News — At The Edge — 6/15
Something is happening here— deepfakes, capitalism, microplastics, drones & evolution — but we don’t know what it is.
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Why ‘deepfake’ videos are becoming more difficult to detect (9.5 min. video)
“Sophisticated and inaccurate altered videos known as ‘deepfakes’ are causing alarm…[because] the accelerating speed of computers and advances in machine learning make deepfakes ever more difficult to detect, among growing fears of their weaponization.
How compatible are democracy and capitalism? —
“[Today] political economists have argued that rising inequality…must eventually threaten the foundations of democracy….
[Oldest] worry that grasping masses will vote to expropriate the wealth….Hayek thought that the governments…responding to the concerns of the masses, had over-centralized economic decision-making…[leading] eventually to totalitarianism….Marx in reckoning that it was the greed of the capitalists that would do the greatest harm. Joseph Schumpeter feared that as firms…might push a country towards corporatism…that would generate profits they could share with politicians….[Others] say that inequality naturally rises in capitalist countries, and that political power becomes concentrated alongside economic power in an unstable way…[or] that full participation in the global economy forces a country to give up a degree of either national sovereignty or democracy….
Quibble with the details, but the overarching story — immobile companies giving governments a degree of sovereignty, which they self-interestedly use to boost the middle classes — seems a plausible account of the stability of advanced capitalist democracies….
[But] sharp slowdown in growth in real median incomes…[governments] less responsive to middle-class priorities…older and whiter generations…[not] caring whether…middle class that does not look like them has opportunities to advance…[and] the corrosive effect of inequality [are dangers]….
[Today’s] democracies may well survive this period…[but] a mistake to assume survival is foreordained.” https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/06/13/how-compatible-are-democracy-and-capitalism
You could be swallowing a credit card’s weight in plastic every week —
“Globally, we are ingesting an average of 5 grams of plastic every week, the equivalent of a credit card… from ‘microplastics’…[in] artificial clothes fibers, microbeads found in some toothpastes, or bigger pieces of plastic which gradually break into smaller pieces when they’re thrown away and exposed to the elements…[in] rivers and oceans…eaten by fish and other marine animals, ending up…[in] water, beer, shellfish and salt….
The largest source of plastic ingestion is drinking water…[with] as many as 1,769 particles of plastic every week…[in] bottled or from the tap…. Shellfish is the second biggest source…[with] as many as 182 microparticles….
[If] shown to damage human health, it will be very difficult to remove them from the environment…[unless] stop it from getting into the nature in the first place….Globally, more than 330 million metric tons of plastic is produced each year, and…expected to triple by 2050.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/11/health/microplastics-ingestion-wwf-study-scn-intl/index.html
Drone deliveries are advancing in health care —
“[Drones] they are vying to tap into a lucrative, $70bn global market in health-care logistics….
[Zipline] took off in Rwanda in 2016…[and] is now a national on-demand medical drone network, delivering 150 medical products…to hard-to-reach places…[so] mortality rates are declining….Zipline is expanding…into North Carolina…with many out-of-the-way rural medical facilities…[and] wants to serve 700m people in the next three to four years….
Drones can fall out of the sky, can collide with other air traffic, create perceived privacy concerns and they can be noisy….
Zipline announced $190m in new financing, which values it at $1.2 billion…[because] save hospitals millions in lab and pharmacy costs….
Drones now service three cities in Switzerland….
In less-developed countries the skies are empty and permission to fly can be granted by a single person. In developed countries, with their more crowded airspace and thicker rule books.” https://www.economist.com/business/2019/06/11/drone-deliveries-are-advancing-in-health-care
Why humans (or something very similar) may have been destined to walk the Earth —
“Many bacterial evolution studies [find]…evolution often follows very predictable paths over the short term, with the same traits and genetic solutions frequently realized…over 65,000 generations…[versus] 7,500–10,000 generations since modern Homo sapiens appeared….
This suggests that organisms have some constraints on how they can evolve…[and] keep evolving organisms on the straight-and-narrow.
Natural selection is the ‘guiding hand’ of evolution, reigning in…random mutations…with only the best enduring. This can also lead to the same solutions of survival being realized in completely unrelated species…[example] wings and beaks evolved twice, in parallel….
At the smallest scales of atoms and particles, true randomness is at play — meaning our world is unpredictable…[but] the broad ‘rules’ for evolution…remain the same no matter how many times we replayed the tape…[like] evolutionary advantage for organisms that harvest solar power…[or] make use of the abundant gases in the atmosphere…[thus] predictably see the emergence of familiar ecosystems….
[T]he guiding hands of evolution…tether adapting organisms to familiar routes. We may not be entirely sure where we’d end up if we rewound time, but the paths available to evolving organisms are far from limitless….
[So] it’s likely that whatever alien world replaced ours would be a familiar place.” https://phys.org/news/2019-06-humans-similar-destined-earth.html
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Doc Huston
