#0055: The end of forgetting
Braingasm
When I was in high-school, I remember once asking my Mum for some photographs of me as a young child for a class project. It took some tracking down, but I think we eventually found one photograph of me as a baby, and a couple more of me as a very young kid. I often wondered if the lack of photographic evidence of my childhood meant that I’d been hatched, but it was simply that my parents were not into photography. Cameras in the 1970s were a lot clunkier than today’s smartphones, and processing costs for printed photographs were significant. They either couldn’t afford cameras and processing, or decided to prioritise other things. Probably a bit of both.
Today, much of our everyday lives is recorded. On social media, on our phones, on security cameras in most workplaces and public spaces. There is a staggeringly vast amount of video footage of just about everything we do, in all facets of our lives, at every moment of the day. And night. This footage is episodic and periodic and punctuated. It’s not continuous. But it is not all that hard to imagine a short walk into the future where we all carry around devices that continuously record everything we do. And it’s also not hard to imagine parents hooking their kids into this kind of thing from a very young age.
It seems inevitable that we will live in a future when everything is recorded and accessible in a moment on any device. It will then be possible for our grandchildren, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren to experience a recap of our lives at any time in vidid detail.
It’s also possible to imagine that our great-great-grandchildren will not only be able to watch detailed videos of moments of the lives of their ancestors, but perhaps even interact with them as though they were having a conversation.
Well, right up until the point in history (more or less about now) when we started recording everything. The time prior to that will be invisible to the future as high-definition video, and only accessible through words and still images recored sporadically, to the whims of history, by its victors.
There’s an interesting historical precedent here. Following the decline of the Roman Empire there was a period in Europe from about the 5th to 10th Centuries when literacy was low, and recorded history slowed, at least relative to earlier Roman and Classical periods. We look back at that time now refer to it as the Dark Ages because it seems impenetrable to us from our vantage point here in the early 21st Century.
We’re now living in a period of history that the future might refer as The Second Dark Ages. A period after which it will be effectively impossible to forget.
Newsgasm
Decentralisation has some (potentially) big implications for centralised institutions, particularly governments, and even more so for their centralised tax collection authorities. Assuming decentralisation kicks off (not a given), then there are some concerns about how profits from cryptocurrency trading might be monitored, and of course, taxed. Why the IRS fears Bitcoin talks thru a simple example of how moving cryptocurrency through a number of counterparties could make it very difficult for the IRS to track capital gains. #bitcoin #blockchain #cryptocurrencies #decentralisation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (famous for his book Black Swan) has chimed in on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to make the wise observation that “It may fail but we now know how to do it.” It’s a very good point because even if there is a dramatic crash in value (another one?) from Bitcoin’s current ~USD$200b valuation, the conceptual genie has been let out of the bottle. Consider an analogy with Netscape Navigator, the first really successful web browser. It changed the way we thought about “applications” and introduced the mainstream to the World Wide Web. These days, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox dominate, and Navigator has long since been end-of-life’d. So even if Bitcoin ends up like Navigator, what comes after it might just be world-changing. #bitcoin #blockchain #cryptocurrencies #decentralisation
Case in point: could the Lightning Network make Bitcoin faster and cheaper? #bitcoin #blockchain #cryptocurrencies #decentralisation
Here’s 5 predictions about blockchain for 2018. #bitcoin #blockchain #cryptocurrencies #decentralisation #prediction
Here’s 95 more. This one is really good! Interesting: “5) Most utility tokens, then, will go to zero, regardless of team quality and execution. You simply don’t need to hold them but for momentum & greater fool investing. When the market lacks “higher order” investors for speculators to flip to, assets will unwind. Viciously.”. And, amusing: “12) BTC = reserve currency for people that hate the fed; ETH = reserve currency for people that hate the SEC; XMR = reserve currency for people that hate big brother; Dogecoin = reserve currency for people who don’t care about money.” #bitcoin #blockchain #cryptocurrencies #decentralisation #prediction
It’s hard to tell if this is the establishment flailing around trying to stave off the inevitable, or a legitimate attempt to avoid potential instability, but Nordea is banning its employees from investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. #bitcoin #blockchain #cryptocurrencies #decentralisation
Maybe it’s #peak-crazy articles like this one on the excesses of the “Crypto Castle” that has Nordea worried? Choice quote: “They talk about buying Lamborghinis, the single acceptable way to spend money in the Ethereum cryptocurrency community.” 😳 #bitcoin #blockchain #cryptocurrencies #decentralisation
And top it all off, if this isn’t the epitome of #peak-crazy, then I don’t know what is: Useless Ethereum Token. From their ICO page: “Unlike with every other token sale on the market, I can guarantee here and now that the value of UET will not (in fact, can not) reduce during or after the ICO. Since these tokens aren't worth anything to start with, there's nowhere to go but up!” #eth #ico #crazy #wow
One for the Physics/Economics double-majors: Economics is quantum? Normally any non-physics article with “quantum” in the title has a very good chance of being complete rubbish, but in this case, it’s the foundations of economics that are creaking under the pressure of empiric reality.
Assuming they’re true, the stats in this tweet about Bezos’s 1-day wealth jump following the release of Amazon Go are pretty staggering. #wealth
Facebook AI Research just open-sourced its research platform for “advanced object detection”, called Detectron. Even a few years ago this would have been the purview of only a very small number of state actors, and it’s not clear that even they could pull this kind of thing off. The “level of commodity” in this space continues to rise at pace. #ai #machineintelligence #computervision #deeplearning
Following on from last week’s pondering about whether consciousness is computational, here’s another thought: what if consciousness is not what drives the human mind? We tend to take free will for granted, but it’s a surprisingly elusive phenomenon when studied deeply. This quote “…we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings — we become aware of them.” resonates pretty strongly with me. #consciousness #freewill #psychology
GDPR kicks off soon in Europe. Here is Amazon’s positioning for AWS with respect to the new legislation. #gdpr #privacy #data
The Dunning-Kruger Effect explains a lot about the modern world, particularly some (most?) of our politicians. It can also be used as a lens thru which to explain peoples’ deluded fascination with alternative medicine. #dunning-kruger #altmed #science
Someone very clever, and with way too much time on their hands, has patched the popular first-person shooter video game Doom so that it runs branchless. This is a hack to the way the software uses the CPU that is “thought to be entirely secure against the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, which require speculative execution on branch instructions.” CPU nerdery aside, what’s fascinating about it is that the speed of the game drops from roughly 24 rendered frames per second (depending on your CPU) to “approximately 1 frame every 7 hours”. This is about as stark an indication of the impact that “speculative execution” has on CPU performance as you would need. #cpu #meltdown #spectre
These folks have done something that is, quite simply, mind blowing: The Visual Microscope and the Recovery of Sound. Choice quote: “If you watch closely enough, everything is a speaker.” This video is definitely worth a watch. #mindblown #science
Great quote: “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” — Bill Gates. #quote
Only in Australia
Australian black kites, whistling kites and brown falcons deliberately collect smouldering sticks from wildfires and use them to start new fires to smoke out prey. One of the comments made me chuckle: “Is everything in Australia set on murder mode?” #onlyinaustralia #murdermode
Btw: Happy Australia Day to everyone back home for the 26th! 🇦🇺
Regards,
M@
