Stress-less belief

Research from the University of Oxford, recently reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology demonstrates that “the belief in science,” increases with stress. In trials where subjects were known to be stressed in the experimental group compared to the control, they found that the stressed group are more likely to agree with seemingly innocuous statements such as “the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge.” This points to the general observation that it is “belief” that acts as the stress reducer. An equal number of people may be using “the belief in religion” in a similar vein.

This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Early days of homo-sapiens were not pretty – animals and cannibals were hunting them down and stress was the primary attribute of living. One had to believe to survive, for without it, everything looked bleak. Burdened with a powerful organ, an evolutionary quirk, humans could look forward and see a worse tomorrow. The uncertainty was constant and they were completely ill-equipped to survive in the environment they were afforded. The elements reduced them to less than a few thousand – before inexplicable luck launched them higher from near extinction.

Stress has been with humans ever since. And survival, thus, selection depends much on how to reduce stress. Belief has become a critical defense mechanism in this battle. They started believing in inanimate objects that resembled something. As society developed, they moved onto legends and stories – that will someday morph into organized religion. Then, science arrived – with similar but potentially superior constructs that could explain what is observed. It slowly ate into the market share of the dominant provider of belief – religion. Science, however, could never appeal to the masses as belief is not about explaining the present - it is more about obscuring the future. The inability of science to give meaning to ignorance will likely hold it back for ever.

Believe to reduce stress – it does not matter what one believes in.

Technology lift

A recent study from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras argues that making cheap tablets available to millions in India may lift them out of poverty. This is a path worth pursuing as poverty is fundamentally driven by lack of access to information and capital. The competence and even desire can be shown to be uniform across the masses but market failures in information have held nearly 1/3 of the world’s population back and pinned them to incurable poverty. This is a shame for a civilization claiming to have made progress in virtually every dimension but has little to show for it.

Lack of access to information is the worst contemporary societal disease, as it leads to poverty, disease, crime and moral decay. As the leaders of countries across the world clamor to build and enhance physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges, they forget the leverage afforded by improved information infrastructure. The world has already moved on from the need for physical transport to mental engagement. With 3D printing around the corner, the trucks, trains and airplanes that carry physical goods are about to become obsolete. Further, with computer languages and mathematics rendering the world flatter than a pancake, the only advantage remains to be in information and knowledge.

If the IIT hypothesis holds good, then the distribution of millions of tablets across the country at $50 a piece, may usher in a wave of innovation. If the leaders of the country are serious about making a difference, here is a golden opportunity to run an experiment that cost nearly nothing. But then, one can never underestimate bureaucratic friction, corruption and sheer incompetence in policymaking, in a country, vastly famous for it.

The goal

What is the goal of an individual? With 7 billion people around the world with little genetic diversity but with a wide variation in perspectives, that include sex, country, language, religion, physique and science, the question is what one should attempt to optimize. In a zero order society such as ours where optimization is always local, it is a good thought experiment.

The problem presented, then, is related to the probability that humanity will pull itself to the next stage. It seems unlikely – diseases have to be cured, the environment has to be mended, happiness has to be restored, art and philosophy have to triumph over prescriptive engineering and science, money has to be abandoned, knowledge has to become the primary currency of transaction and meritocracy has to prevail. Yes, it seems unlikely, but many attempted to achieve much less in the past.

What is the goal for an individual in the precious amount of time she is afforded? Could she try to change the system, society and the culture that envelopes her – or should she simply drift away to obscurity, complying? Should she look around, see what others do not see, make others cannot make and progress thoughts, others cannot have?  Should she redefine who she is and in the process change humanity bottoms up? Should she challenge the status-quo or accept the preprogrammed outcomes? Should she become successful and then change the world or fail attempting early? Should she broker thoughts across time and space to connect and then disconnect?

What is the goal of an individual? Is it comprehensible?

Inflexible homes

A recent study from the University of Warwick statistically demonstrates what could be intuitively clear – policies that result in high home ownership reduces labor and location flexibility, leading to higher unemployment rates. This is an important observation. However, what the study may be ignoring is that the “job market” has changed and any analysis of historical data on jobs and location flexibility may not be valid.

Many are unwilling to own up to the fact that there are no more “jobs” in the conventional sense of the word. With advancements in 3D printing and communications technology, both manufacturing and services industries are being revolutionized. What matters most now are skills and not presence, creativity not political savvy, imagination not optimization and execution not meetings.Those seeking jobs and those who are attempting to hire, should seriously reconsider what they are tying to do. If having a home, ties somebody down to a location and that reduces her employability, then, she may be seeking the wrong job. Equally importantly, if the hiring manager, however yahoo great she might think she is, insist on the presence of the employee on location, may be simply missing the whole point.

Studying historical data is good – but doing so without the context of the changing world, may not be.

Memories

As humans find ways to live longer – first comprehensively beating out the bugs and then tackling some autoimmune diseases – it appears that the brain is taxed more and more. It has been the workhorse, ever ready to monitor, maintain and occasionally think, but it was never designed to last this long. A quantum computer, no less, but constrained by its biological origins and lack of flexibility, the brain has been a puzzle to those who attempt to use it. It stores information but retrieves it less efficiently, allowing humans to be ordinary animals, inaccurately recollecting the past and happily speculating about the future.

Memories of the brain, then, are what sustain humanity and the loss of them is simply disastrous. As the sane departs into the folds of history, they take those precious memories with them as there is no cloud, with sufficient capacity, to store it all. What a tragedy that humans have not found a way to preserve their own memories as the loss of information from those leaving and those who left but yet alive, is infinitely costly. Housed in small spaces, the brain has been front and center to the tribulations of generations in the past and more yet to come, yet it shows flashes of brilliance and compassion with failed attempts at integration and introspection. What could be done to preserve its creative intentions, its ability to seek the truth, its actions to make things right, its attempts to resolve the past and its valiant attempts to forecast the future?

The brain, the final frontier, will likely elude humanity forever as they travel in deep space, accumulate wealth and fame, explain particles and energy, kill and mutilate in the name of religion and politics and assert superiority over the known universe.

Better, older..

Recent observations (1) from a binary star system that includes a neutron star dancing with a white dwarf, indicate that Einstein's general theory of relativity, nearly a 100 years old now explain the seen gravity waves, the best. This is further affirmation that the dark ages of science is prolonged, with no foreseeable end. Fancy theories and heavy steel never measured up to sheer intellect and imagination.

The real question for physicists is where they go from here. Now that the Higgs Boson is proven to be “true”, what is next? Perhaps, a more exotic version of the Boson or maybe another trip to the particle zoo to pick an unproven fantasy, that may require a bigger and more powerful atom smasher. In either case, the expected progress in knowledge is close to zero. Both status-quo education systems and the process of awarding research grants have to change substantially to make any difference here. Awards and prizes, mere nods to mediocrity, who strive to discover and publish, peer reviewed or otherwise, simply make the situation worse. Further, engineers clamoring for “bigger” and more interesting projects simply aid and abet useless experimentation.

It is time to return to paper and pencil, the forgotten art of thinking, instead of measuring.

 

Einstein's gravity theory passes toughest test yet. Published: Thursday, April 25, 2013 - 14:10 in Astronomy & Space

Morality

A recent article (1) proposes that the mere existence of markets substantially erodes moral value, subjectively defined as the willingness to save the life of a mouse (used in animal experiments) instead of receiving money by trading them. Further, the authors argue that multilateral markets adversely affect morality more than bilateral markets.

These are interesting observations. If one were to accept the definition of morality as the ability to reject money to save a life (of a mouse), then, lack of markets will certainly enhance it. For, without markets, one cannot transact and hence an individual with no access to markets will be unambiguously, the most moral. At the other extreme, with large multilateral markets – and at the limit, with instantaneous and unrestricted access to infinite markets, the proclivity of an individual to transact (for money or other such benefits) will be the highest. Such large markets will always reduce transaction costs and participants in these markets will always be less moral (according to the definition) than those with no or restricted access to markets.

The real question is how one should define morality. Is morality a property of the individual or does it depend on the environment presented to her? Does morality change with the context, space and time of the issue at hand? Is morality demonstrable and measurable? Is morality binary or continuous? Does morality differ across ethnic and geographical regions? Are moral people better and if so how? Is morality valuable to society, or is it costly?

It is always important to define what is being measured before setting out to measure it. Also, passive assertion of societal benefits from subjective constructs such as morality can lead to the wrong conclusions.

(1) Morals and Markets Armin Falk 1,*, Nora Szech 2,
1 Center for Economics and Neuroscience, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
2 Department of Economics, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany.

Analyze this!

A recent research demonstrates that application of machine learning techniques applied to brain activity in a dream state do well against activity found in waking responses to visual stimuli (1). In general, visual contents of dreams seem to correlate well with those observed when the brain is awake.

The brain, albeit being a non-linear quantum computer, harbors characteristics that could be understood by traditional techniques. Machine learning techniques have been improving although most are extensions of deterministic statistical methods, engineers have been using for many decades. The observation that even such a crude technology is able to correlate brain states is encouraging and it may imply that the practice, if not the theory, of the brain is understandable. Research into biological and artificial intelligence progressed along opposite directions with little in common. The ability to build robust models from brain patterns that do well in predictions in different brain states could open a path toward collaboration among experts in these different areas.

Convergence in technologies and ideas is the most powerful concept yet. Segmented research is increasingly less productive.

(1) Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep
T. Horikawa1,2, M. Tamaki1,*, Y. Miyawaki3,1,†, Y. Kamitani1,2,‡

Shutting down the brain

Recent research from UCLA demonstrates that rats require less brain power in a virtual reality than in real world. This is an interesting observation. Although the UCLA experiment defines virtual reality in a narrow sense, one could broaden the concept. Conceptually, humans with routine lives are in a sort of virtual reality that requires less brain power to live in and thrive. Such a programmatic life is the norm for most, following traditional careers.

The larger question is whether such an effect has evolutionary implications. If the probability of success is higher when you find yourself in a virtual reality – a repeating game with less volatility – then they are more likely to be selected. Most large companies of today fit the bill. This means that the skills to adhere and optimally shut down parts of the brain that are not useful are the most valuable. If so, it is possible that humans may slide down the brain power curve as they evolve. The brain, already a highly expensive organ consuming 20% of available energy, can only be justified if it is fully deployed. Why buy a super computer if all one needs is a PC running a spreadsheet?

We may be precariously positioned in the evolutionary process, that never led to optimal outcomes in the past. The most likely outcome appears to be more brawn and less brain – a return to the origins for humans.

Disconnected

Recent research from Cornell University hypothesizes that life in the universe may have originated 9.5 Billion years ago. The authors, Alexei A. Sharov and  Richard Gordon do this by looking at trends on Earth and using a linear regression against the Log of the Genome size – a measure of complexity. See the chart below.

This has several implications.

First, with a universe only 13.7 billion years old and suffering from an initial violent epoch dominated by QSOs, this observation means that life initiated at the first available opportunity – just 4 billion years after the inception of the universe. As the solar system does not demonstrate any advantages over numerous other alternatives, it is likely that life originated across the universe, 10 billion years ago.

Second, the only known life progression has taken nearly 10 billion years to reach a level of complexity that aids interstellar communication capabilities. If this relationship holds in the universe, then the complexity of life everywhere may be approximately the same as what is found on Earth. Current capabilities of humans to communicate thru interstellar space are primitive. With similar expected capabilities elsewhere, the chance of a contact is close to zero. Further, current theory allows a very limited window of space-time for possible communications and that further constraints this possibility.

Finally, this observation makes it clear that life arrived in the solar system from outside – perhaps just 4.5 billion years ago. The visitors already harbored sufficient genetic complexity and spread highly successfully. What is not known, however, is whether the progression could have been different given different conditions.

Extra-terrestrial life has been a fascination for humans from the beginning. It appears that the effort expended in this direction is a waste of time. Humans may be better off focusing on how to protect the Earth and borrow sufficient time to evolve into something, bit more interesting.

Quantum efficiency

Recent research from the University of Chicago hypothesizes that quantum coherence may play an important role in the highly efficient conversion of energy in photosynthesis. This is an exciting fundamental finding that may open the doors for the creation of efficient and possibly organic solar cells. This further illustrates that most life, including plants, have figured out how to practically use quantum effects.

Humans are heavily handicapped – as they seek to improve incrementally based on well established frameworks. Most of what we proudly hold as true, are irrelevant and in most cases send us on dead end pursuits. There are enough signs that technologists are on a wrong track to boredom – but they are shackled by an antiquated education system and their prospective employers are chasing next quarter's earnings. This spiral – well constrained by the established notions and status-quo structures, can have only inferior outcomes.

It is ironic that humans are the last ones to the quantum party.

Fine tuning emptiness

Recent findings that the universe is older, is expanding slower and it harbors more dark matter than energy compared to what was previously thought, are attempts at fine tuning a model, most are unwilling to let go. The basic idea that the inhabitants of a space-time bubble could not understand the system that governs itself, appears to have been lost. Only imagination, not experiments, has any chance of breaching that hard constraint.

Knowledge, then, could only come from philosophy and imagination, with science and technology delegated to noise created by those who do not perceive the constraints. Ironically, science is most apt at showcasing the constraints even though the underlying theories valiantly attempt to surpass them. There was a fork on the road – perhaps couple of centuries ago - when humanity eagerly marched down the scientific route, that was predetermined to win the tactics but lose the plot. The question is whether there is a possibility of convergence of the different ideas to substantially expand knowledge. That will require an integration of contrasting belief systems – science and philosophy, included.

Not all hope is lost – As a beautiful mind remarked nearly a century ago - “Logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere.”

Bidding bias

A recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that when the bidders are unaware of the characteristics of their competition, they are likely to bid more aggressively – possibly indicating inefficient price outcomes. Although the study was done on bidding in the social channels over tangible products, the finding has implications for the financial markets as well.

By definition, the originator of a bid price on a financial asset in a liquid market does not know the characteristics of the counter-party. Does this mean that there is a built-in positive upward bias (aggressive bidding) in the prices of financial assets? The article does not seem to explain if there is an asymmetry – i.e. are the sellers of assets, equally aggressive, when they are lacking such information? And without that, it is difficult to conclude anything.

However, the finding seems to imply that transaction prices are less efficient when the buyers are sellers are unaware of the counter-party characteristics. An exchange, thus, may induce a level of inefficiency into transactions. This is an interesting area of research and if straight bartering has a higher probability of establishing efficient prices, then, it may have some policy implications.

The accounting FED

Many economists and those less endowed are at the misimpression that the FED has been doing the right things. Little do they know that the FED, whose chairman had the right prescription for the Japanese a full decade ago would suffer from amnesia and take a course, dramatically opposite to it. Salt water freezes at lower temperatures but the brains of those closer to the oceans, do so faster.

Moving money around never increased value for anybody or anything - countries, companies and individuals included. Buying liabilities of the banks and giving them reserves in return that gained interest did not either. As most first year business school students know by now, dressing up the balance sheet does not increase value – for most of the value of an enterprise emanates from its ideas, people and intellectual property – none of which are balance sheet items. Placing accountants on top of companies, countries and monetary authorities are value destroying. Worse, those who are economists but doubt their own ideas could not do any better.

It is time for a monetary revolution – those with brains speculated over half a century ago that the targeting of money supply will lift production and welfare and at the very least keep the incompetent and impotent fiscal stimulus at bay. There is little know-how left, concentrated around the fresh water lakes ever dominated by those who are still willing to imbibe the toxic brine.

Stuck humans

Nearly hundred thousand years of experience does not seem to have done humans much good. As they spend most of their time seeking materials that provide little overall utility and they spend the rest, harming those around them. Disconnected and sparse attempts at culture building resulted in predictable deterioration to mediocrity, over time. Similarly, attempted leaps at knowledge – religion and science – ended in dead ends.

Humans, then, are stuck. They prefer to ignore constant extra-terrestrial threats of collisions, while seeking to gain land from their neighbors. They prefer to ignore the sub-optimized capabilities of disconnected brains, while attempting to pack transistors ever closer together. They prefer segregation to integration and opinions to imagination. They prefer TV to  irrelevant books and sports to documentaries. They prefer to jog while ignoring who cannot and they prefer to dominate rather than think. They look up in the night sky, lamenting the light around them, while ignoring the knowledge underneath. They travel, learn languages and seek variety, while ignoring the neighborhoods and communities.

Humans are stuck – perhaps, that is the essence of being human.

Applied adoption

Recent research from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics seems to confirm intuition – network influences are important in the rate of adoption of emerging technologies. Large and well connected networks likely will accelerate adoption by biasing societal influence over local utility maximization. However, the study takes it one step further by suggesting that external agents such as the government can strategically grow network size and thus accelerate adoption of technologies, presumed to be good.

This is a slippery slope. The basic premise that external agencies can determine what a societal good (the study suggests that energy efficient technologies are unambiguously good) may be, is fraught with problems. External agents, where decisions are made by a few people, have never shown to be better in selecting and influencing socially optimal outcomes – it is just the opposite. Decision processes controlled by a small group will always be inferior and thus any policy emanating from such an architecture generally destroys societal utility. More importantly, in a world of accelerating networks, there is no need for external influences – the network is fully capable of selecting and adopting innovations that are optimal.

The proclivity to assume superior knowledge in a few compared to the wisdom of the crowds, have led many, down blind alleys, destroying wealth, health and the environment. Research in this direction will only exacerbate this problem.

Good bye, solar system… good bye

News that Voyager I has finally exited the influence of the sun is a major milestone in the history of the solar system. Nearly five billion years after its formation, it appears that its occupants have been successful in artificially ejecting a piece of themselves into deep space. Humans have been fascinated by the empty space beyond themselves for ever and now they are able to listen, if not see, the reverberations of deep space - not through telescopes but by the heartbeat of the metal and plastic that made the projectile, that escaped it all.

Deep space has fascinated many. Lately, it has been shown that the vast emptiness is decorated by molecules, but of such infrequency that the rejection of the existence of empty space remains, theoretical. Such was the power of observation that the skies above always appeared fully populated – some spewing light and others radiations of differing wavelengths, that the emptiness that separated them simply vanished. Only few could envision what the eyes could not see and the idea that emptiness is dominant – inside and outside fundamental particles is tough to grasp. Only the journey of a real object across the desolation could convince those who are objective.

Good bye, imagination.. good bye.

Journey of one man

My journey as characterized by the Genographic project using my dad’s lineage demonstrates a world without boundaries. In modern times, my family had hardly stepped out of a thin strip of land, 50 miles wide and 350 miles long at the Southwestern tip of the Indian peninsula. However, it appears that we arrived there recently, having taken a very circuitous and yet to be researched route – M241.



The wide distribution of the M241 haplo group covering Greece, Italy, Spain, the Arabian peninsula and India is interesting. Although more data is needed to fully characterize the path, it may indicate that we reached our present home in the Southern tip of India recently. Relatively high Mediterranean percentage (14%) in my DNA is consistent with the haplo group distribution. A 2% share of my DNA claimed by Native American characteristics also show connections to Mongolia, the only other region in the world that harbors similar markers.

Segmentation schemes invented by humans – countries, religions and languages – consume most of the world’s mental capacity today. An objective look back into our own DNA may solve most of the problems faced by the modern human.

Quantum necessity

Conventional computing has run its course – attempts at closer packing of transistors in an effort to improve speed is simply succumbing to the most basic problem – heat, with temperatures at the heart of the latest microprocessors exceeding those of nuclear power plants. This was expected but many had hoped for a path dramatically different from the doubling of speed every eighteen months. Anything less, is disastrous.

Engineering has been a decade long yawn – with little to show. As more and more brain cells migrated to less value added activities in financial services and bureaucratic corporations, they left a huge gap in fundamental innovation and humanity will likely pay a price for it. The ambitions of the creative could not have been satisfied by prescriptive increases in the speed of computing – incremental improvements to the status-quo. Demand for computing has been increasing at a rate that cannot be satisfied by conventional ideas, in every field from biology to predictive analytics.

The question is why humanity finds itself in such an unenviable position. With asteroids flying around the blue planet at will and biological systems that demonstrate ever increasing complexity, the young and timid species of homo sapiens run for cover. They were not expected to be here and a twist of fate has them ruling over a highly tolerant planet. It is ironic that humans are left with observations of calamity but no capability to struggle over them.

Quantum computing is a necessity – not a luxury.

Algorithmic discovery

Recent research (1) from USC that demonstrates how predictive algorithms can propel discovery in many areas including medicine and astronomy is further indication that applied mathematics is coming of age. Misguided attempts at rules based Artificial Intelligence kept a lid on more productive empiricism – something engineers and economists have known for many decades. Life sciences has been notoriously backward in the application of mathematics in predictions and decisions. Many have argued that biological systems represent complex interacting uncertainties and hence are not amenable to modeling. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Determinism and normality statistics have played havoc with many fields, including life sciences, for decades. Specialists in this industry followed standardized processes of discovery with rigid and prescriptive expectations of outcomes. The constant and nearly predictable failures have not forced significant changes, yet. The long cycles of research and development have allowed the perpetuation of the status-quo. The USC approach of taking well known mathematical principles and applying them differently with an eye toward practical applications is refreshing. More research of this ilk is needed if the industry is to pull out of the rut it is currently in.

Predictive and decision analytics – supported by established mathematics can wake up the slumbering life sciences industry. Tools have been available for over a decade – but not many have been willing to take the plunge.

(1) Taking the gamble out of DNA sequencing, Published: Sunday, February 24, 2013 - 15:32 in Biology & Nature, e!Science News.

Outside-in innovation

Recent research from the University of Illinois and NC state seems to confirm what companies intuitively knew. The value of an innovation is driven by the uncertainty in customer acceptance. Running separate processes – one for product innovation and the other for customer evaluation, sub-optimize both. Integrating these disparate processes ran by different departments with differing cultures does make sense.

However, it is not that simple. A process view of product innovation implicitly assumes that the R&D machine is sitting idle to serve up the desires of the “downstream customers.” Equally important is the assumption that the customer expectation is stagnant. Customer expectations of products and new features are dynamic and just as local weather is affected by small and possibly unrelated changes in the complex system, they also change quickly and unpredictably. The researchers seem to take a rigid engineering view of the integration of the product innovation ad customer evaluation processes. History shows that not many companies became great by just satisfying expected and measured desires of downstream customers, who are notoriously fickle.

From a decision perspective, companies in high innovation industries are missing a true portfolio view of their product innovation investments. Granted, it is important to understand the status-quo expectations of the customer – but truly great companies anticipate the future. More importantly, they design products incorporating flexibility with a tacit acceptance that the future is uncertain. They anticipate, not precisely, but on uncertain terms. Those who solve this problem systematically – not by rigid integration – but by taking a holistic portfolio view of investment choices, will win. 

Neuro-economics

Recent attempts at using imaging techniques to establish a neuro-basis for irrational economic decisions is likely in the wrong direction. Seeking a hardware deficiency to justify behaviors that cannot be explained by established theory, is a bit like hitting your computer or worse, taking an MRI scan of the computer chip inside, when your spreadsheet produces unexpected results. Perhaps, simpler explanations are already available.

Human mind has never been good in making consistent and rational decisions in the presence of uncertainty. Early in the human evolution, the left brain had to take a firm command of the proceedings, imparting deterministic and process oriented decision methodology on a specialized serial processor. After all, he had to hunt systematically over known routes and gather water from familiar waterholes. The parallel processing right brain remained a silent witness and continues to be so in the modern world.  Economics is no different, linear thoughts and well behaving normality statistics have consistently pushed humans to irrational decisions. But, there is little need to take pictures of the brain or cut it open to understand this phenomenon.

Seeking simpler explanations to known behaviors is always dominant.

Step and Wait

Recent research from USC points out that technology does not grow as predicted by Moore’s law and its variants. Instead, it moves more in a process, the researchers call – Step and Wait. Although the focus was investment decisions in technology, this is applicable across the entire economy.

It should be intuitively clear to anybody observing system wide effects of technology. Airplanes, computers and the Internet ushered in step function changes in productivity that took a decade or two to bleed through the entire economy. Once such a step is taken, however, the wait can be long. Today’s world is yearning for a step but unfortunately none has come and it is possible that the long drought in technology innovation could continue. Many have identified incremental product improvement as technology advancement. For investment managers and policy makers, such ideas are disastrous. iPhone 10 is unlikely to save the world, making device based communications obsolete may be in the right direction.

Some technologists have fallen into the trap of extrapolation – and forecasting using exponential growth curves. Singularity, feared by many, came from such a thought process. But if one has to wait for decades after taking a step, technology singularity may be the last thing we have to worry about.

Modular intelligence

Recent research from Cornell illustrates why modularity is fundamental to design including biological systems. Cost minimization in network systems naturally surfaces modularity as an important building block. This makes intuitive sense as modularity leads to complexity and ultimately intelligence.

Why, then, humans fail to consider modularity in the design of complex systems, systematically? Of course, every brick in the wall is expressed but not every wall in the city. Is modularity boring for those with intelligence or a mere convenience? Does modularity hide a regression from knowledge, or does it break new frontiers? Is modularity limiting or not? Does modularity evolve to an extent that it is able to obscure itself?

At the lowest level, one has to consider minimization of cost as the fundamental driver of modularity. The complication here is the definition of cost itself. First order societies, unable to feed, clothe and house their populations, may consider cost to be different among available alternatives in a limited choice set. Those who have gone further may define cost as ignorance, the minimization of which requires a break from modularity.

Nothing is for sure.

Depressing altruism

Recent research from Princeton, argues that altruism originates from sinister and self-serving tendencies. Much of what has been attributed to the kindness of the human heart can be traced back to local competition and gaining control over zones of influence. This further reinforces the idea that humans are ordinary animals, with little difference from other members of the ecosystem with tightly controlled objective functions.

It is, indeed, depressing. Almost every action, thought and idea can be traced back to fairly crude attempts at utility maximization – at the individual or group level. A few philosophers in the past have argued about the futility of it all, only to be swept aside by the mobs of ignorance. The question is whether humanity is able to move to another level of societal development. Such a transition, however, appears to be a quantum process. At the status-quo energy level, improvements are not possible and any observed abnormalities (such as altruism) can be easily explained away.  More importantly, a quantum energy state transition is never possible from within – humanity appears to be permanently sealed at where they started and where they are likely to end, maximizing food and reproduction.

Only some kind of extra-terrestrial jolt can possibly move society to another state, with different goals.

Policy optimization

As the United States institute another policy regime, that may be a continuation but could equally prove to be different from status-quo, it is important to fully internalize the challenges ahead. With the planet hoarding over seven billion copies of homo-sapiens, sporting an organ – the brain, that is likely the pride of the Milky Way in this slice of space-time, the problems to solve are trivial. With a well behaved fusion furnace, the Sun, ideally situated at 150 Million Kilometers and the big brother, Jupiter, that efficiently sweeps the space debris, at five times that distance, Earth has gotten lucky. It quickly invented a method to accelerate entropy – life, that found many ways to evolve and grow to exponentially increase the original intent. It has culminated in a system, fully dominated by a singular species, able to think, travel and destroy at will. They have spread like wild fire, segmented themselves neatly into buckets of many dimensions – geography, belief and observable trivialities and even threaten to extinguish the whole idea.

Policy, then, is about constrained optimization. It has to consider the space – is it local or is it global, it has to consider the time, is it for now or later and it has to consider the scope, is it for me or for others? Who is in a position to make policy and who will adhere to them? Can policy change the promises made by the past or can it create yet to be understood effects in the future? Is policy good or bad or is it a mere waste of time? Can policy be based on what was written down in the past or should it be about future possibilities? Can policy be blind to ideas and where ideas originate from? Who is accountable for making polices and who may take accountability for them? Who moves, dies and start all over again because of policies and who counts, measures and reports the outcomes? Is the best policy the same in every space-time coordinate or should it differ and if so, could it accommodate differences in perceptions, ideas and culture?

It is a challenge for humanity.

“Too big to” syndrome

Recent announcement by the computer behemoths that they will not pursue exascale computing without government backing is symptomatic of the “too big to” syndrome. The current crop of policy makers, engineers and financiers are all suffering from the same basic disease. They will pursue profits at tremendous risk only if they know the government will bail them out if they fail.

If private enterprises with excess cash will not pursue technologies that could fundamentally change the productivity equation without government backing, it simply means that such technologies are not worth pursuing. The government has no obligation or role to support technology innovation in private companies if the benefits accrue to the shareholders of these firms. This is basic economics. There cannot be any more private profits coupled with social costs. The only difference is that the wily financiers asked for ransom ex-post and somewhat gentler engineers are asking for it, ex-ante.

The “too big to” syndrome is eating into the core of free markets with disastrous consequences for capital allocation across the entire economy.

Returning language to the wild

Recent research from the University of Warwick shows that most remember Facebook and Twitter updates better than faces and polished writing. This confirms that modern technology has been able to simplify the human mind and return it to its origins. As she stood up in the African savannahs for the first time, it was clear that simpler communication was not too far behind. The origin of language, albeit being hotly debated, had only one purpose – organizing to achieve common objectives. From its inception, language was simple, as the faster one can communicate the limited set of available information, the better.

Later, modern humans, took the simple construct of language and used it as an art form to kill time and nourish the inner mind. Literature and philosophy moved language into realms it was never meant to be used. Both created complexity and stretched the concept in pleasurable ways, but still only for a limited subset of the population. Much later, computers ushered in the first step back in language evolution as machines, being efficient and systematic, were not that fond of ornamentation. Computer languages provided the first glimpse of the original language, able to pack in maximum information into simple constructs. Now, Facebook and Twitter complete the full circle, returning language to its origins. After all, a constraint on characters was exactly what the original languages were facing. They had to communicate limited information efficiently.

For some, however, this is a sad story as it is ample evidence that the human psyche will degenerate to its origins at the first available opportunity, provided by technology or society.

Spooky action, closer

A recent article in the journal of Physical Review Letters discusses the possibility of practical teleportation using the known phenomenon of entanglement. By proving the possibility of serial and bulk teleportation of qbits, the authors open up endless possibilities in both quantum computing and space travel.

Ever since entanglement was shown to be real, it has been a constant source of inspiration and annoyance depending on where one sits on the quantum divide. Classical and traditional physics had overwhelmed the real but counterintuitive possibilities offered up by a theory that exposed the fundamental human weakness – a bias to his own scale and a preference for status-quo. For over fifty thousand years, humans have gotten used to object permanence and even babies are born with a firmware that fully accommodate such expectations. Research has provided tantalizing evidence that the brain is indeed a quantum computer, but ironically, most of it is unable to reprogram away from the stupor of evolution.

Extra-terrestrial life at different scales and sophistication may be able to accommodate such broader frameworks faster with an exponential increase in knowledge.

Hundred year yawn

Recent research from the University of Arizona, that illustrates that the parameters that still “fit” the “dark energy” explanation for the observed expansion of the universe is running out of space. The study shows that the remaining relevant patch for the dark energy enthusiasts is a 2inch square area in a football field size of available ranges. The original explanation, proposed a hundred years ago, still seems to be more relevant than the “theories” that have been doled out since then.

Theoretical physics – a hundred year yawn – has accomplished little since the remarkable insights of Einstein, Plank and Heisenberg. More importantly, it has opened so many dead ends that it drained the intelligence and creativity of two generations of physicists, with nothing to show. Granted, in the last few decades engineers have made telescopes, atom smashers, space vehicles and other remarkable things to see, listen and measure that would have made Einstein blush. But what they delivered are noise in an expanding ocean of particles, confusion and empiricism.

There are three primary axes of exploration that has held the field back. First, educational institutions, around the world, appear to have set lower priority to theory compared to experimentation. They have led budding physicists into the rabbit tunnels of immense size and scope that they get lost in them for their entire careers. Second, space exploration has become an activity of pride and prejudice, with entire nations competing to send people and machines to nearby planets, asteroids and moons. Now, seeking extra-terrestrial life by looking for “earth-like planets,” or finding water, are considered to be research of the highest order. Finally, scientists seem to have lost the pure joy of seeking the truth – instead they appear happier if they can publish more papers or grab a Nobel prize.

Let’s hope the hundred year yawn in theoretical physics will end soon – but it will take the emergence of beautiful brains again.

Research computer

Recent work by Emory mathematician, Ken Ono, finds further explanation and meaning in the work of Ramanujan, who died nearly a century ago. Applications stretch in many directions including explaining some behavior of certain types of black holes. This illustrates that ground breaking insights originate from pure imagination even in the absence of a formal education and proven tools. More importantly, it is possible that systematization of education, tools and processes is at the heart of declining productivity in true insight generation.

Most of today’s science is geared toward proving a stated hypothesis. This is akin to manufacturing – execution of a defined and specified process, that includes design of experiments, data gathering, statistical analysis and hypothesis testing. Indeed, humanity is fast approaching the “singularity,” in which computers can be trained to conduct research better than themselves, for the research process is the most systematized and computer programmable than anything else. It is possible that the first type of Artificial Intelligence that may become practical is a research computer, able to design studies, collect data, analyze, test and prove a hypothesis given to it. Such a machine, however, will be incapable of imagination and insight generation. So, it may walk, move objects and conduct research, but it will never sleep, weep or dream.

Perhaps, the “singularity,” that many look forward to is related to a complete elimination of imagination from the human psyche.

Size matters

Recent research from the University of Sweden demonstrates that a larger brain is expensive for biological entities and it compromises the size of the gut and reproductive ability. Using a study on guppies, they show that the increased cognitive abilities of a large brain comes with significant energy demand. Similarly, In humans,the brain that makes up only 2% of the total mass consumes over 20% of the available energy, starving other organs.

Given this data, it is unclear why evolution will push in the direction of aiding the growth of the most inefficient organ in the body, especially if it substantially affects the ability to reproduce. Large brains have unambiguously pushed humans, other primates, dolphins and whales to smaller family structures, increasing the risk of extinction. Humans, for example, was nearly wiped out with less than a few thousand samples surviving through an incredible bottleneck.

Many have considered natural selection, an effective way to optimize systems. Data show this may not be true. Optimizing locally, allowing certain participants to gain advantage over others in short time horizons have long term deleterious effects on the survival of the species. In the case of humans, the large brain seems to have done further damage as individuals in an attempt at maximizing utility locally and within their life spans have accelerated the destruction of the environment, paving the way to extinction.

Size matters – an evolutionary accident and myopic natural selection processes have aided the development of an inefficient and ineffective organ, that will drive the species to extinction.

Bonobo Facebook

Recent research from Duke University shows that bonobos are much more sophisticated in social networking than humans. Past several thousand years of clan behavior has left the humans with distinct disadvantages in the modern world. In every realm, it has been shown that humans prefer to interact and share with those they know. Discrimination and racism – somewhat crude manifestations of the same deficiency – a proclivity to share with known individuals than those who are strangers, may have a significant negative impact on the world economy.

Bonobos appear to be different. They prefer to share (food in this case) with strangers than known friends and family. This allows them to extend their social network faster than otherwise. This is a highly sophisticated behavior that maximizes long term utility, that most humans appear to be incapable of doing. It has also been shown that bonobos are less likely to share anonymously compared to humans. This further illustrates that the behavior is driven by strategy with an understanding of long term and system effects.The behavior of humans in social networking channels further illustrate this handicap. Most connections seem to clump closely, paralleling clan behavior, indicating that it will be difficult for humans to get rid of this baggage. Xenophobia and prevalent resistance to free markets, trade and immigration are also manifestations of the same issue.

Accelerating social software have not improved the human firmware – that is likely to remain rigid for the foreseeable future, capping economic growth and welfare.