New World Same Humans

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 re…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 super…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 powerful 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 tha…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 a…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 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 dr…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 k…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 Holocracy, 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…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 f…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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 deca…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.newworldsamehumans.xyz