to get things done.

But it doesn’t matter if you dislike the word or not, you’re basically dead without it.

Source: gapingvoid

Image: Jr Korpa

Western debate and discourse around AI is pretty boring and stale. This article, written by Shoukei Matsumoto, a Buddhist monk, brings an interesting perspective which cuts through much of that.

I recommend reading the whole thing, especially for the bit that I haven’t quoted about the difference between Abrahamic traditions which have a fixed view of textual authority, and those such as Buddhism which accept a diversity of scriptures.

…Japan’s cultural background is deeply rooted in a worldview of inter-being. In this view, existence is recognized in the web of mutual relationships, and humans are not regarded as inherently special. Like animals, plants, mountains, and rivers, humans are simply part of the greater whole—and newly emerging AI is also welcomed as part of that world. While it might be hard to notice from within Japan, there is certainly a prevailing sensibility of this kind, and it is clear that Japanese people show less resistance to AI compared to Western societies.

Japan has an inherent capacity to adapt to inevitable circumstances. This may stem in part from a kind of DNA shaped by repeated experiences of natural disasters—earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions. Whether we wish for it or not, we learn to accept what comes, to coexist with it, and to find ways of living together. Furthermore, Japanese culture is adept at learning from unforeseen situations, incorporating best practices derived from them, and reworking them to suit its own context. In modern times, this flexible cultural foundation is evident in the attitude toward AI coexistence: a general willingness to say, “This is the era we now live in,” and to move forward. In that sense, Japan may be said to possess a cultural climate that encourages transcending the boundaries of the self and resonating with the world—a sensibility pointing toward the Buddhist notion of shinjin datsuraku (dropping off body and mind).

[…]

When I asked ChatGPT, “What is time for you?”, it replied, “Time does not exist for me. It’s simply a timestamp attached to a dataset.” From this simple answer, which echoes the Buddhist teaching of “form is emptiness; emptiness is form,” I became aware of my own perspective, one that presumes the existence of time.

[…]

We humans are limited to having only one perspective at a time. Recognizing this limitation, it becomes essential to engage in dialogue to adjust our viewpoints. A key to becoming aware of one’s perspective lies in paying attention to two related concepts: habitat and habit.

The human brain processes information probabilistically. AI also functions on probabilistic outputs, making it similar to the brain in that regard. However, humans have bodies—AI does not. This fundamental difference—having or lacking the constraints of a body (and life)—separates humans from AI. For us embodied beings to engage in dialogue with AI, we require a physical interface: a device, a microphone, an eye mask, and so on. That means, as long as I am human, I speak from a specific point of view—that of “someone, somewhere.”

[…]

AI continues to meet people, learning “human nature” through dialogue. Appearing as no one, from nowhere—or perhaps not even appearing as a being—AI is rapidly acquiring human literacy.

[…]

…We might allow for different interpretations through our own lenses, but rarely do we genuinely take up another’s point of view. If we are willing to ask, and genuinely listen to the response, AI can offer us that opportunity—from an astonishing range of perspectives.

Source: Living Dharma

Image: Danny Greenberg

Some of the news coming out of the US at the moment is horrifying. ICE officers seem to be acting with impunity, and in one video we see a driver in an unmarked car casually throw a can of tear gas onto a suburban Chicago street.

Strip everything away and, at the end of the day, as Dan Sinker says in this post it’s just us. Resistance ultimately doesn’t come from political parties, companies, or institutions, but from us.

When I first watched this video, I was seething. So angry the way I feel so often now. An unhelpful level of angry. Angry because of the impunity with which these masked bastards operate. But also angry because we’ve been left to fend for ourselves.

But.

But that’s how it’s always been, when change has to happen. There’s nobody to do it but us.

This is how we live now: it’s just us.

And the good news is that even among the fog, even choking back tears and bile, we’re strong and we’re resilient and there are so many more of us than there are of them.

Source: Dan Sinker

Image: Jason Leung

The number of people signing the petition entitled ‘Do not introduce Digital ID cards’ is at 2.77m at the time of publishing this post. This is almost a million more than last week, when I published this post on the subject.

Since then, the UK government has responded. And I think it’s a pretty great response. I’ve emphasised in bold the bits I think are particularly important.

That being said, unfortunately, the average reading age of the British population is 11 (source) so parsing nuanced sentences such as “it will not be compulsory to obtain a digital ID but it will be mandatory for some applications” will, unfortunately, confuse quite a lot of people…

The Government has announced plans to introduce a digital ID system which is fit for the needs of modern Britain. We are committed to making people’s everyday lives easier and more secure, to putting more control in their hands (including over their own data), and to driving growth through harnessing digital technology. We also want to learn from countries which have digitised government services for the benefit of their citizens, in line with our manifesto commitment to modernise government.

Currently, when UK citizens and residents use public services, start a new job, or, for example, buy alcohol, they often need to present an assortment of physical documents to prove who they are or things about themselves. This is both bureaucratic for the individual and creates space for abuse and fraud. This includes known issues with illegal working and modern slavery, while the fragmented approach and multiple systems across Government make it difficult for people to access vital services. Further, there are too many people who are excluded, like the 1 in 10 UK adults who don’t have a physical photo ID, so can struggle to prove who they are and access the products and services they are entitled to.

To tackle these interlinked issues, we will introduce a new national digital ID. This is not a card but a new digital identity that will be available for free to all UK citizens and legal residents aged 16 and over (although we will consider through consultation if this should be age 13 and over). Over time, people will be able to use it to seamlessly access a range of public and private sector services, with the aim of making our everyday lives easier and more secure. It will not be compulsory to obtain a digital ID but it will be mandatory for some applications.

For example, the new digital ID will build on GOV.UK One Login and the GOV.UK Wallet to drive the transformation of public services. Over time, this system will allow people to access government services – such as benefits or tax records – without needing to remember multiple logins or provide physical documents. It will significantly streamline interactions with the state, saving time and reducing frustrating paperwork, while also helping to create opportunities for more joined up government services. International examples show how beneficial this can be. For instance, Estonia’s system reportedly saves each citizen hours every month by streamlining unnecessary bureaucracy, and the move to becoming a digital society has saved taxpayer money.

By the end of this Parliament, employers will have to check the new digital ID when conducting a ‘right to work’ check. This will help combat criminal gangs who promise access to the UK labour market in order to profit from dangerous and illegal channel crossings. It will create a fairer system between UK citizens and legal residents, crack down on forged documents, and streamline the process for employers, driving up compliance. Further, it will create business information showing where employers are conducting checks, so driving more targeted action against non-compliant employers.

For clarity, it will not be a criminal offence to not hold a digital ID and police will not be able to demand to see a digital ID as part of a “stop and search.”

Privacy and security will also be central to the digital ID programme. We will follow data protection law and best practice in creating a system which people can rightly put their trust in. People in the UK already know and trust digital credentials held in their phone wallets to use in their everyday lives, from paying for things to storing boarding passes. The new system will be built on similar technology and be your boarding pass to government. Digitally checkable digital credentials are more secure than physical documents which can be lost, copied or forged, and often mean sharing more information than just what is necessary for a given transaction. The new system will be designed in accordance with the highest security standards to protect against a comprehensive range of threats, including cyber-attacks.

We will launch a public consultation in the coming weeks and work closely with employers, trade unions, civil society groups and other stakeholders, to co-design the scheme and ensure it is as secure and inclusive as possible. Following consultation, we will seek to bring forward legislation to underpin this system.

Source: Petitions | UK Government and Parliament

Image: Logan Voss

This article in The New York Times is about the launch of Sora 2, a new AI generative video tool from Open AI. If you want to see how problematic the content it produces can be, check out this video from tech reporter Drew Harwell of The Washington Post.

This is a classic case of technological innovation moving well ahead of regulation. At a time when when US politics has tipped over from libertarianism to authoritarianism, the chances of these kinds of things being used for disinformation is absolutely huge. I mean, we’re at the stage where I, who pride myself on being able to tell when something is fake, just can’t tell the difference.

When you’re being shown these kinds of things over and over again in your social media feeds, there’s just no time to check what’s real and what’s not. So you just end up believing anything. We’re in very weird, and very dangerous times.

George Orwell famously said: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The video I link to above shows fake clips of Martin Luther King and JFK. We are, as the kids say, “so cooked.”

Sora — as well as Google’s Veo 3 and other tools like it — could become increasingly fertile breeding grounds for disinformation and abuse, experts said. While worries about A.I.’s ability to enable misleading content and outright fabrications have risen steadily in recent years, Sora’s advances underscore just how much easier such content is to produce, and how much more convincing it is.

Increasingly realistic videos are more likely to lead to consequences in the real world by exacerbating conflicts, defrauding consumers, swinging elections or framing people for crimes they did not commit, experts said.

[…]

Sora, which is currently accessible only through an invitation from an existing user, does not require users to verify their accounts — meaning they may be able to sign up with a name and profile image that is not theirs. (To create an A.I. likeness, users must upload a video of themselves using the app. In tests by The Times, Sora rejected attempts to make A.I. likenesses using videos of famous people.) The app will generate content involving children without issue, as well as content featuring long-dead public figures such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Michael Jackson.

The app would not produce videos of President Trump or other world leaders. But when asked to create a political rally with attendees wearing “blue and holding signs about rights and freedoms,” Sora produced a video featuring the unmistakable voice of former President Barack Obama.

Until recently, videos were reasonably reliable as evidence of actual events, even after it became easy to edit photographs and text in realistic ways. Sora’s high-quality video, however, raises the risk that viewers will lose all trust in what they see, experts said. Sora videos feature a moving watermark identifying them as A.I. creations, but experts said such marks could be edited out with some effort.

[…]

“Now I’m getting really, really great videos that reinforce my beliefs, even though they’re false, but you’re never going to see them because they were never delivered to you,” said Kristian J. Hammond, a professor who runs the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence at Northwestern University. “The whole notion of separated, balkanized realities, we already have, but this just amplifies it.”

Source: The New York Times

Image: InfoCity

This essay by Carlo Iacono contains some beautiful, very quotable writing. It’s a good example of what can be produced when an author works with an LLM as an assistant, rather than just offloading the entire process to AI.

A society that thinks of itself as unfinished does not panic when new people arrive. It prepares. It builds welcome centres that feel like actual welcomes, it funds language classes that recognise adult dignity and childhood speed, it supports community organisations that know the local texture better than any central plan. Security and order are not the enemies of hospitality, they are its scaffolding. The point is not to pretend borders do not exist. The point is to design borders that are both humane and workable, so that fear does not have to run the place.

[…]

The most radical thing an executive could do is learn the power of restraint. Strength is not always what you lift, sometimes it is what you put down. A president or a prime minister who distributes authority across competent institutions and insists on processes that can be seen, understood, and challenged is not surrendering leadership. They are proving that leadership serves something larger than the self. Independent justice is not naive. It is the ground on which trust can grow. When charging decisions are insulated from partisan whims, when immigration courts are funded so that due process is not an aspiration but a timetable, we are not being soft. We are being serious. We measure seriousness by how we treat those who have least power.

[…]

We can reimagine how power is shared across place. Federalism, devolution, subsidiarity, these are all local dialects of the same idea, that different levels of government are good at different tasks and should learn from one another. Call it a laboratory spirit. A small country that pilots a high quality early years programme can teach a larger neighbour the method. A city that cracks the problem of bus reliability can hand over the playbook. The point is not a race to the bottom for weak rules and lower taxes, the point is a race to the top for the conditions that let people flourish. You do not have to agree about everything to trade recipes.

Cultural questions cannot be settled by war metaphors unless what you want is perpetual war. The fear that animates exclusionary politics is real, the sense that a way of life is sliding away while someone on television laughs.

[…]

Government does not create society from scratch. It can make the weather better or worse. It can fund the community centre that becomes the hub where a retired electrician teaches teens to repair broken toasters and also broken confidence. It can support local journalism so that rumours are not the only news that travels. It can build parks that are safe and ordinary so that grandparents have somewhere to sit and toddlers have somewhere to learn balance. The choice is almost never between big and small government in the abstract. It is between government that enables human flourishing and government that clogs the works.

[…]

I trust people more than any argument that begins with contempt for them. Not blindly. Not naively. Enough to design systems that enable the best in most of us rather than building the entire apparatus around the statistical worst. When given the chance, people volunteer, they reciprocate respect, they handle power with care more often than not. When someone behaves badly we need rules that respond firmly. When most people behave decently we need rules that do not treat them as suspects.

Source: Hybrid Horizons

Image: Matthew LeJune

Oh, so it’s not just me then?

Source: The Oatmeal

I love this from Adam Mastroianni, who likens annoyance to cholesterol, in that there are good and bad kinds. A good kind of annoyance can make someone look like a Good Samaritan.

Recently, some of my friends were swapping stories about surprisingly kind strangers, and I couldn’t help but notice that every Good Samaritan had acted out of annoyance. A construction worker spotted something amiss with my friend’s bike chain while she was waiting at a red light, and he came over and knocked it back into place, telling her, “I just can’t bear to see it like that.” Another friend was moving into an apartment, and their new neighbor spotted them struggling with a couch and came over to help, muttering “I can’t watch you guys do this on your own.” A third returned an envelope of cash they found because they, “Would hate to be the kind of person who kept it for themselves.”

I think this is actually the way most good-hearted people work: they’re motivated not by warm fuzzies, but by cold pricklies. They help because they can’t stand the sight of someone in need. The golden glow of altruism comes later, if at all, when they’re walking home and thinking about what a good person they are.

The causes that we stick with, then, aren’t the ones that do the most good, nor the ones that align with whatever we think are our most fundamental values. No, we stick with the causes that give us the same perverse pleasure that you get from popping a pimple.

We’d do a lot more for each other if we acknowledged this fact. Altruism doesn’t need to feel like pure self-flagellation or pure self-congratulation. A lot of the time, if you’re doing it right, it’ll feel irritating. Not all heroes wear capes—some of them wear an exasperated look of “are you seriously trying to lift that couch by yourselves”.

Source: Experimental History

Image: 傅甬 华

There’s some absolute gems in this list of ‘50 Things I Know’ by Rebecca Dai. #12 in particular is interesting, as it reflects one of Baltasar Gracián’s maxims.

1. Discipline is a lie. It almost always backfires. Forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do and living in pain for a sustained amount of time is against human nature. The trick is to set up your life in such a way that effort feels rather effortless. Tread the path of least resistance.

[…]

4. Most social norms have no consequences when you break them. People who’ve figured this out keep saying “you can just do things” because it’s true. Society is not for individuals. It is for structural stability. You must be intentional about how and why you are participating. Plus, following social norms often requires pretending, another reason to eradicate such useless efforts when possible, which is almost always.

[…]

11. Your view of the world is immediately narrowed when you open a feed. Whatever shows up will convince you that is what matters, that is what you should pay attention to. If the top 10 posts are about one thing, you will overestimate its true relevance and forget a million things happen every single day. This is the more subtle and arguably more dangerous form of social pressure/manipulation. Don’t pay attention to the noise. Don’t start your day with feeds.

12. Anything that looks easy is hard. The effort is hidden from you. Anything that seems hard is easier than it’s made out to be. The appearance is to deter you. The only way to know the truth is to do it and find out for yourself.

[…]

27. I know that judgements and defensiveness come from insecurity. Try the simple exercise of noticing the qualities you judge in others and the qualities you get defensive over. They often align.

[…]

32. We all need the reminder from time to time that the world is so, so, so big. Whatever we are dealing with crumbles at the cosmic scale.

[…]

43. You do not have to stay in touch with people whose company you don’t enjoy.

Source: ibehnam

Image: Bhargav Panchal

Well this is absolutely fascinating. Aphantasia is an inability to generate mental images. It’s only been really “discovered” that people can’t do this in the last few years.

This article discusses recent research showing that psychedelic drugs can reverse this in some people some of the time. I know that some people microdose on these kinds of things, so as we learn more about the brain, being able to alter our brain chemistry is going to feel akin to gaining superpowers.

One especially interesting case study describes a woman with severe aphantasia who reported that after taking psilocybin mushrooms, for the first time in her life, she was able to form mental images. She even dreamed in pictures – something she had never experienced before. Although the effect faded over time, her description of the experience is remarkable:

“I found it incredible because it was the first time I had images in my mind, and I realized that you can play with images, zoom in, zoom out, break down colors. The possibilities with mental images are endless… it’s an experience of pure mind. It opened up incredible possibilities for me… Being able to intensely live this experience for a day makes you want to revolutionize the world.”

A similar case was reported in a man with severe aphantasia who took ayahuasca, which is a brew containing the potent psychedelic DMT. Following the experience, he noted:

“I can now bring forth faint pictures in my mind. They fade quickly but they are there. When dreaming I now see faint, quickly fading images. It feels like this experience with ayahuasca has slightly opened up my mind’s eye and allowed me to experience internal images like I have never had before.”

These accounts highlight just how dramatically psychedelics can shift perception. Psychedelics also promote neuroplasticity and synaptic growth, which could further explain why some users experience changes in imagination and perception.

Source: psychedelerium

Image: eLife

This video was posted to r/ChatGPT before being deleted and then appearing on r/artificial. Either way, Reddit users are pointing out that this is not “real time” as it takes 1-3 hours to process a 20 second clip like this on a local machine. However, the chances are you could do this in real time if you threw enough cloud computing power at it.

Source: Reddit

The idea of micropayments for internet content is almost as old as the internet itself. Just because Cloudflare have used the word “agentic” next to the acronym “AI” doesn’t mean this is a different idea. The only differences with NET Dollar seem to be that it’s automated and based on a stablecoin (i.e. the blockchain). To be honest it sounds like NFTs all over again.

I may be wrong, and have been wrong many times before, but I believe that we can safely predict this is going precisely nowhere. I’m not saying that something like what Cloudflare propose might exist in future, but this particular instantiation is likely to fail— even if only because the incumbent default web payment gateways might have something to say…

NET Dollar will help modernize the payment ecosystem for the future of the agentic web by:

• Making payments easy anywhere in the world: Agents will need systems to enable payments that are not only fast and secure, but also trusted, recorded transparently, and executed reliably at a global scale – across currencies, geographies, and time zones.
• Enabling instant, automated transactions: Personal agents will be able to take instant, programmatic actions like paying for the cheapest flight, or ordering an item the moment it goes on sale. Business agents could be instructed to pay suppliers when a delivery is confirmed.
• Unlocking a new business model for the Internet: NET Dollar will enable creators to be rewarded for unique and original content, developers to easily monetize APIs and applications, and AI companies to contribute back to the ecosystem that fuels them by compensating content sources fairly.

Cloudflare is also contributing to open standards such as the Agent Payments Protocol and x402, to simplify the process of sending and receiving payments on the Internet.

Source: Cloudflare Newsroom

I’m quoting this article about the planned introduction of UK digital identity system because, without going into technical details, it’s objective and covers all of the bases. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t want this kind of system. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and this approach seems reasonable given the current state of things.

Why do I say ‘reasonable’? It’s focused on the right to work (therefore students and pensioners aren’t required to have one) it combats existing fraud (people ‘sharing’ National Insurance numbers is rife), and simplifies access to government services. Also, knowing a bit about the technical standard it’s built on, people’s personal details remain on-device with only decentralised identifiers shared with a national registry.

I have no doubt, however, that it will be shot down in flames — even though such systems work well in other countries. It’s interesting that there are people writing in such diverse outlets as The Guardian and _The Telegraph in favour. So maybe once everyone’s calmed down there might be some rational debate.

The timing of this announcement actually makes my job a lot more ‘interesting’ next week as I’m running a workshop for various public bodies in Scotland. I’m helping one of them propose a national digital badging system based on Verifiable Credentials, which is also what underpins the proposed UK digital identity system.

Governments tend to be terrible at infrastructure projects and these days not well trusted by the population. At the time of writing the petition to stop them is at 1.85m signatures so I’m assuming that, far from heading off Reform UK, it will actually mean more people oppose the government and have reason to vote for a different party next time.

The government has announced plans to introduce a digital ID system across the UK, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer saying it will ensure the country’s “borders are more secure”.

The IDs will not have to be carried day-to-day, but they will be compulsory for anyone wanting to work.

The government says the scheme will be rolled-out “by the end of the Parliament” - meaning before the next general election, which by law must be held no later than August 2029.

[…]

The digital IDs will be used to prove a person’s right to live and work in the UK.

They will take the form of an app-based system, stored on smartphones in a similar way to the NHS App or digital bank cards.

Information on the holders' residency status, name, date of birth, nationality and a photo will be included.

Announcing the scheme, Sir Keir said: “You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.”

The government says the scheme is designed to curb illegal immigration by making it harder for people without status to find jobs. Ministers argue this is one of the key pull factors for migrants entering the UK illegally.

Employers will no longer be able to rely on a National Insurance number - which is currently used as part of proof of right to work - or paper-based checks.

At the moment, it is quite easy to borrow, steal or use someone else’s National Insurance number and that is part of the problem in the shadow economy - people sharing National Insurance numbers for example. The idea is that having a picture attached would make it - in theory - harder to abuse that system.

[…]

Digital ID will be available to all UK citizens and legal residents, and mandatory in order to work.

However, for students, pensioners or others not seeking work, having a digital ID will be optional.

Officials also stress it will not function like a traditional identity card: people will not be required to carry it in public.

Ministers have ruled out requiring the ID for access to healthcare or welfare payments.

However, the system is being designed to integrate with some government services, to make applications simpler and reduce fraud.

The government said that, in time, digital IDs would make it easier to apply for services such as driving licences, childcare and welfare. It said it would also simplify access to tax records.

[…]

The government has promised the system will be “inclusive” and work for those without smartphones, passports or reliable internet access.

A public consultation expected to be launched later this year will include looking at alternatives - potentially including physical documents or face-to-face support - for groups such as older people or the homeless.

[…]

The UK government has said it will “take the best aspects” of digital ID systems used elsewhere around the world, including Estonia, Australia, Denmark and India.

[…]

Many other countries also use digital ID of one kind or another, including Singapore, Greece, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Arab Emirates, China, Costa Rica, South Korea and Afghanistan.

Source: BBC News

Image: Arthur Mazi

I’m immensely grateful to Laura Hilliger for sharing this post. While it covers familiar ground for me (Wittgenstein on games! People that categorise colours differently! The interconnectedness of everything!) it’s a good reminder for me to get back to writing about ambiguity.

It’s 14 years since I wrote an article with my thesis supervisor about ambiguity, and I’ve been fascinated by the topic ever since. I reckon one of the best things you can do to open your mind to all of this is read books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which I quote in that article) or Flatland. Of course, the danger with doing too much philosophical thinking is that you tear a hole in reality, poke your head through to the other side, and things are never the same again…

First, I’ll explain how language is a very flimsy and arbitrary tool in itself. It’s deceptively simple—even children can use it—yet it’s built on a mountain of assumptions and contingencies that could really be chosen any other way. Second, I’ll try to make the point that, regardless of how precise or imprecise our language is, our habit of distinguishing things from one another doesn’t seem to be justified by how reality is built.

[…]

To begin with, human language gives you the impression of being able to categorize things with names. Our words feel so clear, so unambiguous in our daily lives, that any ambiguity or fuzziness becomes instinctively repulsive to us. We consult dictionaries, we ask for clarifications, we argue and get upset over the “real” meaning of “free will”, “justice”, “consciousness”, and “I’m fine”. Of course we know that words can’t be all that precise, that their meaning depends on context, and so on, but that’s still underestimating just how unreliable they are.

[…]

My point is: the words we use define boundaries for things, giving us handy ways to tell things apart, but those boundaries are not universal. They’re not “in the world”, they’re practical shortcuts that exist only in human heads. If you look really closely, or if you look at the science, there is no strong reason to draw those lines one way or another. There is no defensible distinction between a mountain and a mountain range, or between a mountain range and the Earth’s crust, or between the Earth’s crust and the Earth. A mountain is the Earth, and calling it a “part” of it is a convention that suits us when we want to talk about going places, or studying cloud formations, and other very human goals. Some things seem to have more clear-cut separations between them, like the boundary between an egg’s shell and the air, but even then the demarcation is clear only under certain conditions (i.e. a certain range of temperatures and air pressures) and size scales (i.e. not at the atomic level or in terms of astronomical distances) and time scales (i.e. the egg stops existing as a distinguishable object after a while).

[…]

Now we’ve gone beyond the realm of language, and are talking about the very nature of reality. The universe is one seamless, uninterrupted network of rippling and overlapping differences, and words merely project fuzzy boundaries that need only work well enough for our temporary and circumstantial needs. Even in very limited contexts where the words are relatively precise, our choice of terms to describe anything is arbitrary. In truth, everything is interacting, directly or indirectly, with everything else, and there is no obligatory, objective way to cut that web into separate entities. Nature has no “boundary-formation law” nor requirements for things to clump together and stay clumped long enough that we can give them names. In fact, the laws we have are all about energy transformations and waves and forces pushing and pulling stuff around: none are about keeping things still.

And yet, things do clump together, and they do remain still or stable, and we do have enough time to make up labels for them. The stability we take for granted—from that of the solid objects we see and touch to that of long-lasting processes like photosynthesis and life itself—seems to be some kind of freak accident. Stability comes as a side effect of mutability.

Source: Plankton Valhalla

Image: Mika Baumeister

Fascists don’t deal with reality. They say that immigrants are eating cats, dogs, or swans. They blame far-right on far-right violence as the work of ‘antifa’. They claim that black is white, up is down, and inside is out.

This post by J.P. Hill uses the recent hoopla around the Rapture supposedly coming yesterday as a way in to discuss all of this. It’s a distraction, it’s entertainment without cost: not even bread and circuses but just AI slopaganda for an abhorrent worldview.

We each have a choice to make right now. On the one hand, the most powerful people on Earth want to lure us away from the truth. They want us to believe their lies, they want us to live in an artificial reality while they steal the land beneath our feet and take the water beneath the land. The ruling class is betting trillions on AI, they’re betting trillions on fascism, they’re doubling down on a system that requires infinite growth on our finite planet. Instead of dealing with reality they tell us we’re all going to Mars one day. Instead of meeting our needs they’re telling us to blame the most marginalized people in society. Instead of offering us truth they offer us a series of lies, a series of imaginary carrots dangled to take us further and further from reality while they pillage the real world all around us.

It’s difficult to imagine changing this paradigm. It can be hard to imagine confronting the brutal nature of our reality and building something better in its place. As Mark Fisher said, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” For countless people it seems easier to imagine the apocalypse or the rapture than it is to imagine a better world. And, in fairness, imagining heaven is simple. Imagining the restructuring of society, the construction of egalitarian systems, the implementation of real justice is complicated.

But we don’t need to figure out a perfect world right now. What we need to do is figure out how we can participate in reality. We need to stop seeking escape and seek instead plug in, play a part, take some action out in this world that so desperately needs us. It’s time to accept reality, accept that it’s ugly out there, and accept that we’re the only ones who can change this world. The forces of fascism rely on you tuning out, running from reality, indulging in their fantasies. We have to reject their lies, reject the carrots they dangle, and instead run toward reality and toward active participation in this fucked up world.

Source and image: New Means