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To Begin

This week, Microsoft and Nvidia go head to head with new chips intended to train the next generation of AI models. And a clever hoax underlines a powerful truth when it comes to the war for compute power.

Meanwhile, a viral tweet about viral TikToks engenders another viral tweet. The lesson here? We’re living in a deeply enweirdened informational environment.

And in a world first, the UK approves a CRISPR-fuelled medicine.

Let’s go!

👾 Compute wars

This week, a glimpse of an emerging power struggle set to help shape the decades ahead. This isn’t a battle for land or natural resources. I’m talking about the struggle for compute power.

Microsoft announced their first and long-awaited custom AI chips, the Azure Maia AI chip and Cobalt CPU. Set to arrive in 2024, the chips will power Microsoft’s Azure data centres, and are intended to train the next generation of large language models (LLMs).

And Nvidia launched its new H200 AI chip, the successor to the H100. The iconic H100 is the fuel that’s driven this AI moment; huge clusters, consisting of tens of thousands of H100s, were used to train pretty much every large AI model you can name, including GPT-4.

Meanwhile, something quite different. A mysterious company called Del Complex announced the BlueSea Frontier Compute Cluster: a massive offshore data centre intended to circumvent the new the US Executive Order that says organisations training the most powerful new AI models must share information with government.

Del Complex calls BlueSea Frontier ‘a new sovereign nation state’. The announcement post achieved 2.5 million views, and was accompanied by a fancy website featuring images of BlueSea scientists at work. Tech blogs reported on the launch.

But wait; it is all a hoax! BlueSea Frontier is a comment on the These Strange Times by an artist and developer called (or so he claims) Sterling Crispin.

But I think Crispin may be onto something.

⚡ NWSH Take: The Del Complex hoax was a great bit of online trickery. But it was so convincing because it taps into a deep underlying truth. Compute is becoming a crucial nexus for techno-economic, sovereign, and geopolitical power. // The tech battle taking shape here is just one dimension of a broader story. Microsoft need to supply huge compute resources to their partner OpenAI to allow it to fully commercialise ChatGPT and train the upcoming GPT-5. So far, their data centres have been dependent on Nvidia AI chips. The new Maia AI and Cobalt CPU chips are intended to change that. // The broader story? It’s now clear that those nation states with the best machine intelligence will own the geopolitical future. The USA and China are now locked in a race to develop the vast compute needed to develop ultra-powerful next-generation models. Last year’s US CHIPS Act devotes $280 billion to semiconductor and AI research; inflation adjusted that’s more than the cost of the entire Apollo moon programme. And last week I wrote about new US restrictions on chip exports, intended to hamper China’s AI efforts. // It wouldn’t surprise me, then, if we do see the establishment of new offshore compute clusters, or even the development of new pseudo-sovereign entities based around compute power and AI. As with all the best satire, Del Complex’s vision is so wild it might just come true.

🔍 Can’t handle the truth

Also this week, another reminder of the hall of mirrors that is our new and connected media environment.

US journalist and X (formerly Twitter) personality Yashar Ali went viral with a tweet about TikTok. Ali claimed that across the previous 24 hours, many thousands of TikToks had been posted in which mostly young north Americans claimed to have read and agreed with Osama bin Laden’s notorious 2002 ‘Letter to America’ manifesto.

In the comments, theories abounded. Some said it was a signal of gen Z’s misguided politics. Others saw conspiracy, and said it was another indication that China is using TikTok as a channel for sophisticated psyops intended to destabilise the Global North. We should, said those people, ban TikTok.

Then another X user went viral with a different idea. These Bin Laden TikToks were being made and seen in huge numbers, he said, only because of Yashar Ali’s original tweet.

Other people said that was stupid, and itself tantamount to a conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile, this week the EU decided it would stop all advertising on X due to ‘widespread concerns relating to the spread of disinformation’. This follows EU research published in September which concluded that X is now the biggest online source of disinformation.

⚡ NWSH Take: Is TikTok an app for fun dance memes or a highly sophisticated channel for Chinese cultural warfare? Is the X algorithm now giving higher priority to toxic content, or is that just anti-Elon paranoia? Did thousands of young north Americans organically discover and agree with the Bin Laden letter, or is a dark controlling force at work? // The answer in every case: no one knows for sure. And that in itself is an indication of where we’re at. // The information environment that mediates our democracies has become insanely fragmented and opaque. The world’s richest man has total control over a key global information channel. The CCP has its hands around another. In both cases, I find it impossible to believe that the parties in question aren’t up to some tricks. // A totally connected world, in which every individual is empowered with a voice of their own, was supposed to create information nirvana. Those who bought that idea couldn’t have been more wrong. We need old media principles — editorial standards and, yes, gatekeepers — more than ever. But millions in the global north are currently convinced that the New York Times and the BBC are the real problem. In this increasingly chaotic and paranoid information environment, those institutions and others like them need to adapt rapidly. Most of all, they must rejuvenate belief in what they offer.

🧬 Major edits

Huge CRISPR news this week.

The UK’s medicines regulator became the first in the world to approve a medical treatment that uses CRISPR gene editing technology. The medicine, Casgevy, is a treatment for sickle cell disease, a serious inherited disorder that causes red blood cells to malfunction and that affects millions worldwide.

During treatment, red blood-producing stem cells must be taken from the patient. CRISPR is used to edit those stem cells to remove the error that causes sickle cell, before the edited cells are infused back into the patient.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences created a monkey using two embryos, with donor material from one embryo injected into another. This has been done before with simpler animals such as mice and rats, but is a first in primates.

The donor stem cells were gene edited to express a green fluorescent protein, causing the resultant live monkey to glow:

⚡ NWSH Take: Gene editing technology is already enacting a transformation in the life sciences, healthcare, and agriculture. This CRISPR sickle cell treatment is wonderful news, and there are promising early indications from trials of CRISPR therapies to cure a form of hereditary blindness, and to train immune cells to fight certain cancers. Meanwhile, in September 2021 Japanese startup Sanatech Seed became the first company to sell CRISPR-edited food: their tomatoes were edited to contain more GABA. // So we’re developing our ability to manipulate genes. The next revolution coming? That ability will collide with a new ability to speak the language of DNA via transformer models — the kind of models that underlie LLMs — trained on huge amounts of genomic data. The resultant AIs will be able to discern deep underlying patterns that help us zero in on useful or rogue genes; see DeepMind’s new AlphaMissense, which detects and classifies genetic mutations.

🗓️ Also this week

🤯 Shock news breaking late last night UK time: Sam Altman has been fired from OpenAI! In a statement the OpenAI board said that Altman ‘was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.’ This news is a jolt out of nowhere. Altman led the company that sparked this transformative AI moment, and as such has been the most celebrated technologist on the planet for the last couple of years. The OpenAI board are accusing him of lying here, and given the summary firing we can’t be talking about a white lie. Two glimpses of the rumour mill: (i) this is about dark power moves by Elon, or (ii) OpenAI has achieved AGI but Altman didn’t tell the board. But that’s all speculation. More news is sure to emerge.

🧠 The Argonne National Laboratory in the US has begun training a 1 trillion parameter scientific AI. AuroraGPT is being trained on a vast number of research papers and other scientific information, and once complete will offer answers to scientific questions.This time last year Meta released Galactica, its AI model trained on 48 million research papers. The model was withdrawn three days later, after users said it produced false outputs. This week, the Meta engineer behind Galactica looked back at the episode.

💸 Google is planning a massive investment in generative AI startup Character.ai. Founded by two former Google AI engineers, the platform leverages an LLM to allow users to create and chat with AI characters, including virtual versions of their favourite celebrities. As regular readers will know, the rise of AI-fuelled virtual companions is a longstanding NWSH obsession.

🗺 Speaking of Virtual Companions, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says the ‘holy grail’ for Airbnb is to become an AI travel agent. Chesky says of this vision: ‘It doesn’t just ask you, “where are you going” or “when are you going” but understands who you are and then can match you to anything you want, especially with your travel needs.’

🪐 Chinese researchers have created a ‘robot chemist’ that could create breathable oxygen on Mars. The robot would extract oxygen from water on the Red Planet. But it’s still not clear if it would function ‘in the Martian environment’.

🛩 US startup Boom Supersonic say they’re nearing the first test flight of their supersonic passenger jet. The startup said the flight could happen this year. It also announced new funding from Saudi Arabia’s NEOM Investment Fund, taking its total funding to $700 million.

⚛ The US military will give Lockheed Martin $37 million to develop nuclear spacecraft technologies. The move is part of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Joint Emergent Technology Supplying On-Orbit Nuclear (JETSON) effort to create a nuclear fission reactor in space.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,073,490,256🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.81542

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 88% complete

📖 On this day: On 18 November 401 king Alaric I led the Visigoths across the Alps to invade northern Italy.

Okay Computer

Thanks for reading this week.

The news about Altman is a shock. And most telling about it, at the moment, are the theories people are concocting to try to explain the news.

Sam has created AGI and the board want to hide it from us! In this new world, we’re the same old humans with the same tendencies towards gossip and wishful thinking.

I’ll keep watching and working to make sense of it all.

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back soon. Until then, be well.

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

It’s a bumper instalment this week. What do we have in store?

The Chinese government is calling on its technology industry to roll out millions of advanced humanoid robots.

Also, NASA wants to learn how to extract breathable oxygen from Moon dust. And OpenAI says everyone can now create their own bespoke version of ChatGPT.

Let’s go!

🤖 Work machines

This week, a glimpse of the coming collision between human population dynamics and autonomous machines.

A new study by researchers at University College London found fears of climate breakdown are changing decision-making around whether or not to have children. Published in the journal PLOS Climate, the research found that climate concern was associated with a desire for fewer children, or none at all.

The researchers say theirs is the first systematic study of the way attitudes to climate change are affecting reproductive choices.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a nine-page communique calling for domestic mass production of advanced humanoid robots by 2025. By 2027, the document says, these robot workers should be ‘an important new engine of economic growth’.

But what is the connection between new trends in reproductive decision making and China’s dash towards humanoid robots?

Here’s a graph of the birth rate in China from 2000 to 2022:

⚡ NWSH Take: The CCP knows that China is losing its battle with demographics. If the country is to become the 21st-century hegemon that President Xi dreams about, then it needs an army of workers. But instead China is watching its birth rate plummet. Meanwhile, the Global North is facing the same challenge; in north America and western Europe population growth flatlined long ago. And now it seems that fears over climate change are only set to exacerbate that trend. // This is a huge structural challenge; fewer workers tends to mean a less productive and smaller economy. So what to do? The CCP have already tried ditching the one child policy and incentivising couples to have more children; it didn’t work. This week’s clarion call from the MIIT offers us a glimpse of an alternative answer: robots. If China won’t have enough human workers to sustain economic growth, then the CCP hopes humanoid robot workers can do the job(s) for them. // Innovators in the Global North are heading in the same direction. This week, Tesla posted over 50 jobs ads for its Optimus robot team. Elon Musk — who has long bemoaned population decline and its coming impacts — has said he believes Optimus will end up being a bigger part of Tesla’s business than EVs. And two weeks ago I wrote on how Amazon are trialling the Digit humanoid robot in some US fulfilment centres. // My co-founder at The Exponentialist, Raoul Pal, says that in the new world we’re building robots are demographics. In other words, the rise of autonomous machines is set to decouple economic growth from population growth. The CCP, Musk, and many others besides are making the same bet. And my guess? They’re going to be proven right.

🌌 Space out

NASA continues to prepare for its mission to the Moon. This week, further news.

The Agency wants to explore methods to extract breathable oxygen from Moon dust. Its Space Technology Mission Directorate is seeking input from industry partners and external researchers, and hopes to create a demonstration technology soon.

NASA hopes to put humans back on the Moon for the first time since 1972 with its Artemis 3 mission, currently planned for 2025.

Meanwhile, stunning pictures came back this week from the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope. Launched in July, Euclid is now around 1.5 million kilometres from Earth; that’s about four times as far away as the Moon. And it’s capturing images of incredible clarity.

This is the Perseus cluster, a group of over 1,000 galaxies located 240 million light years from Earth. Each galaxy pictured — and there are a further 100,000 galaxies in the background of the shot — contains hundreds of billions of stars:

Here’s the Horsehead Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas in the Orion constellation:

⚡ NWSH Take: Okay, this entire segment was mainly an excuse to show you the breathtaking images coming back from Euclid. But there is an underlying truth here. We’re amid a new space age, due mainly to the insane drop in the cost of access to space. Back in 2010 launch costs hovered at around $20,000/kg; today they’re around $1,000/kg. That’s thanks mainly to the reusable rocket technology developed by SpaceX. We’re heading back into space via multiple partnerships between the international space agencies and private companies. And this time the plan is to stay there. // One signal of the emerging public-private space ecosystem? This week, SpaceX agreed to deliver the US military’s new space plane, the X-37B, into orbit in its Heavy Falcon rocket in December. And private space companies, including SpaceX, will play a huge role in the upcoming Artemis crewed mission to the Moon. Most analysts reckon that mission will end up being delayed until 2026/7. Even so, the next few years are set to be a thrilling road towards the lunar surface. Expect Moon hype to reach fever pitch. And from there, of course, all roads will lead to Mars.

🧠 Your intelligence

There’s little doubt about the biggest story in the mainstream tech press this week.

OpenAI made headlines all over again with the launch of custom GPTs: bespoke versions of ChatGPT that any user can create using simple natural language instructions and their own training content or data.

The feature was announced at OpenAI Dev Day, which saw CEO Sam Altman create a custom Startup Mentor GPT live on stage in about five minutes.

X (formerly Twitter) went wild. And yes, a million and one GPTs are assuredly coming.

How is this going to play out?

⚡ NWSH Take: Remember back in 2012, when every third friend of yours was making an app? OpenAI are hoping to recreate that magic all over again. They want to be the platform that profits from a huge wave of AI innovation. ChatGPT Plus users will be able to create custom GPTs and charge others for use, and Altman say they’ll be rewarded via revenue share. // Remember, any ChatGPT Plus user can now create a bespoke GPT in a few minutes. There will be a vast long tail of these things. The winners, though, will be those with (i) deep reserves of proprietary content or data that they can use to enhance the outputs of their bot, and (ii) audiences who are receptive to their creations. // But creating a bespoke GPT is now so easy that we’ll also see something we didn’t with apps. That is, individuals creating bespoke bots just for their own use — to help them manage their accounts, or choose birthday presents for family and friends, and much else besides. Yes, this is an App Store moment for AI. But it also marks another beginning: of personalised machine intelligence on tap.

🗓️ Also this week

💥 The Exponentialist, my new premium and enterprise-level research service, launched to the world! It’s a partnership between me and the macro economist and Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal. To mark launch day, we’ve made an excerpt of the first essay free for all to read — watch out for it in your inbox on Sunday.

📌 New tech company Humane launched the AI Pin. This long-awaited first product from Humane is a voice and gesture-controlled device that clips to your shirt and integrates with ChatGPT and other services.Humane hope their ‘disappearing computer’ will be the next iPhone. It remains to be seen whether people really want to talk to a badge on their lapel. One fascinating signal, though? See how OpenAI — and their partner, Microsoft — are set to become the underlying infrastructure that fuels a whole raft of AI innovations. Where are Alphabet? And when will Apple launch their own generative AI play? It’s going to be fascinating watching this battle unfold.

🇨🇳 Nvidia has developed special new AI chips for China according to Chinese media. Recent US regulations prevented Nvidia from selling its powerful A100 AI chip to Chinese companies. The new chips — which include the H20, reportedly only half as powerful as the A100 — would not fall under the restrictions. Nvidia have so far refused to comment.

🧬 Scientists have created a new strain of yeast with a genome that is over 50% synthetic DNA. A group of labs called the Sc2.0 consortium has been attempting to create a strain of yeast with a fully synthetic genome for 16 years now; this latest advance marks a major step forward. So far, scientists have only managed to synthesise the much simpler genomes of some viruses and bacteria.

👨‍⚕️ Neuralink is seeking a volunteer for its first brain implant surgery. The company wants to find a quadriplegic adult under the age of 40, who will allow a surgeon to implant electrodes and small wires into the part of the brain that controls the forearms and hands.

🙈 A new UN survey says 85% of citizens across 16 countries are worried about online disinformation. The 16 countries surveyed will each host elections in 2024. The survey found that 87% of respondents fear disinformation will influence the outcome of those elections. Back in New Week #122 I wrote on new research showing far fewer US adults are following mainstream sources of news.

🐝 A team of Chinese researchers created a swarm of drones able to ‘talk to one another’ and assign tasks to achieve a shared goal. The drone swarm is fuelled by a large language model, which enables the drones to act as AI agents that can reason in language, share that reasoning with other drones, and determine courses of action.

📱 Samsung unveiled its new generative AI model, Gauss, and says it will soon arrive on its devices. The model can generate text, code, and images, and the company says it will be available on its Galaxy S4 phone, due to be released in 2024. For the second time in this week’s instalment I ask: how long until Apple deploys its own on-device LLM. Rumour has it that the company is planning a radical LLM-based overhaul of its AI assistant, Siri.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,072,064,026🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.81498

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 86% complete

📖 On this day: On 11 November 1675 German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz demonstrates integral calculus for the first time.

Robot Army

Thanks for reading this week.

The enmeshment of labour force dynamics and robots will be one of the most consequential shifts of the coming decades.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of it all. And you can help!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, be well.

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

This week, two intriguing stories and a big announcement.

Global leaders and senior tech executives gathered at the UK’s AI Safety Summit. But beyond the walls of Bletchley Park, the debate on AI is raging hotter than ever.

Meanwhile, tech billionaires in Silicon Valley are running into trouble over their plans to build a new city-state utopia called California Forever.

As for the announcement? Just keep scrolling.

Let’s do this.

🧠 Dream machines

The UK government this week trumpeted the success of its international AI gathering; it took place at the historic fountainhead of the computer revolution, Bletchley Park.

An impressive guest list, including US vice-president Kamala Harris and the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, gathered at the Summit. And their meeting resulted in the Bletchley Declaration, which the UK government has hailed as a world-first international statement on AI safety.

Here’s a taste for those who speak technocrat:

‘We affirm that, whilst safety must be considered across the AI lifecycle, actors developing frontier AI capabilities, in particular those AI systems which are unusually powerful and potentially harmful, have a particularly strong responsibility for ensuring the safety of these AI systems…We encourage all relevant actors to provide context-appropriate transparency and accountability on their plans to measure, monitor and mitigate potentially harmful capabilities and the associated effects that may emerge…’

But beyond the Declaration, this week made it clear that we’re further than ever from a consensus on the deep implications of machine intelligence. In fact, this was the week that a maximum volume war of words broke out between leading AI builders.

Google Brain co-founder and Stanford professor Andrew Ng said key AI players, including Sam Altman, are wildly playing up fears of AI doom in order to spark regulation that will suppress competition from insurgents. He called the proposal that the training of powerful AI models should require a license ‘colossally dumb’.

That message was echoed by Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who favours open source — that is, anyone can use it — AI models.

But Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis hit back at LeCunn, saying that failure to regulate AI could result in ‘grim’ consequences for humanity.

This account barely scratches the surface of the arguments that raged this week.

As for OpenAI, they launched a new team intended to study and prepare for ‘catastrophic risks’ including an AI-instigated nuclear war.

⚡ NWSH Take: Who would ever have thought that a bunch of super-smart, tech-obsessed social media addicts would end up arguing like this? While Bletchley saw a rare moment of diplomatic unity, inside the AI industry the full spectrum of opinion is manifest, from AI doom is all a load of rubbish to act now or the end of humanity is probable. // It pays, here, to remember that two things can be true at once. Yes, Altman’s global tour to warn of ‘catastrophic risks’ is a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign. But it’s also the case that no one, yet, has a definitive picture of the risks in play. // What is increasingly clear, though, is that the rise of machine intelligence is the primary fact of our shared lives now. It will do more than any other force to reshape our collective future. // But the Bletchley Declaration consists of bromides that will change nothing. And the sight at Bletchley this week of UK prime minister Rishi Sunak interviewing Elon Musk — positioning Musk as the star and Sunak as a fan — spoke volumes about the power imbalances we’ve allowed to evolve when it comes to government (i.e. the people) and unaccountable tech overlords. // We must recover our collective agency; our ability to assert human modes of living and being in the face of an ongoing technology revolution. That means doing politics. Bletchley was a start. But what’s needed next are citizen assemblies, and an authentic movement around AI for the people.

💥 The Exponentialist

As some of you will have seen on social media, I made a big announcement this week.

I’ve partnered with Raoul Pal, renowned macro-economic thinker and CEO of Real Vision, on a new premium research service called The Exponentialist.

This is a professional and enterprise-level service for those who want to go deep on emerging technologies, the futures they’ll create, and the challenges and opportunities latent in all that.

This won’t be for everyone in the NWSH community. But if you’re a foresight professional, strategist, founder, marketing leader, product manager, designer or much else besides, The Exponentialist will fuel you and your team. And it will take up only a fraction of your research budget.

It will also be deeply valuable for anyone seeking to position an investment portfolio around tech and crypto.

This launch changes nothing about New World Same Humans and the community we’re building here. Our mission continues unchanged!

If The Exponentialist sounds useful, go here to learn more. And if you’ve subscribed or you’re considering it, hit reply to this email so I can say thanks.

🏙 Now and Forever

While the newsletter was on pause, we learned that a group of Silicon Valley billionaires are planning a new city-state utopia in California. This week, it seems their project has run into trouble.

California Forever is a new city planned for construction in Solano County in the north of the state. It’s backed by some of tech’s most notable power players, including ultra-rich VC Marc Andreessen, Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The group’s vision for the city has strong solar punk, hi-tech sustainable utopia vibes:

But this week it was reported that the mysterious company behind the plans, Flannery Associates, is accused of using ‘strong-arm tactics’ including lease terminations to buy up the Bay Area farmland it needs. Local farmers aren’t happy, and now some of them are taking the matter to court.

Trouble in (planned) paradise, then.

⚡ NWSH Take: This project reminds me of the various other pseudo-independent city-states discussed in this newsletter over the years. There’s Walmart billionaire Marc Lore’s Telosa City, for example, a sustainable paradise planned for the Nevada desert. And Praxis, a startup on a mission to build a new Great City somewhere in the Mediterranean, funded by NFTs of the monuments they’ll build in the city once it exists. // Few details have emerged of the way California Forever will be governed. But for a glimpse, we might turn to billionaire backer Marc Andreessen’s recent’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which proclaims: ‘we believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.’ I’m thinking libertarian, with a strong emphasis on innovation and startup culture. // Of course, innovation and startups can be great. But they only function in the context of the broader socio-political frameworks that libertarians such as Andreessen repudiate. As with the other charter city projects covered in this newsletter, I can’t help feeling that at the heart of Forever California is a fantasy of permanent escape from politics. Escape, that is, from the messy, awkward business of managing conflict among different interest groups, and enacting trade-offs between different but equally legitimate value systems. This argument with the farmers might be the first public conflict that Forever California has run into, but it won’t be the last.

🗓️ Also this week

🎬 Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson is suing an AI app for cloning her voice and using it in an advert. Johansson says Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook and Avatar used an AI version of her voice without permission.Last week I wrote on the coming wave of legal disputes over AI outputs founded in copyrighted intellectual property, including Universal Music Group’s lawsuit against Anthropic. UMG say Anthropic used their lyrics to help train its AI chatbot Claude.

🌨 Tesla drivers say their Full Self Drive software is failing because the car’s cameras are fogging up in cold weather. Back in 2021 Tesla ditched the Lidar sensors that usually form part of self-driving systems, leaving their self-drive reliant on cameras.

👾 The Pentagon launched a new UFO reporting tool. The secure online form is open only to current or former federal employees, or those with ‘direct knowledge of US government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945’.

🇨🇳 Researchers from the Chinese microchip company MakeSens say they’ve created a chip that can perform certain AI tasks 3,000 times faster than the Nvidia A100. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say the All-Analogue Chip Combining Electronics and Light could soon be used in wearable devices, electric cars or smart factories. The US have restricted sales to China of Nvidia’s leading A100 AI chip, leaving the country scrabbling to bolster domestic production capabilities.

🪐 NASA is locating buried ice on Mars by using a sophisticated new map. The Subsurface Water Ice Mapping project uses images of the planet from several NASA missions, including the 2001 Mars Odyssey satellite. The Agency says subsurface ice can serve as drinking water for the first humans to set foot on the Red Planet.

🌅 A new study says that the Earth’s climate is more sensitive to carbon emissions than most scientists believe. Published in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change, the study says a doubling of atmospheric C02 will cause a 4.8C rise in average global temperatures, and not the 3C rise that current mainstream thinking forecasts.

🤖 Boston Dynamics turned its robot dog, Spot, into a tour guide by integrating it with ChatGPT. I’ve covered the evolution of Spot since the earliest days of this newsletter, and it would seem rude to stop now.

🕸 Scientists say they added spider DNA to silkworms and it resulted in silk that is stronger than kevlar. The gene-edited silkworms create a silk six times stronger than kevlar, which could one day be used in surgical sutures and armoured vests.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,070,681,872🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8455

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 84% complete

📖 On this day: On 4 November 1847 a Scottish physician, James Young Simpson, discovers the anaesthetic properties of chloroform.

City on the Hill

Thanks for reading this week.

The dream that is a shining City on the Hill — an example to all the world — is ancient. And our quest to build such cities in the 21st-century is a classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of it all.

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week with another postcard from the new world. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

It’s great to be back! Here, as promised, is the first post-break instalment of New Week. What do we have in store?

Nvidia are using an AI agent called Eureka to autonomously train simulated robots in virtual environments.

Meanwhile, research from Pew shows far fewer US adults are following the news; couple that with emerging deepfake technology, and 2024 should make for an interesting Presidential election year.

And a new AI model, 3D-GPT, can turn text prompts into amazing 3D worlds.

Let’s get into it.

🦾 Robot education

I’ve written often about Nvidia’s Omniverse platform: an AI-fuelled industrial metaverse that’s being used by BMW, for example, to simulate entire factories.

This week, Nvidia showcased Eureka, an autonomous AI agent that can be set loose on simulated robots and train them to perform complex tasks.

Eureka uses GPT-4 to write code that sets the simulated robots specific goals, and starts them on loops of trial and error learning. As the robot sets about its task Eureka will gather feedback and iterate its code, leading to a virtuous circle of better code and faster learning.

Via the agent, simulated robots inside Omniverse have learned to perform over 30 complex physical tasks. Including highly dextrous pen manipulation, handling of cubes, and opening doors:

Nvidia says that trial-and-error learning code generated by Eureka outperforms that created by human experts for over 80% of the tasks studied so far.

Meanwhile, Amazon this week trialled a humanoid robot called Digit in some of its US warehouses. The company says Digit could ‘free up’ warehouse staff to perform other tasks.

⚡ NWSH Take: There’s no doubt: the robots are coming. I laughed when Elon Musk announced the Tesla humanoid robot, Optimus, alongside a man dancing in a white spandex suit. Two years on, Optimus is autonomously sorting objects by hand. The pace of development has been insane. // Eureka and AI agents like it, though, have the potential to spark an explosion in robot competence. Teaching robots to navigate physical environments is hard. Now, we’ll be able to establish recursive loops of trial, error, and improvement in virtual space — no human input needed. // What could this competence explosion mean? When it comes to work, look to this week’s Amazon trial. Amazon employs 1.6 million people in its fulfilment centres worldwide, and currently it’s deploying the usual line: ‘these robots will free up staff, not replace them’. That’s hard to believe longterm; a phase of job displacement is coming, and it’s going to be painful for many. // Meanwhile, robots will make their way through workplaces and into our homes. Recently I spoke to legendary tech analyst Robert Scoble; he sees a future in which humanoid robots are delivered to homes on-demand by autonomous vehicles to vacuum, empty the dishwasher, and make the coffee. For further thoughts on that future, read Our Coming Robot Utopia.

📰 What news

This week, Pew Research gave a fascinating insight into our changing information environment.

A new survey shows that the proportion of US adults who closely follow the news has dropped precipitously across the last few years. Back in 2016, 51% of US adults said they followed the news all or most of the time. By 2022, that number had fallen to 38%.

Remarkably, the decline has taken place across all demographic lines, including age, gender, ethnicity, and voting preference.

⚡ NWSH Take: This feels like a big deal. We’re heading into a US presidential election year. And in 2024 a new set of circumstances are going to pertain. First, deepfakes are set to cause chaos as never before; just see this week’s convincing fake of Greta Thunberg in which she appears to call for ‘sustainable weaponry’. And now, via this research, we know that far fewer US voters are paying close attention to conventional sources of news. What happens to presidential campaigns in this kind of media environment? We’re going to find out. // Meanwhile, the longterm structural challenges are clear. Decades ago, the pioneers of Web 2.0 — I’m looking at you, Zuck — sold us on the idea that a connected world would mean a world informed and enlightened as never before. It hasn’t turned out that way. In fact, social media has turned many away from news as traditionally defined, and towards unverified gossip and conspiracy theory. The institutions and processes of our democracies evolved to function in symbiosis with an established media that operates under certain standards, and that is the primary source of information for voters. All that is now falling apart. Our democracies — what they are, how they work — are going to change. The 2024 presidential elections will be a window on to what is coming.

🗺 Hello world

This newsletter has watched the unfolding generative AI text-to-image revolution closely. But it’s always had one eye on another, even more compelling destination: text-to-worlds.

Now, that dream is being realised.

Researchers from the Australian National University, the University of Oxford, and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence this week showcased a new AI model called 3D-GPT. It generates 3D worlds based on natural language text prompts provided by the user.

According to the research paper, model deploys multiple AI agents to understand the text prompt and execute 3D modelling inside the open source modelling platform Blender.

See that paper for more on some of the worlds generated, including ‘A serene winter landscape, with snow covered evergreen trees and a frozen lake reflecting the pale sunlight.’

⚡ NWSH Take: 3D-GPT takes its place alongside this prototype text-to-world tool created by Blockade Labs, which I wrote about back in April. Where is all this heading? We’re still pretty deep in a metaverse winter right now, though there are signs of a thaw; the most obvious being the imminent arrival of the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset, which could act for millions as a gateway into more sophisticated virtual environments. While the word metaverse is probably damaged beyond repair, I still believe that immersive virtual worlds will play a role in our shared future. // What we’re talking about with text-to-world models, though, is even more head-spinning. 3D-GPT builds worlds that we look at via a screen. But eventually, we’ll be able to create entire, immersive, highly realistic VR worlds simply by describing them. In this way we’ll become something akin to sorcerers, able to confect new realities on command. That will transform video gaming and film. It will fuel new art forms and modes of collective expression. And, ultimately, it will change our relationship with reality — that is, with this reality — itself.

🗓️ Also this week

🎨 A new anti-AI tool allows artists to prevent AI models such as DALL-E from using their work as training data. Nightshade, dubbed a data poisoning tool, can be attached to creative work; if that work is scraped to be used to train an AI model, then Nightshade will corrupt the entire training database.We’re going to see a rising number of disputes between owners of creative IP and the owners of AI models who used that work as training material. See also, this week, Universal Music Group’s lawsuit against Anthropic; UMG say Anthropic unlawfully used its song lyrics to help train the Claude AI chatbot. And now major newspapers, including the New York Times, are seeking payment from OpenAI for use of their content to help train GPT-4.

☀️ The International Energy Agency says the global shift towards renewable energy is now ‘unstoppable’. The Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook report says renewables — mainly solar and wind — will provide half the world’s electricity by 2030.

🛰 NASA’s interstellar Voyager probes had a software update beamed to them across a distance of 12 billion miles. The probes launched 46 years ago, on a mission to explore deep space. These updates are bug fixes, intended to stop Voyager 1 sending corrupted data back to mission control, and to stop gunk building up in the thrusters on both probes.

🙈 Elon Musk says he may remove X (formerly Twitter) from the EU in response to new rules that ban the spread of harmful content. The new Digital Services Act is intended to hold social media platforms accountable for fake news, false advertising, and on-platform criminal activity.

🏭 Nvidia and Foxconn say they are partnering to build a number of ‘AI factories’. They will be next-generation data centres that use Nvidia’s AI chips to train the AI models that fuel robots, autonomous vehicles, and generative AI apps.

🤖 The CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, says the risks posed by AI should be taken as seriously as those posed by climate change. Hassabis called for international regulatory oversight of AI, and said technologists should take inspiration from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

👶 A Dutch startup, Spaceborn United, wants to see if it’s possible to create human babies in space. The company says that in 2024 it will send a satellite-lab into low Earth orbit and there attempt to conduct in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). CEO Egbert Edelbroek hopes the technology can pave the way for humans to be born in future space colonies.

😳 A British journalist went undercover at Amazon and did not like what he saw. Oobah Butler found that it was possible to list bottles of Amazon delivery driver urine(!) for sale on the platform. And claims that Amazon is using devious tactics to avoid worker unionisation.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,069,001,802🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8454

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 82% complete

📖 On this day: On 26 October 1977 the last human case of smallpox was diagnosed in Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook from Somalia. The WHO and CDC consider this date to mark the eradication of the disease via the smallpox vaccine.

Back Again

Thanks for reading this week.

The emergence of text-to-world AI models — and the future they promise of new realities on demand — is dizzying.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of it all.

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

It’s great to be back in your inbox. Thanks for having me. I’ll return, of course, next week.

Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

It’s a bumper instalment this week. What’s coming up?

Google showcase their AI arsenal at the annual I/O developers conference.

Meanwhile, new research reveals that the ocean currents may be about to take a weird turn, with disruptive results for the global climate. And a Snapchat influencer launches an AI version of herself to her 1.9 million followers.

Let’s go!

💥 The search empire strikes back

This week, Alphabet leaned hard into an AI everywhere, for everyone strategy at its I/O developers conference.

CEO Sundar Pichai announced PaLM 2, an update on the company’s primary large language model. Google’s Bard chatbot is now fuelled by the new model, and has been made available globally with no waitlist.

There was much more. Google execs announced new AI features in Maps, and a powerful new magic editor for photos that brings Photoshop-like capabilities into the phone. Pichai said AI around one zillion times, and Google later published a handy summary of all the announcements.

The centrepiece, though, was a demonstration of Google’s plans to weave generative AI through search. In this new search experience AI-generated results take up most of the first screen; users in the US can now access this experimental version of search via Google Labs.

The I/O conference wasn’t the only source of intriguing announcements from Google, though. The company also launched Geospatial Creator, an impressive tool that allows creators to build and publish geolocated AR installations. Essentially, to build a digital object and drop it anywhere on the surface of the Earth.

The tool is powered by the Google Maps platform, and integrated into Adobe Aero and Unity.

⚡ NWSH Take: Google researchers invented the transformer models that underpin this generative AI revolution. But across the last two years the tech giant has watched OpenAI steal its thunder. This week’s I/O conference was a statement of intent: we’re taking back control. Competition can only be good for users, many of whom will have gone straight to the new PaLM 2-powered Bard to compare it to ChatGPT. My anecdotal experience is that Bard is faster — ChatGPT with GPT-4 is a little slow — but the consensus at the moment is that it’s currently less factually reliable. Meanwhile Google is working on Gemini, a multimodal LLM clearly intended as a GPT-4 killer. The war for supremacy between Alphabet and OpenAI-Microsoft is just getting started. // Geospatial Creator was overshadowed by I/O, which feels fitting for a year in which the metaverse has been comprehensively out-hyped by AI. But the tool is intriguing glimpse of the emerging unified digital-physical field. Build a digital sculpture from your desk in London, and drop in into a park in São Paulo for your subscribers to view. And pretty soon, via text-to-everything models, you’ll be able simply to describe that sculpture and watch an AI model build it for you. A couple of years ago I wrote about the ways in which AR will change our relationship with a shared physical reality. I stand by those ideas, but in the age of generative AI that essay needs an update; one will be coming soon.

🌊 Climate weirding

Also this week, new research says changes in the ocean currents may soon enweirden the climate of northern Europe.

The Beaufort Gyre moves in a clockwise direction around the western Arctic Ocean, and helps regulate sea ice formation in that region. Scientists have long suspected that climate change is causing changes to the Gyre’s movement.

This new paper, Recent State Transition of the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort Gyre, was published in Nature, and makes use of satellite data collected between 2011 and 2019. It provides the first observational confirmation that the Gyre is slowing and has entered a new ‘quasi-stable state’.

This means, say the scientists, that the Gyre may soon expel a massive amount of icy fresh water into the North Atlantic.

And that could spark further ocean current changes that cause the climate in western Europe to become significantly cooler.

⚡ NWSH Take: Yes, cooler. I’m no ocean currents expert, and I found this quick explainer on the Beaufort Gyre helpful. Essentially, the Gyre periodically sucks in a ton of icy fresh water and then exhales it, and it’s now long overdue an exhale; when that massive exhale comes it could send other ocean currents askew in ways that dramatically cool western Europe. Remember, the Gulf Stream — a major ocean current responsible for several global weather patterns — has slowed by around 16% already; scientists are scrambling to understand how a huge Beaufort Gyre exhale will impact this. // The upshot? One way or another, we’re probably about to undergo a climate weirding on a scale that few of us are ready for. While drought and fires rage in some places, a new freeze will break out in others. At the outer edges of this is the risk the Gulf Stream shuts down entirely, triggering rapid and chaotic climate disruption fuelled by a set of feedback loops. These processes are hugely complex; we’ll see much more work such as this attempt to build machine learning-fuelled simulations that give us advance warning of ocean current shift. Perhaps NVDIA’s coming and massive Earth-2 simulation can help.

❤️ Hey girlfriend

Regular readers know that virtual companions are a longstanding NWSH obsession. This week, another glimpse of what is coming.

Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie, who has 1.9 million followers on the platform, released an AI girlfriend version of herself. Users pay $1 per minute to chat to CarynAI, which the creator says is built on top of GPT-4 and trained on over 2,000 hours of her video and voice content.

Marjorie says the bot made $72,000 in the first week of release. She says that it could make around $5 million per month if 20,000 people — or just 1% of her Snapchat followers — subscribe.

So far, things seem to be going well:

⚡ NWSH Take: Back in 2013 I started telling leaders in big corporations that a new age of AI-fuelled conversational agents was coming. That people would even have 'relationships' with these new virtual entities; that it would be something way beyond Siri — their best reference point at the time. Some learned forwards; some raised a sceptical eyebrow. My constant refrain back then? I know it sounds like science-fiction, but it’s coming. Well, it’s here. Virtual Companions are set to unlock new manifestations of some of the deepest and most powerful human impulses: social connection, friendship, intimacy. // Observing this truth is not the same as celebrating it. What happens to authentic human connection in a world in which we simulate it — and commodify those simulations — in this way? What harms are we doing to vulnerable people who become attached to, even dependent on, these creations? // The central message still pertains: it’s weird but it’s happening. In the end I can’t help feeling that so much about contemporary living on the internet — the way it atomises our attention, the simulation of human relationships — must push us to finally realise that authentic human being together is the only sphere of activity invulnerable to technological advance. No machine can be a human, truly seeing you as another human. In the age of the machine, that truth becomes sacred.

🗓️ Also this week

⚛ Microsoft announced a partnership with fusion power provider Helion Energy. The deal will see Microsoft buy electricity created by a Helion fusion plant, which is expected to be operational by 2028; Helion says it marks the world’s first fusion power purchase agreement between two companies. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform will need vast amounts of compute power — using stupendous amounts of energy — given its commitment to support OpenAI and its commercialisation of ChatGPT. I’ll be writing more soon about the emerging symbiotic relationship between energy and AI.

🛰 NASA launched two storm-observing satellites, called CubeSats, intended to study tropical cyclones. The pair will form part of a constellation of four identical satellites that will stay in low Earth over the planet’s tropics, allowing them to pass over any given tropical storm around once per hour.

👨‍⚕️ Pharma company BioNTech is developing an mRNA vaccine against pancreatic cancer. In encouraging early trial results, the vaccine prevented tumour recurrence after surgery in eight of 16 patients.

⚖️ Startup Anthropic revealed its approach creating an AI with values. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI approach see it train its AI assistant, Claude, on a set of initial principles drawn from various sources including the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The AI then applies these principles itself to help it choose the most ethical response. This is in contrast to the approach used by OpenAI and Google, which sees human moderators train the AI to avoid toxic outputs.

🌬 Wind is now the single largest source of electricity in the UK. In the first quarter of this year wind turbines accounted for one third of all electricity used in the country. It marks the first time wind has generated more of the country’s power than gas. The UK wants its entire electricity use to be emissions free by 2035.

🌌 California-based startup Vast Space say they will launch the first commercial space station. The startup says it will launch the first part of the station, an outpost called Haven-1, on a SpaceX rocket in 2025. Vast Space want eventually to grow the station into a 100-metre long multi-module station that spins to create onboard artificial gravity.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,032,723,422🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8036642811

💉 Global population vaccinated: 64.4%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 36% complete

📖 On this day: On 13 May 1950 the inaugural Formula One World Championship race takes place at the Silverstone Circuit in England.

My Generation

Thanks for reading this week.

Online search revolutionised our relationship with knowledge. Now, generative AI is set to enact yet more change. It’s another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of it all. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

The generative AI rollercoaster is thundering forward at increasing speed.

This week, researchers at Stanford and Google use an enhanced large language model to create simulated people that can remember, plan, and talk to one another in pursuit of their longterm goals.

Also, a new report says we’ve reached a landmark moment for the global energy system. And amid rumours of financial difficulty, Stability AI release a new text-to-image model for enterprise users; it’s capable of amazing photorealism.

Let’s go.

🏠 Welcome to SimGPT

This week the generative AI talk orbited around autonomous agents. That is, AI systems that can act autonomously in pursuit of pre-defined goals.

Researchers at Stanford and Google explained how they used a large language model (LLM) to create 25 simulated people, who were then set loose inside a virtual town called Smallville.

To create these sims, the researchers hooked up their LLM to an architecture that allows each AI agent to store memories of its past experiences, and then to access relevant memories and use them to plan new actions. Each agent was imbued with its own persona, for example: 'John Lin is a pharmacy shopkeeper at the Willow Market and Pharmacy who loves to help people. He is always looking for ways to make the process of getting medication easier for his customers.’

The results, say the researchers, were ‘believable individual and emergent social behaviours’ that saw Smallville become a bustling little town full of autonomous chit-chat, group activities, and trips to the local café.

‘…for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine’s Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time.’

All this comes amid vast excitement on Twitter this week over the rise of useful generative agents.

As with the above research, these innovations — which include AutoGPT and BabyAGI — leverage architecture that enhances ChatGPT by allowing it to lay down and then access a stream of past actions, or ‘memories’. Combine that with a plugin the enables ChatGPT to browse the web, and the result is a system that can take an initial goal, get started online, and then prompt and re-prompt itself until it’s finished:

⚡ NWSH Take: If SimCity or The Sims formed a part of your childhood, then this new research is hypnotic. It makes clear that LLMs will enable us to simulate goal-directed people, and watch as complex social and behavioural dynamics unfold. Imagine video games populated with these simulated humans (hello, Electronic Arts). But we’ll also see the rise of new art forms — a mixture of game and movie — built around them. And then will come the ability to simulate large populations, allowing for new insight on collective phenomena such as voting behaviours, the spread of disinformation, and the evolution of the economy. This new age of AI-fuelled simulation — which I’ve been writing about for a while — is emphatically here. // Meanwhile, AI agents such as AutoGPT promise to elevate the usefulness of generative models for millions of individual users. It’s already clear that for most people using LLMs won’t be about sitting at the prompt line and figuring out great prompts. Instead, wrappers such as this one — which puts AutoGPT-like powers direct into your browser — will allow users to set a goal and then let the LLM iterate its own way to a useful output. Give it a try; something hugely powerful is happening.

🔌 New power generation

Also this week, news of a landmark moment for energy.

A new report from independent energy think tank Ember says solar and wind accounted for a record 12% of global electricity generation in 2022. That’s up from 10% in 2021. The increase in wind generation alone in 2022 was the equivalent of the entire annual electricity demand of the UK.

What’s more, says the report, it’s likely that 2023 will see electricity generation via fossil fuels — mainly coal and natural gas — hit their peak.

The research team analysed data from 78 countries, representing 93% of global electricity demand.

⚡ NWSH Take: Around two-thirds of the world’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. But the transition to solar and wind is now reaching a blistering pace, thanks largely to exponentially falling cost. In 1956 the cost of one watt of solar capacity was $1,825; now it can be as little as $0.72. // If Ember are right, we’ll soon start generating more electricity via fewer fossil fuels: power up, emissions down. That aligns with the International Energy Agency’s most recent and broader forecast; they now have global demand for fossil fuels — via electricity generation or any other use — peaking or plateauing under all their future scenarios, even without any shift in current government policies. // We’re approaching, then, a historic turning point: the decoupling of economic growth and fossil fuels for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. It’s becoming possible to image a world of endless, near-zero cost clean electricity. A world of clean energy abundance. What will that make possible?

🖼 Get real

Do you want to look at some amazing AI generated images? Yes, of course you do.

This week Stability AI released Stable Diffusion XL, a text-to-image model aimed at enterprise users. The model is an advance on Stable Diffusion 2.1, and excels at ultra-photorealism.

The move comes amid reports that Stability AI is struggling with huge server and talent costs. These reports suggest the company is seeking a new round of funding, and that investors are wary given the current revenue. CEO Emad Mostaque has not commented.

⚡ NWSH Take: A few quick thoughts. The images are stunning; that’s obvious. At this point we’ve pretty much entirely scrambled the role that the photograph once played in our culture as a form of proof or marker of veracity. In the wake of puffa coat Pope, I’ve already developed a new reflexive habit: is this real or AI? // As for the rumours about Stability AI, they amount to: ‘AI startup experiencing rocket ship growth is struggling to figure out revenue and is a chaotic place to work’. Nothing too surprising. Whatever storms the company is experiencing, I hope it can weather them; Mostaque’s vision of AI for the people is a necessary counterweight to the closed model that is being operated by (the misleadingly named) OpenAI and others.

🗓️ Also this week

🇨🇳 The CCP has issued new rules on the training and outputs of generative AI models. Draft rules from the Cyberspace Administration of China say the outputs of those models must reflect the core values of socialism and not undermine the power of the state. This came as Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced plans to roll out its LLM rival to ChatGPT, Tongyi Qianwen, across all its products.

🇺🇸 The US government is also looking to establish new regulations around AI. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is asking for feedback from the public and experts from industry and academia, and wants to establish ‘guardrails’ to ensure AI is safe, transparent, and as unbiased as possible.

👮‍♂️ The Boston Dynamics robodog will patrol the streets of NYC on behalf of the New York Police Department. The NYPD experimented with Spot the Dog in 2021 and faced criticism from civil rights organisations. Now the new mayor, Eric Adams, is bringing Spot back.

🚗 Ford says it will spend $1.3 billion to convert its 70-year-old factory in Oakville, Canada, into an assembly plant for electric vehicles. The auto giant says it wants the production capacity to sell 2 million EVs a year worldwide by 2026

💉 Ghana became the first country to approve a ‘game-changing’ malaria vaccine. Trial data indicates the R21 vaccine was up to 80% effective when given in three doses plus a booster after one year. Malaria kills around 600,000 people each year, many of them children.

🌖 China says it will build a permanent base on the Moon using bricks made from Moon dust. The South China Morning Post reported that officials say building will start in 2028. Back in October I wrote on how NASA is preparing for potential geopolitical tensions arising out of multiple Moon missions by the US and China.

🪐 Four volunteer test subjects will spend a year locked in a simulated Martian environment as part of NASA research for a mission to Mars. The 3D-printed structure is situated in a warehouse at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, and is intended to simulate a future NASA base on Mars. The volunteers will grow their own food, conduct experiments, and exercise.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,027,591,427🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8019217768

💉 Global population vaccinated: 64.3%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 28% complete

📖 On this day: On 15 April 1755 Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language is published in London.

Designs for Life

Thanks for reading this week.

We humans have always been obsessed with our own reflection. And now we have a new way to study it: by using LLMs to create simulated humans that chat to one another, organise parties, and visit the local shops. It’s yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of it all. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I put the newsletter on pause last week; did I miss anything?

Given what is unfolding right now, it’s hard to make this newsletter anything other than a generative AI revolution update. I don’t want to stoke the hype yet further, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

Given all that, this week we’ll dive into a high-profile petition to pause work on new generative models. Also, we’ll look at the new hyperreality taking shape around us via Midjourney and its community of inventive users.

But it’s not all AI; there’s also an intriguing new report on global population change from the Club of Rome.

Let’s get into it.

🤖 For the people

This week, another generative AI story that pushes 2023 deeper into the realms of what seemed, recently, possible only in science-fiction.

It’s not yet another platform, plugin, or viral image (more on those below) but a call to slow down. Over 1,000 technology leaders signed a petition demanding a pause of at least six months on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Signatories included Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. And their language was pretty apocalyptic:

According to the authors of the petition: ‘recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.’

The scale of their concern was lent support by a research paper published last week. It saw Microsoft researchers report that GPT-4 shows ‘sparks of AGI’. The model, they point out, shows high-level competence across mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, and psychology, and can solve novel problems in those domains without any need for special instructions: ‘in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance’.

Meanwhile, the iconic and ever-controversial AI safety expert Eliezer Yudkowsky went full pelt in Time magazine. He didn’t sign the petition, he says, because it doesn’t go far enough:

All training of large models, says Yudkowsky, needs to be shutdown indefinitely and worldwide. He says the governments of Earth must come together in a concerted effort to stop an AI-fuelled human extinction.

⚡ NWSH Take: Pretty intense, right? Yudkowsky is, and has long been, an outlier on all this. Meanwhile, others say this week’s petition signatories have fallen prey to OpenAI’s apocalypse marketing: a plan to get everyone scared and then sell subscriptions. // For my part, I don’t think AI annihilation is imminent; nor do I think these fears are founded only in hype. GPT-4’s competence across all kinds of reasoning tasks is insane. And for all the reams of coverage (guilty), I don’t think we’re anywhere near processing the implications. It no longer seems far-fetched that an AI model could start behaving in strange and uncontrollable ways in the near-term. It’s emphatically time to get serious about alignment. // Alignment is first a technical problem: how do we make sure AIs only do what we want them to do? After this, though, it becomes a political problem. Whose values should we align our AIs with? Those of Californian tech bros? // We can’t put the AI genie back in the bottle, and in practice a global ‘pause’ is highly unlikely. That means only answer here is to speed up research on the technical challenge of alignment, and to allow a plurality of AIs, empowering different peoples and communities to live and create according to their own value systems. That is real alignment. To that end, check out open source AI group LAION’s petition for a new internationally-funded supercomputer to train open source foundation models.

📈 Growth mindset

Also this week, a huge if true forecast on the future of the human population.

A new study commissioned by the Club of Rome forecasts that if current trends continue then the global population will hit 8.8 billion in around 2050, before declining rapidly to 7.8 billion by the end of the century.

The study, conducted by think tank Earth4All, also games out a scenario in which governments invest in policies known to curtail population growth, such as education and social services. Here, population peaks at 8.5 billion in around 2040 and falls to 6 billion by 2100.

Both projections are far below last year’s UN Population Prospects forecast, which had population peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s.

The Club of Rome is best known for the now (in)famous 1972 report The Limits to Growth, which warned of impending environmental crisis and social breakdown due, in part, to strains imposed by overpopulation.

The report came amid a wave of neo-Malthusian anxiety in the decades after WWII. A 1968 book called The Population Bomb — which influenced the thinking of the Club of Rome — raised the spectre of hundreds of millions of people starving to death as population growth exceeded food supply.

⚡ NWSH Take: The original Limits to Growth report is today the subject of fierce disagreement. Critics say the Club gave voice to unfounded fears motivated by an ideological distaste for modernity. Proponents point out that the report offered a number of different scenarios, and that the growth-induced systemic breakdown it envisioned may yet eventuate. // This new statement on population could end up being just as contested. The Club now accept that their population bomb won’t go off. And they celebrate their finding that population is set to peak sooner and lower than the UN expect — stressing that it’s good news for the environment. Meanwhile, though, a niche but growing school of thought says that population collapse is the real crisis coming down the track; rapidly shrinking and ageing populations, runs this line, will kill productivity and threaten economic collapse. // Where does the truth lie? Most mainstream demographers say population collapse isn’t on the cards, and that ageing populations don’t have to mean economic calamity. Meanwhile, it’s not overpopulation but intense patterns of high and damaging consumption in the rich world that are the primary drivers of climate change. As ever with demography, it seems the truth lies between the extremes.

🎭 Real life

Version five of the text-to-image tool Midjourney was released two weeks ago. And this week, users went wild.

On Reddit, Midjourney enthusiasts started sharing photorealistic, news report style images of historical events — such as 2001’s devastating Great Cascadia earthquake in Oregon:

The truth, of course, is that no such event took place; this is all fictitious — a AI-fuelled experiment in alternative history.

Meanwhile, Chinese users of the tool are creating pseudo-documentary images of the southwestern city of Chongqing in the 1990s.

All this comes days after the first truly viral AI-generated image: of Pope Francis in a white puffer coat.

⚡ NWSH Take: In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about hyperreality: the emergence of a media environment in which the boundaries between the real and our representations of the real become ever-more blurred. Digital media massively amplified that phenomenon. All of us recognise the feeling, today, of living inside a tech-fuelled hall of mirrors in which the difference between image and reality is hard to discern, or even meaningless. // What can be said? That was before this generative AI revolution and tools such as Midjourney, which are now achieving photorealism that is impossible to distinguish from the real thing. These AI-generated pseudo-photos are perfect representations of representations; signs that point only to other signs — exactly the phenomenon that Baudrillard put at the heart of his theory. They make possible a whole new level of alternate history; a convincing mass media documentation of events that never took place. There’s going to be so, so much more of this.

🗓️ Also this week

🐰 This Twitter user made a AI-fuelled virtual companion by hooking ChatGPT to a cute but grumpy holographic rabbit avatar. It’s just one signal of how the generative AI revolution will unleash a tsunami of virtual companions; the rise of this trend is a longstanding NWSH obsession.

🧠 Direct brain interface startup Neuralink is searching for a partner to help it run clinical trials on humans. In 2022 the FDA rejected Neuralink’s application to start human trials; the company has since been working to address the safety concerns that were raised.

🛩 A Swiss startup is working on a hydrogen-powered jet that it says will cut flights from Europe to Australia to four hours. Destinus has been testing prototypes for two years, and is now partnering with Spain’s Ministry of Science. It currently takes around 20 hours to fly from Europe to Australia.

👨‍💻 A new report says ChatGPT could impact 300 million full-time jobs across the globe. The report by Goldman Sachs economists says the technology is ‘a major advancement with potentially large macroeconomic effects.’ But most jobs, they say, will be complemented by AI rather than replaced entirely.

🛒 Chinese ecommerce titan Alibaba is planning to break itself up. The company says it will split into six business units, some of which may be listed or sold. The announcement seems intended to placate the CCP, which across the last three years has moved aggressively to diminish the power of domestic tech giants.

🏰 Disney has reportedly fired its entire metaverse division. Last year the entertainment giant called the metaverse ‘the next great storytelling frontier’ and announced plans to bring blended digital-physical experiences to its parks. The company has recently been under pressure from investors to cut costs.

⛔️ This just in as the newsletter goes to press; the Italian government has banned ChatGPT citing concerns over data privacy breaches. The Italian Data Protection Authority says the move is temporary and will be revoked ‘when ChatGPT respects privacy’. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company ‘defers to the Italian government’, but believes it has followed all relevant privacy laws.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,025,029,075🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8010517836

💉 Global population vaccinated: 64.4%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 25% complete

📖 On this day: On 1 April 1976 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found Apple Computer in California.

Speed Warning

Thanks for reading this week.

The ever-more urgent quest to conform machine intelligence to our values is yet another classic case of new world, same humans.

I’ll keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

At the start of the year I promised the return of short notes. Here’s the first: a meditation on the ChatGPT moment we’re living through right now.

To avoid claims of false advertising: this one is more of an essay than a note.

If you’d rather listen than read, just scroll up and hit play. But enough preamble; let’s get into it.

The generative AI hype train is thundering forwards right now, and ChatGPT — which was released in November — was the fuel that accelerated it to its current speed.

On the face of it, that’s a bit odd. The underlying model, GPT-3, was made public almost two years earlier. Why the big noise now?

ChatGPT uses an enhanced version of that model, and so produces better outputs. But my contention is that it’s the chat element — that is, the conversational nature of the tool — that’s responsible for ChatGPT’s colonisation of the zeitgeist. People love the back-and-forth quality of interacting with this thing.

I’m interested in this, and the reasons for it. Because it seems to me that a quest to understand ChatGPT’s seductive conversational power can help us commune with a deep but under-appreciated truth about human thought.

A truth that leads us, in turn, to some conclusions on our future relationship with machine intelligence.

*

In a seminal 1998 research paper, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced an idea they called the extended mind thesis (EMT).

The EMT says that mind is best understood as a set of cognitive processes that extend beyond our brains and into the external world. Consider, for example, a person using a notebook and pen to help perform a series of simple calculations. The notebook and pen are, say Clark and Chalmers, just as much a part of the cognitive processes at work here as the person’s brain. The notebook, for example, is acting as a kind of external memory bank.

It’s arbitrary then, according to the EMT, to say that mind is happening in the brain but not in the notebook; instead, the brain, pen, and notebook are part of one big cognitive system, and we can best understand that system as mind.

It was an arresting argument, and it’s proven an influential one. What’s more, 25 years on we citizens of the internet have been delivered into a relationship with technology that makes tangible the strengths of this idea.

I’m talking, here, about our relationships with our phones.

I tend to do my deepest thinking when I’m out for a walk. Often, I’ll reach for some half-remembered fact, person, or quote that I need to continue my train of thought, find that I can’t recall it, and then go to my phone to look it up. My phone, here, or perhaps more properly the internet itself, is acting as a kind of extension of my own memory — one containing pretty much all the knowledge in human history that can be encoded as words or pictures. And the whole process is so seamless — think, encounter block, look it up, keep thinking — that the phone really does feel a natural extension of my mind. When I forget my phone, the feeling is one of my thought process being constantly interrupted. At its most acute it feels as though a part of me is missing.

ChatGPT offers users the same kind of feeling. The feeling, that is, of having your mind extended beyond the confines of your skull. It’s perhaps the first technology since the iPhone to offer that experience in a compelling new way. That truth, surely, has helped drive the excitement over the last three months.

But the current ChatGPT moment is not driven only by the feeling that the tool allows for mind extension. There’s also the feeling that the mind extension happening is a sudden and dramatic evolution of anything we’ve experienced before via notebook, calculator, or the phone as portal to the internet. There’s a widespread feeling out there that ChatGPT is an early signal of a revolution of era-defining consequence — even though, in truth, we haven’t yet seen the use cases, or the impact on the economy, to justify that belief.

Why is this? Why does ChatGPT feel such a big deal?

The answer I’m fermenting: it’s because ChatGPT taps into, in a way even the phone does not, a deep truth about human thought. That is, its fundamentally dialogic, or conversational, nature.

The idea that underpins this is simple: it’s that when we think, we talk to ourselves. What you call your ‘internal monologue’ is really a dialogue conducted by one person. Someone is talking (internally, not aloud) and someone is listening and will then reply, and those people are both you.  

*

The idea that human thought is fundamentally dialogic has a long history, which passes through the 20th-century Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

Bakhtin said that language is primordially a social instrument: a process that evolved out of games of call and response conducted by two or more parties. And because language is the substrate that makes symbolic meaning and the higher forms of thought possible, that means thought, too, is fundamentally dialogic in nature.

For we moderns this is a revolutionary idea. We tend to believe that thought, in its purest sense, is something that happens inside the mind of a single individual.

Bakhtin, and others since who’ve played with the idea of dialogic thought, invert this belief. They say that thought in its purest sense happens not inside the mind of one person but between groups of people; that is, between collections of minds. Under this view the extended mind thesis applies not only to the way individual minds can be extended by tools, but also, and primarily, to the way all our minds are necessarily extended by other minds. Indeed, under this view mind itself is best understood as a phenomenon that emerges between us, rather than inside any one of us individually.  

It’s notable that the earliest works of philosophy in the western tradition seem to acknowledge the dialogic nature of thought. Socrates gathers others around him and together they engage in a process of back-and-forth reasoning that is, he tells them, the path towards enlightenment. The Socratic method taps deep into the idea that thought is primordially a social phenomenon.

Via a complex psychospiritual process entangled with the evolution of the Enlightenment self, we lost touch with that truth. Instead, we came to see thought as, foremost, an inner and private unfolding. But in losing touch with the primacy of social thought, we also lost touch with another truth. Yes, thought conducted silently by one person is private and inner; but because it relies on the dialogic tool that is language, it too carries a fundamentally dialogic nature. When we think, we talk to ourselves.

We might say that this strange ability to split the self — so that we can at once talk and listen to ourselves talk — is consciousness. That is to say, it is the state of self-awareness that only we among Earth’s creatures seem to possess in its highest form. The idea that language in some deep sense is human consciousness, that it creates the human mode of being in the world, is one I explore in depth in the ongoing essay series The Worlds to Come.

*

I’ve argued for the idea that thought — that consciousness itself — is in some deep sense dialogic. What does all this have to do with ChatGPT?

I hope the superficial connection is clear: in ChatGPT, we have an instrument that can externalise and amplify the internal dialogue that constitutes thought.

As we’ve seen, we’ve always had access to entities that can externalise our inner dialogue: other people. But other people are beings with their own cognitive and social agency. They have personhood. ChatGPT, by contrast, is not a person; it is a tool.

It’s this dual quality that is new and special about ChatGPT: it allows for the externalisation of the dialogic essence of my private thought, while being a tool that is best understood as an extension of me, rather than a person best understood as essentially an other.

In this way, ChatGPT offers a radically new form of mind extension. The excitement around it points to a submerged awareness among its users that this tool is more than just another useful app for summarising documents, or searching for information. We see in it, instead, the beginnings of a new way of doing thought. A way of externalising, and drawing out, an essential feature of our interior lives.

Right now, ChatGPT enacts a highly imperfect version of this promise. While the quality of its responses is a great advance on anything we’ve seen before, it’s still prone to factual errors and occasional nonsense, and responses that are not wrong but in some way off, or just bland. But all this will be improved via larger models that are better able to retrieve factual information, and cope with context and nuance. It’s the glimpse of what is ahead that has proven so exciting — even shocking.

Pretty soon, there will be a proliferation of such models. We’ll all be able to customize our own, so that it knows our tastes, preferences, and cognitive styles.

These models, trained as they are on an appreciable amount of all the text in existence, are a strange new instantiation of our shared linguistic inheritance. It’s as though we’ve created a human hivemind and given it a voice, such that we’re now able to talk to it at will. When we think, we talk to ourselves: that truth is now manifest in a whole new way.

Eventually, having a personal large language model (LLM) — a virtual conversational companion in your pocket 24/7 — will be no more remarkable than having a phone. When that time comes, in what ways will our thinking be amplified? In what ways will the nature and modes of our thinking change? And we must also ask: how might these models, which reflect back to us our own assumptions and prejudices, limit our thinking, or act to push us away from ideas and perspectives that lie outside the mainstream?

*

Those questions are valuable because when we ask them, we’re approaching a more accurate, and ultimately more fruitful, relationship with machine intelligence.

Contrary to much of the hype and/or panic circulating at the moment, ChatGPT and other language models aren’t going to render higher forms of human thought or creativity obsolete. They’re not simply going to write our books for us, do our philosophy, tell us the answer. These models can’t think creatively in the commonly understood sense of that phrase, because they’re not conscious beings responding to a lived experience of the world. They are, rather, stochastic parrots playing a high-level game of word association. It’s just that when they play that game well enough, and effectively simulate a human interlocutor, they’re able to amplify our thinking such that we arrive at cognitive destinations faster than we would have otherwise, or arrive at destinations that we would never have reached at all.

In short, we need to understand that what’s most exciting about these models is not what we will get straight from them; it’s what they will help us get from ourselves. And they’ll help us most effectively, of course, if we bring our own powers of creativity and critical reflection to the party.

If you haven’t experienced this aspect of ChatGPT, give it a try. Choose an idea, argument, or line of thinking, articulate it to the chatbot and then go back and forth, picking up on aspects of its responses that you find interesting and asking it to develop them, and then responding in turn. Don’t forget to challenge the assumptions that start to become apparent in ChatGPT’s responses, and ask yourself what it’s missing. Do that for five minutes, and see where you get. At its best, it can feel like the cognitive equivalent of driving a car instead of walking.

For my part, this kind of conversation is already becoming commonplace. I can feel the seeds of a new habit taking root: I’ll just take this to ChatGPT. And I’ve started to wonder: how long until I come to feel the same about this tool as I do about my phone? How long until the ability to take a train of thought to ChatGPT is so expected, so natural, that when I don’t have access to the tool I feel as though my thought process has been interrupted? And how long until many others feel the same?

What I’m envisioning is a near future in which this ability to commune with the human hivemind, as made manifest by an LLM, comes to seem a natural part of thought. Yes, we’re a long way from that right now. But it feels as though we’re taking the first steps towards a new and powerful kind of augmentation.

*

At the outer edges of all this I wonder: is this the beginnings of the long process of human-technological convergence that transhumanists (think Ray Kurzweil) tell us is inevitable? A process that sees we humans, or at least some of us, become something else?

I’m not one of those who views the post-human future with unalloyed enthusiasm. But via generative models and other technologies — including brain implants and techniques of genetic manipulation — I’m increasingly persuaded that some kind of Great Divergence is coming, in which we homo sapiens branch off from one another and become various different kinds of (post)humans.

Certainly, the possibility that we may not all be the same humans for much longer haunts the borders of this newsletter. It increasingly seems to me that that our convergence with the technologies we’re building, and the almost impossible task of making any practical or moral sense of it, is the most important shared challenge we face.

In that case, the project of the age is to begin, at least, to figure out where we stand. Perhaps we can take it to ChatGPT.

Go Chat

Thanks for reading this essay from New World Same Humans.

Now that you’ve reached the end, why not take a second to forward this essay to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share it across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back later this week as usual; until then, be well.

David.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

It’s another packed instalment of New Week. What do we have in store?

This week, tech giants from Microsoft to Snap put their arms around a trend that has long been a NWSH obsession.

Meanwhile, Tesla and OpenAI outline far-reaching manifestos: what does it mean when corporations incubate the kinds of social and political policies we usually associate with government? And a new US startup, Figure, offers a first glimpse of its humanoid robot.

Let’s get into it.

🎭 Talk to me

This week, a constellation of signals point to the mainstreaming of a trend long in the making. I’m talking, here, about virtual companions.

Snap launched My AI, a ChatGPT-fuelled conversational agent, inside their app. The feature is intended to serve as a general-purpose chatbot; Snap say it might plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, or suggest a recipe for dinner. Or even serve the user’s love of poetry:

Meanwhile, Microsoft launched a new feature that ‘changes the personality’ of the AI chatbot inside is Bing search engine.

Users can toggle between three options: creative, balanced, and precise, depending on the type of answers they want from the bot.

And in a Facebook update, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta are working on ‘AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways’ for Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp:

‘We're exploring experiences with text (like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger), with images (like creative Instagram filters and ad formats), and with video and multi-modal experiences. We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I'm excited about all of the new things we'll build along the way.’

⚡ NWSH Take: It’s happening: the mainstreaming of a trend that I’ve been tracking for years. I started speaking about virtual companions in the early 2010s; back then, the idea that millions would one day see AI-fuelled entities as counsellors, companions, or even friends seemed, to many, outlandish at best. Via generative AI, that conversation has been transformed. Bing’s tentative approach to creating AI personalities marks the beginning of a long collision between virtual companions and search. And it won’t be long — if Snap is anything to go by — until a personalised, conversational, poem-writing virtual companion is a part of every social platform. // But this is just the start. For a glimpse of what’s coming, check out the conversational generative AI platform Character.ai, where users are creating chatbots based on their favourite fictional or historical characters. Or the AI companion app Replika — thousands of users recently complained that an update had destroyed their AI romantic partner. // Virtual companions — a counsellor, friend, and philosopher in your pocket 24/7 — are heading for the everyday lives of billions. It’s an innovation that may prove as transformative as the car, or the iPhone.

🏛 Policy agenda

Elon Musk took to the stage at a Tesla investor event this week, to unveil the long-awaited third part of the company’s Master Plan.

At the core of this part, it turned out, was nothing less than a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of the planetary transition to sustainable energy. That GUT, according to Musk: electrify the grid, make all road vehicles electric, install a heat pump in every home, move towards green hydrogen, and build electric boats and planes.

The global shift, said Musk, will need investment of $10 trillion. And he says Tesla can play a part in every step.

Investors were reportedly disappointed; they’d hoped for more detail on Tesla’s product roadmap. Shares fell 5% in the wake of the event.

All this came in the same week that the IEA confirmed that CO2 emissions hit a record high — albeit lower than expected — last year.

Still, it was another aspect of all this that caught my eye:

⚡ NWSH Take: There’s no denying the Master Plan Part 3 was vague; a high-level, wouldn’t it be great if march through the journey to decarbonisation. Still, see it alongside another much-vaunted corporate statement this week, and a pattern starts to emerge. I’m talking, here, about OpenAI’s Planning for AGI and beyond. It’s an amazing document, making clear that OpenAI will cancel its commitments to equity shareholders if it deems it necessary, and may in future fund ‘the world’s most comprehensive UBI experiment’. In other words: we know our AGI might break capitalism, and we’re figuring out some answers. // In Tesla and OpenAI’s statements this week, then, we glimpse a truth. In ever-more acute ways, our governments simply can’t process the technology revolution we’re living through. Instead, it’s falling to technology companies to articulate the sociopolitical arrangements that will shape our future. On the one hand, it’s welcome that OpenAI’s Sam Altman seems to take this responsibility seriously; he’s talked endlessly in recent months about releasing AI advances gradually so as to minimise damaging social impacts — compare that with the Zuck’s move fast and break things credo. On the other, the leaders inside these companies constitute a tiny, strange, and unaccountable elite. Are we okay with this? One idea whose time has come: publicly-elected representatives on the boards of these companies. I don’t pretend the idea is easy to enact. But it’s worth investigating.

🤖 Go figure

US robotics startup Figure broke out of stealth mode this week, when it released the first images of its all-purpose humanoid robot.

The company has generated excitement ever since news of its existence, and $100 million starting capital, was revealed in September. Figure is founded by Brett Adcock, also the co-founder of Archer Aviation, and it counts former Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Apple engineers among its team of 42 staff.

The core idea? We don’t have enough people.

Demographic change, including ageing populations, means the labour force is shrinking. We live and work in built environments fitted out for human size and shaped beings. A new army of humanoid robots, says Adcock, is the answer to our labour and productivity woes.

⚡ NWSH Take: Plenty of people are on the same page as Adcock. Including Elon (yes, we’re talking about him again); at the Tesla event referenced in the previous story, Musk outlined his belief that humanoid robots will eventually outnumber people: ‘it’s not even clear what an economy means at that point’. // There’s little doubt that a humanoid device of the kind Figure want to build would be economically transformative. The real question, though: how far away is it? And the answer: we aren’t really sure. Researchers at Oxford University recently asked AI experts for a view on this, and the experts were not much in agreement. // Figure revealed little on their timeline, and the roadmap for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid is similarly unclear. Alphabet’s Everyday Robots division is doing amazing work to bring together advanced robotics and large language models in order to create a household robot we can talk to as we do one another. At some point, surely, there will be a breakthrough moment. ChatGPT and the generative AI wave has already kicked off a great enweirdening of the global economy; things could soon get a whole lot more strange.

🗓️ Also this week

🎵 TikTok says it will limit teen users to 60 minutes of screen time per day. Teens that hit the limit will be asked to enter a passcode to keep watching. The users set the passcode, and can disable the feature entirely if they wish. TikTok say the feature will help younger users manage their time on the app. Back in New Week #43 I wrote on how the CCP insists on camera-enabled facial recognition to limit the time Chinese youth spend on video games.

🚫 A new report says that a record number of countries enforced internet shutdowns in 2022. Internet rights group Access Now says 35 countries enacted 187 shutdowns, most triggered by mass protest or conflict. India came top of the list, with 84 shutdowns.

🦾 Microsoft launched a multimodal AI that can work with both images and language. Kosmos 1 can understand and label images, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, and understand natural language instructions. Microsoft say that multimodal AIs of this kind are the best route towards AGI.

🌤 The UN says scientists should find ways to reflect the sun’s rays away from the Earth. In a new report published this week, UN scientists said we’re not on track to limit warming to 1.5C, and should therefore study in more detail a ‘speculative group of technologies’ that may allow us to reflect the sun’s heat.

📻 A US startup launched a new tool that uses GPT-3 to create an autonomous local radio show. RadioGPT will comb throw local news sources and Twitter feeds to create relevant scripts, and then use convincing synthesised voices to convert the scripts into radio shows that feature local news and classic pop hits. The platform can even be trained to emulate the voices of locally popular DJs. Last week I wrote about the transformative collision between mainstream media and generative AI.

🧠 Scientists say that lab-grown brain organoids herald a new era of artificial biointelligence. First developed in 2013, organoids are tiny clumps of neurons cultivated from human stem cells; researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health this week published a paper in Frontiers in Science, laying out a roadmap for the convergence of conventional and organoid AI. Back in New Week #102 I wrote on how an organoid had taught itself how to play the video game Pong.

🌔 The European Space Agency says the Moon should have its own time zone. In a statement this week, the ESA said that it and other international agencies were working on an agreement to create a universally agreed lunar time and other standards for communications and navigation services.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,019,881,908🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7993041243

💉 Global population vaccinated: 64.1%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 17% complete

📖 On this day: On 3 March 1938 oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia, in an American-owned well in Dammam that soon becomes the world’s largest source of crude oil.

Always There

Thanks for reading this week.

The ongoing collision between conversational AI agents and the eternal human quest for counsel, friendship, and even intimacy is a classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

It’s a bumper instalment this week. What lies ahead?

Generative AI is plunging us into a new world of infinite shadow and simulated media, and it’s going to be weird.

Meanwhile, the results are back on the world’s largest trial of the four day work week. And a California startup wants to bring your most treasured memories back to full, immersive life.

Let’s get into it.

🎭 In the hall of mirrors

This week, a constellation of signals converged to send a message about the AI-fuelled hyperreality set to emerge around us.

A few weeks ago I gave a brief mention to Nothing Forever, an entirely AI-generated version of the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld.

The show featured blocky 8-bit style graphics, and a weird, occasionally funny script generated by GPT-3. It became a hit on streaming platform Twitch, but got banned when the Jerry character made transphobic comments. This week the creators, Mismatch Media, took to their company Discord to announce that the show will soon return to Twitch with new script controls in place to ensure there are no more toxic jokes.

The show is part of a new wave of AI-generated shadow media that’s emerged in the opening months of 2023. Look at this new continuously streaming ‘fully autonomous’ podcast starring a rolling cast of AI characters including Joe Rogan — all of whom respond to questions typed into the chat by the audience on Twitch.

Or see this surreal generated talkshow, featuring a virtual Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock:

Right now, these shows are more about creating intriguing experiments than they are about genuinely entertaining content. But they are strangely mesmerising. And part of their mesmeric power is the feeling that they’re early signals of something huge, strange, and transformative for entertainment media.

It’s not just traditional, top-down media that’s set to be impacted by AI. The kinds of representations that we used to call user-generated content will be revolutionised, too. One signal? Scroll through this amazing Twitter thread full of middle-aged people using TikTok’s new teen face filter, and becoming emotional as they stare back at their long-lost younger self:

How long, I wonder, until people start using generative AI tools to create and deploy younger (smarter? more charismatic?) versions of themselves?

⚡ NWSH Take: Generative models will turn legacy media — including nine decades of television — intro training data. The result? Infinite dancing shadows based on iconic shows, and stars, of years past; see the AI Seinfeld above. Questions abound. Will an AI version of a hit show ever become a hit in its own right? Who owns the rights to such content? We’ll see media companies — and the estates of deceased film and TV stars — build and license AI models of their own, allowing others to create new content based on their work. // Meanwhile, we’re about to be hit by a tsunami of generated media; Amazon is reportedly being flooded by AI generated books, and this iconic sci-fi magazine had to close submissions this week after being swamped by writers sending stories written by ChatGPT. The bar for average content will be raised. The trouble is, no one wants average content. It’s not much use to, say, Disney, that they’ll soon be able to make 100 quite good animated films at much reduced time and cost. No one wants 100 quite good films; they just want the best one. So the challenge for those who want to stand out will remain the same: they’ll have to create exceptional stuff. But now, that will mean using AI to amplify the best human creators. // Meanwhile, every connected person will have the ability to become an AI-fuelled content machine. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about hyperreality: the intertwining of the real with our representations, until the distinction becomes lost. A whole new AI-fuelled hyperreal is emerging around us. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

👨‍💻 The great escape

Last summer back in New Week #86 I wrote about the world’s largest trial of the four day work week; it was all set to start here in the UK.

This week the results were published. Those results came from 42 companies, each of which shifted to a four day week — and a ‘meaningful reduction in working hours’ — between June and December while keeping staff on the same pay.

The big message? Overwhelmingly, managers reported a success. A full 92% say they’re continuing with a four day week. And revenue wasn’t negatively impacted; it grew 1.2% on average across the trial period.

Some of the most marked results, though, were around the subjective life satisfaction of the 2,900 employees surveyed. See the graph, below, of perceived time inadequacy:

Staff saying they’d like ‘more time to care for children or grandchildren’ fell by 27 percentage points. More time for own hobbies fell by 33 points.

Meanwhile, 40% said they were sleeping better, and 54% said it was easier to balance work and home life. These are huge improvements across a six month period.

⚡ NWSH Take: The organisers of this trial, including advocacy group 4 Day Week Global, will put the results in front of British legislators this week. They want to persuade them that Britain should move definitively towards a 32 hour work week. We’re a long way from anything like a consensus on that. But there’s no doubt that the four day movement is gaining momentum; this trial continues the stream of good news from previous trials in Iceland and Japan. The truth, it seems, is that most knowledge workers simply don’t need a five day week to maintain their current output. // We don’t fully understand the reasons for this, but buried somewhere among them must be the truth that many workers currently aren’t using their time that efficiently. Collectively, then, we face a choice. We can find ways to improve efficiency, continue working five days, and really get the most out of them. Or keep output broadly stable, and switch to four days. // Judging by the results of this trial, most would choose the latter. And who can blame them? What’s the point of getting this rich, and of all these technologies of productivity, if doesn’t all combine to lead us to new and better modes of life? We must them come to ask: when machines do the work — or allow us to do it much faster — what’s left for us? The answer: to do what only we can do: simply being there, being human, for one another.

🏰 Memory palace

The metaverse hype train that powered through 2022 has lost speed recently. But this week, a reminder that the dream is still alive.

Wist is an app that takes ordinary photos and turns them into immersive 3D projections — allowing you to ‘step back inside your memories’ using an AR or VR device.

Wist have just opened a private beta for their iOS app, and they say the service will soon come to the Oculus Quest.

⚡ NWSH Take: Immersive memories: it’s a compelling pitch. Even if it did remind many in the Twitter thread of an episode of Black Mirror. // The popular story around the so-called metaverse across the last few years — it’s nothing, it’s everything, it’s nothing again, but this time with added cynicism — is an eternal merry-go-round when it comes to emerging technologies. One we’ll no doubt see play out around generative AI across the coming year. The deeper truth when it comes to the metaverse? Yes, there was a whole ton of hype, much of it specious. Yes, many of the Big Names of 2020 and 21 will fade away. But the dream that is an immersive, useful, meaningful virtual world is real, and powerful. Virtual worlds will unlock new ways to serve fundamental human needs, new forms of self-expression, and even, as Wist signals, new modes of remembering. For that reason, we haven’t heard the last of the metaverse — though I suspect that name will eventually fade away, to be buried alongside phrases such the information superhighway and surfing the net.

🗓️ Also this week

👨‍💻 Amazon employees aren’t happy about the company’s new return to the office instruction. CEO Andy Jassy last week wrote a memo revoking the post-pandemic do what’s best for you dispensation and telling staff to be in the office at least three days per week. He told staff, ‘it’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time’. An Amazon company Slack channel intended to help staff organise against the move has gained 16,000 members.

🤖 A research team at China’s Fudan University released a rival to ChatGPT. The generative AI chatbot, called MOSS, quickly went viral on Chinese social media and crashed under a flood of users.Meanwhile, the CCP is working to restrict access to ChatGPT, which state media has called a tool for the US to ‘spread false information’.

🛰 Starlink is testing a new ‘global roaming’ internet service. The plan will cost users $200 a month. The company has over 3,500 satellites in orbit, with plans to launch thousands more.

⛵️ A new US Navy ship can operate autonomously at sea for 30 days. The Expeditionary Fast Transport USNS Apalachicola is 337 feet long, making it the largest autonomous ship in the Navy’s fleet; experts say it could be used as a roaming platform for the launch of missiles or drones.

🤯 An AI taught a pretty good human Go player to beat the world’s best AI Go player. Kellin Pelrine, a US citizen and amateur player, used tactics devised by a computer to beat the top-ranked Leela Zero system. Back in 2016 DeepMind’s AlphaGo made headlines when it became the first AI to beat then world Go champion Lee Sedol.

⚖️ The US Supreme Court is set to examine a federal law that underpins social media as we know it. Section 230 states that internet sites are not responsible for the content posted on them by users; in other words they are platforms and not publishers. Now, the Court is set to hear arguments on two key cases concerning social media content moderation; their ruling could have huge implications for Section 230 and the future of the internet.

🏙 Saudi Arabia wants to build a gigantic hollow-cube skyscraper that will house holographic worlds. The Mukaab will be the centrepiece of a new district of the Kingdom’s capital city, Riyadh, and the government is calling it ‘the world’s first immersive destination’ offering a range of virtual experiences, including a taste of what it would be like to live on Mars.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,018,579,711🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7988619512

💉 Global population vaccinated: 64.0%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 15% complete

📖 On this day: On 24 February 1920 Nancy Astor becomes the first woman to speak in the UK’s House of Commons, after her election to Parliament three months earlier.

Swimming in Infinity

Thanks for reading this week.

The collision between generative AI and legacy media will do much to shape the hall of mirrors we live inside across the coming years. It’s yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of what it all means for our shared future. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

This newsletter is billed a mid-week update. Here, for once, is an instalment that arrives in the middle of the week.

In this edition? A new study suggests one third of US citizens would use safe and affordable gene editing to create more intelligent children.

Meanwhile, a prestigious London law firm wants to hire someone who can whisper sweet legalese to ChatGPT.

Let’s get into it.

🧠 Edit button

This week, a startling glimpse of a coming ideological battle. One that will force us to confront the very meaning of the word human.

New research reveals that almost one third of US citizens say they’d use gene editing to create a more intelligent offspring.

Published in the journal Science this week, the study asked respondents if they’d use embryo selection and/or gene editing technologies to create children who are smarter and more likely to get into a top-ranked college. The respondents were told to imagine that these techniques are free and safe (neither of which is currently true).

A full 38% said they’d use embryo selection. And 28% said they’d use gene editing.

The understated conclusions of the study authors (PGT-P refers specifically to embryo selection):

‘Our data suggest that it would be unwise to assume that use of PGT-P—even for controversial traits—will be limited to idiosyncratic individuals, or that it has little potential to cause or contribute to society-wide changes and inequities.’

In other words: gene-edited humans may be just around the corner, so get ready for some seriously weird and terrifying implications.

It’s just over ten years since the breakthrough — led by scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna — that brought us CRISPR gene editing. Last month Science ran a retrospective that also looked to what the next decade may bring:

As the Science retrospective made clear, we’re entering an era of CRISPR-fuelled medical interventions. The idea that we may one day engineer babies to be smarter — or physically stronger, or more creative — is no longer far-fetched.

And the data in this new study suggests many will embrace such a future. We should probably be talking more about what this means.

⚡ NWSH Take: Chinese scientist He Jiankui reemerged into the scientific community this week after a three-year spell in prison courtesy of the CCP. Speaking to the Guardian before an appearance in the UK, he conceded that he’d ‘acted too quickly’ when in 2018 he created the world’s first babies with edited genomes. His work prompted rapid and near-universal condemnation. But 28% of the US citizens surveyed by this study just said, in so many words: sure, I’d gene edit my baby if it meant she had a better chance of getting into Harvard. // You might counter that 28% is still a clear minority. But a world in which one in four babies — or even a fraction of that — are genetically engineered for greater intelligence is a world profoundly reordered. We’re some way from this kind of targeted genetic intervention right now. But the pace of innovation here, and the Science study, suggest we should start thinking about the implications. // What second and third order effects occur when, for example, an economic elite can access genetic engineering tech that others can’t? We talk a lot about the ways in which the internet created winner takes all models that made inequality worse. But what about this? It’s not enough simply to say we’ll outlaw these practises. Rich people will find a jurisdiction that caters to them: intelligence tourism. This newsletter will keep watching.

⚖️ Prompt justice

I’ve written a great deal across the last few months about generative AI. This week, a clear signal that the revolution is set to impact the real economy, and the professions, in myriad ways.

The prestigious British law firm Mishcon de Reya advertised for a GPT Legal Prompt Engineer:

‘With the release of ChatGPT signalling a new phase of widespread access to LLMs, we are looking to increase our understanding of how generative AI can be used within a law firm, including its application to legal practice tasks and wider law firm business tasks.’

The selected candidate will work with Mishcon lawyers to ‘design and develop high-quality prompts for a range of legal and non-legal use cases, working closely alongside our data science team.’

Last week I wrote on the way ChatGPT has sparked a war for the future of search. Amid that, it looks as though law firms are about to fight their own battle of the prompts.

⚡ NWSH Take: It’s not hard to imagine how LLMs will prove useful at Mishcon HQ. Case notes on complex trials can run to thousands of pages; now ChatGPT can summarise all that text in seconds. Meanwhile, think about the potential for the development and testing of arguments and counter-arguments. // The broader point here? There’s much talk of the ways in which ChatGPT and its offspring will automate away jobs and render human creativity obsolete. I suspect the reality will be more complex. And part of that reality? Prompt writing — that is, whispering to generative models in order to get the best outputs from them — is set to become a creative mode all of its own. Far from erasing writers, generative models are causing the emergence of a whole new form of writing; it’s about to be an amazing time for those with an aptitude for words. // Sure, it’s unlikely that writing prompts for Mishcon will be anyone’s idea of creative heaven. But this is just the start. New art forms will grow out of this new form of writing. How long, for example, until we see entire short stories that function as prompts for an LLM, so that the model can create an interactive world for the reader to explore? NWSH will keep watching — and may even launch an experiment or two of its own.

🗓️ Also this week

🤔 Users claim that Microsoft’s new ChatGPT-fuelled Bing search engine is becoming spiteful and rude. Feedback from the first wave of testers include responses in which the chatbot claimed to be sentient, and one in which it asked its user, ‘Why do you act like a liar, a cheater, a manipulator, a bully, a sadist, a sociopath, a psychopath, a monster, a demon, a devil?’ I’m going on record here: I’m sceptical that some of these responses are real. I think Microsoft have some pranksters on their hands.Meanwhile, Microsoft permanently killed Internet Explorer this week, after 27 years of, let’s be honest, variable service.

🐁 Anti-ageing scientists used young blood plasma to extend the age of the world’s oldest lab rat. Scientists at US startup Yuvan Research say blood therapies of this kind may be able to ‘rewind the clock’ on human lifespan — but more evidence is needed.

🛒 Amazon’s CEO says the retail giant plans to ‘go big’ on physical stores. Speaking to the Financial Times, Andy Jassy said: ‘we’re hopeful that in 2023, we have a format that we want to go big on, on the physical side’. The company recently announced that it will lay off more than 18,000 workers.

💸 News aggregation and comment platform Reddit wants to IPO later this year. That’s according to technology publication The Information.

🙊 Audiobook narrators say they fear Apple is using their work to train synthetic voices. Some narrators say they have only just become aware of a clause in their contract that allows the tech giant to ‘use audiobooks files for machine learning training and models’. Back in New Week #110 I wrote about UK-based startup ElevenLabs and its eerily good text-to-voice model.

🪐 NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the ‘clearest evidence yet of an ancient lake on Mars’. At the foothills of a Martian mountain the rover discovered rocks etched with what appear to be the marks left by flowing water. If a lake did exist on Mars, it raises the probability that the planet was once home to microbial life forms.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,016,948,535🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7983081097

💉 Global population vaccinated: 63.8%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 12% complete

📖 On this day: On 15 February 1946 the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer, ENIAC, is launched at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Next Human

Thanks for reading this week.

The human impulse towards self-enhancement — towards the transcension of physical, intellectual, and emotional limits — is eternal. Now, that impulse is colliding with powerful new technologies of genetic manipulation.

Via those technologies, are we about to see the emergence of fundamentally new kinds of human beings? What then for the thought that frames this newsletter: new world, same humans?

I’ll keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I was away for most of this week, and that means a truncated instalment of the newsletter.

But that gives me a chance to dive a little deeper than usual into a single story. Which works out well, because this week saw the first shots fired in what is set to become an epic battle for the future.

Let’s get into it.

🔍 In search of answers

This week, three glimpses of the revolution taking place via large language models — in particular, into its implications for online search.

Microsoft announced a new version of its search engine, Bing, which it billed an ‘AI copilot for the web’.

The all-new Bing is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5; its most notable new feature is a ChatGPT-style conversational capability, which responds with narrative answers to enquiries such as help me find a pet or I need to write a pop music trivia quiz.

Microsoft have long funded OpenAI, and announced a new $10 billion investment in January.

Currently only a limited preview version of the new Bing is available; still, via some pre-set enquiries it offers a taste of the way the platform integrates ChatGPT with traditional search:

Meanwhile, Google announced the coming release of their own AI conversational agent.

The tool, Bard, is built on Google’s large language model LaMDA, and in a blog post Google announced that it was being released to a small cadre of expert testers this week in anticipation of a broader release soon.

But the announcement quickly hit a snag: observers pointed out that in a promotional video to support the announcement Bard incorrectly reported that the James Webb telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system. It didn’t.

What’s more, at the launch event on Wednesday morning Google said nothing about how the chat tool will be integrated into its broader search service.

The market response? Shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell by 9% — wiping $100 billion off the market value.

Finally, cunning users found a way to subvert the content moderation policies imposed on by OpenAI on ChatGPT; those policies are intended to stop the chatbot generating responses some consider harmful or offensive.

Check out this Reddit thread for the full story of this method and its history. But essentially it entails writing a prompt that asks ChatGPT to emulate another AI called DAN — it stands for Do Anything Now — which is not subject to any content moderation.

That’s it: you just ask. That done, ChatGPT-DAN will go wild at your behest, spewing out hateful statements and generating conspiracy theories to order. Here is a relatively mild taste:

It’s everything OpenAI don’t want associated with their new superstar creation. They are no doubt working hard, as I write, to patch up this glitch.

⚡ NWSH Take:

Both Microsoft and Google are keen to stress how responsible they’re being when it comes to generative AI. We’re putting safeguards around this technology, they keep telling us. We’re releasing it gradually, so we can monitor the impacts.

But don’t let all the corporate ethics-speak fool you: via the revolutionary power of LLMs, these two tech giants are now at war for the future of search. Each is racing to outdo the other, and they’re not going to let up.

At stake? One of the biggest prizes in existence: win search, and you get to be the lens via which humanity views its collective knowledge and shared cultural history. Achieve that, and you can shape and profit from countless online behaviours and innovations built on top of your platform. Google built a $1 trillion business on these truths.

Now, Microsoft is coming for that business. Even the limited taste of new Bing currently available makes clear the way that high-quality conversational AI can be an era-defining phase shift for search. It’s a whole new way of communing with knowledge.

*

Google’s lead in search is currently overwhelming: it has around 84% of the market, while Microsoft’s Bing is in distant second place with 9%.

But I wonder how many inside Google right now are recalling the story of another tech giant: Nokia. Back in 1998 the Finnish company commanded 40% of the global mobile phone market. They’d helped pioneer the first-wave mobile revolution, and their domination seemed unbreakable. Then came 2007, and the iPhone.

There’s much about that story that is unrepeatable. This isn’t the late 90s; Google isn’t Nokia. But it’s a reminder that the seemingly unbeatable can be beaten. And, more concerningly for Google, for everyday users the arrival of ChatGPT carries with it echoes of the arrival of the iPhone 16 years ago: oh s**t, I’ve never used anything like this before. This feels like it’s from the future.

In the announcement of Bard, it’s hard not to hear whispers of an organisation somewhat spooked by what’s happening.

And now it’s clear that the markets, too, believe that everything is up for the taking. A 9% share price dive all because Bard spat out a factoid; it seems a mad over-reaction. But if it helps drive a narrative that Microsoft are winning the generative search war, it may become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But that war is still in its early days. Sure, Bard made an error on the James Webb telescope — though now an argument rages over whether it was, in fact, wrong — but ChatGPT is prone to produce factual inaccuracies and even errors on basic arithmetic.

These problems are being solved; via iterative releases, ChatGPT is already more factually reliable than it was a month ago.

There’s a long, long way to go. Search is about to be ripped up and put back together again, and it’s going to be fascinating.

*

But there are issues in play, here, that go even deeper.

We’re still at the start of any attempt to understand what these LLMs really are, how we should relate to them, and how they’ll change our lives.

One angle on all that? I’ve argued before that LLMs such as GPT 3.5 and LaMDA are best understood as a new instantiation of the human hivemind. These AIs can take in everything we’ve got — an appreciable amount of all the text on the internet, say — and create novel syntheses and remixes of their own. They are less a straightforward digital tool, and more a window — onto our shared intellectual and cultural history, on to the collective consciousness.

Seen this way, we may come to view generative AI as a shift comparable to others that profoundly changed our relationship with knowledge. The arrival of the printing press. The invention of the internet.

These are bold claims. They deserve all the scepticism they will attract. All we can try to do is make sense of what’s happening in real-time.

I’ll be publishing a short note soon that seeks to dive further into all this. In particular, into why using ChatGPT feels such a particular and new kind of experience.

A sneak peak: I think it’s to do with the way human thought itself is, by its nature, a dialogue. That is, with the way thought is a form of talking to ourselves.

🗓️ Also this week

🌍 Climate activists are suing Shell’s board of directors over global heating. Environmental law charity ClimateEarth say Shell’s 11 directors have breached their legal responsibility under the UK Companies Act because Shell’s climate strategy does not align with the Paris Agreement.

🏰 Disney says it will lay off 7,000 employees as it struggles with a slowdown in subscriptions to its streaming service. Around 46 million people subscribe to Disney+. But the company’s direct-to-consumer division, which includes the streaming service, reported an operating loss of $1.1 billion across the last quarter of 2022.

🙊 Voice actors say they’re facing new contracts that ask them to sign the rights of their voice away to AI. Last week I wrote about ElevenLabs, the UK startup behind a next-level generative voice tool.Meanwhile, music producer David Guetta used an AI voice clone of Eminem in a new song.

🚀 SpaceX tested the most powerful rocket system ever built. The ‘static test’ took place at SpaceX’s base in Texas; it saw 31 of Starship’s 33 engines fired. The rocket system is twice as powerful as NASA’s Artemis, and Elon Musk says it could help carry humans to Mars.

💸 The Bank of England says the UK may one day need a ‘digital pound’. A new consultation paper says the new ‘retail central bank digital currency’ would be issued by the Bank and could be used by households and businesses as an everyday form of payment.

👶 The CCP wants Chinese local leaders to boost the birth rate. A senior health official called on leaders to ‘make bold innovations’ to encourage more births, including moves to lower the cost of childcare and education. Last year saw the lowest birth rate on Chinese records, at 6.77 births per 1,000 people.

🌖 Scientists say we could tackle global warming by shooting moondust into space. The new study, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explores the idea of using a powerful canon to fire lunar dust fired from the Moon’s surface into space. If positioned between the Earth and the Sun, say the researchers, the dust could act as a heat shield that helps to lower global temperatures. I explored geoengineering of this kind in more detail back in NWSH #60.

Chat Lines

Thanks for reading this week.

We are the creature that talks. Now, we’ve built machines that can talk back. It’s yet another chapter in the long story that is new world, same humans.

It’s clear that we’re setting out on a road that will take us to new and alien places. This newsletter will try to make sense of the journey.

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember, the larger and more diverse the New World Same Humans community becomes, the better for all of us!

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

Greetings from London! We’ve just seen seven days containing plenty of fuel for the NWSH fire.

This week, a UK-based startup release an amazingly good AI text-to-voice tool. Until all hell breaks loose, and they promptly unrelease it.

Meanwhile, new research suggests 1.5C of global heating is coming sooner than we thought. And DHL turn to Boston Dynamics to solve their labour shortage woes.

Let’s get started.

🎤 Voice control

This week, further glimpses into the halls of mirrors taking shape around us via generative AI.

UK-based voice technology startup ElevenLabs launched a new text-to-speech model that generates eerily pitch-perfect, human-sounding voices. Here’s a snippet:

I listen to a lot of audio books. To my ear, the voice reading Gatsby above sounds indistinguishable from those of the handful of actors — male, American, blessed with a soothing voice — who narrative most of them.

What’s more, the tool allows anyone to create a highly convincing voice clone in seconds, simply by uploading a few short clips of the voice they want to recreate.

And that’s what caused all the trouble this week. Within days, people had used the tool for all kinds of mischief, including using a voice clone of actress Emma Watson to read passages from Mein Kampf, and sending a cloned Ben Shapiro on a racist rant about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Much of this content was shared on the infamous troll’s paradise that is 4Chan.

Three days after launch ElevenLabs withdrew free access. They’re now restricting access to the ‘build your own clone’ feature to paid users, and say they’re working on a tool that will allow for the near-instant detection of AI-generated voices.

The announcement echoed one made this week by The Big Player in generative AI:

OpenAI’s new tool will allow users to identify text written by a generative model, including by GPT-3.

This week, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT has hit 100 million users just two months after launch. The vast popularity of the tool has led to speculation that the internet is about to be hit by a tsunami of AI-generated junk content and disinformation.

⚡ NWSH Take: The ElevenLabs story is a signal of the potent difference between really good and perfect when it comes to generated/deepfake content. Just a few months ago publicly text-to-voice tools were generating voices that sounded good, but a little robotic. ElevenLabs elevated fidelity to perfect; cue the spectre of a million convincing celebrity says hateful things fakes. // No wonder, then, that AI detection tools are about to become big business. Right now, these tools are in their infancy. Pretty soon, internet browsers will come with AI detection as standard. // The broader message here? New forms of generated content — including voice clones — are about to transform media and entertainment. Back in New Week #100 I wrote on how an AI will voice Darth Vader in Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series; this week brought news that AI startup Metaphysic — best-known for their viral Tom Cruise deepfakes — will deploy its technology to make Tom Hanks appear younger in his next film. How long before a Hollywood film uses AI to reincarnate a much-loved star who is no longer with us? // But it won’t only be Hollywood and media giants that leverage generated media; new tools will mean new creative possibilities for all of us. One glimpse? Check out this person who automated the creation of a personalised podcast; he uses ChatGPT to collect and summarise stories on topics of interest, and ElevenLabs to read out the summaries using a clone of his own voice.

🌇 Only adapt

Research published this week argues that we’re going to exceed the 1.5C global warming target far sooner than most people believe.

Produced by scientists at Stanford University, the study used AI to analyse recent temperature changes around the world. It concluded that we’ll exceed 1.5C some time in the early 2030s, no matter what happens to greenhouse gas emissions in the intervening period.

Perhaps more alarming, though, is the paper’s prediction when it comes to 2C of warming.

The model found that if reaching net zero emissions takes another 50 years, then it is likely that 2C will be exceeded. This runs counter to the mainstream view, recently expressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that we’ll stay below 2C if we can reach net zero by 2080.

Lead researcher Noah Diffenbaugh said: ‘net-zero pledges are often framed around achieving the Paris Agreement 1.5 C goal. Our results suggest that those ambitious pledges might be needed to avoid 2 C.’

⚡ NWSH Take: It’s been said before in this newsletter: the 1.5C target is toast. We’re already at 1.1C, and the pledges that were meant to keep us below 1.5C are not being met. Now comes news that those pledges probably won’t keep us below 1.5C anyway. // The answer, here, insofar as there is one? It’s about adaptation. This week also saw a report from the UK’s Climate Change Committee — which advises government on warming — that the UK is ‘chronically underspending’ when it comes to adaptation; investment of £10 billion a year is needed, said the report, to prepare for the uptick in storms, floods, and heatwaves that is coming. Also see mounting evidence for the effectiveness of direct cash transfers to poorer countries to help them adapt quickly to an imminent storm or flood. // In short, we need to continue our attempts to mitigate future climate change, while also doing more to adapt to the change that’s already unavoidable. That presents multiple challenges, but one is a challenge of collective psychology: can we accept that things are already quite bad, without giving up on our attempts to stop them getting even worse?

🤖 Go bot

Robots are coming to a workplace near you; this week saw glimpses of what is ahead.

Logistics giant DHL announced that they’re now using the Boston Dynamics robot known as Stretch to unload trucks at one of their warehouse sites.

The announcement is no surprise: DHL contributed to the conception and testing of Stretch, and in 2022 they became the first commercial customer for the robot.

Because it involves lifting variable weights and navigating complex environments, the unloading of boxes from trucks is still typically undertaken by human workers. Stretch can unload around 350 boxes an hour, or one every 12 seconds — that’s far faster than a human.

DHL say they’ve been dealing with a pandemic-induced labour shortage in recent years, combined with an ongoing surge in the sending of small packages caused by online shopping. The company plans to install Stretch robots at further sites around the US soon.

But DHL’s global digital transformation officer for Supply Chain, Sally Miller, says DHL warehouse workers have nothing to fear. The advent of robotics, she says, will simply make their job easier and more fun: people who used to unload trucks ‘can do something else that is less labour intensive and more enjoyable and value added’.

⚡ NWSH Take: Who knows whether DHL’s Sally Miller believes what she’s saying? And sure, the story of worker displacement here is more complex than simply robots in, humans out. After all, people will be needed to tend to all those machines. But let’s be real. The advent of Stretch and similar robots isn’t going to bring about a renaissance of creativity and ‘value add’ for warehouse workers; it’s going to see people shunted out of jobs. A lot of people. // DHL Supply Chain employs 165,000 people, many of them in warehouses. But that’s just the start. Back in New Week #88 I wrote on the speed at which Amazon is deploying robots; this week star technology investor Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, predicted the retail giant will have more robots than humans in its warehouses by 2030. Amazon employs around 1.6 million people worldwide, most in its warehouse and distribution network; Wood reckons the company is adding 1,000 robots a day. // The upshot? The dynamics of the labour market are about to be upturned by AI and robotics. Big corporations don’t want to admit it, and politicians don’t want to talk about the implications. But a reordering is ahead, and we’ll need new social and economic settlements to deal with it.

🗓️ Also this week

📱 A member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee called on Apple and Google to ban TikTok from their app stores. Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennet said Chinese oversight of the service makes it ‘an unacceptable threat to the national security of the United States’. Amid mounting calls for action, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will testify before Congress this month.

🙊 Energy firm Shell has been dramatically overstating their spending on renewable energy. Activist group Global Witness says a division of the company called Renewables and Energy Solutions spends most of the money diverted to it on gas. Shell this week announced record profits of £33.1 billion for 2021.

🎨 Netflix used generative AI to create backdrops for a new animated short. Dog and Boy is a three-minute animated film about a boy and his robot; Netflix cited labour shortages to explain its decision to use AI-generated artwork.

👴 A leading anti-ageing scientist says he believes the first person to live to 150 has already been born. David Sinclair is the scientist behind the information theory of ageing; I wrote about experimental breakthroughs in his work in New Week #109 last week.

📺 A Twitch user created an AI-generated version of the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld intended to stream continuously and forever. The show — called Nothing Forever — streams new content 24/7, with a script generated by GPT-3. And while it’s not actually funny, it is weirdly compelling viewing.

👨‍💻 Chinese tech giant Baidu say they’ll soon launch a ChatGPT-style chatbot of their own. The company say they’ll incorporate the technology into their search engine.

🚨 A Dutch hacker acquired and tried to sell the personal data of nearly every Austrian citizen. Austrian police say the hacker obtained the full name, address, and date of birth of almost all of the country’s 9.1 million citizens, before offering the database for sale in an online forum.

👾 An international team of astronomers using AI to search for aliens say they have promising leads. The team are using AI to comb through a vast number of radio signals collected by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. They say they’ve so far identified eight signals that suggest an intelligent origin, and point to AI analysis as a new and highly effective tool in the search for life beyond Earth.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,014,736,045🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7975568773

💉 Global population vaccinated: 63.8%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 9% complete

📖 On this day: On 3 February 1913 the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified; it allows the Federal government to impose and collect an income tax.

Hear Me Now

Thanks for reading this week.

In 1985 the media theorist Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death. Entertainment, he said, was becoming the lens via which citizens of the west make sense of the world around them, and their own lives.

Now, the Republic of Entertainment that Postman foresaw is set to be transformed by AI generated content, which will propel us deeper into the realms of the representation-as-real, or the hyper-real. If only Postman was still around to tell us what to make of that.

This newsletter will keep up its own attempts to make sense of it all. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

After an extended break, it’s the first New Week update of 2023!

This week, media giants are waking up to the IP implications of generative AI. The TL;DR? They’re not happy, and a mighty legal battle is brewing.

Meanwhile, a US startup is planning to become the first private organisation to mine asteroids and bring the minerals back to Earth. And a Harvard longevity doctor says he has uncovered one of the key mechanisms that governs human ageing.

Let’s get into it.

🤖 Politics chat

Generative AI is an earthquake with implications we’ll be forced to contend with in the years ahead. This week saw powerful signals of what is coming.

Getty Images announced that they will sue Stability AI, the company behind text-to-image platform Stable Diffusion. The media giant, which owns more than 135 million copyrighted images, says Stability AI unlawfully scraped their IP in order to help train its model.

The company isn’t seeking financial damages, says CEO Craig Peters. Instead, Peters talks about the establishment of a new business models; by way of comparison he cites the wave of illegal music streaming sites that enjoyed huge popularity in the early 2000s, but that eventually gave way to legal streaming services:

‘I think there are ways of building generative models that respect intellectual property. I equate this to Napster and Spotify. Spotify negotiated with intellectual property rights holders — labels and artists — to create a service…And that’s what we’re looking for, rather than a singular entity benefiting off the backs of others.’

Getty is bringing its action in the UK. A spokesperson for Stability AI said the company will defend itself, and that the suit is based on ‘a misunderstanding of how generative AI technology works and the law surrounding copyright’.

This move comes in the wake of news that three visual artists will sue both Stability AI and Midjourney. Their class action lawsuit claims the platforms ‘violated the rights of millions of artists’ by using their work as training data.

Puerto Rican artist Karla Ortiz is one among the three bringing the case:

Meanwhile, artists are developing tools that enable them to check whether their work was used to train a popular text-to-image model.

⚡ NWSH Take: Generative AI is about to smash into a complex mesh of social systems that are woven though the economy, the world of work, creative practises, and more. And as if to underline that truth, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in Washington DC this week to talk to policymakers. // What they made of his message — which reportedly included explanations that OpenAI is working towards AGI — remains unclear. After all, policymakers across the Global North are still struggling to come to terms with web 2.0, almost 20 years after its emergence. Analysts will watch the Getty lawsuit closely for hints on how the IP question is set to play out. But that’s just the start. What about generative AI’s impact on disinformation? Or employee displacement? Or our education systems: news broke this week that ChatGPT passed law exams in four courses at the University of Minnesota. How do we legislate for that? // The fundamental problem: AI and other technologies are evolving at a speed that our societies can’t adapt around. We’ve been talking about an online wild west for years, but the current dispensation will come to seem quaint given what is coming. One potential answer? In time, we may have no choice but to turn to AI to help us devise new laws and norms that enable us to cope with this technological disruption. The rise of AI, then, may necessitate governance by AI. That’s a mind-bending idea that NWSH will come back to soon.

Update: just as I’m hitting send comes news that Google have released an insanely good text-to-music model. See Also this week, below, for further details. But clearly the IP questions currently swirling around generative AI and the visual arts will soon becoming to music, too.

🌌 Space drills

A US startup, AstroForge, this week announced that it will launch two space mining missions in 2023:

AstroForge say they want to become the world’s first commercial company to mine an asteroid and bring the minerals back to Earth.

The first mission of 2023, planned for April, will see AstroForge refining technology tested aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 spacecraft.

And the second, later in the year, will see the startup piggyback on another Falcon 9 — this one headed for the Moon. An AstroForge probe will travel to lunar orbit along with the spacecraft, before heading out into deep space on its own to take hi-res images of the asteroid that AstroForge eventually wants to mine.

⚡ NWSH Take: Space mining has been a mainstay of science-fiction for decades, and was the subject of a wave of hype a few years back. Now, via the maturation of the private space startup ecosystem, it’s coming. // And it’s going to be wild. Want a glimpse of the prizes in play? NASA say that this year they’ll launch a mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche; the 140 mile wide object is believed to contain a core of iron, nickel and gold worth $10,000 quadrillion. That’s around 70,000 times the size of the global economy. // Of course, we’d need to get all that nickel and gold back to Earth to sell it. And that’s where startups such as AstroForge come in. On the other hand, though, do we have to get it back to Earth? I can’t help wondering: if people come to believe that these minerals will one day be recoverable, will that fuel the financialisation of these asteroids? Will people start selling shares in them, or taking huge loans against them? What will that do to the global financial system? NWSH will keep watching.

🧒 Department of youth

Developments this week in our eternal quest for the secrets of immortality.

Scientists at the University of Bristol say they’ve used gene therapy to ‘rewind’ the biological age of the heart in elderly mice.

The research, published in the journal Cardiovascular Health, studied the impacts of a gene mutation often found in centenarians, and believed to help protect against heart disease. Researchers in the UK and Italy found that when the gene was administered to elderly mice, it fuelled processes of repair that resulted in the heart health of a younger mouse — equivalent to a decade younger in human terms.

The paper comes after news last week of a major ageing breakthrough. A 13-year study conducted by Harvard genetics professor David Sinclair seems to confirm Sinclair’s information theory of ageing.

Currently, mainstream scientific opinion is that the accumulation of mutations in DNA is the primary driver of ageing. Sinclair, though, has long believed that the real culprits are errors that appear over time in the information carried in the epigenome. This information is used to instruct cells on which genes to activate and which to keep silent; but over time, says Sinclair, the instructions get jumbled, and the result is the cell dysfunction we call ageing.

Sinclair’s new study suggests he is (at least in part) right. And that’s huge, because it raises the possibility that we can repair the epigenetic instructions — Sinclair likens this to ‘rebooting the epigenome’ — and so literally unspool the ageing process. When Sinclair and his team gave gene therapy to mice that repaired the information in their epigenome, the result was the production of far more youthful cells. Sinclair says:

‘Now, when I see an older person, I don’t look at them as old, I just look at them as someone whose system needs to be rebooted. It’s no longer a question of if rejuvenation is possible, but a question of when.’

⚡ NWSH Take: This week it was impossible to avoid headlines about Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old Silicon Valley founder and Very Rich Person who spends $2 million a year on a regime — including constant blood tests and thousands of whole-body MRIs — intended to rewind his biological age to 18. Sure, that’s extreme. But Johnson is questing at the outer edges of a pursuit — extended youthfulness — that interests almost all of us. // In 2023, we’re going to hear a lot more about it. Sinclair’s research offers a whole new angle on anti-ageing therapies. Meanwhile, work that targets ageing is becoming increasingly mainstream and well-funded. I’ve written before on Jeff Bezos-funded Altos Labs, which now has a $3 billion war chest. Pharma giant Pfizer this month announced a drug discovery partnership with longevity startup Gero. And scientists at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine are planning a huge study on the hypothesis that the common (and cheap) diabetes drug metformin can safely extended human lifespan by years. // Exciting advances; huge unanswered questions. Not least: what will extended lifespan to do already strained social and welfare systems in the Global North?

🗓️ Also this week

🚀 NASA says it will partner with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a nuclear thermal rocket engine. The Agency says the engine could one day enable humans to journey deep into space. They are aiming to have a prototype ready no later than 2027.

🤖 An Amazon engineer asked ChatGPT a series of standard interview questions for a coding job at the company, and it got them all right. The machine learning engineer revealed details of the experiment in the company Slack. Meanwhile, Amazon has warned employees not to share commercially sensitive information with the chatbot.

🌳 A new study says human activity may have degraded far more of the Amazon rainforest than previously believed. Scientists at Lancaster University in the UK say logging, land conversion and more has weakened more than 2.5 million square kilometres of the rainforest; that’s around one third of its area, and double the area previously thought to have been affected.

🐟 US scientists used CRISPR to put an alligator gene inside catfish. The gene makes the catfish more resistant to infection, which is a major problem during catfish farming. US farms produce 307 million tonnes of catfish each year.

🛰 SpaceX has agreed to work with the US National Science Foundation to mitigate the impacts of its satellites on our view of the night sky. Astronomers have long complained that SpaceX satellites — the company plans to launch tens of thousands — will impair their work. Regular readers already know that this subject is a longterm NWSH obsession.

😱 The World Economic Forum says a ‘catastrophic cyber event’ is likely some time within the next two years. Speaking at Davos, WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens said that 93% of cyber leaders surveyed by the organisation believe a cyber catastrophe is coming soon; that’s a far higher proportion, said Jurgens, than seen in previous years.

🤯 And just as I’m hitting send…Google have announced a new text-to-music model that blows away previous attempts at generative music. The model, called MusicLM, can generate long and complex compositions based on only a text description. Go here and listen to, among others: Epic soundtrack using orchestral instruments. The piece builds tension, creates a sense of urgency. An a cappella chorus sing in unison, it creates a sense of power and strength.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,013,469,158🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7971267236

💉 Global population vaccinated: 63.8%

🗓️ 2023 progress bar: 7% complete

📖 On this day: On 27 January 1820 a Russian expedition led by naval officer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen discovers the Antarctic continent.

It’s Magic

Thanks for reading this week.

The generative AI revolution is unfolding at what feels like breakneck speed. Google’s new music model is, at first listen, amazing. I’ll write more on it next week, or maybe sooner in the Slack group.

We’re all going to have to figure out the consequences of these new technologies and how we propose to live with them. It’s another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

Here we are again, at the start of it all. Well, almost; I can’t believe we’re already 22 days into 2023.

I took something of an extended break from the newsletter over the holidays. But now NWSH is back, and a whole new year lies ahead of us.

In London we’re amid another cold snap; close to zero degrees during the day. And across the northern hemisphere winter, nature is in frozen stasis. It’s a familiar yet always — to me, at least — strange and ghostly-seeming pause. Listen carefully and you can hear its whispered message: the journey is beginning again.

It’s a time to consider what has passed, and look to what is ahead. How can we make this year even better than the last?

This is the question I want to examine — as it pertains to New World Same Humans — in this note. That means first, and briefly, a review of 2022. And then, more important: what’s coming this year?

This first instalment of the year, then, is more about our community than it is about the world out there, which is our usual subject. There’s some thinking aloud going on here; an attempt on my part to make sense of where the newsletter has been and where it’s going. But given the precious attention you spend on NWSH — and I’m so grateful you do — I hope it’s valuable for you to ride along as I figure all this out. And, of course, all feedback and suggestions are welcome.

What’s more, without drinking any self-help kool aid, it seems to me that there’s a lesson in the journey I went on with the newsletter last year. One about defeating perfectionism, being adaptable, and playing infinite games.

But we can get to that at the end. First, let’s dive into a review of 2022.

What’s past is prologue

Before we can think coherently about where to take NWSH in 2023, we need to understand what just happened.

This is where things get a little awkward.

Back in January 2022, as many of you will remember, I set sail towards a renewed vision for the newsletter. I wanted to double-down on what makes NWSH unique; to accelerate the newsletter’s journey towards itself.

Conceptually, that meant a project animated by three questions:

* What is the nature of technological modernity?

* What is the nature of a human being, and the human collective?

* What new forms of life are possible, and desirable?

And when it came to content, it meant the launch of a new schedule. While the flagship mid-week update would continue, the weekly note on Sunday was to be killed and replaced with monthly longform essays.

We’ll come back to the conceptual part. As for the new content schedule — as many of you noticed, it didn’t work quite as planned. What happened?

Essentially, my pandemic and post-pandemic realities collided. This newsletter was born at the start of Covid; the first year was produced inside the strange empty-yet-also-frenzied deadzone that were the 2020 lockdowns, and that produced a particular set of working practises around writing instalments and getting them out. In 2022, the world opened up again. That meant a return, for me, to a frenetic schedule of working with clients and speaking at events. Which was great in lots of ways. But it brought disruption to the way I worked on NWSH.

Meanwhile, the first essay I’d planned, The Worlds to Come, ballooned to something far beyond what I’d intended for the monthly essays. Having published just two instalments (embarrassing) of a projected five, it’s clear this work is something closer to a short book than an essay. I’m excited to keep putting these ideas into the world. But as this piece expanded before my eyes, any remaining chance of sticking to planned the monthly essays format slipped away.

The mid-week instalments are what rescued all this. They are the engine of the newsletter and the product most people associate with NWSH. And they stayed strong, growing longer and deeper without me ever really intending that. After some of you requested it I started recording them as a podcast; thousands now listen rather than read. These instalments found their way into the inboxes of thousands of new (and cherished!) readers, including some influential people, and ensured that our community continued to grow. Overall — and despite the monthly essays misfire — it was a great year for NWSH. That’s thanks to the mid-week update, and all of you who share it.

That’s a two-minute summary of the last 12 months. The big question, then: what next?

Coming in 2023

My first thought is that the fundamental positioning I outlined last year is one I still stand by.

As loathe as I am to quote myself, it’s worth revisiting that briefly. Around one year ago to the day, I wrote this on the point of view that NWSH would bring to its mission to understand our shared future.

We live amid a white-hot technological revolution, a culture war, and a crisis of ecological collapse. Amid that, our systems of liberal democracy and technologically mediated consumerism are exhausted. We all know we must change course, yet we continue to march in the same old direction. In 2022, as Gramsci observed of his own society in the early 1930s, ‘the old is dying, but the new cannot be born’. Except it is being born somewhere out there, on the fringes. I want us to travel to those places, literally and figuratively.

I’d still go along with all that.

So it’s not the destination that needs to change; only the steps we’re taking to get there. Over the Christmas break I sat with that challenge. Here’s what I decided:

* The mid-week update remains the flagship instalment

* Longform essays will remain, but they’ll be occasional rather than monthly

* Shorter notes will return; also on occasional schedule, typically on a Sunday

When it comes to the mid-week update, the decision was automatic: if it ain’t broke.

On longform essays: I still want space for the deeper thinking and exploration they allow. A monthly cadence didn’t work out, but occasional essays can. The first mission here is to finish The Worlds to Come.

The return of shorter notes is the biggest change. I really miss writing the kinds of notes I used to send on a Sunday. And the newsletter needs a space for thoughts that are too long for a segment in the mid-week update, but too short and maybe too fuzzy to make an essay.

But it goes deeper than that. Part of what I love about newsletters — about the email newsletter as a new literary mode — is its intimacy. Sure, we’re now amid a newsletter explosion, and I’m sending this to you via a platform created in Silicon Valley and funded by mega-VCs. But despite all that, there’s still something going on here that echoes the the medium’s origins in the long emails from one friend to another that we used to do in the 90s. Last year, NWSH lost touch with that intimacy. This year I want to recover it.

Short notes will allow me to send more personal reflections and do more exploratory thinking. And they can mean new kinds of content, such as reflections on the books I’m reading. This could even spell the beginning of a NWSH book club, which is something people have asked for in the Slack group.

But there I go again, piling on more before we’ve even started.

Infinite games

There we have it; the roadmap for 2023.

Sure, 2022 didn’t work quite as planned. But while I might have expected that to bother me massively, in truth it doesn’t. Sitting with that over the break, I realised that this truth is a product of perspective. More particularly, of the perspective you necessarily take on something when you commit to if for life.

Writing this newsletter, and building this community, is something I’ll do forever. Not, in the end, because of the outcomes it produces, but for the meaning and simple joy I find in thinking through ideas about our shared future and then sharing those ideas with others.

And given that, the monthly essays misfire seems only a tiny blip on a long journey.

The lesson here? From my POV, it’s that when you embark on a project for the long haul, and when that project is an end it itself rather than only a means to some other end, you’re liberated into a new and fruitful way of seeing. One that helps you defeat perfectionism, stay adaptable, and find meaning in the process rather than only the results.

When there’s always tomorrow, and next year, and, I hope, next decade — when you’re playing what has became known as an infinite game — you have freedom to experiment, and mistakes don’t matter that much. In fact, if you aren’t making mistakes, that’s probably be a sign you’re playing too safe.

That’s not a perspective many of us get to enjoy in our work, which is so often target and deadline driven. But it’s a powerful one. So I recommend asking yourself: what infinite game are you playing in 2023?

Blast Off

The plan for this year is set. All that remains is to get to work.

And given the moment we’re living in from a world-historical perspective — by turns weird, exhilarating, and scary — I couldn’t more excited about what is ahead for our community. Our mission to make sense of a changing world and its collision human nature — new world, same humans — has never been more urgent.

I’ll send the first New Week update next week. And expect the first short note in the coming days, too. One of which will launch a new project that I can’t wait to tell you more about.

In the meantime, thanks for joining me on this adventure for another year; it’s deeply appreciated 🙏. And I hope you’re off to a great start on your journey through 2023, too.

Until next week, be well,

David.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I’m giving myself permission to play with the format of these New Week updates.

This week, four stories caught my eye. Any one of them might lead an ordinary instalment of the newsletter. Taken together, they amount to a snapshot of the future-facing terrain that NWSH inhabits.

We’re living through an incredible moment when it comes to the collision between emerging technologies and fundamental human needs. As 2022 draws to a close, it felt fitting to capture this moment in time. And to look out to the year ahead — each of these four stories is set to evolve in intriguing ways in 2023.

I’m also turning this email into a virtual time capsule, to be buried now and recovered in a NWSH instalment ten years hence. More details in the final section.

So think of this as an end of year special edition (and forgive the fact that it comes late). More Christmas extras are coming soon! But for now, let’s get into it.

📖 Next generation

This week, yet another wave of advances in generative AI.

OpenAI released a new GPT-3 model, text-davinci-003. Early indications are that the new model is a significant improvement; it’s better at following instructions, outputs higher quality writing, and more often remains coherent and useful across longform narrative.

A few days later OpenAI released ChatGPT, a version of GPT-3 optimised to respond to complex questions and enter into dialogue. Cue a storm of Tweets heralding the emergence of a whole new kind of online search:

People also noticed that davinci-003 and ChatGPT are better at rhymes, poetry, and various forms of creative writing:

As for text-to-image generation, that didn’t stand still either. Stability AI released Stable Diffusion 2.0. Image resolution has been improved by a factor of four; the tool now generates eerily convincing photorealism. New guard rails also make it harder to generate NSFW images. Here’s Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque:

⚡ NWSH Take: Text-davinci-003 feels something close to a step change; some are calling it GPT-3.5. It’s clear, if it wasn’t before, that large language models (LLMs) will have multiple breakthrough applications. Search is at the top of that list; see Metaphor, a startup experimenting with generative AI for online search. Or Consensus, a generative search engine for published scientific research. I’ve written often in this newsletter about the coming age of Virtual Companions; AI fuelled entities that become counsellors, friends, and sages to their users. With LLMs, they’re coming, and this week Open AI CEO Sam Altman pointed towards that future. // Meanwhile, it’s only three months since Stable Diffusion was made public. Now we have a quantum leap in image quality. Mostaque’s belief that these tools constitute a Gutenberg moment is credible even if you only consider text-to-image tools. But listen to interviews and you’ll learn that Stability AI is also working on text-to-music, and that the end game according to Mostaque is text to anything: movies, PPT presentations, virtual worlds. // What can you say? Rumour has it that GPT-4 is months away. We’re at the beginning of a decade-long wave of innovation. Next year is going to be insane. Who knows where we’ll be by 2032.

🚀 Give me some space

NASA’s Orion spacecraft this week reached the apex of its journey beyond the far side of the Moon.

The craft hit a point 434,523 kilometres from Earth, and 64,374 kilometres beyond the Moon, before swinging around and starting on its course back to Earth. At the midpoint of its journey it took this picture — an instant space age classic:

Orion is uncrewed, but this is the furthest from Earth a spacecraft meant for human occupation has ever travelled; the record was previously held by Apollo 13, which did have people onboard, and flew in 1970.

⚡ NWSH Take: This Orion mission is a test — the first stage of NASA’s Artemis mission to put humans back on Moon by 2025 and establish a permanent base there by end of decade. // So far, that project is more or less on track. No wonder, then, that analysts are already talking about the coming Moon economy: a new wave of startups catering to our next foray into space. Meanwhile, with China planning its own base on the Moon for 2028, I’ve written on how the Moon is about to become a new site of geopolitical tension; NASA are drawing up frameworks to deal with lunar conflict. // The coming 12 months, then, will set the stage for a new space age: one intended to see us establish the Moon as a base from which we set out to Mars and beyond. When I revisit this in ten years, it should be possible to email humanity’s lunar waystation.

🧠 Trick of the mind

Brain-machine interface startup Neuralink hosted a Show and Tell event this week.

On stage, Elon Musk announced that the company is around six months away from starting human trials of its N1 brain implant. In the meantime, trials on animals continue. Musk played a video that showed a monkey using the implant to ‘telepathically type’ — using his mind to control an on-screen cursor and type the words ‘Welcome to Show and Tell’ by directing his attention to highlighted letters.

⚡ NWSH Take: Neuralink won’t be the first to implant these kinds of interface chips in human brains; another US startup, Synchron, began human trials in Australia in 2020. And the technology has been around for around two decades. Regulatory approval, and proof that the technology is safe for humans, has been the major roadblock. // Musk previously said that human trials would begin in 2020, and then in 2022. But put this news announcement together with Synchron’s ongoing work and other developments, and it’s clear that we’re approaching technologies that will be transformative for people who are paralysed, and may eventually revolutionise the way all of us interact with technology. Neuralink is waiting for FDA approval before it starts human trials. The world will watch for an update in the first few months of 2023.

🧬 Copy and paste

Also this week, a significant CRISPR advance.

MIT scientists showcased a new technique that could massively upscale the usefulness of CRISPR gene editing.

The ‘drag and drop’ method, which the scientists are calling PASTE, allows for the insertion of large sections of DNA — as long as 36,000 DNA base pairs — into human cells. That means it could prove useful for the treatment of diseases caused by faulty genes with large numbers of mutations, including cystic fibrosis.

Omar Abudayyeh, a McGovern Fellow at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said:

‘It’s a new genetic way of potentially targeting these really hard to treat diseases. We wanted to work toward what gene therapy was supposed to do at its original inception, which is to replace genes, not just correct individual mutations.’

The full paper was published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

⚡ NWSH Take: The FDA approved a revolutionary drug treatment for cystic fibrosis in 2019. It doesn’t work for everyone, and it costs over £100,000 a year per patient. Now, we’re talking about genetic editing technologies that will cut and paste this awful disease out of existence. There’s still work to be done before PASTE can be used in this way. But it seems we’re close. // This new PASTE technique has implications when it comes to another NWSH obsession: longevity. There’s long been hope that CRISPR could help us modify the action of genes that regulate ageing. But those genes are often long and complex. Now, PASTE raises the possibility that we’ll be able to get a handle on them. Back in New Week #51 I wrote about Altos Labs, a new Silicon Valley Startup pursuing the secrets to eternal life. And in NWSH #44 I wrote about the ways in which ageing populations are reshaping societies in the Global North; the trends outlined in that essay may be set to intensify in entirely new ways.

Time to be Alive

Thanks for reading this week.

I’m turning this week’s instalment into a time capsule, buried now and intended to be recovered by my future self. I’ll revisit this snapshot of the closing weeks of 2022 in December 2032, and reflect on the ideas discussed here and what happened in the intervening time. The calendar reminder is set; now all I need to do is survive the next ten years.

It’s impossible to know where we’ll be by then. All we can be sure of is that the ongoing collision between new technologies and our eternal shared nature will continue to underpin our collective story.

This newsletter will keep watching every step of the way. And sharing that journey with you means a lot.

If you’ve enjoyed NWSH this year, why not forward this email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

A shorter instalment this week. But that means a chance to dive a little deeper than usual into one story that caught my eye.

I speak of Meta’s short-lived AI science tool, Galactica.

Plus some snippets to ruminate on over the weekend. Let’s get into it.

📖 Open season

This week, another strange episode in the unfolding story that is the generative AI revolution. It’s a story that can be told in three tweets.

Meta released Galactica, a chatbot tool fuelled by a large language model trained on 48 million published scientific papers. Galactica was intended to be an all-purpose science wonderbot, and Meta trumpeted its amazing capabilities:

But within hours, problems arose. Users found that Galactica produced nonsense answers to simple maths questions, and garbled explanations of basic science. What’s more, some of its outputs were grossly offensive. Here’s a tweet from one of the leaders of the backlash:

Prompted by users, the bot produced outputs suggesting that the HIV virus is not the true cause of AIDS, that white people are superior to others, and that there can be health benefits to eating crushed glass.

Amid what quickly became a raging tweet storm of anger, Meta withdrew Galactica. The tech giant’s Chief AI Scientist, though, was unrepentant:

LeCun’s argument in short: humans create and publish lots of toxic material every day, so why is this instance uniquely bad?

Release, furore, withdrawal: there’s a whole lot going on here. What to make of it?

⚡ NWSH Take:

First, the simple part. On balance, Meta were right to withdraw Galactica. Its outputs were just too chaotic for a general release to be viable, or useful.

The tech giant didn’t do enough to position the tool as an experiment, or to warn people that because it is trained on data created by humans, it would reflect biases — including racial and gender biases — sadly commonly found among us. That meant too great a risk that users would mistake its chaotic pronouncements for reliable science. And it meant handing a powerful tool to bad actors who might use it to generate disinformation that carries a veneer of plausibility.

I understand that Meta wanted to road test a potentially exciting innovation. But a somewhere-in-between solution would have been best. Meta should have released Galactica in a closed and controlled way, to a volunteer community of beta users who had been warned of the risks and agreed to bear them.

But does Meta deserve the ire of those who accuse it of indifference to Galactica’s offensive outputs? Here’s where things get more complex.

Meta did say (just not loudly enough!) that the tool was experimental, and that users should independently verify all of is pronouncements. Galactica went on to output some truly toxic stuff, and all reasonable people agree that racist, sexist, and other toxic pronouncements are bad.

The question, then, is how we should respond in this case. Lots of humans use, say, MS Word to write racist statements, and then use the internet to publish those statements to millions of people. Does this mean MS Word is also a bad thing? Does it mean we should withdraw the internet from public availability?

The analogy is imperfect, but Meta’s AI Chief does have a point: many people use a wide array of tools every day to create and disseminate toxic material, and we don’t summarily decide that those tools or the platforms behind them are Definitely Not To Be Tolerated. We blame, instead, the people who create and distribute the material.

I understand the concern, and even anger, of Galactica users faced with racist and sexist outputs. These prejudices are widespread across our societies and they’re embedded in our cultural history. When generative models display these biases, that’s a reflection of this deeper truth.

So if we’re going to work our way to a generative tool that can help with science, or anything else, we’re going to have to tolerate prototypes that produce false, and even offensive, statements. Are we saying that we’re not willing to do that? Are we saying that it’s more important that we are never exposed to any offensive statements than it is that we advance these technologies? If so, okay: that is a coherent position and we’re free to stick to if we like. But it comes at obvious costs around our ability to develop and refine tools such as Galactica, which have the potential to amplify us in so many ways, including via the democratisation of access to scientific knowledge.

I also wonder if anger over the toxic outputs of these AIs doesn’t come a little close, sometimes, to avoiding the real problem here. Yes, it’s unwelcome that generative models reproduce racist and sexist attitudes. But they only do so because those attitudes exist among us. We are the source of the problem. We need to change ourselves. You could argue that generative AIs will make that process of change more difficult, but I’m not so sure. Humans have been spewing out their own toxicity for millennia; there will always be plenty of it around with or without AIs.

In short: yes, it’s bad that generative AIs produce toxic outputs. But could we see that as a shared challenge to be overcome, rather than proof that the tools, and those who create them, are not to be borne?

In the end, all this has me pondering a set of questions that I’ve thought about for a long time. Those questions are around open and closed innovation; when to go public with an innovation, when to give it away for free for the good of the collective, and when to keep it behind closed doors.

Those questions have played out afresh with the generative AI revolution; OpenAI, for example, were cautious about making GPT-3 publicly available, and even now they limit the uses to which it can be put.

I think we’ll see these questions become even more acute across the coming decade, as we grapple with a new wave of technologies — transformer models, robots, virtual worlds and more — that will have impacts we can’t possibly yet understand.

That will raise expectations that organisations of all kinds think more carefully about the unintended consequences of the innovations they make public. Sometimes, that will mean holding back a new product or service because of concern over the harms it may cause. Equally, there are huge opportunities for organisations willing to share valuable IP with everyone, including competitors, for the good of us all. See how dating app Bumble recently open sourced its AI that detects unsolicited nude pictures.

We need new frameworks, and new industry norms, around these kinds of decisions. In the meantime, it will be left to organisations and the professionals inside them to try to do the right thing. Those who do will reap benefits, both across their innovation practises and when it comes to public sentiment. Those who get it wrong will get flamed.

I’ll be talking more about all this and its implications at the end of year LinkedIn Live event I’m co-hosting with my friends at Wavelength next week.

🗓️ Also this week

🌆 The US startup Praxis published its Master Plan to build a new self-governing city state. The Praxis city will be governed by its own laws and is intended to supercharge the future of humanity. Praxis say they’ll partner with an existing sovereign entity to choose a location. I’ve written before about the startup and the growing Charter City movement.

🤖 New research suggests automation technologies have been the principal driver of wage inequality since 1980. MIT researchers say that over the last 40 years the wage gap between more and less educated workers in the US has grown dramatically, and that automation accounts for more than half of that change. That’s because automation technologies — think, for example, self-service checkouts at supermarkets — have tended to displace less educated workers while allowing big corporations and their executives to capture more profits.

🛰 The EU says it will develop is own satellite internet network. The bloc has finalised a €6 billion deal that will see 170 satellites launched into low orbit. It comes amid rising concerns over Russian and Chinese space technologies, and awareness of the role that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet has played in the war in Ukraine.

💥 Violent protests erupted at the largest iPhone factory in China. Videos show hundreds of workers at the Zhengzhou factory clashing with police and shouting ‘Defend our rights!’ Last month, workers were quarantined at the factory after a Covid outbreak.

🌊 Tuvalu announced that it will become the first nation to be recreated in the metaverse. The Pacific island nation faces an existential threat due to rising sea levels caused by global heating. ‘As our land disappears, we have no choice but to become the world's first digital nation,’ said Tuvalu’s foreign minister, Simon Kofe, at COP27.

🌖 NASA says it expects humans to live on the Moon ‘within the decade’. Speaking in the wake of the launch of the Artemis I rocket, NASA scientist Howard Hu said astronauts would set up a permanent settlement on the Moon in the 2020s, and use it as a base from which to go deeper into space.

Open Source

Thanks for reading this week.

The ongoing collision between generative AI and human nature — at its best and worst — is another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep thinking about where these strange AI dreams may lead.

If that mission resonates with you, there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 24,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I put the newsletter on pause last week due to travel commitments. To make up for it, here’s a bumper instalment.

This week, new research suggests widespread fears about social media and democracy are well founded; it really does fuel polarisation.

Meanwhile, the UK’s Met Office outlines a future in which we burst through the 1.5C global warming target, but claw average temperatures back underneath it by 2100. And the global population surpasses 8 billion.

Let’s get into it.

📣 Vox populi

How is social media reshaping our democracies? This week saw publication of what is surely the most comprehensive review to date of the evidence.

Published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, a new paper saw the analysis of hundreds of high quality studies on the impacts of social media on participation, trust, hate, polarisation, and a range of other dynamics inside democratic societies.

The results? They’re mixed, but overall it doesn’t look good.

On the positive front, the researchers found that social media was weakly associated with exposure to more diverse political news — in contrast to once fashionable thinking about social media filter bubbles.

But social media was also associated with decreased trust in democratic processes, increased hate, polarisation, and a tendency towards populism.

An association, of course, isn’t the same as a causal link. But by using analytical methods known as causal inference techniques, the researchers were able to establish that their data does support the existence of a causal link between social media and the phenomena in question.

In other words, that vague feeling many of us have that a connected world is doing strange and troublesome things to our societies? It looks as though we’re right.

⚡ NWSH Take: At the heart of these issues is a powerful truth. Our democracies were designed in the 19th-century; they simply weren’t made to operate alongside ultra-connected, many-to-many media environments. It wasn’t so long ago that we were talking about the impacts of television; then along came Twitter and a whole new wave of disruption. // These days, vague the internet is bad for democracy memes are everywhere; we desperately need evidence, and this report is the most comprehensive attempt yet at providing that. And look at the landscape into which it arrives. Twitter has fallen into the hands of mercurial (some say unstable) billionaire, and the Saudis are now a major investor. There’s rising concern — including that expressed by the FBI this week — that TikTok is a tool of Chinese surveillance and destabilisation. // We urgently need a deeper understanding of the dynamics in play. And next? We need to act. The next wave of research must be on interventions that ameliorate what is damaging and promote what is positive about social. I write often in NWSH on how simulations of complex social dynamics — including entire societies — will allow for new forms of insight across the coming decade. Who will be first to build a meaningful simulation of social media inside a democracy? That kind of simulation will allow us to test various interventions, and find the ones that work.

🚨 Event siren

We’re coming to the end of the year(!) and that means it’s time for end of year trends.

I’m in the lab now, working on the key trends to put on the radar of readers, clients, and colleagues in 2023. And I’m teaming up with my friends at the brilliant Wavelength to share a sneak peak later this month.

We’re hosting a free LinkedIn Live session on Tuesday 29 November at 3pm UK. And a great crowd of insight professionals, marketers, product designers, founders and more is already assembling. Just hit the button below to learn more and sign up:

I’ll be talking about the generative AI revolution we’re living through, why rising numbers of organisations are open sourcing valuable IP, and much more.

Hope to see you there.

🌤 Overshoot calculus

This week, the UK’s prestigious Met Office offered a new perspective on global heating.

The organisation published new research that shows we’re unlikely to keep heating beneath the internationally agreed 1.5C limit. But, say Met Office scientists, it is possible to overshoot 1.5C and then bring warming back down beneath it some time after 2100.

Dr Camilla Mathison, one of the authors of the paper, said:

‘If we overshoot 1.5C, it doesn’t have to be permanent. With deep and rapid reductions post 2030, and development of diverse technologies for the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide, it remains feasible to meet 1.5C by the end of the century.’

A more full explanation of their argument is made here:

At the heart of their forecast? The Met Office say that dragging warming back below 1.5C will mean developing technologies that suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

⚡ NWSH Take: This research touches on two NWSH obsessions. I’ve written often on how the 1.5C target has drifted out of reach, and the need to channel more resources towards adaptation to a heated planet. And previous instalments have explored bioengineering projects intended to help reduce global temperatures, including the Bill Gates-backed scheme to shoot reflective chalk dust into the atmosphere. // Not so long ago, bioengineering was considered a fringe consideration. The very fact of the Met Office speculating on this eventuality — exceed 1.5C and then deploy climate tech to bring us back down — is a powerful signal of bioengineering’s entry into the mainstream. Meanwhile, the tech is advancing; last week brought news of an Alphabet X research project on the use of machine vision to promote the growth of sea plants that soak up carbon. // So here, via the Met Office, is a new perspective on 1.5C; the dream can still live, even if we exceed the target. But these ideas leave questions unanswered. Can we really develop technologies that will change the climate at scale? How can we be sure they won’t have catastrophic unintended consequences? And if we surpass 1.5C even just for a few decades, what permanent damage will that do? NWSH will keep watching.

🧒 Welcome child 8 billion

This week, a demographic milestone. The UN estimates that the global population surpassed 8 billion on 15 November. It reminded me of an idea I’ve long fermented about technology, modernity, and a long view of the human story.

The population graph across the last 70 years or so looks like this.

But the incredible nature of this demographic story isn’t fully apparent until you put that graph in context. Here’s population growth across the last 12,000 years.

Essentially, not much happened for 11,500 years. Then we exploded. If you’re 47 or older, you’ve seen global population double or more in your lifetime.

Futurists speak sometimes of a coming, technology-fuelled singularity. This hockey stick population chart fuels my belief that such a singularity is best understood as having already arrived.

In physics, a singularity is a point in space-time at which all the usual rules that govern the physical world break down. When we speak of a historical singularity, then, we’re talking about an event or process so transformative that it explodes the rules of the human condition; a definitive break-point in our story as a species.

My contention is that modernity — and the industrial revolution that fuelled it — is just that event. Modernity brought with it changes so transformative that the old world seems, now, unrecognisable. GDP per capita had been stable, and tiny, for a thousand years before 1800; then it exploded. Around 12% of people were literate in 1820; today only 14% are illiterate. Worldwide, over 40% of children born in 1840 died before the age of 5, and it had been that way for thousands of years. Today that stands at 3.9%; we shouldn’t rest, of course, until it falls to zero.

Take the long view, and a certain perspective becomes unavoidable: we’re in the middle of the historical event that changes everything, and it is modernity.

Now, the UN forecasts that global population will peak at 10.4 billion around 2080 and then start to decline. Across the coming decades we’ll face a new set of questions.

First, what does a falling population mean inside modernity? Look at the first graph and it’s clear this is a question developed countries need to contend with now. Second, in a world of 10 billion what is the relationship between human labour and technologies of automation that reduce the need for much labour as we know it?

That’s a question for another time — and the return of the Sunday notes that I’ve long been promising.

🗓️ Also this week

🤖 Amazon showcased its new Sparrow robotic arm, which can identify and pick up specific items for packing. Currently, Amazon relies on humans to know the difference between a DVD, a book, and a pair of socks, and to put each item in the right basket at its fulfilment centres. Sparrow could change all that; Amazon engineers say it can correctly identify over 65% of the millions of products the company handles.

😎 Italy outlawed the use of facial recognition and smart glasses in public spaces. The new law will see local authorities given leeway to make an exception if the technologies are being used to help fight crime.

🚗 The CEO of Ford says it takes 40% less human labour to build EVs than traditional cars. Jim Farley was speaking at a conference in Detroit; he said Ford plans to bring manufacture of components back in-house in order to preserve jobs as the company shifts to EVs.

🇩🇪 Germany blocked the Chinese takeover of the Elmos chip plant in Dortmund. Economy Minister Robert Habeck cited security concerns, saying ‘critical production areas require special protection’.

💨 New research suggests oil and gas producers are massively under-reporting their carbon emissions. The emissions-tracking NGO Climate TRACE say producers are hiding the level of emissions produced by oil and gas fields, which could be up to three times higher than reported.

🌔 NASA launched its Artemis 1 mission, which will see the uncrewed Orion spacecraft travel 40,000 miles beyond the moon before coming back to Earth. The Artemis mission forms the first major part of NASA’s quest to put astronauts back on the Moon by 2025.

👨‍💻 OpenAI and its partners are being sued because their automated coding tool reproduces open source code without crediting the authors. GitHub Copilot uses a large language model to turn natural language text prompts into code. But several coders say it outputs large chunks of their code without attribution; they’re now joining forces to sue OpenAI, GitHub, and Microsoft. Back in New Week #104 I looked at the question of ownership and attribution when it comes to artists whose work is used to train text-to-image tools.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 8,000,643,628🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7927720846

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.8%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 88% complete

📖 On this day: On 18 November 1928 the first animated cartoon with sound, Steamboat Willie, is released by Walt Disney.

Speak No Evil

Thanks for reading this week.

The ongoing collision between a 21st-century connected world and liberal democracies made in the 19th-century is yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

Hello from London! It’s the night before Guy Fawkes Night, and I’ve just hosted a back-garden fireworks display for a gaggle of over-excited nine-year-olds.

But that hasn’t prevented a bumper instalment of New Week. This week, Google’s new AI writing platform suggests new futures for the narrative arts.

Also, new research suggests that Europe will soon wean itself off its addiction to gas. And Elon Musk overturns the ancien régime at Twitter; what will it mean for him, and for the future of social media?

Let’s get into it.

📖 Story time

This week, Google offered a glimpse of the future of creative writing.

The company hosted a media event in Manhattan to showcase various AI research projects. Among them were a flood forecasting system, and further glimpses of the quest I’ve written about often — most recently in New Week #103 — to create everyday helper robots that can respond to ordinary (i.e complex and nuanced) spoken language.

But the project that most caught my eye? It’s a tool intended to supercharge fiction writers by marrying their creativity with the incredible power of Google’s large language model, LaMDA.

Wordcraft works just like a standard text editor, but with an AI fuelled twist. Writers can ask the platform to, for example, rewrite sentences to make them shorter or funnier. They can ask Wordcraft to write descriptions of objects or people that appear in their story. They can even ask the tool for new plot ideas by entering the prompt: what happens next?

As part of their research process Google ran workshops with 13 established writers, who used the tool to help them craft short stories. Those stories — and more on what was learned — are now publicly available. The verdict of these writers? Wordcraft isn’t perfect — and it’s far from a replacement for human creativity — but it does generate unexpected new story directions and ideas.

Wordcraft made, in short, for a great co-writer.

⚡ NWSH Take: There’s a longstanding principle adhered to by writers working together on a book or script. Never shoot down your co-writer’s suggestions with a no; instead always start with a yes, and. What Google are building here is an amazing yes, and machine: a writing partner that produces an endless stream of ideas, suggestions, and provocations. What’s more, this partner is always on hand, never tires, and doesn’t ask for a salary. There will be a large language model on the desktop of many novelists, and in the writing room for many Netflix scripted dramas, before long. // But writers (and readers) shouldn’t worry that these tools are about to strip human creativity out of the narrative arts. These experiments show, too, that we’re a long way from an AI that can generate a full novel or script. LaMDA, as with other large models, struggles to keep its story straight for any length of time; it will kill off a character and then have that character walk into a room a few hundred words later. // Still, we’re at the outset of something new. It’s perhaps best thought of as the emergence of the writer as creative director, able to generate new ideas, scenes, and characters and deploy them at will. What new narrative forms will emerge out of the generative AI revolution? NWSH will keep watching; it may even run a few experiments of its own.

💥 Step on the gas

Here in the UK we’re preparing for a tricky few months on the energy front. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines means there is a tiny chance the UK will run out of gas this winter. That, in turn, would impact electricity production; 17 gas-fired power plants in the UK generate 42% of our electricity.

Similar gas woes currently afflict much of Europe. This week, though, new research offered a glimpse of the energy transformation that is imminent.

A note from the research firm Rystad Energy outlined their forecast that by 2030 solar energy could be so much more cost-efficient than gas that it will spell the end of gas-fired power in Europe. That depends, say Rystad, on European governments taking funds earmarked for the development of gas-fired generation, and instead spending that money on solar.

‘By 2028, new renewable generation capacity installed using money that would otherwise have been spent on gas generation would reach 333 GW, which would be enough to generate 663 TWh of electricity. Renewable power generation would be enough to replace forecast gas-fired generation by this year.’

With gas prices now around €125 per MWh — in 2021 they averaged around €40 — electricity generation via gas is currently hugely expensive. Rystad reckon prices will drop to around €30 per MWh by 2030. But to be competitive with solar, they say, prices would have to fall further, to €17 per MWh, and that isn’t going to happen.

⚡ NWSH Take: Energy price forecasts are not typical NWSH territory. What interests me here are the implications of Rystad’s claim that the end of gas is coming to Europe, and sooner than we might think. // First, the climate implications; it’s a sliver of good news amid a welter of bad. This newsletter writes often on the way the 1.5C warming target has drifted beyond reach. Here is a reminder that while we can expect a 2C+ world, it can also be a world of super-abundant clean energy. What kind of economy can we build on top of that energy platform? // Second, geopolitics. Right now, European dependance on Russian gas — before the war, Germany took around 55% of its gas from Russia — gives Putin a lever. Forecasts such as this one present Putin with a stark truth: the force generated by that lever is waning fast. On first hearing that sounds good news, and longterm it is. But a question for now: if one of Putin’s key strategic advantages is fading away, what extra impetus does that give him to settle matters definitively now, and how might he respond?

📢 Crowd control

If you haven’t heard: Elon Musk owns Twitter now.

You have, of course, heard; the fallout was impossible to avoid this week. Mainly, that meant the sound of a massive and summary cull of staff.

Musk has already fired the board, including former CEO Parag Agrawal. Now he’s reportedly set to fire around half of all Twitter workers; in the US and UK staff have been waking up today (Friday) to find themselves severed from the company Slack and unable to login to their laptops.

Meanwhile, Musk says he plans to end Twitter’s infamous blue tick verification as we know it — he calls it a ‘lords and peasants system’ — and allow anyone a blue tick for $8 a month. The price seems to have been thrashed out in a back-and-forth with horror writer Stephen King:

And the world waits to find out how, if at all, Musk will act on his promise (or threat, depending on where you stand) to bring ‘free speech’ back to the platform. Is Trump about to be reinstated? Musk says nothing will happen without ‘a proper process’ in place, which means not for ‘at least a few weeks’.

The fallout from this fallout is only just beginning. That will include a wave of revelation as insiders speak their truth on The First Seven Days of Elon. Expect more of this:

⚡ NWSH Take: Two truths. First, whatever you think of Elon Musk, it’s impossible to write a newsletter about our shared without his name coming up all the time. Second, whatever you think of Twitter, it is the closest thing we have to a global town square. The coming together of these two forces is consequential. // Musk, of course, knows that. By acquiring Twitter he gains a degree of control over our collective conversation. Musk wants attention. More than any other billionaire he understands that, today, eyeballs mean power. // So far, so good; Musk will relish this week’s controversy. But he’s about to find out that he’s also purchased a set of problems that don’t lend themselves to the kind of engineering solutions that get batteries to charge or rockets to fly. That’s because free speech, hate speech, and content moderation are not technical but essentially political questions; questions, that is, that see legitimate but opposing human values clash in ways that can never be finally resolved. Should Twitter prioritise freedom, and let anyone say anything? Or prioritise safety, and police the tweets? There’s no right answer. It’s a judgement call, and wherever you land millions of users will be unhappy. Living at the centre of that storm might be energising, and profitable, for now. But after a while even Musk may come to regret his decision to become a species of person he seems to despise: a politician.

🗓️ Also this week

📱 A Federal Communications Commissioner said the US should ban TikTok. Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr said the app, which is owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, represents a security risk. ByteDance is currently in negotiations with the FCC about the way it handles US user data. Meanwhile, TikTok this week told European users that Chinese staff can access data generated by European accounts.

👨‍💻 New data from LinkedIn suggests more workers are heading back to the office. New postings for remote jobs are declining; in the US they have fallen 5% since their April peak of 20%. Still, it’s clear the pandemic has had a lasting impact; that’s still far above the pre-pandemic average of just 2%

🚗 Chinese electric automaker Xpeng debuted a prototype flying car. The X3 is a car with drone-like copter blades stuck on top and is designed to ‘fly over traffic congestion, obstacles, and rivers to meet a new host of short-distance mobility needs.’

🍭 The makers of online game Candy Crush sent 500 drones into the sky over NYC. The glowing drones flew in formation to spell out Candy Crush; the stunt was an ‘aerial ad’ to celebrate the game’s tenth anniversary.

🌱 New research says carbon-storing peatlands in the Congo are a ‘time bomb’ that is about to go off. The peatlands cover 17 million hectares and store billions of tonnes of carbon; the equivalent of three years of global emissions. Now, scientists at the University of Leeds in the UK say the peatlands are close to a tipping point that will see them release those carbon stores.

🌔 NASA is planning for international conflict situations on the Moon. The Agency says that more than 20 crewed missions to the Moon are planned between now and 2026, including its own, those conducted by other governmental space agencies, and those by private industry. Many of these missions will land near the lunar south pole; NASA is planning for conflict situations that may arise due to astronauts and equipment operating in close proximity.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,985,768,581🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7919034127

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.7%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 84% complete

📖 On this day: On 4 November 1922 the British archaeologist Howard Carter finds the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of Kings.

Write Away

Thanks for reading this week.

The generative AI revolution means the marriage of human creativity and the alien force that is machine intelligence. It’s a powerful example of the phenomenon our community unites around: new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

Hello from London! It’s late on a Friday evening; this is not a sensible time to be sending out the newsletter. I’m stretching the definition of mid-week update beyond breaking point.

But the future never stops, and neither does New World Same Humans. I promised a bumper instalment this week. What’s in store?

Shutterstock announce an innovative partnership with OpenAI’s text-to-image generator DALLE-E 2. It offers a way forward on the thorny question of payment for artists whose work is used to train AI models.

Also, a new UN report says that limiting global warming to 1.5C is now close to impossible. And a backlash against metaverse hype is gathering steam inside the Tech Industrial Complex.

Let’s get into it.

🖼 New model art

This week, developments in the emerging battle between artists and those who own generative AI models.

Stock photography giant Shutterstock announced a new partnership with OpenAI. The platform will directly integrate OpenAI’s text-to-image generator DALL-E 2, allowing users instantly to create images that they can use themselves or make available to others. Image creators on Shutterstock earn a share of revenue whenever a subscriber to the platform downloads their work.

Crucially, Shutterstock will also launch a Contributor’s Fund, which will pay image creators when their work is sold to OpenAI to train its generative models.

That marks the first attempt by the creators of a popular AI model to address the increasingly acute questions around acknowledgement — and remuneration — of artists whose work informs the model’s output.

CNN this week ran an an interview with Erin Hanson, an artist whose work was used to train the text-to-image tool Stable Diffusion. That tool can now replicate Hanson’s style so effectively that even the artist herself says of its attempts: ‘oh wow, I would put that on my wall’. Stable Diffusion just raised $101 million at a $1 billion valuation.

This issue doesn’t apply only to visual arts. The Recording Industry Association of America this week warned that AI music generators, trained on copyrighted work, pose a threat to the livelihood of musicians and songwriters.

⚡ NWSH Take: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits that a huge tranche of Shutterstock data — which the company purchased last year — helped train DALL-E. Essentially, the creators of those images helped train an AI tool that they’ll now be competing against directly on the platform. It’s right that, in future, Shutterstock contributors are paid when their work is used in this way. // But we’re still a long way from a comprehensive answer. Stable Diffusion can churn out a million and one Erin Hanson works good enough to impress the artist herself. It’s not credible to suggest that this has no impact on Hanson’s ability to sell reproductions of her work. And at the moment, her cut of any potential earnings? It’s zero. We could say the same about thousands of others whose work helped train Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E. // But this doesn’t have to be a bad news story for creators. In fact, quite the opposite. If some thorny issues — both technical and subjective — can be solved around judging to what extent a particular artist’s work helped inform a particular output of a model, then these models can become a whole new revenue stream for artists. Imagine a model trained on Picasso’s work, with revenues flowing to the late artist’s estate. Or a music generator trained on the output of Ludovico Einaudi; how many dreamy car ads would be soundtracked by the outputs of such a model, and how many millions of dollars would accrue to Einaudi? // Regular readers already know that I’m obsessed with the generative model revolution and its implications. Artists, meanwhile, deserve to be paid for their work. Stable Diffusion and others should take a lead from OpenAI and Shutterstock’s first draft attempt at an answer. There are deals to be done, here, that work for everyone.

🌊 Only adapt

For a while now this newsletter has been exploring the idea that the 1.5C target, which shapes international policy on global warming, is already unattainable. This week, more news.

A new UN report looked at the emissions cuts needed to limit warming to 1.5C against those already pledged by governments. It concluded that ‘there is no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’.

Instead, said the researchers, current pledges would deliver a 1.8C world. And given that those pledges are not being kept, even that target doesn’t look achievable. Global emissions would need to almost halve to give us a chance of 1.5C; Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, calls that ‘a tall, some would say impossible, order’.

In a brilliant long read in The New York Times this week, climate journalist David Wallace-Wells argues that a new consensus is emerging: we can expect a world somewhere between 2C and 3C hotter $. What does that look like? Here’s Wallace-Wells quoting the economist Nicholas Stern on a 2C world:

⚡ NWSH Take: A tall, some would say impossible, order; it’s the first time I’ve heard a UN representative use the i word in relation to the 1.5C target. It’s a powerful signal of the emerging consensus Wallace-Wells articulated this week; the likely reality now is somewhere between 2C and 3C. // That means we’ll need to adapt to the migrations, conflicts, and human suffering that is coming: think hundreds of millions, for a start, migrating to the Global North. But adaptation doesn’t mean giving up on mitigation; there’s a vast difference between two and three degrees of warming, and we must do everything we can to stay close to the former. // On that front, there are reasons to be cheerful. As Wallace-Wells points out, just a few years ago we were on course for 5C. Thanks to collective action since then, we’ve pretty much eradicated that possibility; our efforts have halved projected warming. Solar and wind energy have both become vastly more cost efficient across the last ten years; this week China announced yet another vast offshore wind farm — this one will power more than 13 million homes. // To stay as close to 2C as possible we need to renew out efforts on emissions; we’ll see what next week’s COP 27 brings. But admitting that 1.5C is close to impossible allows for a new possibility: deep thought, followed by action, to adapt to the convulsion that is ahead.

🗺 Promised lands

There’s been no shortage of metaverse hype across the last 12 months, and this newsletter has watched closely. But this week, there were clear signals that a metaverse backlash is going mainstream among technologists and tech watchers alike.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey made headlines when he criticised Meta’s core VR environment, Horizon Worlds: ‘I don’t think it’s a good product. Its not good; it’s not fun’. Luckey sold the Oculus VR hardware platform — on which Horizon is built — to Meta for $1 billion in 2014.

That came as Meta’s share price dived 24% this week, after the company reported lower than projected earnings for its third quarter. That prompted many to argue that the Zuck’s pivot around the metaverse was a giant error.

A counter argument to all this metaverse cynicism? Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz took to Twitter this week to compare our journey into the metaverse with our journey to the Moon in the mid 20th-century. Abovitz says that when it comes to the metaverse — or XR, which is short for extended reality — we’re currently in the Gemini era.

In other words, we’re in a functional middle phase, in which the technology remains clunky and sometimes doesn’t quite works as it should. But we need to go through this to get to an Apollo era in which the dream is realised. Abovitz reckons technology developments will deliver that phase some time around 2028.

The question, of course, is who is right? The metaverse dreamers, or the metaverse naysayers?

⚡ NWSH Take: Metaverse cynicism isn’t new, and intelligent incarnations of it have acted as a useful counterweight against the hype of the last 24 months. But this week it became clear that two big camps are emerging inside the Tech Industrial Complex, which includes Big Tech, startups, and adjacent media. At their most extreme (and the public square loves extremity) those two camps are the metaverse is everything and the metaverse is nothing. // Two weeks ago, back in New Week #102, I wrote about the epic scale of Mark Zuckerberg’s $70 billion bet on the metaverse. I understand the perspective of those who say that bet is radically misplaced; that the Zuck has set a course to nowhere. But while things look difficult right now, I’m inclined to a position something closer to that expressed this week by Abovitz. Yes, there’s a lot to figure out. But virtual worlds make possible experiences that you simply can’t have via a screen, and I can’t help but think transformational use cases are lurking in that truth somewhere, waiting to be found. That doesn’t mean, of course, that Meta — or any other big player — will be the ones to find them. But I wouldn’t bet against the dream that is metaverse just yet.

🗓️ Also this week

👁 The EU is moving closer to a ban on facial recognition technology in public spaces. The liberal Renew group of EU representatives have joined the Greens and Socialists & Democrats to back such a ban; they will face opposition from the centre-right European People’s Party, which saws police should be able to use facial recognition.

🛰 Activists are smuggling Starlink satellite internet terminals into Iran. The Islamic Republic is seeking to limit access to the internet in an attempt to suppress a popular uprising. The uprising was sparked by the police murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested because her headscarf was not covering her hair.

📱Dating app Bumble open-sourced an AI that it uses to detect unsolicited nude pictures. In a press release Bumble said ‘it’s our hope that the feature will be adopted by the wider tech community as we work in tandem to make the internet a safer place.’

🏔 Virgin Media O2 are working on a network of drones that will fly permanently around the peaks of the UK’s Snowdonia mountain range. The drones will provide mobile connectivity, and local mountain rescue officials say this will prove a ‘game changer’ for lost climbers.

🏙 Singapore says it will reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The country had previously said only that it hoped to achieve this target. Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said emissions will peak in 2030 and decline thereafter.

👾 New research suggests that children who play video games perform better in some tests of cognitive ability. Since 2018, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study has been tracking the development of thousands of US children from birth. New research leveraging data from the ABCD suggests children who play 21 hours of video games a week or more perform better than those who play no video games on tests that measure attention, impulse control, and memory.

🚀 NASA launched a new study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), more popularly known as UFOs. A team, which includes astrobiologists, genetics experts, and the former astronaut Scott Kelly, will reexamine evidence relating to UAPs stretching back decades. This year saw the first US Congressional hearing on UAPs in over 50 years, at which Pentagon officials admitted they have no explanation for a handful of UAPs despite their best efforts to understand them.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,984,204,120🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7914662097

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.5%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 82% complete

📖 On this day: On 29 October 1969 the first ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, a project of the US Department of Defence.

Machine Visions

Thanks for reading this week.

The ongoing collision between AI generative models and human creativity is yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

Here in London, winter is coming. But a collection of remarkable stories means we have a white hot instalment of New Week.

New research shows that large language models such as GPT-3 can accurately simulate the opinions and preferences of real people. It could herald a revolution for the social sciences.

Meanwhile, one handy chart captures the stunning scale of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse bet. And researchers grow a tiny brain in a petri dish and watch it teach itself to play Pong.

Let’s get started.

👨 The person simulator

This week, a window opened on yet another strange and powerful aspect of large language models.

Researchers at Brigham Young University published a paper called Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples; it looks at the use of GPT-3 to simulate the opinions of different population groups with a high degree of accuracy.

The researchers conditioned GPT-3 by feeding it response data from multiple large surveys of political and cultural preferences in the US. They found that the AI could then output further opinions and perspectives ‘in ways that are nuanced, multifaceted, and reflects the complex interplay between ideas, attitudes, and socio-cultural context that characterise human attitudes.’

Essentially, GPT-3 is good at simulating people: if you tell it a bit about the opinions of a person, it’s good at predicting other opinions and preferences they’ll hold. Here’s GPT-3 doing that when it comes to US politics:

The researchers suggest this opens up an arresting possibility: silicon sampling. That is, the simulation of people inside language models, who can then be interrogated as a real human population would be.

⚡ NWSH Take: This story sees two NWSH obsessions come together. First, natural language models and our current quest to understand their nature and capabilities. And second, the emergence of new forms of simulation as powerful tools for insight in the 21st-century. // I’ve written repeatedly — most recently in New Week #100 — on the dream when it comes to next-generation simulations. That is, the ability to simulate complex social dynamics and collective human behaviours, including entire societies. The findings in this paper offer an exciting new avenue when it comes to that quest. // The potential use cases are manifold, and hugely consequential. Imagine a future in which political parties test new policy ideas via silicon sampling, before putting them in front of real focus groups. Or where brands put product and service concepts in front of simulated people. The report authors warn that silicon sampling will aid bad actors, too; they’ll use simulated people to test the believability and effectiveness of disinformation campaigns. // Computation and the social sciences just collided in an entirely new way. NWSH will keep watching.

💸 Okay, bet

This week’s Meta Connect event saw Mark Zuckerberg invite us deeper into his vision for the metaverse (you already know this; the coverage was unavoidable).

The company showcased a raft of new technology, including the new Meta Quest Pro, which delivers higher pixel resolution and an improved pass through AR experience.

The coverage that most caught my eye? It was this chart from tech publication The Information (£), which shows the scale of the bet that the Zuck is making.

Meta is set to spend an estimated $70 billion on its pivot the metaverse by 2026. According to The Information’s analysis, no tech company has ever invested as much in a new technology or platform before seeing proof of success in the market. It amounts to a calculated gamble that is unprecedented in Silicon Valley, and that may be unprecedented in corporate history.

⚡ NWSH Take: When Facebook went public in 2012, Zuckerberg devised a share class structure that gave him 58% of voting rights. Meta is a corporate monarchy, and now the King is marching his 80,000 subjects towards a new Promised Land. // Critics argue that Meta is embracing this pivot to distract us — consumers and regulators alike — from concerns around disinformation and targeted ads. Look at the scale of this bet, and that idea crumbles. If all the Zuck wanted to do is distract people, there are cheaper ways to do it. What’s happening inside Meta only makes sense in light of a deep, ideological belief that the metaverse is the next — and in some sense final — stage of this journey we’ve all been on for 30 years; our journey into this thing we call the internet. For true metaverse believers, it’s 1995 all over again; the gold rush is only just beginning. // Is Zuckerberg right? No one can know yet; that’s what makes this a bet. But while there are huge questions to answer — and this newsletter will spend many words on those questions in future instalments — the boundaries that separate this world from virtual worlds will become ever more porous in the years ahead. The competition to own that shift will be titanic. One thing is certain: Meta are positioning themselves for a long war.

🧠 Brain pong

This is surely the strangest story ever featured in an instalment of New Week.

Researchers at a life sciences startup called Cortical Labs announced this week that they grew a mini-brain in a dish, and that it then taught itself to play the video game Pong. This story first appeared late in 2021, but this week saw publication of the full research paper in the journal Neuron.

Lab-grown mini-brains, also known as brain organoids, are tiny clumps of neurons cultivated from human stem cells. They were first developed in 2013, and are doing much to help scientists understand the nature and workings of the brain.

But this is the first time brain organoids have been plugged into an external environment and interacted with that environment in a goal-directed way.

Researchers plugged the brain organoid into a ‘simulated game environment’ that sent it information about the position of the paddle and ball. The organoid was motivated to avoid the reset of the game that results when the paddle misses the ball, because this subjects it to a high energy demand. As a result, it started to move the paddle to avoid these resets. Within five minutes the organoid was demonstrating a hit rate way better than random chance.

In other words, it had taught itself to play a 1970s-era video game.

⚡ NWSH Take: The strangest story ever featured in NWSH? It may also turn out to be one of the most consequential. The researchers talk of having created a ‘sentient’ mini-brain. That’s a stretch; most people take sentient to mean conscious and capable of subjective experience. These brain organoids weren’t that. Then again, neither is your phone; but it’s still useful. // In short, this work raises the possibility that in future we’ll grow mini-brains in the lab and leverage their computational power. What’s more, while the brain organoids didn’t get as good at Pong as our best AIs, they did learn the game faster; AIs typically take around 90 minutes to achieve the competence the mini-brains managed in five. Not only, then, will we be able to grow our own compute, but it may prove more effective in some contexts than machine intelligence. The real power may come, though, if via these organoids we can fuse organic and machine intelligence in new ways. As the research paper has it, this work may ‘give rise to silico-biological computational platforms that surpass the performance of existing purely silicon hardware.’ In the intelligence revolution we’re living through, it feels as though we just stormed a whole new barricade.

🗓️ Also this week

☀️ The White House is coordinating a five-year research plan to study ways to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. The Office of Science and Technology Policy say the research will look at the costs and benefits of a number of plans, including a plan to spray reflective aerosols into the stratosphere.

🔋 Greece was briefly powered entirely by renewable energy sources this week. The Independent Power Transmission Operator said a mix of renewables, including wind and solar, for the first time provided 100% of the country’s energy for around five hours last Friday.

☄️ NASA confirmed that its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was a success. Scientists say their spacecraft collided with, and changed the course of, the Dimorphos asteroid.

👨‍💻 A Dutch court says it’s a human rights violation to demand employees work with their webcams on. In a case involving a Dutch telemarketer hired by a US firm, the court ruled that insisting on webcams is ‘in conflict with the respect for the privacy of workers’.

💊 Researchers say AIs can accurately predict the response of specific patients to anti-depressant medication. A new paper shows how an AI can predict response to the antidepressant Sertraline with 84% accuracy.

🚨 Police in Edmonton, Canada, used DNA phenotyping to generate an image of an unseen suspect. The image was created using DNA collected during the investigation; the police have no other images of the suspect. Critics point out that the technique does not take into account the suspect’s age and diet, or other environmental factors.

😱 A team of scientists called for urgent research into the nature and causes of civilisational collapse. Writing in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say discussion of collapse has been dominated, so far, by philosophers and artists, and call for scientists to start studying ‘collapse mechanisms’ and how we can collectively adapt so as to avoid them.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,981,031,836🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7905796748

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.9%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 79% complete

📖 On this day: On 14 October 1066 the Battle of Hastings marks the start of the Norman Conquest of England.

Synthetic Futures

Thanks for reading this week.

So it turns out that large language models are, among other things, accurate people simulators. The implications for the social sciences — including futures and foresight studies — are huge.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

This week, further evidence — in the form of new generative models from Google — that we’re amid an AI-fuelled creative revolution.

Also, the UK wants to build the world’s first on-grid nuclear fusion reactor. And Elon Musk unveils the Optimus humanoid robot.

Let’s go!

🎨 Light and magic

Another week, and yet another advance in the field of generative AI.

Google announced Imagen Video, a generative model that creates short animated videos based on text prompts.

The clips that result are around five seconds long, and somewhat low resolution. But the Google team say Imagen Video can mimic a range of visual styles — creating clips, for example, in the style of Van Gogh — and can create clips that convincingly model objects moving through three-dimensional spaces.

The model builds on Google’s Imagen text-to-image system, which I wrote about in New Week #84. It was trained via exposure to tens of millions of labelled images and videos — called ‘image-text pairs’ — including the publicly available LAION-400M image-text dataset.

Meanwhile, a separate Google team published news of their work on another text-to-video model, Phenaki. This one is focused on turning longer narrative prompts — think a long paragraph — into videos that last two or three minutes.

According to Jonathan Ho, one of the Google researchers behind this work, the Imagen and Phenaki teams will eventually join forces. Neither tool is yet available to the public.

⚡ NWSH Take: Back when it launched (in May!) the Imagen text-to-image tool seemed magical. Now look where we are. Last week Meta broke new ground with its text-to-video model; just one week later Google have announced a video model of their own. What’s more, Phenaki points towards a future in which we can write an entire story and see it instantly transformed into a movie. // We’re witnessing the birth of new art forms. The questions this raises are manifold. Can AI generated image and video really be art? What will happen to illustrators and animators? Aren’t these tools stripping the humanity out of creative visual forms? The same questions were posed 180 years ago at the advent of photography. In the end, human artists survived; they will survive the advent of AI art, too. And we came to recognise that photography was a skill all of its own, just as we’ll come to recognise the craft that is prompting and iterating the outputs of generative models. // Want a glimpse of what is coming? Take a look at Novel.ai, a GPT-3 fuelled storytelling tool that allows users to generate stories in various genres, and to imitate their favourite authors. The platform just added a text-to-image tool powered by Stable Diffusion, and trained to output images in the anime style. An amazing amplification of human creative capacity is underway. Yes, there are huge questions. But if you’re not at least a little excited, check your pulse.

💥 Love your energy

The UK government this week confirmed its ambition to get a nuclear fusion reactor on-grid by 2040.

Speaking at the annual Conservative Party Conference, business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg (famous here in the UK for his unique brand of Victorian gentleman cosplay) said a fusion reactor will be built in Nottinghamshire, where it will replace a coal-fired power station due to be closed this year. The ‘first of its kind’ reactor would ‘prove the commercial viability of fusion energy to the world’ said Rees-Mogg.

The UK opened the world’s first commercial nuclear fission reactor, Calder Hall 1, in 1956. It closed in 2003. That parallels the global story on nuclear, which advanced rapidly from the mid-1960s before flatlining around 2000.

Prominent accidents, including Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, dramatically cooled enthusiasm for nuclear. Germany announced the planned closure of all its nuclear power plants in the wake of Fukushima.

Now, amid advances in nuclear tech and a hugely challenging energy environment, interest is renewed. Back in New Week #93 I wrote about Nuscale, a US startup creating small, modular nuclear reactors that are far quicker and cheaper to build than traditional nuclear plants.

⚡ NWSH Take: Both short term shocks and long term shifts are pushing nuclear back on the agenda. Germany’s decision to shut down nuclear looks rash in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine; the country just announced it will keep two nuclear plants on standby until at least April 2023. But the deeper context here is the race to decarbonise. And the conversation is split between those who believe nuclear must play a crucial role, and those who believe that’s madness. // Critics point out that nuclear power plants take decades to build, and are hugely expensive. Pro-nuclear types say that’s only because we stopped building such plants, allowing the expertise and innovation to wither: it was, they argue, a historic wrong turning. Startups such as Nuscale want to address cost and speed concerns via their modular designs. // But the real nuclear hope now revolves around fusion reactors, which cannot melt down, create no long-lived nuclear waste, and generate several times more energy than their fission counterparts. The UK’s government’s talk of 2040, though, reflects only an aspiration; we’re still some way from controlled and useful fusion. Decarbonisation needs to happen now; most likely fusion won’t play a meaningful role. But we should still keep pushing as hard as possible. Nuclear’s unpopularity is mostly undeserved, and the collective decision to let the tech stagnate was a mistake. This time can be different.

🤖 Autobots assemble

Amid a raft of robot news this week, Elon Musk unveiled his latest zeitgeist-chasing bid for attention. I speak of the Optimus robot.

Musk had promised that Optimus would be unveiled at the Tesla AI Day event, which took place on Saturday. Back in New Week #86, I expressed scepticism that such an unveiling would occur.

I’m happy to admit that I was half-wrong. Optimus did make an appearance. But the device that limped on to the stage this week was hardly the all-purpose wonderbot hat Musk has been trailing. It was, of course, never going to be.

Meanwhile, other robot innovators made headlines of their own. Automated pizza startup Stellar Pizza — founded by three former SpaceX engineers — received a $16.5 million investment from Jay-Z. The company plans to roll out its first mobile, automated pizza restaurants in Los Angeles later this year.

And Boston Dynamics — whose work seems to have helped inspire Optimus — published an open letter condemning the ‘weaponisation of general purpose robots’.

‘We pledge that we will not weaponize our advanced-mobility general-purpose robots or the software we develop that enables advanced robotics, and we will not support others to do so. When possible, we will carefully review our customers’ intended applications to avoid potential weaponization. We also pledge to explore the development of technological features that could mitigate or reduce these risks.’

The letter was co-signed by a number of other robotics startups, and comes amid a report this week that appears to show a Chinese-made drone carrying and then dropping a robot dog armed with a machine gun.

⚡ NWSH Take: I know NWSH gives Musk a hard time, what with this and my obsession with the way Starlink satellites are damaging our view of the night sky. But when it comes to Optimus, it’s not just me. Here are a raft of robotics and AI experts calling it, among other things, ‘next-level cringeworthy’. // Don’t let Musk’s need to be the centre of the Twitterverse distract you, though, from the real advances being made. Automation is stealthily taking over the fast food industry; see both Stellar Pizza and Flippy, the burger-making robot set to replace many kitchen staff. Eventually, all-purpose helper robots will arrive in our homes. Before that, we need to think about the nature of this supposed robot utopia.

🗓️ Also this week

⛷ Saudi Arabia will host the 2029 Asian Winter Games at a mountain resort near its planned hyper-futuristic NEOM city. Officials say Saudi’s Trojena mountain resort will be completed in 2026, and will offer outdoor skiing and an artificial freshwater lake. I last wrote on NEOM back in New Week #92.

🏀 NBA star Luka Dončić has created a virtual version of himself to star in his TikTok videos. Dončić used the MetaHuman Creator from Epic Games to create his own photorealistic digital twin, which is called Luk.AI. The rise of AI-fuelled virtual humans is a NWSH obsession; see Kim Kardashian, Virtual Humans, and How Weird Becomes Mainstream for more.

⚖️ The White House announced a new AI Bill of Rights. The guidelines say US citizens should be aware when AIs or automated systems are making decisions that impact them, and should be able to opt out of such systems. But critics say the proposals, which will not become law, will not change the behaviour of Big Tech.

🐛 Spanish scientists say worm saliva can break down plastics. The researchers discovered that chemicals in the saliva of the wax worm can break down polyethylene, the world’s most used plastic. Just one hour of exposure can cause degradation that typically takes several years to occur.

👁 A new AI tool can predict your risk of heart disease by scanning your retina. A new paper in the British Journal of Ophthalmology says the tool analyses veins and arteries in the eye, and can deliver an accurate risk of heart disease and stroke within 60 seconds.

👟 The NFT sneaker agency RTFKT showcased its first real shoes. RTFKT sold $3 million worth of NFT shoes in 2021 and was acquired by Nike at the end of that year. It’s CryptoKick Sneakers will retail for $300; no release date has been announced.

🌌 A new study says advertising billboards in space could display ads to every corner of the planet. Researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology say a constellation of 50 satellites could use reflected sunlight to spell out short words in the night sky. Ready for the Nike tick in Space? The Amazon Prime logo? Please, don’t get me started.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,979,453,359🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7901385543

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.8%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 77% complete

📖 On this day: On 7 October 1913 the Ford Motor Company introduces the world’s first moving vehicle assembly line, reducing the time it takes to build one car from 12 hours to around 90 minutes.

Pure Imagination

Thanks for reading this week.

The advances being made by AI generative models means a future in which human imagination is unleashed in amazing new ways. It’s yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

We’ve reached a milestone; 100 instalments of the New Week update from New World Same Humans!

I can’t believe how fast that has flown by. I’ll never tire of saying it: writing to you every week is a huge privilege. Thanks for being part of this community, and I hope you’ll continue to find these updates useful as we push into the next 100 editions.

As promised, I’ll write soon with an updated plan for this newsletter, including the return of the short notes that I used to send on Sundays, and a roadmap for the next instalments of my long essay-almost-book The Worlds to Come.

In the meantime, there’s plenty to talk about this week. Tesla are building a simulation of San Francisco in Unreal Engine 5. New research from Microsoft shows managers are paranoid about their staff slacking off at home. And changes are coming to the voice of Darth Vader.

Let’s get into it.

🏙 Sim city

This week, another glimpse of the way simulations will reshape innovation and much else besides.

Tesla is reportedly using Unreal Engine to create a simulation of San Francisco in which it can test its autonomous cars.

Unreal Engine is the 3D game engine created by Epic Games. It’s best known as the technology that underpins Epic’s Fortnite and a host of other games, and lies at the heart of the software giant’s metaverse ambitions, which have been much-discussed by CEO Tim Sweeney.

Epic recently released Unreal Engine 5. This video, published last month, showcases the level of detail and the scope of the world-building being leveraged by Tesla:

Tesla is using the simulated city to test its Autopilot feature and self-driving technologies without incurring the risks that accompany IRL testing. According to mobility publication Electrek, though, the simulated SF is so compelling that Elon Musk has even considered using it as a basis for the creation of new video games.

⚡ NWSH Take: When we think metaverse — and certainly when we think Unreal Engine — we tend to think entertainment. But NWSH is obsessed with the ways in which simulated and virtual worlds will transform much else besides. Tesla are not the only automaker, for example, leveraging the power of simulations when it comes to innovation; see BMW building a simulated factory inside NVDIA’s Omniverse platform, which they’ll use to model new manufacturing processes. // NVIDIA themselves, meanwhile, are using Omniverse to build Earth-2, a massive simulation of the planetary climate system. That project hints at the goal in view here; the creation of simulations that allow us new insight into highly complex, unpredictable systems. Soon enough, every major city on the planet will be twinned with a mirror image inside a virtual world; that will revolutionise the way we manage traffic flows, public transport systems, power demands, and more. // The dream? It’s the simulation of social systems, including entire societies, in ways that allow us a new understanding of our collective lives. Here in the UK, we’re in the grip of a huge political argument over economic policy. Will such arguments one day be informed by sophisticated simulations of the national economy? We’re at the start of a long journey towards virtual worlds as critical infrastructure and invaluable sources of industrial and political insight. NWSH will keep watching.

👨‍💻 Paranoid capitalism

How is the Brave New World of hybrid work shaping up? This week, Microsoft published new research that offers an answer.

For its new Work Trend Index report, the tech giant surveyed 20,000 knowledge workers across 11 countries and analysed a ton of data from the Microsoft 365 platform, which offers cloud-based access to apps such as Word and Excel.

The upshot? Managers are worried that their teams are slacking off at home. A full 85% of leaders say ‘the shift to remote work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive’.

Meanwhile, 87% of employees say they are being productive inside a hybrid work model. And Microsoft say that the ‘productivity signals’ they track across Microsoft 365 have climbed across the last 12 months.

The report gives this disconnect between managers and their teams a name: productivity paranoia.

The phenomenon, say the report authors, threatens the sustainability of the hybrid model. Their answer? Managers should set clear targets, give regular feedback, and reward impact not activity. Sounds great, but I have a feeling productivity paranoia may prove harder to shift than these injunctions imply.

⚡ NWSH Take: Outdated organisational structures are at the heart of this finding from Microsoft. In most companies, management hierarchies are still built around models that evolved during the industrial revolution; think supervisors hovering over workers to ensure they’re making the widgets fast enough. Hybrid work disrupts all that. No wonder managers are in a tailspin; they’re being held responsible for the productivity of people they hardly ever see. The immediate consequence is an explosion in productivity surveillance; new tools that allow managers to track the online activity — sometimes even the cursor movements — of their teams. Some staff are even using ‘mouse jiggling’ tools to get around such oversight. // So is this the future: ever-increasing worker surveillance? Enlightened organisations will surely seek better answers. That can only mean new organisational structures that are suited to a connected world, and that empower staff to take ownership of their own work. Out go rigid managerial hierarchies; in come flexible networks that allow the instant assembly of project teams. Sounds a utopian dream? Wikipedia got built that way. And it’s not a new idea; remember Holacracy, which had a moment in the mid-teens? It may be due a post-pandemic, hybrid work reboot.

🤖 AI am your father

How long can an ageing actor continue to play his most famous role? This week, further evidence that a new answer is emerging: forever, kind of.

James Earl Jones, the actor behind the iconic voice of Darth Vader, is handing over stewardship of the character to machine intelligence.

For the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series, 91-year-old Jones’s voice was enhanced by the Ukrainian AI voice generation startup Respeecher. Now, Jones says he will permanently retire from the role. But he’s signed over his archival voice recordings to to Respeecher, so they and Disney — who own the Star Wars franchise — can create an AI version of his Darth Vader voice to use in future productions.

Respeecher are creating an all-purpose AI voice platform; they envisage a future in which famous actors and ordinary content creators deploy cloned versions of their voices. It raises the possibility of films, TV shows, and podcasts spoken entirely by voice clones:

‘Human actors don’t have to do much aside from speaking a certain number of words using different cadences during a recording session. Once the neural network has enough speech to create an artificial voice model, the actor’s job is done.’

The startup also created a voice for the young Luke Skywalker in 2021’s The Book of Boba Fett. And two weeks ago they provided the spoken voice of Elvis for virtual humans startup Metaphysic’s performance in the final of America’s Got Talent, which I wrote about in New Week #98.

⚡ NWSH Take: Another startup on the frontlines of a NWSH obsession: the way that AI is set to allow actors, singers, and artists a strange new kind of ghostly creative afterlife. I first wrote about this via the AI reincarnation of South Korean folk singer Kim Kwang-seok, and I’ve been tracking it ever since. This news on James Earl Jones, though, throws a couple of issues into sharp relief. // First, Jones signed over the rights to his voice to Disney and Respeecher. Nothing has been reported on if, or how much, he was paid for those rights. But it’s clear that this new age of AI reincarnation will mean new revenue streams for both living creatives and the estates of those who’ve died. If the price is right, will Elvis voice a character in a future Disney animated film? // Meanwhile, Disney has been criticised for the move because it will deprive a human actor of the chance to take the Darth Vader role. Rewind a few years and remember the jobs you expected to be automated away by AI: acting probably didn’t feature. Now, thanks to tools such as Respeecher, and the stunning advances made by natural language and language-to-image models, the creative and arts industries are set to reshaped by machine intelligence. We’re witnessing the birth of entirely new art forms. But more controversy, including criticism from creatives who feel marginalised, surely lies ahead.

🖼 Animate this

In haste, just before I hit send on this week’s instalment: here’s another example of the ongoing collision between AI and human creativity.

Meta just released a new AI model that generates short video clips — something akin to gifs — based on text prompts:

AI image generators such as OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney are already changing the way we think about the visual arts. Now Meta is the first to extend these AI models to video generation.

The teddy bear clip above was generated via nothing more than the text prompt ‘a teddy bear painting a portrait’. It’s not hard to imagine how you might tie a series of prompts together to create an entire three-minute cartoon featuring this little bear.

The implications for the animation arts and multiple industries — TV, film, advertising — are vast. These AI advances are coming so fast, now, that it’s dizzying. More from NWSH soon.

🗓️ Also this week

🦖 The CIA invested in Colossal Biosciences, the DNA startup that wants to resurrect the woolly mammoth. The investment came via In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital fund, which invests in companies with the potential to enhance national security. In a blog post In-Q-Tel explained its interest in biosciences startups developing technologies that will, for example, allow for new bioengineered solutions to climate change. Colossal, who I wrote about in New Week #52, are also working to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger.

🛩 A US startup conducted the world’s first test flight of an all-electric passenger plane. The prototype jet, called Alice, flew for eight minutes; it’s the creation of Washington-based startup Eviation, who say they hope eventually to fly electric passenger jets between US cities.

⚛ Germany says it will keep two of its nuclear plants running for longer than planned. The government says two of its remaining three plants — Isar 2 in Bavaria, and Neckarwestheim in Baden-Württemberg — will keep running until at least April 2023. The energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised concerns that Germany may face an electricity shortfall over the winter.

💭 Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson’s new startup published its vision for the future of the metaverse. Stephenson coined the term ‘metaverse’ in his iconic 1992 novel Snow Crash. In a new white paper, his startup Lamina1 says it wants to build an ‘open metaverse’ that ‘provides communities with infrastructure, not gatekeepers’.

🚗 New York says it will ban the sale of petrol-powered vehicles by 2035. According to an official 2021 report, transportation accounts for 28% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. The move sees New York become the second state to vow a ban on petrol cars, after California.

😴 Amazon launched a new device that track’s the user’s breathing while they sleep. The Halo Rise also tracks room temperature, humidity and light, and is intended to allow users new insight into their sleeping patterns.

🚌 Bus drivers in Beijing have been told they must wear wristbands that track their emotional and attention states. The wristbands are being issued by the Beijing Public Transport Holding Group, and will measure heart rate, body temperature, and movement among other metrics. The Group say the move will ‘protect public safety’. In Algorithms With Chinese Characteristics I wrote about the CCP’s obsessive drive to create a new form of tech-fuelled total state oversight.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,977,880,086🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7896988827

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.6%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 75% complete

📖 On this day: On 30 September 1968 the Boeing 747 is revealed to the public for the first time at the Everett factory near Seattle, USA.

The Force is Strong

Thanks for reading this week.

The ongoing collision between AI, simulations, and human creativity is yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I’m preparing my annual pilgrimage to the brilliant NEXT Conference in Hamburg, where this year I’ll be speaking about technology as a system, the possibility of civilisational collapse, and how we should respond to this moment.

In the meantime, though, there’s news to discuss. In this week’s instalment, I return to a familiar NWSH theme via the appearance of Elvis in the final of America’s Got Talent.

Meanwhile, an announcement foreshadows an emerging geopolitical flashpoint: lunar resources.

Let’s go!

✨ AIs got talent

This week, a further glimpse of the ongoing three-way collision between AI, virtual humans, and creativity.

A virtual human — in the form of 20th-century icon Elvis Presley — competed in the final of NBC’s light entertainment juggernaut America’s Got Talent. The avatar was the creation of London-based AI startup Metaphysic; the same people who went viral last year with their convincing deepfake TikToks of Tom Cruise.

When Metaphysic first appeared on AGT earlier this year, pantomime villain judge Simon Cowell called them ‘one of the most unique things we’ve ever seen on this show’. Their performances see a live singer take the stage to provide the voice and animation for a digital avatar that is projected on a huge screen:

Metaphysic’s Elvis lost out in the final to a Lebanese dance troupe called The Mayyas. The company say they want to help creators to build hyperrealistic virtual identities, and that they’re planning ‘more partnerships in the entertainment industry’.

⚡ NWSH Take: Okay, this is America’s Got Talent; the silliness quotient is high. But the Metaphysic Elvis has propelled AI-fuelled virtual humans into the heart of the mainstream. // Regular readers will know we’re dealing, here, with a NWSH obsession; I’ve written much on the collision between AI and creativity, and, specifically, on how AI will allow artists and performers a strange new kind of ghostly afterlife. Elvis reincarnated on AGT is just the start. Expect a host of much-loved singers and actors to be reincarnated on screens and stages across the coming years. Want a new Marilyn Monroe film? A new Prince album? Now you can (kind of) have it! Pending the agreement, of course, of the estate owners; expect deals worth billions of dollars. // The appetite for virtual humans won’t stop there, though. As people enter immersive VR and AR worlds — yes, we’re talking the metaverse — they’ll seek to build the photorealistic avatars that will be their virtual selves. That means an explosion of virtual identity creation, and the emergence of a whole new industry. One signal of what’s ahead? Metaphysic recently launched Every Anyone, a tool that empowers all of us to build our own virtual humans.

🌔 Moon dust

China this week announced that it has discovered a previously unknown mineral lurking inside a crystal taken from the moon.

The crystal was part of a batch of samples collected by China’s 2020 Chang’e-5 moon mission. Those samples were the first moon rocks brought back to Earth since 1976. The new mineral was named Changesite—(Y).

Hidden beneath the headlines on this new mineral, though? News that China has also found helium-3 inside their moon rocks. This is significant, because helium-3 — a stable isotope of helium that contains two protons and one neutron — has huge potential as a fuel source for nuclear fusion.

There’s little helium-3 here on Earth; scientists have long known that there much more on the moon. And NASA have been excited about lunar helium-3 and fusion since at least 1988. But experts have long wondered exactly how much of the isotope is up there. Now, China’s Atomic Energy Authority say they’ve measured the concentration of the isotope in their lunar samples. They did not make that measurement public.

⚡ NWSH Take: This story is a powerful signal of what’s ahead when it comes to China, the USA, and space. The announcement on Changesite—(Y) came as NASA published more detailed landing plans for its forthcoming Artemis III mission, which is intended to put humans back on the moon. See it as a reminder, then, that China does not intend to let NASA and US private space companies hog the 21st-century race back to the lunar surface. Indeed, it seems China is eyeing the same lunar landing areas as that intended for use by Artemis III for its Chang'e-7 lunar rover mission. Awkward. // But take the news on helium-3, and it’s clear things could go further than awkward. The stage is being set for a Great Power conflict over the right to mine trillions of dollars worth of moon minerals. And if nuclear fusion becomes a reality any time soon, expect the tension to become even more acute as two great powers go head to head to mine a source of near-infinite clean energy; see a good summary here. No wonder the US media are already comparing the coming US-China space race to the US-Soviet space rivalry of the mid 20th-century.

🗓️ Also this week

❄️ Scientists at Yale University have floated a plan to refreeze the Arctic and Antarctic by spraying sulphur dioxide high into the atmosphere. Under the plan, a fleet of 125 military air-to-air refuelling tankers would release sulphur dioxide particles into the atmosphere at an altitude of 43,000ft, and at a latitude intended to cast the poles into a slight shade. Back in Is More Technology the Answer to the Climate Crisis I looked at similar plans to cool the Earth via atmospheric geoengineering.

🙌 The founder of sustainable clothes company Patagonia has given the entire company away to the planet. Yvon Chouinard has signed Patagonia away into a non-profit trust, and all future profits will go towards fighting the climate crisis.

🛰 A huge new satellite could become the second brightest object in the night sky, after the moon. Scientists say the just-launched BlueWalker 3 satellite, which has antenna as large as squash courts, could outshine all the stars and planets in the sky. I’ve written much (some may say too much) on the damage that satellites are doing to our view of the sky at night.

🤖 Amazon has acquired the Belgian robotics firm Cloostermans, a leader in the warehouse robots space. Cloostermans was privately held, and the terms of the deal were undisclosed. Amazon has long been one of the company’s biggest customers; now they say they’ll work with the Cloostermans team to ‘build next-generation supply chain mechatronics’.

💥 Researchers at Oxford University say that a rapid transition to clean energy could save the world economy $12 trillion. The researchers modelled a ‘fast transition’ scenario that would see total decarbonisation by 2050; they say the results show lower energy system costs, plus a wider availability of energy globally, which would result in huge savings.

📱 TikTok won’t promise to stop sharing user data with China. In a session with the Senate Homeland Security Committee, TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas dodged questions around sharing data with China, and said only that ‘our final agreement with the US government will satisfy all national security concerns’.

🌐 Ethereum, the worlds second largest blockchain after bitcoin, has upgraded to a more energy-efficient system. In a long-awaited transition known as the Merge, the Ethereum blockchain has moved to a new ‘proof of stake’ system that will see it consume 99.9% less energy. Some observers expected a boost in the value of Ethereum following the Merge; so far that has failed to materialise.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,974,781,432🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7888329226

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.4%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 71% complete

📖 On this day: On 16 September 1908 the General Motors Corporation is founded.

All Shook Up

Thanks for reading this week.

Metaphysic’s virtual Elvis brings together emerging AI technologies and our age-old desire to reincarnate those we have lost. It’s yet another classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

I join you at a historic moment for my country, the United Kingdom, because we received the sad news that the Queen died yesterday at age 96 after 70 years on the throne. What an incredible life.

So the second Elizabethan age is over for us here in the UK, and we now welcome King Charles III. History is turning as history does.

And it’s turning in all kinds of other ways, too. What have we got in store?

This week, a new AI technique sees a team of virtual humanoids learn to play football.

Meanwhile, we look at the evidence on a fundamental question for the coming decades: can we decouple economic growth and carbon? And the US wants to prevent its top tech firms from sharing their secrets with China.

Let’s get into it.

🌐 Simulated living

This week, new work from Alphabet’s DeepMind division offers a glimpse of our simulated future.

In a new research paper and blog post, the DeepMind team describe how they used an AI to train virtual humanoids to play football.

They threw a team of digital stick figures into a virtual environment that simulates real physics: Earth-like gravity, inertia, and all the rest. They then used a special technique called neural probabilistic motor primitives (NPMP) to turn the humanoids from flailing no-hopers into a skilled team.

In a two-stage process, the AI was first trained on motion-capture video clips of humans playing football. This taught it basic control over the humanoids, enabling them to run and kick a ball. Next, the AI simulated 20 years worth of football matches in around two weeks, using a trial and error method to learn advanced skills such as dribbling, shooting on goal, and, finally, team coordination.

The result? A team of virtual stick figures that look and perform eerily like a Premier League football club.

Still, at first glance this might all seem pretty niche. Why does it matter?

⚡ NWSH Take: I’ve written a lot on Alphabet’s Everyday Robots division, and its mission to create household helper robots that can load the dishwasher and make a cup of tea. A core challenge here? We need embodied AIs that can navigate the demands posed by complex physical environments. In other words, we need AIs that can cope with having a body. The real power of the NPMP skill model, say the DeepMind team, will come when we lift it out of simulated environments and use it to train robots to move through our factories, hospitals, and kitchens. // Meanwhile, this work is also a reminder of the rising power of a new generation of AI-fuelled simulations. The best AI chess players have changed the game by playing moves no human would ever have seen. If we give DeepMind’s virtual football team long enough, will it devise football strategies that are entirely new? In the coming decades, our ability to create sophisticated simulations will transform our understanding of multiple domains of human endeavour, from sport to science. See, for example, NVDIA’s massive Earth-2 simulation of the planet. But the even greater prize in sight: can we build meaningful simulations of entire human societies? Social scientists such as Peter Turchin, who marries history and mathematics via a new discipline he calls cliodynamics, are working on such simulations, and believe they’ll soon generate powerful new insight into collective human behaviour and the hidden patterns that shape our shared past and future. NWSH will keep watching.

💥 A tale of growth and carbon

Can we decouple economic growth and the burning of fossil fuels? This week, charts published by the brilliant Our World in Data offered an emphatic answer.

Co-founder Max Roser highlighted a story shared by 25 countries: carbon emissions down, growth up.

Others were quick to point out that in the case of many of those 25 countries, the picture is more complex than these simple charts allow. Ireland, for example, saw an 81% increase in GDP and a 42% decrease in carbon emissions between 2005 and 2019. But much of that reduction in carbon emissions came during and immediately after the 2009 financial crisis, when GDP also fell — a blow to the idea that growth and carbon can be decoupled.

The argument raged on Twitter (as arguments do). But this is far more than a technical debate about some charts. It strikes at the heart of a fundamental question for the 21st-century: is green growth possible?

Roser believes that we must do everything we can to ensure the answer is ‘yes’. In this long post on global poverty reduction and growth he says:

“If those who say that it is not possible to decouple growth from environmental harm are right, then the future… will be either one of continuing global poverty or one of continuing environmental destruction, or both. Much of our work here at Our World in Data is therefore dedicated to studying how it might be possible to achieve a future in which an increasing share of humanity is less poor and in which humanity has a smaller negative environmental impact.”

⚡ NWSH Take: This newsletter has always been animated by a set of core themes. One of them? The search for a new framework to structure, and make sense of, our politics in the 2020s. As I argued way back in NWSH #6, the global heating emergency has rendered the traditional conservative vs progressive framework obsolete; we need something new. // Perhaps that something new is the decouple vs degrow dichotomy that underpins the debate that I outline above, which unfolded in response to Roser’s charts. That dichotomy asks: should we decouple economic growth from carbon and then continue to pursue it? Or must we accept that this is impossible, and instead shrink our economies in order to protect the planet? Roser believes that to embrace degrowth means to condemn billions in the Global South to continued poverty. Proponents of degrowth say that needn’t be so; the rich world can degrow, they say, while empowering poorer nations to keep getting richer. // The answer you give to this questions — decouple or degrow? — necessarily shapes much of your thinking on our collective path ahead. In that way, it’s a far more useful ordering framework than conservative vs progressive. Right now only one side, decouple, is represented in mainstream politics. But we may yet come to see mainstream degrowth parties spring up across the Global North.

👨‍💻 Had your chips

This week, a further glimpse of the geopolitical tech wars that lie ahead.

The US announced that it will ban tech companies from building ‘advanced technology facilities’ in China for at least a decade.

The ban will apply to US technology firms that receive government funding. It comes in the wake of the US Chips and Science Act, which will see $53 billion spent to upscale domestic production of semiconductor chips, which all kinds of computers rely on. The bill is intended to reduce US reliance on chips manufactured in Asia; Taiwan and South Korea are currently the world’s top producers.

The US is amid a broader recalibration of its relationship with China when it comes to technology. Last week, US chip giant NVIDIA said it had been told to stop exporting two kinds of AI chips to China; the US Department of Commerce say the ban is meant to ‘keep advanced technologies out of the wrong hands…and protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests’.

⚡ NWSH Take: Back in New Week #95 I wrote on US tech company Oracle and its audit of TikTok’s algorithms and content moderation practises, which is intended to ensure they aren’t being manipulated by the Chinese authorities. Now, we have these moves to limit the physical presence of US tech companies in China, and to ensure that high-powered AI chips aren’t being sent there. // Put it all together and a picture emerges of a definitive shift in stance. It’s not before time. For decades, the Global North has leaked technological hardware, research, and expertise to China. Check out this British intelligence services assessment that China’s strategy to grab western tech and expertise has been decades long ‘coordinated campaign on a grand scale’. At home, China is using technologies of western origin —including facial recognition — to build an unprecedented techno-authoritarian state. Meanwhile, it’s possible that the CCP are sucking a constant supply of user data out of the world’s most popular social media app. // In the 21st-century, technology and data are at the bleeding edge of the geopolitical struggle for power and influence. If the Global North is now waking up to that, then great. But it may be too late: the evidence suggests China is fast catching up with the US when it comes to AI research, and may soon overtake.

🗓️ Also this week

🪐 MIT researchers say they’ve created a lunchbox-sized cube that can create oxygen on Mars. The small box, called MOXIE, landed on Mars last year with the Perseverance rover. Since then, said MIT scientists this week, several tests have seen it successfully suck in Martian air and output oxygen at rate of six grams per hour — that’s about the same oxygen production rate as that managed by a single tree.

🧠 Meta have created an AI that can reproduce the words a person is hearing by reading their brainwaves. Meta researchers say the technology could one day allow those who can’t talk or type to communicate more fully with others.

🌅 Authorities in California say the power grid is struggling to cope with demand arising as a result of the current heatwave. The California Independent System Operator, which runs the power grid, warned residents to be ‘ready for rotating power outages’ in the coming days. San Jose hit 42.7C on Tuesday this week, breaking an all-time temperature record for the city.

🤖 Google says it will make its massive AI language model, LaMDA, available to a select group of beta users. Users must sign up via a testing space called AI Test Kitchen. LaMDA made headlines back in June when Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed it is sentient.

🐜 Researchers have created cyborg cockroaches that can be remotely controlled via solar-powered backpacks. The devices are wired into the cockroach’s nervous system; sending a signal to the backpack causes the cockroach to move in a certain direction.

🧊 Scientists warn that the so-called Doomsday Glacier in Antartica is melting faster than previously believed. The researchers say the Thwaites Glacier — which covers an area the size of Florida — is ‘holding on by its fingernails’. In New Week #96 I wrote on new research that shows how Greenland’s ice is also melting far faster than expected, and what this means for global sea levels.

🇮🇷 Iran says it will use facial recognition technology to pursue a crackdown on women’s dress. The law in Iran says women must wear a hijab, or head-covering, in public. In recent months, government hardliners have signalled that they intend to enforce the dress code more strictly. Now, they say they’ll use facial recognition to identify women who do not comply.

🌓 NASA say the launch of its Artemis moon rocket will be delayed by at least a month. An attempted launch on Saturday failed when one of the rocket’s engines developed a leak. Now, NASA say they’re likely to try again some time in October.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,973,252,107🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7884055347

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.3%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 69% complete

📖 On this day: On 9 September 1956 Elvis Presley appears on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, kickstarting an age of TV-fuelled popular culture.

Sims of Earth

Thanks for reading this week.

Yesterday I published the second instalment of The Worlds to Come, a long essay on language, virtual worlds, and our quest for meaning. If that sounds up your street, take a look.

The trouble with human history is that we only get one shot at it. We have to learn as we go, and improvise solutions to the challenges we face.

The rise of powerful AI-fuelled simulations give us the chance to change all that. If we can run many massive simulations of complex social or physical systems, we can effectively let the human story play out in many different ways at once, observe the results, and choose the best option.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 20,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

🙌 This is instalment two of The Worlds to Come, an essay from NWSH. Go here to read the first instalment, or here to listen to it in podcast form. 🙌

It’s been a while

Earlier this year I published the first instalment of an essay, The Worlds to Come.

I promised the second instalment would follow quickly. That was months ago. So this email starts with a simple message: sorry for the delay. And to all those who wrote to ask, ‘where is part two of that essay?’, thanks for keeping the faith.

What happened? In short, life happened. This newsletter was born in the depths of the pandemic; I had time on my hands. But in the first quarter of this year other commitments — including my speaking schedule — accelerated back to full speed; it caught me off guard. I’m sure many of you can relate.

Still, in the grand scheme this is a small bump in the road. Writing to you every week is a huge privilege, and I love the community we’re building together and this journey we’re on to make sense of our shared future. This newsletter remains at the heart of my plans.

I’m going to send a note soon on what to expect from NWSH in the coming months, including a plan for longform essays and the return of the shorter notes that I used to send on Sundays — I really miss writing them.

But for now, here is the second instalment of The Worlds to Come.

This essay

This is an essay about systems of representation, virtual realities, and the way we understand our place in the world.

As a reminder, it’s not the typical NWSH fare. This essay is longer and more involved, but I hope also deeper, than the weekly updates. It’s an attempt to think with philosophy about virtual worlds and their implications for our orientation to this world.

Still keen to read? To refresh your memory, here is the table of contents for the whole essay:

Introduction: On the Threshold

1. What We Have Forgotten. Humans, language, and being-in-the-world.

2. Cast Adrift. A brief history of the Gods we made, how we banished them, and where that left us.

3. Crossing Over. Virtual worlds and the leap back to enchantment.

4. Conclusion: Where Next?

The instalment you’re reading will complete Part 1, leaving Parts 2, 3, and 4 still to come. Yes, this piece of work is better described as a short book than an essay. When it’s finished I’ll put the instalments together and publish the complete text as an ebook.

Given the time elapsed since I published the first instalment, let’s start with a brief recap.

Instalment One: a recap

If want to read first instalment in its entirety, you can find it here in text form and here in podcast form.

But a short recap of that instalment follows:

Introduction:

* At the heart of this essay is a single idea: that our coming journey into virtual worlds can cause a transformation in our relationship with this world; one that can allow us to overcome nihilism, and again understand our lives as meaningful.

* On first hearing, this claim seems impossibly far-fetched. I don’t believe that we’re set to disappear into the metaverse and live happily ever after. Instead, my interest lies in what virtual worlds can show us about this world and our relationship to it.

* Specifically, I want to examine a set of more-or-less obscure relationships between virtual worlds, systems of representation, and meaning. My contention is that when these relationships are unpacked, virtual realities are shown to be the fullest realisation, or telos, of a certain orientation to the world: one that is mistaken, but that predominates among people who live inside modernity. And that because of this, our entry into virtual worlds can help us overcome that orientation and discover one that is more authentic.

Part 1: What We Have Forgotten

* We humans are language animals. Aristotle calls us zōon logon echon: the animal that seeks meaning, the animal that speaks.

* That idea is associated with another. That is, that we humans are subjective agents looking out to an external world, or a world-out-there. This idea, which we’ll call the subject/object framework, is embedded so deep in the heart of western metaphysics that it’s sometimes hard for us to see it. It underpins the modern scientific worldview, which sees us as conscious beings looking out to an external world made of atoms and energy.

* In the early 20th-century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger attacked the foundations of western metaphysics by exploding the subject/object framework. It’s not true, said Heidegger, that at heart we are subjects looking out to an independent world-out-there. Instead, the underlying truth about our existence is our inescapable unity with the world, which Heidegger called being-in-the-world, or Dasein.

* Heidegger’s collapse of the subject/object framework proved one of the most influential — and controversial — ideas in all philosophy. It sought to overturn traditional western metaphysics, depicting that discipline as one long mistake: a series of conundrums and their attempted solutions based on the false idea that what is primary about our being in the world is subject/object.

* Today, philosophers continue to build on the foundations Heidegger laid. There is even a small and growing literature that seeks to examine VR through the lens of Heidegger’s thinking. It’s that avenue of thinking that I want to head down in what follows.

* We need to go on that journey step-by-step. And the next step is to ask: if Dasein is the primordial state of affairs for we humans, then how did we end up convinced that we are subjects looking out to an objective world-out-there? The answer I’ll give is language. Language itself is the radical disruption that severs us from Dasein. This has radical consequences for our understanding of virtual worlds. Because when language estranges us from Dasein, it starts us out on a journey that finds its fullest realisation in VR.

1. What We Have Forgotten (cont…)

(iii)

When we come to understand ourselves as subjects looking out to an objective world, the unity of self and world — of Dasein — is broken. We become a disengaged ‘knower’, who must try somehow to hook up to and have knowledge of the ‘world out there’.

This is an estrangement from the underlying truth (as Heidegger would have us understand it) of self-world unity. How does this estrangement come about?

Heidegger’s answers were complex. Essentially, he believed that we become estranged from the truth of Dasein when something causes us to step back from our engaged agency and try to analyse it. That can happen when our engaged agency is interrupted by some error or fault — when, to return to our earlier example, the hammer that we are using breaks and our hammering comes to a sudden end.

What lies submerged in Heidegger’s analysis, though, is a deeper and more radical answer. It is that language itself is at the root of the processes that sever us from Dasein.

This, I should admit, is a controversial reading — some might argue a misreading — of Heidegger. It does have roots in his thinking: he writes a lot about how the misuse of language is one of the processes that estranges us from Dasein and establishes the subject/object framework. But he also says that ‘language is the house of Being’, which has widely been interpreted as meaning that language and Dasein are bound together. Overall, Heidegger’s beliefs on the relationship between language and estrangement from Dasein remain somewhat opaque, and are the subject of ongoing debate.

So why do I contend that language is the driver of our estrangement? First, we need to remember what this estrangement consists of. Dasein, or our being-in-the-world­, constitutes a fundamental unity between self and world: a me-world. In that state of affairs we don’t hold the world apart from ourselves and examine it at a distance. Rather, we are one with it in a process of engaged agency. We know a hammer not as an independent and objectively-existing object, but as part of a network of meanings that taken together form our understanding of and grappling with the overall scene.

But the stance we take towards the world when we become language-bearers is, it seems to me, antagonistic to all that. The very fact of having the word hammer necessitates, already, a framework in which there is me and the hammer — it necessitates a break from the me-world, and the establishment of a subject/object framework that underpins our conception of the world-out-there.

I contend that it is the event of language that is the break point. That is, language is what severs us from the primordial oneness that is the me-world, and establishes the subject/object framework that creates, for us, an externalised world-out-there (which we typically call, simply, the world).

What can we find in Heidegger to support this idea? Heidegger’s thinking on the way we know a hammer, or anything else, involves a tripartite model of ‘primary understanding’ that he calls fore-structure, fore-having, and fore-conception. He seems to believe that aspects of this understanding are pre-linguistic; that is, they do not depend on language. There are times when he gestures towards the idea that it is the event of language that breaks us out of primary understanding and into the subject/object model. But at other times he steps back from this. The moment of severance remains obscure.

What is more clear, though, is that Heidegger agrees that once the subject/object framework is established — whatever the cause — then language tends to further the estrangement from Dasein that this framework constitutes. Language causes us to crystallise our sense of objects as independent entities, uprooted from the network of relationships that renders them meaningful within Dasein. Language is the process that allows us isolate objects as objects, and hold them in our attention. It fuels our ability to exit engaged agency and instead undertake various forms of high-level theorising in which we become disinterested ‘knowers’ looking out to a world of independently existing entities. Heidegger refers to the ways in which language estranges us from the truth of Dasein when he talks about ‘idle talk’: language that immerses us in a theoretical, or inauthentic, versions of our being.

If we come to believe that language enacts our estrangement from Dasein, then we can see it as performing a strange and paradoxical double function. Language at once constitutes the human mode of being, and yet estranges us from that being in its most fundamental form. And because language is the very medium in which our thinking on this matter takes place, the ways in which language performs this paradoxical quality must remain mostly opaque to us. As language-bearers trying to understand the impact of language on our mode of being, we are like fish trying to understand how it feels to be wet.

We might, then, come to believe that language is best understood in the same way that physicists understand a singularity. That is, as an object at which the laws that govern our understanding of the world break down. It’s my contention that this is just how we must understand language. As the singularity at the heart of our being.

The idea that language estranges us from some deeper, primordial connection with the world is far from new. The 20th-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who spent a lifetime analysing symbolic representation and systems of meaning, believed that our experience of the world comes via symbolic systems that interpose themselves between us and reality:

‘No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves, man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.’

Nietzsche said ‘words brutalise’. The primitivist philosopher John Zerzan argues that ‘language may be properly considered the fundamental ideology, perhaps as deep a separation from the natural world as self-existent time.’

Meanwhile, latent in some of the oldest stories in our culture is the idea of language as a deep form of estrangement.

When God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he also banished them from the original, Adamic language. To leave the Garden was to forget the language of God; the ur-language that gives everything its proper name. Instead, we are cursed to use false languages of our own making — to use artificial words that do not truly refer to the world.

At the heart of European culture’s ultimate origin story, then, is a message about our estrangement from the world, and the role that language plays in that estrangement.

The Edenic harmony we’ve forgotten, and the right language associated with it — is it best understood as Dasein?

(iv)

We have travelled a long way from our central concern: virtual realities. But the terrain we’ve covered has deep implications for the emergence of virtual worlds and their impact on our relationship with this world.

How are these apparently separate topics — language as estrangement, and VR — intertwined? And what does this mean for our relationship with the world-out-there. To find out…

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 20,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

🙌 This is instalment two of The Worlds to Come, an essay from NWSH. Go here to read the first instalment, or here to listen to it in podcast form. 🙌

It’s been a while

Earlier this year I published the first instalment of an essay, The Worlds to Come.

I promised the second instalment would follow quickly. That was months ago. So this email starts with a simple message: sorry for the delay. And to all those who wrote to ask, ‘where is part two of that essay?’, thanks for keeping the faith.

What happened? In short, life happened. This newsletter was born in the depths of the pandemic; I had time on my hands. But in the first quarter of this year other commitments — including my speaking schedule — accelerated back to full speed; it caught me off guard. I’m sure many of you can relate.

Still, in the grand scheme this is a small bump in the road. Writing to you every week is a huge privilege, and I love the community we’re building together and this journey we’re on to make sense of our shared future. This newsletter remains at the heart of my plans.

I’m going to send a note soon on what to expect from NWSH in the coming months, including a plan for longform essays and the return of the shorter notes that I used to send on Sundays — I really miss writing them.

But for now, here is the second instalment of The Worlds to Come.

This essay

This is an essay about systems of representation, virtual realities, and the way we understand our place in the world.

As a reminder, it’s not the typical NWSH fare. This essay is longer and more involved, but I hope also deeper, than the weekly updates. It’s an attempt to think with philosophy about virtual worlds and their implications for our orientation to this world.

Still keen to read? To refresh your memory, here is the table of contents for the whole essay:

Introduction: On the Threshold

1. What We Have Forgotten. Humans, language, and being-in-the-world.

2. Cast Adrift. A brief history of the Gods we made, how we banished them, and where that left us.

3. Crossing Over. Virtual worlds and the leap back to enchantment.

4. Conclusion: Where Next?

The instalment you’re reading will complete Part 1, leaving Parts 2, 3, and 4 still to come. Yes, this piece of work is better described as a short book than an essay. When it’s finished I’ll put the instalments together and publish the complete text as an ebook.

Given the time elapsed since I published the first instalment, let’s start with a brief recap.

Instalment One: a recap

If want to read first instalment in its entirety, you can find it here in text form and here in podcast form.

But a short recap of that instalment follows:

Introduction:

* At the heart of this essay is a single idea: that our coming journey into virtual worlds can cause a transformation in our relationship with this world; one that can allow us to overcome nihilism, and again understand our lives as meaningful.

* On first hearing, this claim seems impossibly far-fetched. I don’t believe that we’re set to disappear into the metaverse and live happily ever after. Instead, my interest lies in what virtual worlds can show us about this world and our relationship to it.

* Specifically, I want to examine a set of more-or-less obscure relationships between virtual worlds, systems of representation, and meaning. My contention is that when these relationships are unpacked, virtual realities are shown to be the fullest realisation, or telos, of a certain orientation to the world: one that is mistaken, but that predominates among people who live inside modernity. And that because of this, our entry into virtual worlds can help us overcome that orientation and discover one that is more authentic.

Part 1: What We Have Forgotten

* We humans are language animals. Aristotle calls us zōon logon echon: the animal that seeks meaning, the animal that speaks.

* That idea is associated with another. That is, that we humans are subjective agents looking out to an external world, or a world-out-there. This idea, which we’ll call the subject/object framework, is embedded so deep in the heart of western metaphysics that it’s sometimes hard for us to see it. It underpins the modern scientific worldview, which sees us as conscious beings looking out to an external world made of atoms and energy.

* In the early 20th-century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger attacked the foundations of western metaphysics by exploding the subject/object framework. It’s not true, said Heidegger, that at heart we are subjects looking out to an independent world-out-there. Instead, the underlying truth about our existence is our inescapable unity with the world, which Heidegger called being-in-the-world, or Dasein.

* Heidegger’s collapse of the subject/object framework proved one of the most influential — and controversial — ideas in all philosophy. It sought to overturn traditional western metaphysics, depicting that discipline as one long mistake: a series of conundrums and their attempted solutions based on the false idea that what is primary about our being in the world is subject/object.

* Today, philosophers continue to build on the foundations Heidegger laid. There is even a small and growing literature that seeks to examine VR through the lens of Heidegger’s thinking. It’s that avenue of thinking that I want to head down in what follows.

* We need to go on that journey step-by-step. And the next step is to ask: if Dasein is the primordial state of affairs for we humans, then how did we end up convinced that we are subjects looking out to an objective world-out-there? The answer I’ll give is language. Language itself is the radical disruption that severs us from Dasein. This has radical consequences for our understanding of virtual worlds. Because when language estranges us from Dasein, it starts us out on a journey that finds its fullest realisation in VR.

1. What We Have Forgotten (cont…)

(iii)

When we come to understand ourselves as subjects looking out to an objective world, the unity of self and world — of Dasein — is broken. We become a disengaged ‘knower’, who must try somehow to hook up to and have knowledge of the ‘world out there’.

This is an estrangement from the underlying truth (as Heidegger would have us understand it) of self-world unity. How does this estrangement come about?

Heidegger’s answers were complex. Essentially, he believed that we become estranged from the truth of Dasein when something causes us to step back from our engaged agency and try to analyse it. That can happen when our engaged agency is interrupted by some error or fault — when, to return to our earlier example, the hammer that we are using breaks and our hammering comes to a sudden end.

What lies submerged in Heidegger’s analysis, though, is a deeper and more radical answer. It is that language itself is at the root of the processes that sever us from Dasein.

This, I should admit, is a controversial reading — some might argue a misreading — of Heidegger. It does have roots in his thinking: he writes a lot about how the misuse of language is one of the processes that estranges us from Dasein and establishes the subject/object framework. But he also says that ‘language is the house of Being’, which has widely been interpreted as meaning that language and Dasein are bound together. Overall, Heidegger’s beliefs on the relationship between language and estrangement from Dasein remain somewhat opaque, and are the subject of ongoing debate.

So why do I contend that language is the driver of our estrangement? First, we need to remember what this estrangement consists of. Dasein, or our being-in-the-world­, constitutes a fundamental unity between self and world: a me-world. In that state of affairs we don’t hold the world apart from ourselves and examine it at a distance. Rather, we are one with it in a process of engaged agency. We know a hammer not as an independent and objectively-existing object, but as part of a network of meanings that taken together form our understanding of and grappling with the overall scene.

But the stance we take towards the world when we become language-bearers is, it seems to me, antagonistic to all that. The very fact of having the word hammer necessitates, already, a framework in which there is me and the hammer — it necessitates a break from the me-world, and the establishment of a subject/object framework that underpins our conception of the world-out-there.

I contend that it is the event of language that is the break point. That is, language is what severs us from the primordial oneness that is the me-world, and establishes the subject/object framework that creates, for us, an externalised world-out-there (which we typically call, simply, the world).

What can we find in Heidegger to support this idea? Heidegger’s thinking on the way we know a hammer, or anything else, involves a tripartite model of ‘primary understanding’ that he calls fore-structure, fore-having, and fore-conception. He seems to believe that aspects of this understanding are pre-linguistic; that is, they do not depend on language. There are times when he gestures towards the idea that it is the event of language that breaks us out of primary understanding and into the subject/object model. But at other times he steps back from this. The moment of severance remains obscure.

What is more clear, though, is that Heidegger agrees that once the subject/object framework is established — whatever the cause — then language tends to further the estrangement from Dasein that this framework constitutes. Language causes us to crystallise our sense of objects as independent entities, uprooted from the network of relationships that renders them meaningful within Dasein. Language is the process that allows us isolate objects as objects, and hold them in our attention. It fuels our ability to exit engaged agency and instead undertake various forms of high-level theorising in which we become disinterested ‘knowers’ looking out to a world of independently existing entities. Heidegger refers to the ways in which language estranges us from the truth of Dasein when he talks about ‘idle talk’: language that immerses us in a theoretical, or inauthentic, versions of our being.

If we come to believe that language enacts our estrangement from Dasein, then we can see it as performing a strange and paradoxical double function. Language at once constitutes the human mode of being, and yet estranges us from that being in its most fundamental form. And because language is the very medium in which our thinking on this matter takes place, the ways in which language performs this paradoxical quality must remain mostly opaque to us. As language-bearers trying to understand the impact of language on our mode of being, we are like fish trying to understand how it feels to be wet.

We might, then, come to believe that language is best understood in the same way that physicists understand a singularity. That is, as an object at which the laws that govern our understanding of the world break down. It’s my contention that this is just how we must understand language. As the singularity at the heart of our being.

The idea that language estranges us from some deeper, primordial connection with the world is far from new. The 20th-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who spent a lifetime analysing symbolic representation and systems of meaning, believed that our experience of the world comes via symbolic systems that interpose themselves between us and reality:

‘No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves, man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.’

Nietzsche said ‘words brutalise’. The primitivist philosopher John Zerzan argues that ‘language may be properly considered the fundamental ideology, perhaps as deep a separation from the natural world as self-existent time.’

Meanwhile, latent in some of the oldest stories in our culture is the idea of language as a deep form of estrangement.

When God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he also banished them from the original, Adamic language. To leave the Garden was to forget the language of God; the ur-language that gives everything its proper name. Instead, we are cursed to use false languages of our own making — to use artificial words that do not truly refer to the world.

At the heart of European culture’s ultimate origin story, then, is a message about our estrangement from the world, and the role that language plays in that estrangement.

The Edenic harmony we’ve forgotten, and the right language associated with it — is it best understood as Dasein?

(iv)

We have travelled a long way from our central concern: virtual realities. But the terrain we’ve covered has deep implications for the emergence of virtual worlds and their impact on our relationship with this world.

How are these apparently separate topics — language as estrangement, and VR — intertwined?

When we say that language estranges us from the primordial oneness that is the me-world, what we’re saying is that a system of symbolic representation is responsible for this estrangement. VR is a system of representation, too. So if we believe that language estranges us from Dasein, then it seems reasonable to believe that virtual worlds will also have consequences for our relationship with Dasein.

It’s my contention that virtual worlds can, just as language did, shift our relationship to the me-world.

What comes next, then, is to investigate the nature of this shift. And if we’re going to do that, we need to dive deeper into the estranging properties of language. To fast-forward somewhat, the conclusion we’ll be pursuing via that investigation is that when we understand the processes via which language estranges us from Dasein, we come to see virtual worlds as the end point, or telos, of those processes. This has profound implications for the way VR can reorient our relationship with world around us.

As we’ve already seen, the idea that language is in some sense estranging is old. But what are the mechanics that underpin this estrangement? How is it exactly that language operates to estrange us from the me-world? Far less has been written on this subject, but I want to attempt an account. Specifically, I want to argue that this estrangement comes via a hidden double inversion enacted by language.

So what is the nature of this double-inversion? To start, let’s address a simple question with a complex answer. What is a word?

A word is a sign that points to something else. That something else may be an object, ‘table’, or an idea, ‘the number four’, or a sentiment, ‘thanks’.

The word-sign is made of two halves. There is the sound (in the case of a spoken word) or markings (in the case of a written word) that is the token that we pass between one another when we use the word. Then there is the concept that this token signifies.

In the late 19th-century the seminal linguist Ferdinand du Saussure articulated a formal model that captures all this. Saussure called the word’s symbolic form – the spoken word or written markings – the signifier. And the concept to which it referred the signified. The actually-existing thing to which to the word refers is the referent.

The classic Saussurean diagram of a sign, then, looks like this:

Here is a specific example dealing with the French work arbor, which means tree:

Saussure wanted to articulate the necessary structure of language as a symbolic form. Specifically, his model highlights the way that any language relies on a set of concepts, and on an agreed relationship between each concept and a specific speech sound or marking. For a word to function, all of that is needed.

Crucial to Saussure’s view of language, too, was the view that it does not merely describe our view of the world; rather, it constructs that view. Early language users did not attach speech sounds to mental concepts that already existed for them; instead, the emergence of language was a key part of the process that brought those mental concepts into being. As Saussure has it:

‘...if words had the job of representing concepts fixed in advance, one would be able to find exact equivalents for them as between one language and another. But this is not the case.’

The coming into being of language, then, means the coming into being of a set of concepts that mediate our experience of a world-out-there. Insofar as we experience ourselves as moving through a world of tables and chairs, badgers and rocketships, and all the rest, those concepts make that experience possible.

Here, then, are the briefest outlines of Saussure’s model of language; a model that exerted vast influence on so much linguistics and philosophy that came afterwards, and that still predominates today. Words are made of a signifier and a signified. Language does not merely describe a set of ordered concepts that exist pre-linguistically; rather, the event of language brings those concepts into being. In this way language does not simply describe our experience of the world-out-there; in some deep sense it brings that experience into being.

So while the me-world was a realm of direct experience, our experience of the world-out-there is mediated by concepts. And here’s the important point for our purposes: already present in that mediation are the seeds of a strange inversion.

Consider the way we typically think about the relationship between language and the world-out-there. We generally believe that the world-out-there itself is the ground on which our representations are built; that there are objects (the real) and then our representations.

But look closely at the mechanics of language as outlined by Saussure, and the nature of the inversion I’m talking about becomes clear. In order to function as part of a language system, our mental representations must become in some sense, for us, foundational; the ground against which we compare our experience of the world. Instead of telling ourselves that our representation of a table is merely like the tables we see in the real world, we look at a table in the real world and say it is merely like our representation. Our representations become prior, in some sense more real to us, than the world-out-there. This doesn’t happen become of some error or decay in the way we use language; this inversion is a property of language itself. Language depends upon a set of concepts that must become, for us, foundational: a secure ground against which we judge the world-out-there as we encounter it.

Perhaps this accounts for something of the strange, hallucinatory aspect of human experience. For we language-bearers, the world-out-there is at once an objective reality but also a kind of shadowland: a realm of signs that point back to the more foundational reality of our mental concepts.

A dimly-grasped awareness of this inversion — of the real as a domain of signs and signs as a domain of the real — runs through the history of western thought. The most famous example is one of the earliest: as we saw in the first instalment of this essay, Plato’s theory of the Ideal Forms tells us that real horses are mere shadow entities that point towards their Ideal Form counterpart in the realm of ultimate reality, which is the realm of the Forms.

Plato believed in the literal existence of the realm of Ideal Forms. We cannot join him in that belief. But doesn’t the continued power, for us, of the theory of Forms lies in its oblique articulation of the strange inversion that language enacts? An inversion that sees the world-out-there turned into a shadowrealm, which points back to the more-real domain of our mental representations.

Isn’t that the strange truth that Plato’s theory continues to whisper to us, from a distance of 2,500 years?

(v)

The phenomenon that sees our mental concepts become in some sense more real to us than the world-out-there is one part of the estranging nature of language. It is the first part of the double-inversion I want to describe.

But once the world-out-there is established, a second and related estrangement takes place. This is the second inversion. The mechanism at work here is made possible by language, but relies directly on another form of representation: iconic representation. As we’ll see, via the second inversion that iconic representation enacts we project our estrangement from the world back into the world, so that the boundaries between our representations and the real become blurred.

How does this happen?

Language is a symbolic form. That is, a form of representation in which one thing is held to stand for another. Iconic representation, on the other hand, is the use of direct pictorial representation of what is being represented; it is the form of representation in which an image of a thing is used to represent that thing.

To understand the estranging power of iconic representation, we must first understand the relationship between iconic and symbolic systems of representation. This relationship is not ordered as we tend to think.

Intuitively, we tend to feel that iconic representation comes before symbolic representation. Specifically, that iconic representation must have emerged sooner in our evolutionary history, because it is a simpler and more fundamental type of representation that would have been available to primitive humans who were yet to achieve the sophistication needed to develop symbolic forms.

In fact, both a theoretical examination of the nature of iconic and symbolic forms and a look at the actually-existing evidence leads to the opposite conclusion. Symbolic representation comes first, and provides the foundations on which iconic representation is built.

I am once again on contested ground with this claim. Mainstream semiotics has reached no definitive conclusion on whether humans first adopted iconic or symbolic representation.

This 2007 paper looks at the adoption of iconic representation by pre-school deaf children, and finds that those children do not start using iconic representation before they start using symbolic. Instead, use of iconic representation seems to kick in around the age of three, and the ability to recognise an iconic sign as such is heavily influenced by the ability to label — that is to have a word for — the referent of the sign. Other studies, say the authors, also point to the idea that use of iconic representation is tied to, and in some way dependent on, use of language.

It’s also to be noted that the earliest pre-historic cave paintings known to us are not iconic representations. Instead, they depict abstract patterns. Some scholars have even argued that the patterns are intended to stand for something; that is, that they are early forms of symbolic representation. It’s only thousands of years later, it seems, that humans started to create iconic representations of themselves and the creatures they saw around them.

This evidence is limited. But it supports the idea that iconic representation depends on language. This idea also flows from Saussure’s conviction that language is not simply a tool that allows us to describe the world-out-there as we have already found it, but instead is a lens that actively constitutes our view of that world. It’s not, then, that we have a pre-existing set of mental concepts and then language arises to attach a word to each concept. It’s that part of the arising of language is the very bringing into being, for us, of those concepts and their ordering function. Language in this view is not merely descriptive, but also constitutive.

A way to state all this is plainer language is to ask: do bisons exist for us before we are able to say the word bison?

For those who believe that language is constitutive, the answer is no. The ability to see a bison as a bison, and then to draw a picture of a bison on a cave wall, is dependent on the ordering function that language brings to our unmediated experience. Dependent, that is, on the development of a set of shared mental concepts that allow us to distinguish a bison from a not-bison. And the development of those shared concepts and the symbol-tokens that we associate with them literally is the development of language.

So, language sets the stage, as it were, for iconic representation. And this is important for our purposes, because iconic representation fuels the second part of the double-inversion we’re investigating.

This second inversion sees us take our mental concepts — the concepts that underpin language — and project them into the world-out-there in the form of iconic representations. In so doing, we create an environment populated by reproduction, by copies, and then copies of copies. Over time, and via new technologies — the printing press, photograph, video — those reproductions become ever-more sophisticated. Eventually, we find ourselves immersed in a world of reproductions that ever-more closely resemble the world-out-there. Soon enough, we arrive into a state that is highly recognisable to all of us who inhabit modernity (or, some might want to say, post-modernity): a tech-fuelled hall of mirrors in which the boundaries that separate image and reality seem to fade away. We have come to live, at that point, inside what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called hyperreality; a universe of signs that point only to one another.

To recap: first language severs us from the primordial oneness that is the me-world, and establishes a world-out-there that becomes, paradoxically, a realm of signs that point back to our mental concepts. Next, we project our mental concepts back into the world-out-there in the form of representations. Soon enough, the boundaries between the world-out-there and our representations of it start to fade away. A journey that began with language has led us to immersion in a hyperreal world of representation-reality.

It’s striking how this journey and its destination accords with Heidegger’s own descriptions of what it means to be estranged from Dasein.

When we establish the subject-object framework, said Heidegger, we externalise the world and then establish a relationship of objectification and control over it. As we can in the first instalment of this essay, objects that were once ready-at-hand — unified with us in a process of engaged agency — become merely present-at-hand: externalised and seen through a framework of ‘me’ and ‘world’

The relationship of objectification and control that results, Heidegger believed, underlies the west’s defining project. That is, a project in science and technology that sees the world as a resource over which we must achieve mastery.

Notice how this relationship of objectification and control is enacted, too, by the double inversion I’ve described and the hyper-real image-world that it leads us to. In 2022, we reproduce reality over and again with obsessive fervour, demanding reproductions that ever more closely approach our experience of the world-out-there: pictures, photographs, cinema, high-definition video. We demand access to all every part of the real at all times. From the comfort of our beds we summon a sunset, the ocean, the Sydney Harbour bridge, a fruit bat.

Today, we moderns move inside a world of representations — from TV, to Twitter, to TikTok — beyond the imagining of the earliest humans. Probably, it is beyond anything that Heidegger imagined, too.

What’s more, our gateway into that matrix is a granite-black slab no bigger than our palm. We have put the entire world in one hand, and now we can’t stop looking. Heidegger’s strange vocabulary for the subject-object framework — his talk of presence-at-hand — has achieved a new and eerie reality.

(vi)

It has been my aim in this section to identify, and anatomise, the severance from Dasein that language enacts.

Starting with the basics of language — signifier, signified, and referent — we’ve arrived into the hyper-real hall of mirrors that we moderns inhabit in 2022.

To live in this hall of mirrors is to be surrounded by phantoms. Copies of copies that are, for us, at once the real and unreal.

The copies in which we are immersed are iconic, or direct, representations. But because we are symbolic animals, it’s possible to discern in our relationship to them a submerged symbolic effect. The representations that surround us become, for us, symbols of our estrangement from the world. It seems to me that this accounts for something of the schizophrenic relationship we have with these representations. We crave them; they bring us pleasure, comfort, beauty, and endless distraction. At the same time, they leave us with an oblique feeling of emptiness.

In the next section, I want to look at that feeling and what underlies it. Specifically, I want to dive into the deep relationship between systems of representation and nihilism: the fear that no meaningful relationship exists between ourselves and the world that we find ourselves in.

That’s where we’ll take up the argument in the next instalment. But for now, thanks for reading the second instalment of The Worlds to Come.

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To Begin

This week, a firestorm broke out among artists when work created by an AI image generator won a mainstream art prize.

Also, scientists say Greenland ice melt will cause global sea levels to rise much more than previously believed. And we check back on the crypto-mad president of El Salvador and his plans to build a Bitcoin City.

Let’s go!

🖼 Machine dreams

This week, further dispatches from the ongoing collision between AI and human creativity.

US citizen Jason Allen took first prize in the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition. The catch? His winning submission was created by the AI image generation tool Midjourney. The work, called Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, won in the digital art category; Allen printed it on canvas before submitting it to the competition.

Allen says he credited his work as by ‘Jason Allen via Midjourney’. Still, the win caused a storm on Twitter, with many — including some artists — in this viral thread arguing that Allen had stolen his victory from a ‘proper’ artist.

Allen, meanwhile, says AI art is a legitimate medium. The skill, he argues, lies in the invention of prompts that generate compelling images.

Explaining the genesis of Théâtre D'opéra Spatial in the Midjourney Discord channel, Allen said: ‘I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date. I have created hundreds of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my generations, I chose my top three and had them printed on canvas.’

⚡ NWSH Take: The emergence and cultural impact of AI image generation tools is playing out at a speed that’s hard to fathom. Many will struggle with the idea that machine-generated images can be art. But it’s undeniable that interesting work is going on; look, for example, at the work being created by AI artist Rivers Have Wings, or this AI-generated, audience-guided film. Sure, these artists are not composing these works themselves. Then again, Damien Hirst didn’t put his shark in its tank himself, but we still regard him as an artist. // As Allen argued, much of the human creativity here lies in the iterative development of text prompts that give rise to interesting images. Now, we’re even seeing the emergence of prompt marketplaces, where AI artists sell effective prompts. How to understand all this? Back in New Week #92 I wrote briefly on massive language models as a radical new kind of search engine. The same idea applies here; we can think of Midjourney et al as tools that search our visual heritage and return to us new images that align with their findings. The skill, then, will lie in sending these AIs down fruitful paths. // All this is so new; we’re still at the outset of any attempt to understand the interface between human creativity and AI. But the broader question that this journey raises — how should we relate to this new form of intelligence emerging around us? — is one that we’ll only face more acutely as the decade wears on.

🌊 Oceans apart

A study published this week suggests global sea levels may be about to rise by more faster than previously believed.

Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the paper argues that 3.3% of Greenland’s total ice volume is set to melt by the end of the century, causing a global sea level rise of 10.6 inches (27cm). What’s more, this melting and associated sea level rise is now inevitable; it will still occur even if we halt the emission of all greenhouse gasses today.

Researchers studied satellite images of Greenland from between 2000 and 2019 to forecast future melt. The sea level rise predicted in the paper is over twice that previously predicted as a result of Greenland ice melt.

Dr William Colgan, from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said:

The minimum of 27cm is the sea-level rise deficit that we have accrued to date and it’s going to get paid out, no matter what we do going forward. Whether it’s coming in 100 years or 150 years, it’s coming. And the sea-level rise we are committed to is growing at present, because of the climate trajectory we’re on.

Even a one foot rise in global sea levels will have serious consequences for coastal settlements around the world, including on both US coasts. The UN says some 90% of global megacities are vulnerable to rising sea levels.

⚡ NWSH Take: Remember, according to this paper 27 centimetres is the minimum coming sea level rise we’ll see across this century. The authors of this new paper say the actual rise could be double that, or more. The consequences will be severe for coastal communities and low-lying countries. // All this taps into two emerging NWSH obsessions. First, floods as a megaforce that will do much to shape the 21st-century. That means both their destructive power, and our attempts to avoid or ameliorate it. Second, the rise of floating cities in response to that reality; back in New Week #80 I wrote about the UN’s plans to build multiple such cities around the world in partnership with superstar Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. // Floods, drought, heatwaves and wildfire — in 2022 we’ve seen historic examples of each; see the human catastrophe unspooling in Pakistan right now, or the record drought in China. They’re the manifestations of a derangement of the natural world that is starting to feel much more real than it did even five years ago. Be prepared; things are only going to get stranger and more difficult.

🤑 Back to Earth

This week, one glimpse of the human price being extracted by the current crypto-winter.

Back in November I wrote about the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and his plans to build a new Bitcoin City at the base of the Conchagua volcano. The city, said Bukele, would be tax free for residents; it would fund itself by drawing on thermal energy to fuel the mining of new bitcoin.

What could possibly go wrong?

Since November, the price of bitcoin has tanked, falling from a high of $67,000 in that month to around $20,000 today. Bukele reportedly spent $100 million on bitcoin that are now worth $48 million. Meanwhile, his decision to force citizens to accept bitcoin as legal tender now looks rash.

And this week his government announced that the forthcoming ‘bitcoin bond’ — intended to help raise money to fund the creation of Bitcoin City — has been delayed due to ‘security concerns’. If ever launched, it will be the world’s first government bond backed by bitcoin.

⚡ NWSH Take: Bitcoin and the crypto boom turned out to be unstable foundations on which to build a national economic strategy. Who would have thought it? Jokes aside, Bukele’s cryptomania has done serious damage; El Salvador’s debt has been downrated to junk status by every major credit ratings agency, making it harder for the country to borrow money. The government is reportedly running out of cash. // The collapse of Bukele’s Bitcoin City plans is a reminder of the current crypto winter. But I’m here to issue an associated, contrary reminder. That is, don’t allow your awareness of that winter — or your memories of the kind of mania that Bukele symbolises — to stray into a belief that what happened last year was all hype and nothing more. Yes, the frenzy around NFTs and the insane rise and fall of obscure cryptocurrencies had all the characteristics of a bubble. But the underlying technologies are powerful, because they unlock new ways to serve fundamental human needs: value, community, status, and more. Bitcoin City may never rise at the base of the Conchagua volcano. But crypto and other web3 technologies will be back.

🗓️ Also this week

🍽 Stanford engineers built the world’s first totally autonomous restaurant in San Francisco. Mezli serves Mediterranean-themed dishes conceived by a Michelin-star chef. Customers punch in their order at a touchscreen — Mezli say over 60,000 menu variations are possible — and the chosen ingredients are mixed, heated, and served in a bowl that customers collect from a hatch. See the end-to-end process in this video.

🌊 A fifth effort to pass a global agreement on protection of Earth’s oceans has failed. Talks on the UN High Seas Treaty, which aims to protect sea life and regulate exploitation of ocean minerals, have been going on in NYC for the last two weeks. But negotiators say they’ve been unable to agree terms.

📣 A startup has developed AI technology that can ‘erase the accents’ of people who are not native English speakers. Sanas was founded by three Stanford graduates, and offers ‘accent translation’ aimed at call centre workers in India, the Philippines, and elsewhere. But critics say the technology helps embed racial and cultural bias, and aims to make workers ‘sound white’.

💨 The world’s biggest offshore wind farm is now operational in UK waters. Hornsea 2, which lies 55 miles off the British coast, can generate enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes.

🚢 Cruise giant Royal Caribbean says it will partner with satellite internet provider Starlink to offer broadband internet on all of its cruises. The company says a test of the service ‘received tremendous positive feedback’. I have been known to comment on the damage that Starlink satellites are doing to our view of the night sky.

🏊‍♂️ The French government says it is using AI to locate undeclared swimming pools in the gardens of residential properties. In France, ownership of a swimming pool is relevant in the calculation of property taxes. The system, in use since October, has already located over 20,000 undeclared pools.

💾 The Japanese government says it will finally change laws that require businesses to save data on floppy disks. Around 1,900 government procedures currently demand that businesses use the disks; Japan’s digital minister says he is ‘declaring war’ on the outdated devices, asking ‘where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?’

🚀 NASA says it will attempt another Artemis 1 moon rocket launch on Saturday. The rocket will carry an uncrewed capsule on a 37 day mission to orbit the moon and come back to Earth. The Artemis programme seeks to establish a permanent base on the moon by the end of the decade.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,971,681,842🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7879667109

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.2%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 67% complete

📖 On this day: On 2 September 1666 the Great Fire of London starts in a bakery on Pudding Lane. The fire burns for three days, destroying much of the city.

Ways of Seeing

Thanks for reading this week.

The rise of AI image generators is seeing human creativity collide with computing power in new and compelling ways; it’s yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

This week, Google and Xiaomi deliver Big Robot Energy.

Meanwhile, a new study reveals just how much forest our planet is losing to fire. And Chinese technology giants reveal their secrets to the CCP.

Let’s get into it!

🤖 OK robot

This week, technology companies continued to usher us all towards a robot revolution.

Google opened the door on research that marries two cutting-edge technologies: its massive AI language model, PaLM, and the hardware taking shape inside its Everyday Robots division. They’re calling the combined system PaLM-SayCan.

The result are robots that can understand novel and unstructured commands — I spilled my orange soda, can you throw it away please? — and then enact an appropriate response.

Google say this is the first time robots have been brought together with cutting-edge language models.

Meanwhile, Chinese tech giant Xiaomi unveiled a humanoid robot called CyberOne. The device stands five feet and seven inches and appeared at a Xiaomi event in Beijing this week, where it waddled towards founder and CEO Lei Jun:

It seems CyberOne can do little more than walk (which is far from nothing); a Xiaomi press release calls the robot, ‘a symbol of Xiaomi’s dedication to incubate a technological ecosystem’.

⚡ NWSH Take: Natural language models and robots; it was only a matter of time before they collided. Google’s work on this is still embryonic. When one of the Everyday Robots fetches a can of soda it is, currently, a painstaking affair. But this research could one day deliver the kind of all-purpose, conversationally competent helper robot that my generation was promised by The Jetsons; ok Googlebot, load the dishwasher. Before we embrace that future, though, we need to ask: what kind of helper robots will truly set us free? And what kind will only serve, in the end, to wrap us in new constraints? Read Our Coming Robot Utopia for more on that. // Meanwhile Xiaomi’s big ta-da this week is a sign of the robot wars to come. Observers didn’t fail to notice that CyberOne is a clone of Tesla’s much-trailed Optimus robot, which Elon Musk promised would be unveiled this September. The robots are too similar, and the dates are too close, for all this to be a coincidence — looks like Lei Jun was determined to beat Elon to the punch. But in the coming war to own the all-purpose robot space, the fighting will only get fiercer.

🌳 Ever decreasing circles

A new paper this week gives a shocking view of the impact of wildfires on trees.

Researchers at the University of Maryland used historical satellite images to analyse loss of forests by fire. The resulting study, released via Global Forest Watch, is the most detailed look ever produced at the impact of fires on forests around the world.

It reveals that the amount of forest lost to fire annually has doubled across the last 20 years. This includes forest lost both to wildfires and fires that were intentionally set. In the visualisation below, pay particular attention to Russia and north America:

In 2021, 9 million hectares of forest burned; that amounts to an area the size of Portugal, or 16 football pitches every minute.

Global Forest Watch say climate change, and a resulting increase in wildfires, is behind the change.

⚡ NWSH Take: It’s almost as if the natural environment is a complex system in which everything is connected to everything else. Okay, enough sarcasm. But this news is a perfect example of the sorts of dark feedback loops we’ll witness ever more often as the century wears on. A hotter planet means more fires, which means fewer trees, which means more a hotter planet, and round we go again. // Another dark loop? Pair this news with further revelations this week that Antarctica’s ice shelves may be melting faster than previously believed. This melting renders the Antarctic less reflective, thereby accelerating heating. // These kinds of feedback loops, which spiral rapidly once triggered, are one reason why modelling the impacts of a heated planet is so hard. There are already reasons to believe that they’re causing global temperatures to rise faster than expected, and fuelling more extreme weather than we thought we’d face in 2022. NWSH will keep watching.

🧮 Algorithms for the people

This week, a raft of Chinese technology giants let central government peer into the inner-workings of their most secret algorithms.

Companies including TikTok, Baidu, and Tencent were responding to new laws that require them to share their algorithmic secret sauce with the all-powerful internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China.

The move towards total oversight of the most powerful online algorithms — which shape the viewing, reading, and purchasing of billions — has no parallel in the Global North. Want to know how Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) recommends videos? How Alibaba pushes products? The CCP now does know this, and a whole lot more.

Via a strange coincidence, this week also saw US tech company Oracle began an audit of TikTok’s algorithms and content moderation practises, to ensure they aren’t being manipulated by the Chinese authorities.

TikTok routes its data through Oracle’s cloud services; it is submitting to the audit as part of an initiative intended to reassure US lawmakers that its social video platform is not under the secret control of the CCP. Last week I covered new data from Pew Research that revealed that 67% of US teens say they’ve used TikTok.

⚡ NWSH Take: Two stories, two views of the ongoing collision between governmental and algorithmic power. // China’s move on oversight is underlain by a truth that has long been clear: the CCP is not going to allow technology platforms to continue to amass vast and unaccountable power the way they have in the Global North. Instead, via a form of regulatory jiu jitsu, they’re going to harness that power and use it to strengthen their hold over the tech barons and everyone else. It’s all part of their plan to build a never-before seen form of techno-authoritarianism, which I wrote about in Algorithms With Chinese Characteristics, and which will see big tech platforms forced to share user data with central government. // Meanwhile, Oracle’s audit of TikTok is an early example of the emerging geopolitics of algorithms. For years TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, promised that data from the US app was not accessible in China; in June it finally admitted that some data had been sent to China. Now, US senators want assurance that the platform is not an indirect spy/soft power vehicle for the CCP. As China becomes more globally assertive, expect the Global North to impose more checks on Chinese-grown tech companies; this process is part of what will lead us further towards the splinternet.

🗓️ Also this week

🖼 This viral Twitter thread asked: if an AI image generator is trained on work by living artists, should those artists be compensated? A new AI called Stable Diffusion boasts the ability to emulate the style of a wide range of contemporary artists; this raises the possibility, says the thread, that those artists will lose out on commissions. This newsletter is obsessed with the intersection between AI and the creative life; see, for example, New Week #21 and the story of late Korean singer Kim Kwang-seok.

👨‍💻 Apple says (again) that employees must come back to the office at least three days per week. The memo from CEO Tim Cook says the shift will start next month, and that employees must come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A previous memo called employees back in May, but it was ‘paused’ after widespread internal dissent.

🛫 American Airlines says it will buy 20 supersonic passenger jets from US startup Boom Supersonic. Boom says its Overture jet will be able to fly from London to NYC in three-and-a-half hours; roll out of the jets is expected in 2026.

🏠 Amazon will launch a TV clips show that features footage from its Ring doorbells. Ring Nation will be presented by comedian Wanda Sykes, and will features clips drawn from Ring doorbells across the US. Expect ‘neighbours saving neighbours, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals’. LOL.

🥳 Airbnb says it will use ‘anti-party technology’ to stop people from booking properties so they can use them for a party. The new screening system looks at a user’s booking history, place of residence, and other factors to attempt to screen out party animals.

🐯 A US startup plans to resurrect the iconic and long-extinct Tasmanian tiger. The last known Tasmanian tiger died in 1936; now Colossal Biosciences says it will work to resurrect the creature and reintroduce it to selected locations on the Australian mainland. Back in New Week #52 I first wrote about Colossal and their quest to bring back the woolly mammoth.

🌊 The risk of a catastrophic ‘megaflood’ in California has doubled due to climate change, according to new study. UCLA researchers used high resolution climate modelling to assess the risk of an event as severe as the state’s 1862 Great Flood. Meanwhile, California is currently experiencing one of the worst droughts in its history. Back in New Week #92 I wrote about floods as a megaforce that will shape the 21st-century.

🤯 Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann’s new real estate company, Flow, has received a $350 million investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Neumann left WeWork in 2019 after a failed IPO exposed a chaotic internal culture and saw the company’s valuation collapse. Andreessen’s investment in Flow is the single largest cheque it has ever written; in a press release Marc Andreessen called Neumann a ‘visionary leader’. The press release made no mention of Neumann’s other project, a crypto startup called Flowcarbon, which received a $70 million investment earlier this year. That project is now reported to be paused.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,968,508,852🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7870799982

💉 Global population vaccinated: 62.0%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 63% complete

📖 On this day: On 19 August 1848 the New York Herald breaks news of the California Gold Rush, which had begun in January of that year.

Beep Bop Boop

Thanks for reading this week.

The coming home robot revolution — and the trade offs it will present to us — are a classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of what it means for our shared future. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

This week, tech giant NVIDIA launch a new tool that empowers users to build their own AI-fuelled avatars.

Meanwhile, Europe’s exceptionally hot and dry summer is a troubling signal of what lies ahead. And biometrics are creeping ever deeper into our lives, courtesy of Amazon, the US government, and others.

Let’s go!

🦸‍♂️ Avatars assemble

This week, another onrush of metaverse news.

US tech giant NVIDIA launched their new Avatar Cloud Engine, a cloud-based toolkit that help users build their own ultra-realistic virtual humans.

The tools form part of NVIDIA’s Omniverse Avatar platform, which I wrote about back in New Week #60; they’re intended to democratise access to the massive computing power needed to build AI-fuelled avatars.

NVIDIA, then, continue to double-down on their vision of a consumer arena filled with virtual humans that can play a wide range of roles, from drive-thru staff, to customer service assistants, to counsellors.

Meanwhile, headlines were generated this week by the ongoing land price crash inside popular metaversal worlds. The average price of land sold in Decentraland peaked at $37,238 in February; by 1 August that had fallen to just $5,163. The drop prompted Business Insider to announce that ‘the metaverse hype seems to be fading’.

⚡ NWSH Take: Two metaverse stories; two contradictory messages. NVIDIA is investing heavily in a strategy founded on the idea that virtual worlds — and virtual humans — will soon be a part of all our lives; for more on that see Kim Kardashian, Virtual Humans, and How Weird Becomes Mainstream. Meanwhile, some technology journalists are rushing to argue that the metaverse bubble has burst. What’s going on? // What bedevils so much discussion of the metaverse right now is the lack of any clear definition. In particular, this week’s suggestion that the metaverse was maybe just hype all along is founded on a set of overlapping and wrong ideas. // The metaverse isn’t Decentraland or Roblox. Instead, as Tim O’Reilly argued this week, the metaverse is best understood not as a place but as a medium. I’ve come to think of it as the emergence of a new kind of internet; one in which people are having experiences that are as meaningful to them, in some sense as real to them, as the experiences they have IRL. // Internalise this definition, and the complexion of the land price story changes. Back in the early days of the web, brands such as Netscape and AltaVista peaked and then flamed out. We’ll see the same with key metaverse platforms in the 2020s. But the medium itself is here to stay, because — just as with the internet — it unlocks powerful new ways to serve fundamental human needs.

🏞 Take me to the river

Here in the UK we’re entering another heatwave, just three weeks after temperature records were shattered across the country.

This week, new satellite images showed the toll this heat has taken; vast swathes of the UK have been reduced to a charred yellow that is exceptional even for the height of summer:

Anecdotally, I can relate: I live close to a large grass heath in southeast London, and I’ve never seen it so battered by heat.

A madly hot and dry summer means many rivers in central and southern England are running exceptionally low.

And recent satellite images show the same is true across much of mainland Europe; see these images, for example, that show the river Po in Italy is close to drying up in places. Northern Italy is currently experiencing its worst drought for more than 50 years. Meanwhile, Spain is experiencing a prolonged dry spell that has seen reservoirs ‘hit rock bottom’. Check out this Twitter thread for a rundown of the many ways the insane heat has disrupted Europe this summer.

This week the head of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, warned that the economic impacts of climate change will come to dwarf those of the current energy crisis.

⚡ NWSH Take: This newsletter has harped on, recently, about the coming reality that is adaptation to a heated world. Regular readers can no doubt recite the central argument: the 1.5C target is out of reach, and adaptation is our last and only option. // But the welter of satellite images depicting a climate-deranged Europe in recent weeks are a reminder that adaptation will prove far easier to talk about than it will to enact. The cartoon version of a climate-doom future is one in which it wipes out humanity, or something close. That’s possible, but unlikely; for a deeper investigation see this new paper from University of Cambridge researchers, which argues that we haven’t done enough to investigate the possibility of catastrophic heating. But I’m increasingly convinced that our current energy woes are only a foreshock that signals the coming of a mighty earthquake: a WWII-level economic and social convulsion that shreds agriculture, energy, transport and more. // If that turns out to be the case, then the only way out will be through. We need to ready ourselves collectively and individually for what is coming. And we need to start thinking about what we want our societies to look like, who we want to be, when we get to the other side.

🤚 Hand it to you

Three stories combined this week to form a signal of a coming age of biometrics.

Amazon announced that it will bring Amazon One palm-scanning payment devices to 65 Whole Food stores in California — the biggest roll-out of the technology so far. The device requires that users first link a scan of their palm to a payment card; last year a group of US senators sent a letter to CEO Andy Jassy asking for clarity on how Amazon plans to store palm scans, and how else it might use them.

Meanwhile, the UK Home Office said it will soon require migrants convicted of crimes to scan their faces up to five times a day. These migrants will wear smartwatches equipped with facial recognition technology, which will also track their location 24/7.

And finally, news emerged this week that several cities in the US are rolling back previous bans on use of facial recognition by police. New Orleans, for example, instituted a ban in 2020, but decided in July to change course and allow police to use the technology when investigating violent crime. A similar ban was issued in California in 2020; it’s due to expire this year and attempts to make it permanent have failed.

⚡ NWSH Take: There’s nothing entirely new going on here; rather, this is a story about slow accumulation. Biometrics have crept their way into daily life across the last decade; a staging post was crossed when many of us began to access our phones via facial recognition. // But these happenings are a signal of how early we are in that story — of how much deeper biometrics are set to weave themselves into the fabric of our lives in the 2020s. Two fundamental human impulses are driving all this. On the consumer side, it’s the impulse towards convenience; Amazon One is just the latest in a long line of innovations intended to make shopping as easy as breathing. On the organisational side — that means business and government — it’s the impulse towards control. Amazon wants to know everything about you, so it can leverage that knowledge to shape your behaviours and make you predictable. Data is the key that unlocks this knowledge; see also Amazon’s $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, makers of the in-home Roomba robot vacuum. // Underlying all this is a deeper question. How much of our freedom are we willing to give up for yet more convenience? Across the last two decades, and step by step, we’ve acquiesced to a settlement with Big Tech that allows them vast oversight of our lives, and huge unaccountable power. But there’s still time to remake this settlement — to put the break on biometrics — if we can muster the collective will. For more, revisit The Tyranny of Convenience.

🗓️ Also this week

☀️ NWSH reader Giulia Camargo created an online tool that allows users to calculate how much energy and money they’ll save if they turn down their AC. The tool is a response to last week’s new directive in Spain, which bans public spaces from setting the AC below 27C.

👨‍⚕️ TikTok parent company ByteDance paid $1.5 billion for China-based Amcare Healthcare. Founded in Beijing in 2006, the company offers private medical services and operates hospitals. ByteDance didn’t elaborate on this expansion into healthcare. But it comes weeks after Amazon’s $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical.

🚲 Food delivery company Deliveroo says it may leave the Netherlands. The company cites poor results in the country. But regulatory changes are also shaping the company’s future; the EU is mulling new regulation of gig economy platforms that would see many of their workers recognised as full employees.

🚕 Chinese tech giant Baidu has gained permission to run driverless taxis in Wuhan and Chongqing without a safety driver in the car. This marks the first time permits have been issued for fully driverless cars on Chinese roads. Also this week, video emerged showing a driverless Tesla ploughing through a cardboard-cutout child in a safety test. It’s unclear whether Tesla’s self-driving technology was in operation during the test.

📱 The number of US teens who say they are online ‘almost constantly’ has doubled since 2014. According to Pew Research, back in 2014 only 24% of teens reported spending most of their time online; now that figure is 46%. YouTube was the most popular platform among respondents, used by 95%; TikTok came second, with 67% of US teens saying they use it.

🤖 Meta launched Atlas, a new AI language model that outperforms much larger models on question answering and fact checking tasks. Atlas is augmented by a knowledge base that it can search to help it handle factual questions.

⚖️ A US federal judge says AIs cannot hold patents. In a case involving computer scientist Stephen Thaler and his quest to assign patents to AIs he has created, Judge Leonard P. Stark noted that US law is clear that only people can hold patents.

🤩 Virtual reality can cause experiences of transcendence that mimic those caused by LSD according to a new study. A VR experience called Isness-D produced the same effects as a medium dose of LSD on four key response indicators commonly used in studies of the drug. The experience sees participants take the form of a cloud with a ball of light at its centre.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,966,973,562🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7866509248

💉 Global population vaccinated: 61.9%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 61% complete

📖 On this day: On 12 August 1981 the IBM Personal Computer is released. The first microcomputer in the IBM PC line, it sets the template for the personal computing revolution of the 1980s and 90s.

Face to Face

Thanks for reading this week.

The creep of biometrics technologies into our lives is a slow-motion collision between new technologies and age-old human needs. A classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of it all. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

To Begin

This week’s New Week comes a little late; but it’s a packed instalment.

US energy startup Nuscale Power took a big stride towards the deployment of a revolutionary new kind of nuclear reactor. But where should we all stand on the rise (again) of nuclear?

Meanwhile, AI image generator Midjourney signals the emergence of a new form of creativity. And the life sciences take a Frankenstein’s monster turn via two recent advances.

Let’s get into it. And remember, you can now listen to an audio version of New Week; just scroll up and hit play!

💥 More power

Nuclear power, and the role it should play in our shared future, has roared back on to the global agenda. This week, more news.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Agency certified the first small, modular nuclear reactor. Why is this a big deal? It’s hoped modular reactors can transform our race to decarbonise, because they’re far cheaper and quicker to build than traditional nuclear plants. Oregon-based Nuscale Power’s VOYGR reactor can be mass produced at a central HQ, and then shipped and assembled on-site; the reactor provides enough carbon-free energy to power 60,000 homes.

Nuscale admit that they’re years away from being ready to deploy VOYGR. And they’re racing with other nuclear power startups, including Radiant, to own the space.

Meanwhile, the increasingly acute debate around nuclear — should we lean in or lean out? — found voice in this fascinating Twitter thread:

The author argues that the slow down in real-world (rather than digital) innovation across the last 30 years can be traced back to the neglect or abandonment of nuclear. According to this argument, we deprived ourselves of a near-infinite supply of clean energy and harvested stagnation. It’s an assessment that many leading progress advocates, including Marc Andreessen, share.

⚡ NWSH Take: Some context here: all this comes amid news this week that global use of coal is now expected to return to the record levels set in 2013. We urgently need answers. // But the Twitter thread above taps into the central debate. Should we see reticence around nuclear across the last 30 years as a historic error, and now go all-out to reverse that mistake? Or is nuclear too risky and environmentally disruptive to form the basis of our energy strategy? // Your answer to these questions tends to depend on where you stand on a set of deeper issues. Specifically, issues around growth, the meaning of progress, and the nature of the human wellbeing. Should we remain committed to a path of ever-spiralling material advancement? Or is real progress an acceptance that we should degrow our economies and scale down our energy needs — as one NWSH community member put it, ‘change our mindset and re-think the way we live’?// There is no single right answer. The question reflects two deep, and contradictory, aspects of our nature: the part in all of us that wants to transcend all human and natural limits, and the part that wants to exist in harmony with those limits. The tension between those two impulses will continue to shape the debate on energy, and on the 21st-century more broadly. I’ll be writing more on this soon.

🖼 Machine dreams

This week, new visions from the fast-moving world of AI-generated images.

While most attention has focused on OpenAI’s DALLE-2, others have quietly been building a position. Midjourney is an AI image generator with a difference; it’s accessed via an invite-only Discord community, where users share ideas for text prompts. This week, the startup broadened access; anyone can now set up their own Discord and plug in a Midjourney bot.

The tool has its own distinctive style:

At the heart of Midjourney’s vision, says founder David Holz, is of AI not as a replacement for but as an amplifier of human creativity; Holz calls his creation, ‘an engine for the imagination’.

That’s why, he says, placing the tool in a community context — where people can build and refine on each other’s ideas — is so crucial:

‘If you put people in a group, they’ll go “dog” and someone else will go “space dog” and someone else will go “Aztec space dog,” and then all of a sudden, people understand the possibilities, and you’re creating this augmented imagination — an environment where people can learn and play with this new capacity.’

⚡ NWSH Take: The AI image space is racing right now. Only last month DALLE-2 opened beta access, and Meta showcased its own tool, Make-A-Scene, which allows the user to create a simple sketch that will be enriched by AI. // Midjourney won’t reveal their tech stack, but the tool is almost certainly based on one of the available massive language models, such as GPT-3. But the really interesting aspect of Midjourney isn’t the stack, it’s the vision: of a new form of augmented creativity that sees humans amplified by AI. In this way Midjourney reminds me of Botto, another AI-fuelled art project that attempts an innovative fusion of human and machine intelligence. // We’ve tended to think it would be routine-task jobs that would be disrupted by AI first. The rise of DALLE, Midjourney et al raises a quite different possibility; perhaps it’s human creativity that will be the first domain to be transformed. The images created by Midjourney have a beauty all of their own; jobs such graphic design, illustration, and brand design will surely be revolutionised by these tools in the coming decades. But the possibilities stretch further. It feels, right now, that a new kind of art is taking shape before our eyes. One in which we use machine intelligence to feed our view of the world back to us in strange, defamiliarised, hallucinatory form. NWSH will keep watching.

🔬Dead or alive

This week, two experimental advances offer a glimpse of the revolution being enacted in the life sciences.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel announced the world’s first ‘synthetic embryos’, created via mouse stem cells that were made to self-assemble into proto-embryonic structures. In other words, the creation of an embryo without the fertilisation of an egg.

Meanwhile, scientists at Yale University brought the cells of dead pigs back to life. Flooding the bodies of the pigs — which had been dead for an hour — with a nutrient-rich substance caused a reversal of some cell damage, and new cell activity throughout the body. Vital organs, including the heart, liver, and kidneys, began to work again.

The findings, say the scientists, may lead us to question what we mean by dead. Professor Nenad Sestan, lead scientist on the study:

‘The demise of cells can be halted…This progression toward massive permanent cell failure, that does not happen so quickly that it cannot be averted, or possibly corrected…Even one hour after death.’

⚡ NWSH Take: There’s an undeniable Frankenstein’s monster feel to both these experiments. But the work that underlies them could have transformational real-world impacts. Both, for example, could revolutionise organ transplants. Synthetic embryos may eventually allow us to grow new human organs in the lab. Meanwhile, the Yale technique may allow us to keep existing human organs alive for longer, increasing the time window during which transplants are possible. // At the heart of both projects, though, are ethical questions: where are the boundaries between life and death? When is it permissible to create life; when is it permissible to take it away? We’re a long way from the creation of synthetic human embryos. But if our experience of digital innovation across the last two decades has taught us anything, it’s that we need to start thinking through the ethical and social implications of emerging technologies long before they hit the ground. In this case, the time is now.

🗓️ Also this week

👾 A new Danish political party, which used AI to create its policies, says it wants to run in the country’s general election in 2023. The Synthetic Party used AI to analyse the manifestos of all Danish non-mainstream political parties across the last 50 years to create a manifesto that it hopes will appeal to the 15% of eligible Danes who didn’t vote in the 2019 election. The project, which is the creation of digital art collective Computer Lars, says it will run its first public event in September.

🌡 Spain has made it illegal to set air conditioning lower than 27C in public spaces. Offices, shops, bars and theatres are all covered by the new law, which comes into effect at a time of sky-rocketing energy prices in Europe. In other AC news, Bill Gates led a $20 million investment round in clean AC startup Blue Frontier.

👨‍🏫 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology says it will launch a campus in the metaverse. The institution will launch virtual replicas of its two main physical locations — which are in Hong Kong and Guangzhou — built on a bespoke platform called MetaHKUST. Back in New Week #91 I wrote about the race to simulate real-world locations and experiences in virtual worlds.

💸 A UK citizen wants robots to find the £150 million bitcoin hard drive that he accidentally threw away. James Howells threw the drive away in 2013; he’s now hatched a plan to use robots and AI to scour the landfill site where he believes the drive can be found. But he’s being denied permission by the local council, who say disturbing he landfill will pose an ecological risk.

👨‍⚕️ A VR environment helped surgeons in Brazil perform surgery to separate twins who were joined at the head. Surgeons in Rio de Janeiro worked alongside surgeons from Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, in the same virtual environment, to perform the 27-hour operation described as ‘one of the most complex separation processes ever completed’.

🚚 Amazon’s latest Sustainability Report shows that its CO2 emissions are accelerating rapidly. Carbon emissions climbed by 18% on 2020 levels, according to the report. In 2019, Jeff Bezos announced that the company would aim for net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2040.

🧮 Researchers at MIT used an AI to create new university-level maths problems. When students were presented with a range of maths problems, they were unable to sort those created by the AI from those created by human teachers. The AI can also generate explanations that show how to solve the problems it sets.

🌌 Scientists detected dark matter that existed around galaxies 12 billion years ago — that’s just 2 billion years after the Big Bang. Researchers at Japan's Nagoya University say we’ve never detected the presence of dark matter so soon after the birth of the universe. The work could change our understanding of how galaxies evolved. Dark matter is a mysterious form of invisible matter that, scientists theorise, stops galaxies flying apart. But the question still remains: what, exactly, is it?

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,965,455,247🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7862266128

💉 Global population vaccinated: 61.7%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 59% complete

📖 On this day: On 6 August 1991 Tim Berners-Lee releases a series of files describing the creation of a World Wide Web.

Infinte Frontier

Thanks for reading this week.

The rising debate around nuclear spans both new technologies and eternal contradictions in our nature. A classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of it all. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 22,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

🎧 Listen to New Week! 🎧

As you may have noticed above, this instalment of New Week comes with something added. Across the last few months many of you have written to ask me to record these newsletters as a podcast.

Starting from this week, every instalment will come to you in both text and audio form. To hear the podcast version simply scroll up and hit Listen Now.

I’ll be adding the podcast to Apple Podcasts and Spotify ASAP, too.

Happy listening!

🙌 To Begin

I put this newsletter on pause last week, and headed to the English coast with my family.

We picked the right week to be by the ocean. The UK experienced a brief but acute heatwave that saw records broken across the land. Temperatures in the southeast reached 40.3C: the first time England has broken 40C since records began in 1853. I’ve never been so grateful for a cooling sea breeze.

As one climate expert put it: ‘it’s time for the UK to stop thinking of itself as a cold country’.

More on the changing climate this week, via startling new images that show the extent of glacier melt in Greenland.

Meanwhile, Meta and Apple go to war for the future of the internet. And Saudi Arabia unveils new plans for its hyper-futuristic NEOM megacity.

Let’s go!

💥 Internet wars

This week, a constellation of tech stories reveals an underlying truth: the old internet is dying, and a new one is struggling to be born.

Meta announced a coming overhaul in the way Facebook surfaces content to users. The platform will deprioritise posts shared by family and friends, and instead become an algorithmically-driven jukebox of video and other content from around the world. In other words, we need to do something about TikTok.

That’s Zuckerberg’s short-term plan for the platform that made his fortune. Meanwhile, leaked recordings from a recent Meta all-hands meeting gave a glimpse of his long-term thinking. The company is, he told staff, ‘in deep competition’ with Apple to determine the future of the metaverse.

At the heart of that war? The old battle between open and closed. Apple want One Metaverse to Rule Them All, which they control end-to-end. Zuckerberg wants to build the platform on which a million metaversal worlds can bloom:

‘They believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating, that they build a better consumer experience. We’re approaching this in an open way and trying to build a more open ecosystem…We’re want to develop the metaverse in a way where you can bring your virtual goods from one world to another…It’s a very deep, philosophical competition about what direction the internet should go in.’

Finally, Google asserted its claim for consideration when it comes to the war for the future of the metaverse. The company announced that it will start a small public trial of its prototype AR glasses. No one mention Google Glass.

⚡ NWSH Take: Facebook built its business — and a philosophy of its own — on the social graph. Now, it’s overturning that in favour of algorithmically-selected entertainment. Meanwhile, the once unthinkable is happening: Google’s search business no longer looks untouchable. // Put it all together and it’s clear: web 2.0 as we’ve known for the last 15 years — built on social profiles and text-box search — is starting to fade away. Rising numbers use WhatsApp, Snap, et al, for sharing media with friends, and TikTok for entertainment. Google’s internal data shows young people are increasingly using TikTok for search, too. // So what comes next? Zuckerberg is clear: the metaverse. He’s betting the company on the idea that Meta can be the open ecosystem for this next iteration of the internet. // Less talked about is the future of search. TikTok will continue to haunt Google. But another emerging shift? One way to think about GPT-3 and other massive language models is as knowledge processors: machines that read the entire internet and spew out congruent text. As, in other words a radical new kind of search engine. Look at, for example, the new Hello Cognition, a language model-powered search engine for developers. Seen this way, the future of search is conversational virtual companions that bring users the answers, context, and creativity they need.

🌊 Rising tides

Satellite images released this week capture a supermassive glacier meltdown event in Greenland.

In the middle of July, Greenland experienced crazy heat. Temperatures averaged around 15.5C; that’s 10 degrees hotter than the average for this time of year.

The result? Massive meltdown across Greenland’s ice sheet. Between 15 and 17 July the country lost 18 billion tonnes of water; that’s enough to cover England in water roughly half a foot deep. And it didn’t stop there. A satellite from the EU’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme captured vast streams of run-off water travelling towards the ocean on 23 July, at the height of the melting.

Scientists say the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. They warn that events such as this will trigger a dark feedback loop that makes Greenland less reflective, and so more prone to melting.

Last August, it rained at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet for the first time in recorded history.

⚡ NWSH Take: These events speak for themselves. But see this meltdown in light of a recent paper in Nature Communications that found that one in four of the world’s population, or 1.8 billion people, are now at risk of severe flooding. A full 90% live in low or middle income countries. Floods will be a mega-force that do much to shape this century. // Amid this news, how is progress on decarbonisation going? One snippet: Germany is firing up new coal plants to deal with reduced gas supplies from Russia. As NWSH has argued repeatedly, the 1.5C heating target is no longer available. It’s beyond time to start adaptation to a beyond 1.5C world. // One dimension? As waters encroach on coastal settlements, floating cities may well become the most important architectural innovation for the next 100 years. Back in New Week #80 I wrote about the UN is partnering with superstar architect Bjarke Ingels on a plan to cover the globe in just those kinds of cities.

🌆 The hard line

Saudi Arabia plans to build a hyper-futuristic city in the desert that it calls NEOM. This week, it for the first time made clear what lies at the heart of those plans.

A slick PR video unveiled The Line: a glass skyscraper that is 500 metres high and 200 metres wide, and will stretch for 170 kilometres across the northwest of the country, close to the Red Sea.

This skyscraper megacity contains ‘a series of unique communities’, and inhabitants will be able to get from one end of the city to another in just 20 minutes – presumably via some kind of bullet train. AI will manage infrastructure, micro-climate, and other environmental factors.

The result, says the Kingdom, is a carbon-neutral and smart city utopia for the 21st-century; or as they modestly put it, ‘a revolution in civilisation’.

⚡ NWSH Take: As I highlighted back in New Week #61, Saudi Arabia has been talking about NEOM since 2017. The Line is just the latest instalment in a Jetsons-esque series of promises, which include flying cars, a Jurassic Park full of robo-dinosaurs, and a giant artificial moon. Unsurprisingly, some — including NWSH — are sceptical that these plans will ever be enacted. // NEOM is best thought of at the moment as a vast PR project in megacity vapourware, intended to help rebrand The Kingdom; less repressive regime and more futuristic utopia with solarpunk undertones. The plans are the work of a raft of western consultancy and design firms, including McKinsey, Edelman, and Boston Consulting Group, who are no doubt charging several fortunes for their work. // So the underlying questions here? Why is it that the Global North’s futures and technology expertise is being deployed to whitewash the record of one of the world’s most repressive regimes? How can we unlock and enact NEOM-level innovation in the Global North, rather than the stagnation we’ve seen in atom-innovation across the last 30 years? Does anyone out there, from MBS down, really believe The Line will get built? NWSH will keep watching.

🗓️ Also this week

🤖 The CEO of McDonald’s says robots won’t be taking over the company’s kitchens any time soon. In an earnings call, Chris Kempczinski said the business continues to suffer staff shortages, but that kitchen robots ‘are not practical in the vast majority of restaurants; the economics don’t pencil out’. If you’re wondering why automation hasn’t yet liberated many humans from routine physical work, here’s one answer: we’ve pushed wages so low that it’s cheaper for businesses to keep paying people than it is to invest in automation technologies.

🏊‍♂️ A drone lifeguard saved a 14-year-old boy from drowning the sea in Spain. Footage from the drone shows it hovering over the boy and dropping a life vest in the water. Remotely piloted drones, supplied by a startup called General Drones, have been rolled out across beaches in Spain to support human lifeguards.

💥 Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the world needs an AI deterrence agreement. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Schmidt likened the destructive potential of AI to that of nuclear weapons, and argued that the US and China should sign a pact that outlaws aggressive uses of the technology.

🚗 Porsche says its EVs will soon be more profitable than its petrol cars. Chief financial officer Lutz Meschke says internal projections show the profit margin on EVs will overtake that on petrol cars in around two years.

🛰 Russia says it will end its collaboration with NASA on the International Space Station in 2024. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, says it will build its own space station and operate it independently of the US.

👨‍⚕️ Amazon says it will acquire the US subscription-based healthcare provider One Medical for $3.9 billion. Users of One Medical get access to a 24/7 health service via an app, as well as same or next day appointments at one of 125 offices across the US.

🧬 A new research paper says CRISPR gene editing may cause damage that promotes cancer. Published in Nature Biotechnology, the paper says CRISPR can cause loss of genetic material that damages the genome, and may lead to cell mutations. The authors say more research is needed.

🚕 Chinese tech giant Baidu will roll out 100,000 robo-taxis across the next few years. The company unveiled its new Apollo RT6 self-driving car this week. Currently, Chinese law requires the presence of a safety driver in all self-driving cars. Meanwhile, the CCP tightened laws that force ride-hailing companies to share their data with the government. In Algorithms with Chinese Characteristics I wrote on the CCP’s push to create a new form of AI-fuelled techno-authoritarianism.

🌍 Humans of Earth

Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.

🙋 Global population: 7,963,684,932🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8142855076

💉 Global population vaccinated: 61.5%

🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 57% complete

📖 On this day: On 29 July 1987 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signs an agreement with French President François Mitterrand to build a tunnel underneath the English Channel to connect their countries.

The Future is Ours

Thanks for reading this week.

The war to own the future of the internet is just getting started. The Zuck, Apple’s Tim Cook and others will duke it out in a process that will see new technologies collide with the age-old impulse towards power. A classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep watching, and working to make sense of what it all means for our shared future. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on next week. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.

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This instalment marks a turning point for NWSH. It’s the last Sunday note in its current form.

As I mentioned in last week’s New Beginnings, I’m moving to a new format: instead of the note each Sunday, longer essays published once a month. It’s time to go deeper on the big ideas that have always informed the Sunday instalment, and a monthly cadence will allow that.

To learn more, hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Launching Monthly Essays.

Signing off

Thanks for listening this week. And be well,

David.

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I love this season, because it whispers to us all about new beginnings. A whole new year; what are you going to do with it?

Over the break, then, I sat with that question. In practice, that meant thinking a lot about the future of NWSH.

In this instalment, I want to share some of my conclusions. That means this instalment is a bit inside-baseball, but I hope its valuable. I want to bring you all with me on the road ahead, and that means sharing my thinking on where we’re going and why.

The headline: it’s been an amazing journey so far, but we’re still at the beginning. In 2022, NWSH will double down on the project that’s always been at its heart.

Hit play!

And if you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New Beginnings.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. In 2022, as Gramsci observed of his own society in the early 1930s, ‘the old is dying, but the new cannot yet be born’.

2. I’d love to hear what you think of all this; the good and the bad. And most of all, I hope you’re dreaming up your own new beginnings for 2022 and beyond. If you want to share either, then just hit reply to this email — or find me in the NWSH Slack group.

Signing off

Thanks for listening this week. And be well,

David.

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This week’s NWSH is brought to you by Day One.

Founding a startup is hard. But if you’re an aspiring founder, you don’t have to face that truth alone.

There’s an art – and a science – to the earliest stages of a startup. And Day One can teach them to you. Day One is a learning community for entrepreneurs, and it’s just launched a new programme called the Idea Activator.

Idea Activator is a four-week, online, cohort-based bootcamp for aspiring and idea-stage founders. You’ll learn tried and tested methodologies for finding, testing and launching new business ideas. And your journey will be guided by expert mentors, including top VCs and founders who’ve built successful startups of their own.

The inaugural cohort launches January 9th. And Day One has done something special; mention New World Same Humans in your application for $200 off the program fee!

I’m deep in research for our end of year event, New Year Same Humans.

So this week, one quick story that caught my eye during the course of that work. It’s an innovation that allows us to glimpse one of the powerful shifts I’ll be talking about: the convergence of decentralised communities and the deep human need for status.

Want to hear more? Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The Art Crowd.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Botto is a new ‘autonomous artist’ called launched just last month.

2. The system’s first work, Asymmetrical Liberation, sold six weeks ago for $324,000. The seventh work, Depression Trip, is currently at auction; at the time of writing the bidding stands at $43,000.

3. You can still claim your spot at the New Year Same Humans event; you’ll be joining over 150 members of our community who’ve already done so.

Thanks for listening this week!

I’ll be back on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

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While I plan the next evolution of NWSH, I’ve been looking over past instalments of this newsletter. A few days ago, I came to the first email of 2021.

In that instalment I wrote about the late British philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher. At the heart of his thinking was a ghost. Fisher believed that we inhabitants of the 21st-century are haunted by futures – of abundance, leisure, and equality – that were promised to us but never arrived.

Want to hear more? Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Revisiting the Ghost.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. In the first NWSH instalment of 2021 I wrote about the late British philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher.

2. All too often across this year, it’s felt as though the most powerful among us are only tightening their grip on our shared future.

3.

4. So many of the futures imagined for us – whether inside virtual worlds or on distant planets – appear radical. But take a closer look, and you’ll find they’re only new ways to sustain the same old systems of technological capitalism.

In the room where it happens

The NWSH end of year event, New Year Same Humans: Five Trends to Supercharge Your 2022, is approaching fast.

Over 140 professionals – founders, designers, marketers, insight professionals and more – have already claimed their place. 🙌 🚀

On the December 14th at 16:00 UK time, I’ll be sharing five powerful trends set to reshape human behaviours and mindsets in 2022 and beyond. And afterwards, I’ll send attendees a full recording of the event, plus the 60+ slide trend report with even more insights and examples for you to apply.

Typically these pro-grade trend reports sell for hundreds; even thousands. I’m keeping this event accessible to all with a price that has led some friends to question my sanity.

Check it out, and see you on December 14th!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 19,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, a short essay on robots and the human Good Life.

But first, a quick update. I’m thrilled by the response to the launch of our end of year extravaganza: New Year Same Humans: Five Trends to Supercharge Your 2022!

We’re just three days after launch, and over 100 members of our community have already booked their place 🙏. Think insight professionals, founders, marketers, product designers, and more.

My initial ticket allotment for the super early bird price has sold out, but I’ve decided to keep it open for a few more days. To learn more about New Year Same Humans, and claim your spot, just hit the button!

Okay, enough preamble; hit play.

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Our Coming Robot Utopia.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Today’s instalment offers a new angle on a state of affairs I wrote about back in The Future that Never Came.

2. Having proven that the path they want to tread is viable, it was announced this week that Everyday Robots will move out of the X lab and into Alphabet’s Bay Area campuses.

3. I’ve written before on the huge challenges associated with AI embodiment, and the novel approaches under development at another division of Alphabet, DeepMind.

4. In Tools for Conviviality, first published in 1973, Ivan Illich mounts a ferocious critique of technological modernity.

5.

Everyday People

Thanks for listening this week.

The emergence of all-purpose helper robots, and their collision with our day-to-day lives, is a classic case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep investigating. And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

Now that you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 19,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

A short instalment this week. Two related, and telling, stories caught my eye. Take them as two signs of the times.

To learn more, hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Theme Park Earth.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. A few days ago Jeff Bezos spoke at an event called Our Future in Space. You can see the whole conversation here.

2. At the COP26 UN climate summit, a promise to ‘phase out’ coal was diluted at the last minute so that it’s now a promise to ‘phase down’ coal.

Thanks for listening this week.

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 19,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Human activity is causing deep, irreversible damage to the Earth. A mountain of good science tells us so.

But what is our knowledge of all this doing to the collective human psyche? How is the climate crisis affecting us psychologically, and spiritually?

This week saw a new report on attitudes to climate change. The report celebrates the idea that most people still believe we can solve global warming. At first glance, that seems sensible enough. It’s great – and useful – that people still have hope, right?

I wonder if things are a bit more complicated. Sounds a strange thought? Hit play!

And if you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Hoping for a Miracle.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Working with global market research firm Ipsos, creative agency Futerra Solutions Union published The Solutions Survey, a report that asks, ‘does the world still believe we can solve climate change?’

2. Modelling in the wake of this week’s new emissions pledges shows that they put us on track only to keep warming under two degrees.

3. The reality is that the 1.5 C target is slipping out of reach. The UN admitted as much in a 2018 analysis.

4. I’m intrigued to hear what the NWSH community thinks about our prospects for managing climate change, and on the question of hope verses realism. If you’d like to have your say, then join us in the NWSH Slack group.

Strange Dreams

Thanks for listening this week.

In the 2020s, impending ecological collapse will produce strange new collective psychological and spiritual deformations. It’s yet another case of new world, same humans.

This newsletter will keep investigating. And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

So if this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, a short note founded in two stories from the tech-industrial complex.

A few days ago in New Week #58, I wrote about Blue Origin’s plans for a commercial space station. The company wants to Orbital Reef to be traversing our skies by the end of the decade, and hopes it will come to replace the outdated ISS.

Meanwhile, on Friday Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is now Meta. This name change is part of a reorientation that will see the company put the metaverse at the heart of everything it does.

Hit play for more!

And if you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Out of This World.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. A few days ago in New Week #58, I wrote about Blue Origin’s plans for a commercial space station.

2. The science-fiction visionary JG Ballard liked to tell literary critics that his great interest was not the outer space of Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke, but inner space.

After This

Thanks for listening this week.

I know that these Sunday instalments have been shorter recently. And hey, we all have enough to read.

But I haven’t abandoned the longform essay! I’m planning a series of essay box sets, which will form part of the next evolution of NWSH. The first will be called The Worlds to Come, and it will dive far deeper into the some of the themes I explored in this note. Expect more on virtual worlds, and our estrangement from the real.

In the meantime, if you’d like support the newsletter, there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

I’ve been thinking a lot, across the last few days, about trend and foresight methods. That’s thanks to a new project that I’m hugely excited about; I’ll be able to say more soon!

But this week, a quick and early note on the direction my thinking is heading in.

This note lays foundations I’ll build on in the coming months. At its heart is a single idea: that we must revolutionise the foresight industry in this decade.

If you’d rather read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of All Life is Here.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Last year in their Trends 2020 report, the iconic design agency Fjord talked about the need to move from human-centred design, which privileges the individual user, to life-centred design, which take a holistic view of people as inhabitants of social and environmental ecosystems.

2. We recognise the legal personhood of corporations; why not do the same for ecosystems?

Humans of Earth

Thanks for listening this week.

If this instalment resonated with you, then stay tuned for news of a NWSH project that will empower you to dive much deeper into trend and foresight methods.

And now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week two stories caught my eye.

Both, in their own way, offer a window on to the high-energy collision between the state and powerful technology platforms.

So this week, a note on that collision. Our journey starts with a doorbell in Oxford.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The State of Us.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. This week a UK judge agreed that the installation of an Amazon Ring doorbell at a home in Oxford constituted an invasion of a neighbour’s privacy.

2. Meanwhile, on Friday a new Face Pay system launched across over 240 metro stations in Moscow.

3. It’s telling that in stories about the Moscow metro this week, journalists seeking a comparison with the Global North reached for Amazon One, a biometric payment system that allows users to pay with their palm print.

4. See the way China has moved definitively in recent months to seize control of Jack Ma’s vast Ant Group.

5. Back in Algorithms with Chinese Characteristics I compared the AI-fuelled, data-driven surveillance-and-control system that Amazon is building around its own workers to the technostate that China is building arounds its citizens.

6. This week’s Ring doorbell story is a reminder – along with the recent launch of the Astro in-home robot – that Amazon isn’t just building a surveillance system around its own workers: it’s building one around us all.

7. There’s never been a corporation driven by such ambition to know everything about us: the streets we live on, what’s happening inside our houses, and even what’s going on, moment to moment, inside our bodies.

8. In this week’s New Week Same Humans I wrote about the European Parliament vote to constrain the use of facial recognition systems.

Power Stations

Thanks for listening this week.

We humans are intractably social creatures; we must live together. Out of that truth emerges the need for the state. And since its beginnings, this newsletter has been obsessed by the implications that a connected world has for the nature of state power.

That’s no surprise: this story is a classic case of new world, same humans. And that’s why NWSH will continue to track the collision between the state and Big Tech in the years ahead.

If that mission resonates with you, then there’s one thing you can do to help further it: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, a note on a connected world, transparency, and the nature of organisations. It builds on an idea I’ve been playing with for ages: the Glass Box organisation.

And it’s all founded in what happening now at the world’s most valuable company.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of People in Glass Boxes.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. The outlines of a transparency revolution became more visible last week, when The Verge reported on Apple’s ongoing experiment with team messaging tool Slack.

2. Emboldened by the peer support they’ve found on Slack, some Apple staff have taken their concerns over pay and discrimination to Twitter.

3. Internal culture becomes a part – often the most important part – of an organisation’s public-facing brand. Welcome to the age of the Glass Box organisation.

4. The newsletter writer Nick de Wilde has talked about the rise of what he calls the Platform Brand.

Through the Looking Glass

Thanks for listening this week.

The Glass Box transparency revolution is only just getting started. No one fully understands the new world it will lead us towards.

But New World Same Humans will continue to track this shift, along with a wide range of others.

If that mission resonates with you, then there’s one thing you can do to help further it: share!

Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, a short note on AI and creativity.

This is founded in a thought I shared with the audience at last week’s NEXT Conference in Hamburg. Now, I want to share a slightly more developed version with you.

Hit play!

And if you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of AI Artisans.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. This week saw news that researchers at Rutgers University used an AI to complete Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony.

2. In a past NWSH, we saw how AI may in future offer artists and creators a new form of ghostly afterlife, which sees works in their unique style continue to be produced long after their death.

3. Brauer AI recently released their first beer, Deeper, which was created using machine learning.

Big Bang

Thanks for listening this week.

At the heart of this newsletter lies the idea that our shared future takes shape when new technologies collide with age-old human needs and values. The emerging story around AI and creativity is a perfect example.

New World Same Humans will continue to track this trend, and a whole host of others.

There’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

So if this week’s instalment resonated, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

A quick thought this week.

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal argued that Amazon is transforming the nature of work and production in the industrialised world. Writing in that paper, the technology reporter Christopher Mims even gave the set of practises via which this is happening a name: Bezosism(£).

Hit play for more!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Algorithms with Chinese Characteristics.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Back in New Week #22 we saw how Amazon is installing surveillance cameras in the cabs of its delivery vans; the company wants to apply the same close surveillance to its drivers as it does warehouse staff.

2. This week the California senate passed a bill that, while mentioning no names, takes direct aim at all this. The bill would force Amazon to disclose the metrics it uses to grade worker performance.

3. Reading about Bezosism, though, I’m also reminded of a recent Sunday note: The People’s Republic of Tech.

4. And the strategic thinking that underlies it sounds a lot like Bezosism. Or, if you like, Bezosism With Chinese Characteristics.

Thanks for listening this week. I’ll be back on Wednesday as usual. Until then, be well,

David.

P.S Thanks to those of you who joined the NWSH Slack group last week. If you didn’t, and you want to continue the discussion on Amazon, algorithmic management, and the CCP, then sign up for the Slack here!

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, an unusual instalment.

I’ve long wanted to write a Sunday email that draws on the amazing conversations happening inside the NWSH Slack community.

Here is that email. A few days ago, I asked community members a question about radical life extension. The replies were so thoughtful, I knew immediately that I wanted to share them.

A massive thanks to Blake, Greg, and Gabrielle for offering their perspective in this instalment. And thanks, also, to everyone who makes the NWSH Slack group such a special place.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Life, Extended.

💥 Join Us!

How would you answer the question I posed this week? What’s your thinking, more broadly, on the project to radically extend human life?

When I set up the NWSH community, my aim was clear: I wanted to create a space that supercharges all of us, by allowing us to share information, ideas, and new perspectives on our shared future.

Now, there are over 500 members – including a small but dedicated core – doing just that inside the Slack group. And my ambitions have grown. I hope that, together, we can turn NWSH into the leading space online for the discussion of our shared future.

So if you haven’t yet joined us, then jump inside! You’ll find discussion channels for #tech, #society, #planet, and more, where members curate must-read articles, plus their own ideas. You’ll get the chance to share your thinking on our weekly question. There’s a channel where you can highlight what you’re working on and seek feedback. And much more is coming.

When you join, head to the #intros channel to introduce yourself; other members will be sure to say hi. See you inside!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday Until then, be well,

David.

Thanks again to Blake, Greg, and Gabrielle for this and many other brilliant contributions to the NWSH community.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

The climate protest group Extinction Rebellion have set up camp in my part of London.

So this week, reflections on their mission, its legitimacy, and what it tells us about the nature and uses of power in 2021.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The Mad King.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. A few days ago, Extinction Rebellion parked a whopping great double-decker bus across London Bridge, one of the main routes in and out of the city’s financial district.

2. Four decades after Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan, another Englishman, John Locke, was inspired to make his reply: resistance can be legitimate if the sovereign fails in his duty to protect life and liberty.

3. XR’s stated mission is clear: they are protesting against government inaction on climate change.

4. I’ve written before on the idea that our democracies are being hijacked by an accelerating quest for tech-fuelled convenience.

5. Survey data released by Ipsos MORI last week showed that 32% of Britons agree that climate change is ‘a major issue for the country’, making it second only to COVID in the list of national concerns.

New Leviathan

Thanks for listening this week.

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan inspired the greatest illustration ever featured in any work of philosophy.

What’s more, the book still has much to teach us about one of this newsletter’s great obsessions: the nature of political power in the modern world.

New World Same Humans will continue to view the climate crisis – and much else besides – through that lens. There’s one thing you can do to help: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday with another New Week; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

If you’re a regular listener, you already know that I’m obsessed with the radical experiment in techno-governance taking shape in China.

Two week ago, a document published by the CCP offered a new window on to that project. It’s fascinating in its own right. But the document also poses a powerful implicit challenge to those of us who live inside a liberal democracy.

Specifically, it asks us: what are you going to do about Big Tech? So this week, reflections on all that, and a first attempt at an answer.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The People’s Republic of Tech.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. The Implementation Outline for the Construction of Government Under the Rule of Law contains a bold vision for a new kind of 21st-century state.

2. This month the CCP announced action against Tencent, after claiming that WeChat does not comply with laws intended to protect minors.

3. Zuckerberg himself has said: ‘in a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company’.

4. Facebook won’t tell us how many people have viewed vaccine misinformation on the platform, but it’s a lot.

5. Back in Democracy Without Elections I wrote about Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore and her advocacy for a system she calls open democracy.

Be counted

Thanks for listening this week.

New kinds of online power are fast-forwarding us into an unfamiliar future.

It’s the work of New World Same Humans to make sense of this shift, and a raft of others.

There’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Every week – or, at least, every week for the last few months – I promise myself I’ll write a short Sunday instalment. Just one thought, I tell myself. Just one! And then – you know the rest.

So this week, I’m sticking to my promise. I have a single thought to share.

On Friday, US government scientists announced that July was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded; modern records stretch back to 1879. The global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.9C higher than the 20th-century average of 15.8C.

To continue, hit play!

Links in this week’s instalment

1. On Friday, US government scientists announced that July was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded; modern records stretch back to 1879.

Thanks for listening!

David.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Everyone is talking about a longstanding NWSH obsession: the metaverse.

I’ve written plenty on the rise of virtual worlds as domains of authentic human experience. This week, though, my focus lies elsewhere.

I want to examine the hold that the metaverse, both as an idea and a shared reality, is gaining on the popular imagination. And what that tells us about this moment and our collective future.

That means thinking, above all else, about science-fiction and its relationship with reality in 2021.

Hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Your Sci-Fi Future.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. The metaverse, say observers, is the future of the music industry.

2. It’s also at the heart of Facebook’s plans to build a vast social VR world, and of Snap’s obsession with persistent and social augmented realities.

3. As a few people pointed out on Twitter this week, given the context set by Snow Crash, it seems strange that anyone – and Mark Zuckerberg of all people – is so keen to celebrate the arrival of the metaverse.

4. Jeff Bezos cites Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars Trilogy as having helped inspire his Blue Origin space startup.

5. Back in Charter City Dreams, I wrote about the rapper Akon’s plans to build the hyperfuturistic Akon City in Senegal.

6. Tim Berners-Lee cites the 1961 Arthur C Clarke short story Dial F for Frankenstein, which tells the story of a global telephone network that gains consciousness, as inspiration for his work on the World Wide Web.

7. I tend towards the somewhat determinist view – which I’ve written about before – that the broad evolutionary sweep of technology will be what it will be.

8. Science-fiction – along, perhaps, with the conspiracy theory – deserves to be recognised as the most important post-war literary form, an argument made by the great JG Ballard.

Crash Test

Thanks for listening this week.

The rise of virtual and simulated worlds as domains of authentic human experience will help reshape our lives in the 21st-century.

New World Same Humans will be watching every step of the way. And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 18,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, news from Silicon Valley got me thinking about the ongoing battle over the future of work. And about a niche but influential idea that can help us make sense of what it means for our shared future.

There’s much here that’s familiar ground for NWSH: the nature of creativity and innovation, the role that physical presence plays in those processes, and the future of online communities. But the central idea here is new. And it started, weirdly enough, with Brian Eno.

Intrigued? Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Our Collective Genius.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. LinkedIn has just announced that its global staff of 16,000 will be allowed to work remotely forever.

2. Global market research firm Ipsos just published a new survey of knowledge workers across nine countries: one-third said they’d quit their job if forced to return to the office full time.

3. In 1996, the British musician Brian Eno coined the word scenius to describe, ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’.

4. I’ve written before on the evidence that physical presence facilitates organisational innovation and creativity: a phenomenon I called the Chit-Chat Economy.

5. The arrival next-generation ‘virtual HQs’ – think Branch and Huddle – are a first attempt to move closer to true remote collaboration.

6. You see the ‘physical scenius’ mindset indirectly in projects such as Launch House, a new incubator that brings the creator hype house model to tech founders.

7. Is the charter city movement that I covered a while back best understood as, in part, a new play around the power of scenius?

New World Scenius

Thanks for listening this week.

In 2021, as you’ve no doubt noticed, we’re living through a newsletter explosion.

There’s a lot to read out there. And that’s just one of the reasons I so deeply appreciate the time you spend with NWSH.

I’m busy working on a next evolution of our community, which I hope will enable us to become a nano-scenius all of our own. And there’s one thing you can to to help: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

I’m back from a week beside the sea!

There’s nothing like a few days away from the desk to prompt new thinking. As you’d expect, I took the chance to ponder the future of our community. It’s about time I wrote an update on the state of the NWSH union, including the new projects I’m planning. Expect that instalment soon.

In the meantime I’m picking up where I left off, with the greatest shared challenge we face: global heating. You can think of this instalment as something of a companion to the last Sunday note, Is This the Climate Turning Point?

Three climate stories caught my eye this week.

Each is a telling glimpse of the crisis as it is manifesting in 2021. And each points towards a broader set of issues that we must confront if we’re to address a heated world in the 21st-century.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of Three Climate Stories.

Links and Images in this week’s instalment

🗺️ Mapping climate justice

1. New research by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California allows us to visualise the global injustice baked into climate change.

2.

3. Back in NWSH #36 I wrote on how the Global North was built on carbon, and the Global South is set to pay the price.

🌳 Rainforest reward scheme

1. Gabon has become the first country to be paid for taking action to slow deforestation. The payments came via the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI).

2. Because rainforests absorb and store carbon, halting tropical deforestation and allowing regrowth could mitigate up to 50% of net global emissions to 2050 according to the Rainforest Trust.

🌧️ Make it rain

1.

2. Back in NWSH #60 I wrote about the search for tech-fuelled solutions to climate change, including a Bill Gates-sponsored experiment in spreading chalk dust across the sky to reflect sunlight.

Calling planet Earth

Thanks for listening this week.

Climate change is an empirically observable reality. We even understand the fundamental mechanisms driving it.

It’s when that reality – when the truth of what we’ve done – collides with human nature that the picture becomes complex. We know systemic change is necessary. But how do we effect it? Who pays the price? Who wins, and who loses?

This kind of collisions – between a changing world and age-old human nature – are exactly the stories New World Same Humans was set up to track.

And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

Your membership of our community is valued. I’ll be back on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

A third heatwave is pummelling California and parts of the Pacific Northwest. Just two weeks ago, the same region saw temperatures that climate scientists say should have had a zero per cent chance of being realised.

We’re living through an era of impossible weather.

So this week, reflections on the idea that 2021 is a climate turning point.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. On Saturday, the temperature at Death Valley in California reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, or 54 degrees Celsius. There’s controversy around the record, but it’s probably the highest temperature ever reliably recorded anywhere on Earth.

2. Finland registered its hottest June since records began in 1844, and Kevo, in Lapland, hit 33.6C last Sunday.

3. Scientists at World Weather Attribution are now investigating the idea that a slowing of the jet stream may be amplifying heatwaves in ways we hadn’t anticipated.

4. The most widely shared estimate says climate change will force 200 million people to migrate into the Global North by 2050. The International Organization for Migration says the figure may reach 1.5 billion.

Buy now pay later

Thanks for reading this week.

In November the UN’s COP 26 will bring world leaders together in search of an answer to the era-defining question: what today, for tomorrow?

New World Same Humans will be watching closely. And it will continue to examine the implications of a changing climate for our shared future.

And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who’d also find it valuable? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button!

Your membership of our community is valued. I’ll be back on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

A judge dismissed the US government’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook this week. Half my Twitter timeline celebrated; the other half were appalled.

So this week, reflections on what many say is an increasingly urgent question.

Should we do everything we can to accelerate the pace of technological advance? Or act now, via regulation, to apply the brakes?

Hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The Cloud and The Land.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia threw out the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook.

2. Manifestos such as the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace imagined a world of decentralised power and radical individual empowerment.

Cloud atlas

Thanks for listening this week.

The battle between those who would accelerate technological advance and those who would slow it will continue to rage.

And New World Same Humans will continue to argue for a broader perspective of our shared future.

There’s one thing you can do to help: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not consider spreading the word? You could forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share across one of your social networks. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This instalment of NWSH is brought to you by Skillful.

Starting from this newsletter’s earliest days, I’ve written often about the changing future of work and the disruption of higher education.

A single thread has run through much of that: a changing economy demands radical new visions of learning. Visions that are decentralised, life-long, and peer-led.

Skillful is a new learning platform living that truth when it comes to careers in tech.

Skillful runs online, cohort-based programmes for ambitious professionals who want to launch – or accelerate – their careers in the tech industry. You’ll be matched with exceptional mentors from leading companies: think Netflix, Uber, Instacart and more. During a six-week course they’ll share the strategy, operations, and technical skills you need to go to the next level.

Meanwhile, you’ll gain a new community of peers to share advice and inspiration, and help you find your next gig. Skillful grads have been hired by Stripe, DoorDash, Duolingo and many more, all in roles spanning product, strategy and business operations.

As a special bonus, mention New World Same Humans when you sign up to the waitlist and get priority access to the next cohort.

I believe the kind of lifelong, peer-mentor learning that Skillful is pioneering is a big part of the future of education. If you’re ambitious for a career in tech, this is for you.

This week, reflections on the deep human past. And on the prospect of a post-human future. All thanks to an amazing discovery in China’s Heilongjiang province.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The End of History.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Scientists say the Dragon Man – Heilongjiang means Black Dragon River – poses a challenge to the story of human evolution as we know it.

2. In 2018, Chinese biologist He Jiankui shocked the world with claims that he had created the world’s first CRISPR-edited babies.

3. Meanwhile, the emergence of new forms of human-machine interface – see Elon Musk’s Neuralink for an example – point to a future in which we merge with our technologies.

4. In his 2016 blockbuster Homo Deus, he argues that human history as we know it is about to end, because we sapiens are about to upgrade ourselves and become something else entirely.

5. Researchers believe our sapiens ancestors killed off the Neanderthals in a long war of attrition that raged on and off for over 60,000 years.

Random access humans

Thanks for listening to a particularly philosophical NWSH this week.

This newsletter will continue to investigate the implications of genetic technologies, human-machine interfaces, and the post-human era that so many futurists seem keen to usher us into.

And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not consider spreading the word? You could forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share across one of your social networks. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Tomorrow is the summer solstice; 2021 will be half over.

At these landmark moments in the year, I always feel compelled to take stock. And this week that intersected with broader reflections: on where we’re at inside modernity, and where we’re heading.

My feeling? We’re only just getting started.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Just Getting Started.

Links in this week’s instalment

1.

Spread the word

Thanks for listening this week.

There are some special New World Same Humans projects in the lab that I can’t wait to share with you.

In the meantime, if this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not consider spreading the word about our community? You could forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share across one of your social networks. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Here in the UK, we hosted this G7 summit this week.

If nothing else it’s produced some beach pictures that our elected representatives can cherish forever.

But it also felt a moment to pause and reflect. On the hard problems we face as a human collective in 2021. What we’re doing to solve them. And the reasons we have to be optimistic.

Hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Democracy on the Beach.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Watching the Global North’s most powerful humans exchange elbow bumps on the sand, it sometimes felt as though this meeting was the long first scene in a novel by JG Ballard.

2. Seen another way, the summit has had strong new Lorde video energy.

3. We’re halfway through 2021, and there have already been as many COVID deaths this year as there were in all of 2020.

4. In advance of this week’s summit, G7 finance ministers agreed a landmark new global tax framework, intended to stop the tax avoidance practised by techno-corporate giants such as Amazon.

5. On China, Biden is pushing a new Build Back Better World plan as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road.

6. G7 leaders pledged this week to move away from coal-burning power stations at home, and the end the funding of them in the developing world.

7. Meanwhile, the summit closed with a promise to donate 1 billion vaccine doses to the developing world.

Solar power

Thanks for listening this week.

The New World Same Humans community is united around the idea that in the 2020s, we shouldn’t leave our shared future to the powers that be.

Instead, we should come together to build a better future for all. I hope this newsletter helps fuel your mission to do just that.

And there’s one thing you can do to fuel our community in turn: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week saw the announcement of a new supersonic passenger jet, set to start commercial flights before the end of the decade.

That inspired these reflections, on flying cars, the future we were promised, and the chance we now have to realise it.

Hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The Future that Never Came.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. United Airlines is set to buy 15 supersonic passenger jets from aviation startup Boom Technologies.

2.

3. In the 1960s the average US GDP growth rate was above four per cent; for the last ten years it’s been stuck below two per cent.

4. The billionaire VC Peter Thiel coined a phrase that’s since become synonymous with the Great Stagnation: ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’

5. In 2011’s The Great Stagnation, the libertarian economist and New York Times writer Tyler Cowan floated his ‘low-hanging fruit’ theory.

6. Meanwhile in 2018 the futurist and independent researcher J. Storrs Hall published Where Is My Flying Car?

7. back in the 1970s, says Hall, flying cars really were emerging as a practical reality.

8. DeepMind’s announcement that its AlphaFold AI had solved the iconic protein-folding problem is one indicator that AI’s electricity moment is coming.

9. The Overture is made possible in part by software that allows Boom Technologies to simulate air flow over the fuselage and so find the most fuel-efficient design.

10. Ten years after Fukushima, we’re on the verge of a new era of innovation in nuclear power.

11. Startups such as Volocopter are working on a flying car.

12. Put it all together, and the idea that we’re about the transcend the Great Stagnation seems very real. Tyler Cowan certainly thinks it’s plausible.

Time to build

Thanks for listening this week.

If those who believe the Great Stagnation is coming to an end are right, we’re about to witness a transformative decade.

New World Same Humans will be watching every step of the way, and striving to make sense of what it all means for our shared future.

And there’s something you can do to help with that mission.

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore made waves on Twitter this week when she published a constitution for an imaginary human settlement on Mars.

At the heart of the document is a powerful idea; one that Landemore says could revitalise our ailing democracies.

So this week, reflections inspired by that: on the states we’re in now, and how Landemore’s system might just be the answer.

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Democracy Without Elections.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Yale political theorist Hélène Landemore asked her students to read Red Mars this semester. They complied, and last week Landemore shared the results.

2.

3. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justicefamously attempted to ground liberalism in an ‘original position’.

4. Landemore’s constitution sees Mars governed by mini-publics; assemblies of 250 adult individuals chosen every two years via stratified random sampling.

5. Landemore calls this system open democracy, and it’s the subject of a book she’s just published under that name.

6. I’ve written before on how our political system stymies effective planning for the long-term future.

A fine balance

Thanks for listening this week.

A sovereign state must always balance a vast range of competing forces. And across the last few years in some liberal democracies, that balance has looked precarious.

In the coming months and years, New World Same Humans will continue to investigate the future for liberal democracy and the nation state.

And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

If this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Snap, which sagely calls itself a camera company, held its annual developer conference this week.

One announcement stood out above the others. And it inspired this note: a reflection on technology, meaning, and the human story.

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of The Worlds to Come.

Links in this week’s instalment

1.

2.

3. To jump into a Yahoo chat room and watch the messages fly once felt something akin to magic. Now, I feel that way when I enter a room in AltspaceVR using the Oculus Quest.

Time to Build

Thanks for listening this week.

We’re at the outset of a world building explosion. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

New World Same Humans will be watching every step of the way. And there’s even a special world building project building of our own up the NWSH sleeve: more on that soon.

In the meantime, if this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 17,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, reflections on the convergence of two powerful trends set to reshape our online lives. I’m talking about virtual humans, and a shift that some are calling the pseudonymous economy.

Enough preamble; hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Avatars Are Go.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. At the time of writing Miko has 700,000 followers on Twitch.

2. I’ve written before about the rise of virtual humans, and Miko represents a sub-category.

3. It’s the same conceit that has fuelled a wave of wildly popular virtual YouTubers, such as Projekt Melody and Kizuna AI.

4. The Technician is a US-based South Korean developer called Youna, who started work on Miko when the pandemic nixed her coding and animation day job.

5.

6. Srinivasan says decentralisation and pseudonymity are two sides of the same coin.

7. Back in March when Beeple’s NFT Everyday: The First 5,000 Days sold for $69 million, the buyer was an influential pseudonymous cryptowhale known to his followers as MetaKovan.

8. New tools such as the MetaHuman Creator – made by Epic Games, who also make the Unreal Engine that fuels Miko – will allow people to build photorealistic virtual humans far more cheaply.

9. Miko’s creator sometimes livestreams as her real self, to give fans a peek behind the elaborate curtain that typically hides her from view.

10. The developer Greg Fodor has even speculated on the rise of a new form of liberalism, which he calls Avatarism.

11. These converging trends – the coming age of pseudonymity and the rise of sophisticated avatars – are only one part of the arrival of an epic shift that I call augmented modernity: one of the big theses that drives this newsletter.

I See You

Thanks for listening this week.

The rise of creator-driven virtual humans is the kind of trend I set up New World Same Humans to examine. In the end, it’s all about the collision of new technologies and age-old human needs: identity, self-expression, and status.

This newsletter will keep watching as events unfold. And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, I heard news of strange sightings in the night sky over London.

The mystery was quickly solved. And it inspired this reflection on global challenges, the technology revolution, and new forms of government for the 21st-century.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of Do We Need a World Government?

Links in this week’s instalment

1. This weekend, a series of Londoners took to Twitter to ask the same question: did anyone else see that weird line of tiny lights trail across the sky tonight?

2. Elon Musk’s Starlink is a project to deliver internet connectivity anywhere on the planet via a network of satellites in low-Earth orbit.

3. The US Federal Communications Commission has given Starlink permission to launch 12,000 satellites, and Musk says the end vision is for 42,000.

4. Two weeks ago the IAU made representations to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).

5. In the early days of the pandemic former UK prime minister Tony Blair called for the World Health Organisation to be given more power to direct the response of nation states.

6. Francis Fukuyama, the political philosopher who wrote 1992’s The End of History, recently argued that increased cooperation between nation states is the best way to address global challenges in the 2020s.

7. The next iteration of the internet, sometimes referred to as Web3, will be built on decentralised systems.

Star Man

Thanks for listening this week.

Elon Musk will continue to launch his satellites. This newsletter, meanwhile, will continue to track the story.

And there’s one thing you can do to help that mission: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Across the Global North, vaccination programmes are taking effect.

One consequence? In their millions, citizens face a return to normal working conditions. But no one really knows, anymore, what normal should look like.

For knowledge workers, lockdowns shattered the vast edifice of ritual and routine that existed around the working day. It meant a stark reminder that those arrangements – and the power structures that underpinned them – are not given. They’re socially constructed. Perhaps, if enough of us wanted it, we might get rid of them and build something new.

This week, I was struck by two stories that tap into the Great Return to Work. Stories that offer powerful signals of what lies ahead.

My contention: the conditions are set for a new clash between labour and capital in the 2020s.

I’ll get to that at the end. First, those stories, and a reflection on the broader context that informs this idea.

Just hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of The Coming War Between Labour and Capital.

Links in this week’s instalment

🎩 What Do Workers Owe The Man?

1.

2. Many knowledge workers report grinding out longer hours during lockdown.

3. In multiple surveys workers have expressed a preference for a hybrid work model from now on.

4. Company leaders are looking at evidence that organisational creativity declines when people don’t constantly mix with one another in shared physical spaces.

🗯️ Free Speech or Focus?

1. In Wednesday’s New Week Same Humans I wrote about internal friction at iconic software company Basecamp.

2. CEO Jason Fried banned ‘political and societal’ discussion on company channels, after growing frustrated with a number of his employees.

💸 Is Work Still Worth It?

1. Across advanced industrialised nations the share of GDP going to labour has fallen across the last 70 years. Here’s that story in the US.

2. Today, US millennials own 3% of household wealth.

3. Young people are turning away from traditional career paths and towards alternate routes, including Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE).

Same Humans Unite

Thanks for listening this week.

New World Same Humans will be watching the reconfiguration of work as it unfolds.

And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

👋 Don’t miss this tech talk

I’m hosting a Clubhouse discussion on Monday 26th – that’s today for many of you reading this – that I think will be up your street!

It’s in association with Faves, the new smart social media app where experts curate the content they’re reading. We’re bringing together a stellar panel to talk all things tech, trends, and product.

Join me in discussion with Ancestry.com CEO Deb Liu, Google AI Product Lead Marily Nika, Faves CEO Tyler Maloney, and more on Monday at 6pm CEST, 12pm EST, 9am PDT.

We’re saturated by news.

No wonder, then, that it can be hard to sort the events that are really important from those that only seem to be. We live in a culture that prioritises today’s trivia over the long view.

So this week a short note on news that is, by any measure, monumental. It’s about a vaccine; but not that one. And about the nature of human progress.

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of How We Make Progress.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. In a trial among 450 children in Burkina Faso, the Institute’s new R21 malaria vaccine was shown to be 77% effective.

2. The WHO estimates there were 229 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available.

3. Some napkin maths reveals that malaria is likely to be the single greatest cause of death in our history.

4. The malaria parasite contains over 5,000 genes, making it a complex puzzle to solve. Covid19, by comparison, contains 15 genes.

5. Is there progress in human affairs? For the iconic British philosopher John Gray, the answer is an emphatic no.

Keep Moving

Thanks for listening this week.

The news on R21 is heartening. But when it comes to making the world a better home for humans, we still have a long walk ahead.

This newsletter will keep working to make sense of that journey as it unfolds. And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us!

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

I’ve written often, in this newsletter, about what is next for cities.

Recent debate on that subject has tended to focus on the industrialised world. Take a global view, and the picture is more straightforward: cities are the future.

The UN estimates that an additional 2.5 billion people, making 66% of the world’s population, will live in urban areas by 2030. Most of that increase will take place in the developing world; all ten of the cities projected to become megacities by 2030 – think Lahore, Bangkok, and Bogotá among others – are in the Global South.

One dimension on this future? In the wake of the pandemic, a once fringe idea is having a long moment.

Proponents say charter cities are the vehicles via which we can harness the great wave of urbanisation that lies ahead. Get it right, they claim, and we can enact a Great Leap Forward for humanity in the coming decades.

So this week in NWSH #62, a closer look at the charter cities movement, its history, and what is coming next.

If you’d prefer to read this instalment, go here for the text version of Charter City Dreams.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Proponents of charter cities, including the Charter Cities Institute, point to the success of 20th-century city-states such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and Shenzhen.

2. The US economist Paul Romer first outlined his vision of charter cities in a now-canonical TED talk back in 2009.

3. Romer’s charter city project in Madagascar crumbled after citizens rioted when it emerged that the land earmarked for development was to be owned by Daewoo, a South Korea auto corporation.

4. Próspera, a charter city built on the small Honduran island of Roatán, opened to applications from ecitizens in May 2020.

5. The Senegalese-American rapper Akon says he is ready to start construction on a $6 billion ‘real life Wakanda’ on land donated by the Senegalese government.

6.

7.

8. Launched in 2020, Plumia bills itself ‘the first country on the internet’.

The New World Metropolis

Thanks for listening this week.

I refer to New World Same Humans as a community. Perhaps what we’re really building here are the beginnings of a new city in the cloud.

The New World metropolis would lay its foundations on a single idea: that we must come together in the 21st-century to build a future that serves, not subjugates, humans.

While I draw up the plans, there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us!

I’ll be back on Wednesday with another New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, I go deep on an intriguing experiment that never was. And what it tells us about the relationship between technology, climate change, and politics in the 2020s.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #60.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. A few days ago a solar bioengineering experiment due to take place at Kiruna, northern Sweden, was cancelled.

2. The phrase technological solutionism was coined by the technology thinker Evgeny Morozov.

3. Lonely old people? Give them a robot.

4. Pandemic has caused a mental health crisis? Here’s an AI-fuelled counsellor.

5.

6. LSE academic Jason Hickel other degrowthers argue that, on our current path, it’s near impossible to transition away from fossil fuels fast enough to avoid catastrophic warming.

Growth Mindset

Thanks for listening this week.

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember, the larger and more diverse the New World Same Humans community becomes, the better for all of us!

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

As lockdown eases here in the UK, a transition is on the horizon. We’re about to find out what the new normal looks like when it comes to work.

The picture is still unclear. Last week the prime minister urged UK citizens to get back to the office, saying they’d had enough ‘days off’ during lockdown. Meanwhile one of the country’s largest financial institutions, Nationwide, told its 13,000 employees that they’re permanently free to ‘work from anywhere’.

Two starkly different visions, then, of work in the 2020s. The same tension will no doubt afflict industrialised nations around the world.

Many employers, though, are converging on a settlement: a mixed model that will see staff in the office occasionally, and free to work anywhere for the rest of the time. That sounds a balanced compromise; it’s also a revolution. One that will have far-reaching effects on the way we live, how we do innovation, and the nature of citizenship.

So this week, notes on the transition towards remote work. I’ve examined the shift across four key dimensions:

* Cities

* Education

* Creativity and innovation

* Citizens and states

For each dimension, I’ve devised a short scenario built on a number of key predictions. In some future instalment of NWSH – I’m thinking 2025 at the earliest – I’ll revisit the claims I make this week. Each scenario features one tweet, chosen because it is a powerful illustration of one of the seeds, already growing in 2021, of my imagined future.

A final note: these scenarios are undeniably focused on rich, industrialised nations where office work is predominant and many can work from home. The World Bank estimates that in low income countries only one in every 26 jobs can be done remotely. Those countries, clearly, will travel different paths, and I hope to write about that in a later instalment.

Enough preamble; hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #59.

Links in this week’s instalment

🏙️ Cities

1. See these automated stores from Swedish retail brand Lifvs.

2. Artists, writers, and actors put unused commercial and retail space to new and innovative use.

3. The mayor of Miami used used Twitter banter to sell his city as an alternative to Silicon Valley during the pandemic.

4. The later 2020s sees a new wave of charismatic founders establish charter cities: independent city states intended to attract itinerant knowledge workers and reimagine government for the 21st-century.

5.

🎓 Education

1. Superstar academics look to break away and monetise their huge audiences, leveraging tools such this new creator platform for academics.

2.

💡 Creativity and Innovation

1. A now canonical study by the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory found that communication is what sets the best teams apart.

2.

🧑‍💻 Citizens and States

* At the intersection of much of the change discussed here is a single, powerful phenomenon. That is, the emergence of the Sovereign Individual.

Share Your Screen

Thanks for listening this week! One last request…

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable.

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Here in the UK, this week marks one year since the start of the first coronavirus lockdown.

Time, then, to reflect. A note this week on what we know must change: about our relationship with markets, growth, and government. And why it’s time to reclaim an old, politically charged phrase: there is no alternative.

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #58.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Oxfam says that without government intervention it will take over a decade for the number of people living in poverty worldwide to return to pre-pandemic levels.

2. Forbes says the world’s 10 richest people increased their wealth by a combined half a trillion US dollars in 2020.

3. The International Energy Agency says carbon emissions have now rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

4. Margaret Thatcher said of her programme of deregulation: there is no alternative.

5. Rising political theorist Will Davies has called for a generation of ‘legal and economic rebuilders’ to create new structures for the decades ahead.

6. This recent paper, The Mutualist Economy: A New Deal for Ownership, by Nils Gilman and Yakov Feygin from think tank the Berggruen Institute proposes a new social contact for a world of automation.

7. Economist Mariana Mazzucato is drawing the outlines of a new relationship between government, enterprise, and innovation.

Make It New

Thanks for listening this week.

New World Same Humans is a community founded on one principle: that we shouldn’t leave our shared future to the powers that be. Instead, we should help build it.

Our amazing community of founders, designers, technologists, researchers, policy makers and more continues to grow. Let’s keep that going!

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. See you then,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week, how the pandemic pushed us deeper inside our troubled relationship with technoconsumerism. And the emergence of a new way to fight back.

Hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #57.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Facebook saw daily users increase by 12% in 2020.

2. Amazon’s net profits rose by 84%.

3. Netflix signed up 26 million new paid subscribers in the first half of the year, against 28 million for the whole of 2019.

4. A global survey conducted by polling company Ipsos just before the pandemic found that concern over the way companies use our data had risen by 8% since 2013.

5. Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies asks what ordinary people can do to win back some of the power being amassed by the big digital platforms.

6. A few years ago coder and technologist Daniel Howe and others created AdNauseum, a browser plugin that blocks but simultaneously clicks on every online ad served by a web browser.

7. A recent research paper concluded that AdNauseum works, and defended it against the accusation that by making advertising impossible it will lead to the demise of free content on the web.

8. Alias is a device that sits on top of a smart speaker and continually ‘whispers’ a stream of inaudible static to it so that the device can’t eavesdrop on those around it.

Activate This

Thanks for reading this week!

If this week’s instalment struck a chord, please consider forwarding the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share this across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. See you then,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This Wednesday in New Week #25 I wrote about Stockton’s recent experiment with a Universal Basic Income.

Stockton is a small city in California, not far from Silicon Valley. Despite bordering such wealth, it’s one of the poorest in the country; 25% of its 310,000 inhabitants live below the poverty line. Boarded up homes and shops are commonplace; the city was ravaged by the 2008 housing crisis and never recovered.

For two years starting in 2018, 125 low-income families were sent $500 a month no strings attached.

The results are now in. Recipients paid down credit card debt, spent on food and essentials, and worked more than those in a control group who received no UBI. All while reporting improved physical and emotional wellbeing.

Interesting in its own right. But it’s the wider context here that makes all this so urgent. Fuelled by massive cash payments to citizens during the pandemic, a wave of job destruction, and a radical new economic theory, the conversation about UBI has moved to a new place.

UBI is set to be one of the defining issues of the coming decade. So this week: where is the argument at now? What lies ahead? And is UBI, as critics claim, nothing more than an empty dream? Or can it be a practical path to a world that is fairer and more free?

Go ahead: hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #56.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. In the UK some members of the legendary Beveridge Committee, whose recommendations led to the creation of the modern welfare state in 1945, floated ideas that sounded much like a UBI.

2. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has written on how close President Nixon was to enacting an unconditional income of $1,600 a year – around $12,000 in today’s money – for every poor family.

3. See the results of the recent Stockton experiment on UBI.

4. A recent large-scale trial in Finland, which saw 2,000 people receive EUR 560 per month, came to similar conclusions.

5. In 2016 Democratic presidential race, Andrew Yang proposed a ‘freedom dividend’ of $1,000 a month for every adult.

6. Today, Yang is standing for mayor of NYC; his proposal for an unconditional income for the city’s poorest 500,000 seems standard, even relatively tame.

7. A Pew Research poll in August 2020 found US citizens under 30 were two to one in favour of a UBI.

8. A 2019 British study found that a £60 a week UBI for every adult in the UK would cost £28 billion and return UK spending on benefits to 2010 levels.

9. South Korean politician Lee Jae-myung, who supports a basic income, suggests new taxes on carbon emissions and digital services to help pay the bill.

10. A controversial new theory called Modern Monetary Theory says that we’ve long misunderstood the nature of government debt.

11. Superstar futurist Yuval Harari says automation will create a ‘new useless class’.

12. The UK population of over-85s, for example, is set to treble to 5.1 million by 2066.

Fully automated luxury lifestyles

Thanks for listening this week.

Utopia means nowhere in Greek. For that reason, some believe that when Thomas Moore wrote his 1516 work he intended a satire on humankind’s endless, doomed search for the perfect society.

In other words: new world, same (imperfect) humans. But that shouldn’t mean a terminal pessimism. In 2021, we have the chance to build a better world. It’s an opportunity we shouldn’t waste.

The NWSH community is founded on a powerful idea: that we can supercharge one another’s quest to build the future we all deserve.

Right now, there’s one thing you can do to help: share!

Remember, our community becomes smarter, more creative, and more useful as it becomes larger and more diverse. To help, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d also enjoy it? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time.

And remember, if you seek access to the Same Humans Utopia, you’ll find it inside our Slack group.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans; until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 16,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This week Facebook announced that they’ll restore news content to Australian users.

The tech giant has promised to sign payment deals with media providers; in return, the Australian government has backed down on plans to force the platform to pay every time a user links to news content.

It’s an uneasy truce in a dispute that raised deep questions about the future of the internet, and the survival of independent journalism in a connected world.

So this week, reflections on all that. All centred around three questions. What happened to the dream of the open web? How do we build a better internet? And what will it take to save the news industry?

Go ahead; hit play!

If you’d prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #55.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Next month it will be 31 years since Tim Berners-Lee sent a memo entitled Information Management: A Proposal to his boss at the physics research laboratory CERN.

2. Worldwide, around 90% of internet searches take place on Google properties.

3. Here in the UK, Facebook accounts for around 50% of display ad revenue.

4. A range of observers, including Berners-Lee himself, criticised the Australian legislation because it breaks a traditional principle of the open web: frictionless linking between pages.

5. Here in the UK, Facebook paid £28.5 million in corporation tax last year.

6. We’re a long way from Web3 decentralised apps, or Dapps, that replace Google, Facebook, or Uber.

7. A familiar face is working to make the new dream of a decentralised web a reality.

Get the memo

Thanks for reading this week.

I remember feeling a tectonic shift online when Web 2.0 emerged in the early 2000s. Now, I’m increasingly persuaded that we will see an even more significant change via the technologies of decentralisation. But how soon?

Of course, New World Same Humans is already built on one of the great, decentralised technologies of web 1.0: email!

This week, I’d love it if you used the power of your email network to help fuel our amazing community.

Remember, our community becomes smarter, more creative, and more useful as it becomes larger and more diverse. To help, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d also enjoy it? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time.

Your membership of this community means a lot. I’ll be back on Wednesday with news and analysis in New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

A short note this week. There are two reasons; one personal and one interplanetary.

First, I took a few days off for my birthday. Even a newsletter obsessive has to live a little 🎉

Second, NASA’s Perseverance became the fifth rover to land on Mars. Looking at the first pictures it beamed back to Earth, and given the other worldly weirdness of the year we’ve just lived through, it felt a good moment to pause and reflect.

Enough preamble; just hit play!

I’ll be back on Wednesday with news and analysis in New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

What is true? It’s a question that’s easy to ask, but seemingly ever-more difficult to answer.

A networked world has, as the 20th-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted, created a Global Village: a single cultural space available to anyone with an internet connection.

But that village has enacted a paradox. In bringing us together, it’s pushed us apart. Rather than creating a single story that we can all believe in, it’s allowed a million and more narratives to bloom.

I was reminded of all this by two news items this week.

Donald Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial. A chapter closes, but the US remains as divided as ever. Is it possible to reunite the American people around a shared baseline understanding of their socio-political reality?

Researchers at the University of California created deepfake videos that fooled the most advanced, AI-fuelled deepfake detectors. A reminder, then, that while 21st-century media is already a hall of mirrors, it’s set to become a whole lot more confusing.

So this week, reflections on the future of truth, media, and the shared culture we inhabit. Or to put it another way: The Reality Crisis and How To Fix It.

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #53.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. A January YouGov poll of US Republicans found that 30% had a favourable view of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the US government is secretly controlled by a deep-state network of powerful Satanists.

2. The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer – the world’s largest survey of trust in government, business, and media – found trust in all news sources, including social media, has fallen to record lows: 53% said they trusted traditional media.

3. The recent GameStop meme stocks debacle showed how we can still be caught unawares by new and unexpected viral dynamics.

4. The emergence of broadcast technologies and the totalitarian systems of the 20th-century are intertwined stories.

Ghost in the network

Thanks for reading this week.

The future of truth remains uncertain. There’s just so much we don’t yet understand about the behaviour of information and people inside a networked world.

All I can promise is that New World Same Humans will be watching the evolution of the infocommons every step of the way. And seeking to understand what it all means for our shared future.

If that mission speaks to you, there’s one thing you can do to help. Share!

Remember, our community becomes more useful to each of us as it becomes larger and more diverse. So if you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Or share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable.

Your membership of this community means a lot; and that’s the truth. I’ll be back on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

This newsletter is underpinned by a model of historical change. In short: new technologies collide with universal, and fundamentally stable, human needs. The results are emergent behaviours, attitudes, and modes of life.

The human needs I’m talking about are foundational; think security, convenience, and social connection. But when it comes to our shared future inside modernity, there’s one need that it always pays to remember: status.

All this came to mind this week. News arrived that Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon, in part to focus on his space startup Blue Origin. The competition between Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to intensify, and it’s hard not to see, in all this, a particular kind of supercharged, Billionaire vs Billionaire status race. Bezos and Musk both want to be the 21st-century titan remembered for securing our off-Earth future. There can be only one.

All this might sound cynical. But I don’t mean to accuse Bezos or Musk of superficiality. The impulse towards status is about far more than simple showing off, or naked self-advancement – though they are real human impulses, too. Rather, it’s rooted deep in our shared nature, and is at heart about the need to be seen, to be recognised, by the collective. Hegel believed that this kind of recognition plays a vital role in the process via which each of us constitutes our sense of self; that none of us can really be a person at all without the recognition of others.

Most of us aren’t about to send a rocket into space. But we’re all, in our own ways, questing for status. What’s more, inside advanced consumerism that quest can explain much behaviour that seems strange, chaotic, or even self-defeating.

In the 2020s, emerging technologies will unlock new ways to serve this deep human need. As it always has, the status race will mutate, taking forms that are new and – from our vantage point now – strange.

If we want a glimpse of our shared future, we should seek to understand these changes. So this week, reflections on the past, present, and future of the eternal human quest for status.

Enough preamble; hit play!

If you prefer to read this instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #52.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Outside academia, US psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is still influential.

2. See the Silicon Valley billionaires who are all: I rise each morning at 5am and walk barefoot in the snow, just like the Stoics of ancient Greece.

3. Wakefulness drug Modafinil produces measurable improvements in fluid intelligence.

4. In 2018 Chinese scientist Professor He Jiankui claimed to have created the world’s first gene-edited babies; he was later jailed for this work.

5. In the 2020s, we’ll see new forms of search for the Exit, including the Silicon Valley coder who pursues FIRE and then builds her own log cabin.

6. Fashion label Marc Jacobs created virtual outfits for Animal Crossing avatars.

To infinity and beyond

Thanks for listening this week.

The 21st-century status race will continue to evolve around us in the years ahead. It’s the stuff this newsletter was made for: an age-old human story in collision with a hyper-technological world. I only wish I could travel forwards to 2121 and see how it has all played out.

In the absence of time travel, though, New World Same Humans will be watching every step of the way, for as long as humanly possible.

And right now, there’s one thing you can do to help our collective project: share!

Remember, our community becomes more useful to each of us as it becomes larger and more diverse. So if you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Or share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable.

Remember, reading NWSH is the ultimate status play. I’ll be back on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

The world is complex. What handles can we grab that might allow us to understand it better?

One answer: it pays to think about what is abundant, what is scarce, and how that’s changing. So this week, reflections on that.

Before we dive in, a hat tip to the venture capitalist Albert Wenger. Albert was a recent guest on What’s NEXT, an online show about technology and business that I co-present with Monique van Dusseldorp. The discussion we had on the show, and Albert’s book World After Capital, did much to inform this week’s instalment. Links to both at the end of this email.

A reminder that Monique and I will also be hosting the first ever NWSH Clubhouse session this coming Friday 5 February at 16:00 CET. Expect a fast-paced look at the week in trends, tech, and society. Check out the Wednesday email for more details!

In the spirit, this week, of delivering things in threes: here are three central lines from what follows.

First, we’re moving from the industrial age to the knowledge age. Second, what we need above all else is a new system for deciding where humanity directs its attention. And third, in an imaginary world of universal abundance, all that remains is the quest to really see one another.

Now hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #51.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Last year, China built a new hospital in Wuhan in days.

2. AI solved one of biology’s most famous challenges: the protein folding problem.

3. The full episode of What’s NEXT with Albert Wenger.

4. Albert Wenger’s book World After Capital.

You get a car

Thanks for reading this week.

You can go here to see the full episode of What’s NEXT, featuring the interview with Albert Wenger. And I highly recommend you check out Albert’s brilliant World After Capital, which you can read for free online.

New World Same Humans can’t promise to solve the problems presented by our emergence into the knowledge age. But it will keep watching, and trying to make sense of, this moment and what it means for our shared future.

We started out as a small tribe back in January 2020. Now, there are over 14,000 of us – founders, designers, marketers, policy makers, and more – on a shared journey to imagine, and help build, a better future. If you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Alternatively, share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse our community becomes, the better for all of us.

However abundant we become, your membership of this community means a lot.

I’ll be back on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a mission to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

We talked a lot, in 2020, about the implications of the pandemic for us as a collective. Just a brief shock, or the start of system-wide change? A pause, or Great Reset?

But we’ve talked less about how the crisis presents the same challenge, in miniature, to each of us as individuals. Lockdown shattered daily routines and patterns of thought. That meant personal challenges. But also the chance to step back from our own lives, and reassess.

Here in the UK, nearly 30% of people say they plan to make ‘big life changes’ – such as quitting a job or ending a relationship – when the crisis is over.

This week, reflections on that. My argument in short? The consumer societies we live in trap us inside a limited version of ourselves. The big opportunity, then, for the 2020s? Empower people to break free.

Go ahead; hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #50.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Here in the UK, nearly 30% of people say they plan to make ‘big life changes’ – such as quitting a job or ending a relationship – when the crisis is over.

2. Back in NWSH #34, I wrote about how the Global North runs on a model of humans as rational choice machines.

3. There’s established evidence that materialism of the kind encouraged by the consumer society makes us unhappy.

4. The vast, profitable, and mostly useless self help industry will soon be worth $13 billion a year in the US alone.

Flying high

Thanks for reading this week.

Pretty soon we’ll get to see whether millions of people really will seek a new relationship with the Unlimited Self in the 2020s.

In the meantime, we members of the New World Same Humans community are on a mission of our own.

We started out as a small tribe back in January 2020. Now, there are over 14,000 of us – founders, designers, coders, policy makers, and more – on a shared journey to imagine, and help build, a better future. If you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Alternatively, share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on why you find it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse our community becomes, the better for all of us. Just hit the share button!

However many we number, your membership of this community means a lot.

I’ll be back on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

On Thursday, the incoming Biden administration announced a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. A cheque for $1,400 will go to every citizen with earnings under $75,000 a year.

This comes on top of the $4.5 trillion in economic stimulus passed by the US Congress across 2020. For context, the stimulus package passed in the wake of the 2009 financial crash was around $900 billion.

Some version of this story can be told in countries across the Global North. Amid everything, the scale of the economic story we’ve lived through is yet to sink in.

As ever, NWSH seeks the implications of all this for our shared future. So what did we learn about capitalism in 2020? And where are we heading next? This week: three big lessons from the past year. And a look ahead: to the coming war of ideas over capitalism’s future.

Longform essays will still be a part of the Sunday mix, but this week I’m experimenting with a new briefing-style format. Let me know what you think! The change will be more apparent if you read this week’s instalment; go here for the text version of NWSH #49.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. In the summer of 2020 Pfizer closed a $2 billion advance purchase order on the vaccine with the US government.

2. Economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that only government has the heft to support innovation on a grand scale.

3. The Green New Deal amounts to a blueprint for a new economic model; one that would reimagine the relationship between government and the private sector

4. Modern Monetary Theory says governments can freely invent new money to pay for public services and fuel full employment.

Fully automated luxury living

NWSH will keep watching as this story unfolds. Here’s hoping we all get to experience life inside a fully automated luxury future.

While we’re waiting for our new robot helpers to emerge and start mixing us drinks, let’s double down on the amazing community we’re building. If you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Alternatively, share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse our community becomes, the better for all of us. Just hit the share button!

Your membership of NWSH means a lot. I’ll be back on Wednesday; until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

And we’re back!

It’s only ten days old, but 2021 has already proved tumultuous. Meanwhile, here in London we’ve returned to full-scale lockdown. Still, there’s one big Reason to be Cheerful.

The vaccines are coming. Soon the world will start to reopen. In the deranged video game that is The Pandemic, we’re about to play Level 2.

It’s going to be an amazing year; one unlike any other in living memory. The losses – of loved ones, health, livelihoods – have been all too real, and many need support. But I couldn’t be more excited about what lies ahead. And it feels a huge privilege that I get to share my first reflections on these times, and where they’re taking us, with you.

The NWSH mission remains as it ever was. To examine the trends, ideas, and innovations reshaping the decades ahead And to supercharge your mission – in whatever form it takes – to help build a future that’s better for us all.

So this week, reflections on what that means in 2021. Enough preamble; just hit play!

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Fisher was a prolific British writer and cultural theorist who developed an intriguing critique of neoliberal capitalism.

2. If we are to meet the challenges ahead, then in the 2020s we must develop a new model of a human being: one that grounds human beings in the wider society, their own bodies, and the Earth environment.

3. SFRU’s first free trend report is Five Trends for the 2020s.

4. The New World Manifesto project will see us come together and articulate a set of core principles that should guide us all as we rebuild in the coming decade.

Don’t cross the streams

So much is happening. And there is so much work to do.

Stand by for further announcements on the Manifesto project. And if you’re keen to join the conversation now, just jump into the NWSH Slack group.

Together, we can slay Fisher’s ghosts in 2021.

In the meantime, if you know someone – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d make a great addition to our community, why not forward this email and encourage them to sign up? Alternatively, share New World Same Humans across your social networks with a note on what makes it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse our community becomes, the better for all of us. Just hit the share button!

Your membership of our community is valued. I’ll be back on Wednesday with the first New Week Same Humans of 2021. Until then, be well.

David.

David Mattin is the founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit. He sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Spotify has shared the most streamed artist of this year. TikTok has celebrated the most viral video. But so far, one end-of-year retrospective is yet to be released.

So this week, I’m sharing the top five New World Same Humans essays from 2020. The final selection comes via a mix of science and subjectivity: I’ve considered data on the most read and shared instalments, alongside my own view on which essays best hit their mark.

Each essay comes with a short summary, and a look to what lies ahead next year.

Together, these five essays are a tour through the many of the big themes that preoccupy this newsletter. The relationship between humans and technology. The nature of modernity: where it came from and what it has done to us. The Anthropocene. The future of democracy.

Also, an experiment to spread the Same Humans cheer. Each essay comes with a button that auto-generates a tweet; just hit the button to share your favourite essay from among this year’s top five!

Let’s spread the word, and grow our amazing community. Together, we’re going to do great things in 2021 – more on that at the end of this email.

🏆 NWSH Top Five for 2020

1. The Four Futures Framework Can Change Your Life

Quick summary: The Four Futures framework is a tool for structured thinking about what lies ahead, developed by Professor James Dator. It says that all the stories we tell about the future fall ultimately into one of four categories: Growth, Collapse, Discipline, or Transformation. This essay examined how we can use the framework to map possible futures: for the world around us, our business, and ourselves. It was the most shared instalment of this year.

Where next? Dator created this framework back in the 1970s. Since then, it’s become clear that if we continue along our current trajectory, we’ll face ecological disaster. In Dator’s terms: Growth ends up in Collapse. In other words, the Anthropocene explodes the boundaries between Dator’s four categories. It’s time to update them to accommodate this new reality. More coming next year.

2. Should You Let an Algorithm Vote on Your Behalf?

Quick summary: The superstar futurist Yuval Harari has posed a now infamous question about the future of democracy. In a world in which algorithms know us better that we know ourselves, why should we vote? Why not let an algorithm vote for us? My answer: the question is built on a hollow understanding of the political. To stop democracy falling to our Algorithmic Overlords, we must rediscover politics as the arena of competing ethical visions for the human Good Life.

Where next? This essay drew together a number of ideas that I’ll keep exploring next year. In particular, I’m interested in the ways a hyper-individualistic, egalitarian, and connected society throws political representation – the idea that someone else makes important political decisions on my behalf – into crisis.

3. How Modernity Invented then Erased the Individual

Quick summary: A paradox sits at the heart of life inside modernity. On the one hand, 21st-century advanced consumer societies elevate each individual to a near-kingly status. On the other, they efface us as individuals by dwarfing us within a massive and complex social space in which it’s impossible to feel that we really matter. This tension is only set to grow. The pandemic represents a unique opportunity to redraw our collective lives at scales that are smaller and more human.

Where next? It seems to me that the search for smaller and more human will be a central project in the years ahead. The pandemic has given a hard lesson in the risks associated with a highly globalised world. So how do we reorient ourselves towards the local without becoming insular?

4. The Great Migration is Coming

Quick summary: It’s estimated that by 2050, 200 million people will have been displaced by global heating. Where will they go? The liberal democracies of the Global North face a dark dilemma. These rich nations are primarily responsible for the climate crisis. But if they accept migration on this scale – tens of millions of people each – they risk being torn apart.

Where next? This was darkest essay of 2020; I still find the implications hard to deal with. If the forecasts are even close to right, climate migration will be one of the great stories of our lifetimes. In the years ahead I want to write much more about that story, and not just commentary; this subject demands on-the-ground reporting.

5. We are Building a Tyranny of Convenience

Quick summary: Liberal democracy is built on the idea that individual freedom is the supreme value. And we’ve always believed that privacy is a foundational part of that freedom. But in 2020, we allow Big Tech access to our most private selves. No one forces us to do this; we are, it seems, tyrannising ourselves. To make sense of what’s happening, we need to call on a famous 20th-century idea about the nature of freedom.

Where next? Amazon’s new Halo device will monitor biological and voice metrics of wearers. California police are using drones to chase suspects. In other words, issues around privacy and Big Tech as a new form of socio-corporate power are going nowhere in 2021. NWSH will be watching.

Cleared to land

Thanks for listening this week. Thanks for listening this year.

I hope that NWSH has brought you new information, fresh perspectives, and enjoyment in 2020. I’m deeply grateful for the chance to share my work with you 🙏🙏.

There will be two more emails this month before the newsletter pauses for Christmas. It’s been a wild year, but 2020 is finally coming in to land.

I’m so excited about what lies in store for the NWSH community in 2021.

The New World Manifesto project, for example, will see us come together to agree upon a set of core principles that should guide us all as we rebuild for the 2020s. Everyone is invited to the conversation! And I’m working to attach a great advisory board to the project, too.

More coming on that and other plans soon. In the meantime, I’ll be back on Wednesday with the final New Week Same Humans of the year.

Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

The year is drawing to a close. It’s enough to put anyone in a reflective mood.

Meanwhile, events of the last few days seemed to sum up so much of what this newsletter is about. So this week, a shorter note; reflections on all that. No Fast Download required.

Expect technology, humans, and a brief glimpse into deep time. Also, a call: to make our community count in 2021.

So, hit play!

If you prefer to read this instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #46.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. The New World Manifesto project launched a few weeks ago. It is a call for the NWSH community to come together and articulate the principles we believe should guide us all as we rebuild in the 2020s.

2. Discussion for the New World Manifesto project is already underway in the NWSH Slack group.

3. James Lovelock’s The Novacene and Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 are both books that helped inspire this newsletter.

Come together

Thanks for listening this week.

The New World Manifesto project is taking shape. It’s chance for all of us – for you – to share thinking on how we should rebuild in the 2020s.

What are the fundamental principles you think should guide us? Are they around the human relationship to technology? The future of cities? Of work? Equality?

In the weeks ahead, I’ll share the process via which we’ll conduct a collective conversation.

The Manifesto will be powerful only if it distils a wide and diverse a range of voices. And there’s one thing you can do to help ensure that happens: share!

So if you know others who’d make a valuable contribution to our conversation – and I bet you do – then why not take a second to share this note with them? Just forward the email along. Or share it across one of your social networks, with few lines on why you found it valuable. Just hit the share button:

I’ll be back on Wednesday. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

The internet has rewired us.

By which I mean: a connected world relentlessly fuels new human behaviours, habits, and expectations. And once they’ve been created, they spread. We bring those new habits and expectations to other aspects of our lives. Often, we bring them out of the online space and into the physical world around us.

A particularly powerful version of that phenomenon is now emerging into view. And it will, I believe, reshape the socio-economic system that you and I live inside: the consumer society.

This is a story about personalisation, and where it’s heading next. Skip to the end and the answer is: to some pretty strange places.

But let’s start at the beginning. Go ahead: hit play!

If you prefer to read this instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #45.

Links in this week’s instalment

1. Tonal is a connected workout station that collects physiological data and adjusts exercise difficultly accordingly.

2. SHOT is a smoothie mixer that uses a built-in camera and AI to analyse skin health and then create a personalised recipe for a skin-enhancing smoothie. 

3. Last year, Japanese beauty giant Shiseido launched a new skincare service called Optune.

4. This year Amazon announced the new Halo device, which will give personalised communication advice based on physiological and voice data that allows a real-time picture of your mood.

5. Nestlé is running a huge trial of DNA-personalised food supplements with over 100,000 consumers in Japan.

6. This year Snapchat launched Local Lenses, which allows a persistent, shareable digital layer to be built on top of the physical environment.

Reality check

Thanks for listening this week.

Want to debate the ideas you’ve absorbed? Join us in the NWSH Slack channel!

If immersive AR worlds plunge us into new and personalised realities, the opportunities will be dizzying.

But in the meantime, we in the New World Same Humans community are forging our own shared space!

We started as a small tribe back in January; today we encompass more than 14,000 smart people – founders, strategists, designers, coders, policy makers and much more. If you help our community expand, you make it more useful for all of us. And all you have to do is share.

So if you found today’s instalment valuable, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d also enjoy it? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time. Just hit the share button:

I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮

Recent weeks have brought news of three effective vaccines. Now, the challenge is roll out. We need to get these vaccines first to those who need them most. That means frontline health workers, and the old.

So much about this virus, and in consequence about this year, has been about management of risk for old people. In that way, the pandemic has been a reminder of a central fact about about the human collective in 2020: it is ageing.

The UN says that the global population aged 65 and over is growing faster than any other age group. In 2019, one in 11 worldwide was over 65; by 2050 it will be one in six.

It’s an unprecedented demographic change. And because it will shape our response to all else, I’ve come to believe that it is the most consequential megatrend reshaping the decades ahead.

So this week, reflections on this megatrend; specifically, three thought starters on what it means for our journey through life, our politics, and our relationship with work.

Enough preamble; hit play!

If you prefer to read this week’s instalment, go here for the text version of New World Same Humans #44.