Antifragile: Build Open Resilient Systems

Nicholas Taleb Nassim’s latest book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (2012) is a nice continuation and development of his oeuvre. The main point in his first mainstream book, Fooled by Randomness (2001), was that humans are not good at thinking statistically, and therefore to improve our lives and ability to act in the world, we need stories or heuristics that package accurate underlying statistical information. Black Swan (2007) made us aware that black swans (seemingly rare events (if you have never seen a black swan, you incorrectly think that they do not exist)) can happen much more frequently than we can estimate. Therefore, we should organize our lives to minimize exposure to negative black swans (events with unlimited downside risk like stock market crashes) and maximize our exposure to positive black swans (events with unlimited upside like investing in startups (with a small portion of total assets)). In the future, there could be a Black Swan App to help us respond to life’s events in real-time with bias correction, heightened rationality, and statistical accuracy.

In Antifragile, Taleb continues to articulate his unique world view and winds it into a proposal for how to better lead our lives as individuals and societies. Fragility is organic systems that aim for stability and avoid change, thereby becoming brittle, weak, and breakable as a result. Antifragility (like Derrida’s autoimmunity) on the other hand, describes systems that are open to mistakes and quickly learn from and incorporate errors, thus becoming resilient and vibrant with the ability to adapt and survive (like Silicon Valley’s mantra to ‘fail early and learn fast’). For better vigor and survival, organic systems (like living organisms, humans, and societies) should develop their antifragility.

Another way of understanding antifragility is that when you have a capability, it means that you are able to handle new situations that arise in the same domain, effectively handling situations that arise that are up to 10% outside the bounds of situations you have seen before in that domain. For Taleb, success is determined more by tinkering and harnessing the disorder and chaos in a system (the variance or antifragility) than applying pure intellect. This is how the industrial revolution happened, and how technologies develop that drive science. Antifragile systems are those that gain from randomness or uncertainty (statistically, pulling a probability distribution’s mean higher with more upside long-tail instances).

Fragility/antifragility applies only in the case of organic systems, not inorganic systems (like our computers (at present)). Organic systems need stressors to grow, thrive, and survive. Taleb’s colorful example distinguishes between a cat and a washing machine.

Systems-level Thinking Helps to Address Protein Folding

Deciphering protein folding is critical to a fundamental understanding of biology as proteins conduct most cellular operations, and since misfolded proteins are often causally implicated in disease.

The status of protein folding (describing proteins as folded into their final 3D shape) is that as of January 2014, the main resource, the Protein Data Bank, has 96,000 listed known protein structures. There has been much technological advance in determining the static and dynamic features of protein structures, including in X-ray crystallography, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy), cryo-electron microscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering, and other spectroscopic techniques.

This sounds like good progress, however, taking the human example, only 24,000 of the Protein Data Bank's 96,000 listed proteins are human, and this is of an estimated total of 2 million human proteins. Further, all of the protein conformations have been determined empirically (e.g.; manually) rather than with prediction (e.g.; digitally). It was proposed that given the amino acid string, it should be possible to predict the 3D conformation of the protein as finally folded, but this has proved elusive. Both scientific and crowdsourced efforts are looking at the problem. Crowdsourced projects include games like fold.it, community projects like Protein Folding@Home, and prediction contests like CASP (Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction), a community-wide, worldwide experiment for protein structure prediction, the next one taking place May – August 2014. All of these projects focus on the unitary folding of one target, such as TM019, as opposed to more universal system dynamics.

Complexity scientist Sandra D. Mitchell presented work at Stanford on January 15, 2014 suggesting that we need a plurality of conceptual representations and models (any model is only partial in some way), and that any complex problem should be addressed with an integrated multiplicity of approaches. Many (and possibly most) complex biological issues such as cancer and aging are now understood as deeply dynamic and systemic phenomena. Similarly, proteins do not fold in isolation, the local environment is highly involved with protein chaperones and other signaling processes (one example is the intricate behavior of toxic amyloid HSPs (heat shock proteins)).

Integrated Information as a Measure of Consciousness

The fourth FQXi international conference was held in Vieques Puerto Rico January 6-10, 2014 on the Physics of Information.

The first and primary focus was on information in the quantitative physical sense, as opposed to the epistemic sense, particularly as information is used in quantum mechanics. There are several objective measurable definitions of information such as Shannon information. Objective information and other mathematical and physics theories were also used to formalize definitions and distinctions between determinism, free will, and predictability, and intelligence versus consciousness.

Many talks and debates helped to sharpen thinking regarding consciousness, where we have been stuck with crude explanatory heuristics like ‘consciousness may be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex system.’ Interesting and provocative research was presented by Giulio Tononi and Larissa Albantakis from the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin. They have an objective measure called ‘integrated information’ which is meant as the compositional character of experience (including subjective experience), and represents the causality amongst macro-level elements within a system. There could be systems that are complex at the macro level but have low integrated information if there are not extensive mechanisms with causal relations within the system. In other words, complexity does not necessarily confer consciousness, and the relevant factors to look for could be causality and experience. 

2014 Top 10 Technology Trends

2014 promises to be another exciting year for technology development! Technology more than any other endeavor has the potential to most quickly improve people's lives.  

Some prominent multi-year trends currently in development include:

1. Worldwide Internet-connected (2 billion in 2013 growing to 5 billion in 2020) and growing Southern hemisphere megacities
2. Big data (doubling to 8 zettabytes 2013-2015)
3. Smartphone (>1 billion)
4. Smartwatch 
5. Wearables, Glass 
6. Quantified self-tracking (QS) gadgetry
7. Self-driving vehicles
8. eLearning and MOOCs 
9. 3D printing 
10. New economic models: bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, crowdfunding, crowdsourced labor marketplaces 

On the Horizon:

• Lab-produced synthetically-engineered food 
• Smart home 
• 3D bioprinting / DNA computing / synbio

Predictions for 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 

Synbio Reformulates the Traditional Scientific Method

Synthetic biology continues to be one of the most wide-spread trends reshaping the conduct of science.

Lauded as the potential ‘transistor of the 21st century’ given its transformative possibilities, synthetic biology is the design and construction of biological devices and systems. It is highly multi-disciplinary, linking biology, engineering, functional design, and computation.

One of the key application areas is metabolic engineering, working with cells to greatly expand their usual production of substances that can then be used for energy, agricultural, and pharmaceutical purposes.

Since the nature of synthetic biology is pro-actively creating de novo biological systems, organisms, and capacities (the opposite of the esprit of the passive characterization of phenomena for which the original scientific method was developed), synbio is reformulating the traditional scientific method.

While it is true that optimizing genetic and regulatory processes within cells can be partially construed under the scientific method, the overall scope of activity and methods are much broader.

Innovating de novo organisms and functionality requires a significantly different scientific methodology than that supported by the traditional scientific method. This includes computational modeling and simulation, engineering practices, feedback loops, automated bio-printing, and a re-conceptualization of science as an endeavor of characterizing and creating.

Biodesign: a Prevalent Cultural Trope

A new science or technology field really starts to capture the imagination and become mainstream when it seeps into art and culture. This is increasingly evident with bioart, bioprinting, and synthetic biology.

In bioart (using biological materials to make art), there have already been several phases starting with bacteria drawings in petri dishes and more recently culminating in DNA manipulation, live cells growing into cultured shapes in galleries, and the Algae Opera (an opera singer’s CO2 producing algae in real-time for audience consumption).

Bioprinting is an emerging field which marries the 3D printing revolution with biohacking and DIYlabs in the 3D printing of designed human materials for aesthetic and functional purposes.  

Synthetic biology (the design and construction of biological devices and systems) is being featured in art shows alongside industry conferences and in film festivals, including in its own Bio-Fiction, an international synthetic biology science, art, and film festival series.

Not only are we making art with biology as an artistic material, culture is being made in new ways through biology. 

The theme of biodesign is becoming prevalent as a cultural trope through the rapid expansion of designed biology into the arts, culture, collective human consciousness, and science and technology. These ideas are becoming quite normal, which can only mean that their demise through kitschification and cliché could be coming soon in a subsequent era of anti-bioart, post-bioprinting, post-synbio!

Supercomputing Processing Speed Nearly Doubles in One Year

The Top500 November 2013 biannual list of the world’s fastest supercomputers shows China's Tianhe-2 still at nearly twice the capacity of the second fastest, with virtually no change since the machine vaulted onto the list in June 2013.

Tech Specs: Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P. The machine was constructed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT).

Tianhe-2's maximum processing power is 33.8 petaflops per second (and peak processing speed 54.9 petaflops per second). The nearest competitor is the US DOE's Titan, a Cray XK7 Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz with a maximum processing power of 17.6 petaflops per second. Processing power is firmly on a steep growth curve, accelerating since the 5 petaflops per second mark was surpassed in June 2011 by RIKEN Japan (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Supercomputing Processing Capacity (Source: Top500)

Supercomputers, although processing faster than the human brain for some time now, process in a massively linear parallel manner which is not at all how the brain functions. However, while not mimicking the human brain, trying to understand it is a key use of supercomputers, along with other traditional prediction problems like weather forecasting, and physics phenomena and energy modeling. Now firmly in the big data era, processing astronomical data too is a key use for supercomputing. Maybe Tianhe-2 will compute findings from lunar data processed through China's recently landed Jade Rabbit. In other astronomical applications, astronomers expect to be processing 10 petabytes of data every hour from the Square Kilometer Array telescope under development in Australia and South Africa with a total collecting area of one square kilometer.

Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Mania!

With bitcoin nearly doubling in value in the last few weeks (surpassing USD $400 on November 9, 2013 and reaching USD $937 on November 29, 2013) (see this chart in Figure 1 and the real-time exchange rate), the question is whether it is just another inflationary virtual currency bubble like WOW gold and Second Life Lindens, or a trend that will endure. At present volume is skyrocketing, with a daily turnover (as of November 25, 2013) of 50,000 bitcoin per day (USD $45 million) which translates to USD $17 billion per year. 

Figure 1. Daily Bitcoin-USD Price-Volume Chart: Oct 4 - Dec 1, 2013. (Source: BitcoinCharts, quotes also at Bitcoin Charts)

What is bitcoin? 
Bitcoin is an open-source protocol enabling the transmission of value across the Internet in the form of a digital asset, digital currency, or payment mechanism – it is essentially a peer-to-peer decentralized monetary system. Exchange across the network is pseudonymous (not anonymous) because there is a trace if you give someone your wallet address for a transaction. Transfers use a public key/private key system, and a record of transactions in kept in the blockchain. Bitcoin is just one of hundreds of virtual cryptocurrencies (e.g.; cryptography-based) as illustrated in Figure 2; yes, there is a BaconCoin, BBQCoin, [YourNameHere]Coin...

Figure 2. Cryptocurrency Hot List: Dec 1, 2013. (Source: CoinWarz)

Bitcoin Mining Ecosystem
In addition to exchanging physical-world currencies for bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies on exchanges (example: DealCoin), bitcoins can be earned by ‘mining.’ An extensive cryptocurrency mining ecosystem has arisen. Mining or hashing is using home-based GPU rigs (like SETI@home but for crytocoin mining) in resource pools with others (like Coinotron), or renting cloudhashing processing resources, to algorithmically make as many guesses as possible on the number of the next block of coin to be released, sort of like a lottery. There is a safeguard against money-printing and inflation as in the case of bitcoin, only 21 million total bitcoins can be created.

Sophisticated mining operations have driven the profit in bitcoin mining below zero so erstwhile traders mine more volatile currencies that may be up-and-coming like ScryptCoin (USD $27/week profit), MicroCoin (USD $20/week profit) and other riskier alt.currencies that may yield USD $16-$20/day.

Prospects for Long-term Success
The reason why a few top cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could succeed are the huge worldwide liquidity of the Internet, the demand for flexible, digital, cross-border, pseudonymous payment systems, and the practical and social political support for peer-to-peer payment systems, financial empowerment, and self-sufficiency as part of the ongoing Occupy response to the 2008 banking crisis, global capitalism, and corporate hegemony. Transfers within the crytpocurrency network are pseudonymous and not directly trackable by authorities, but network ingress and egress exchange to physical-world currencies can be monitored. Regarding regulation and taxation, bitcoin is already being classified as falling under regulatory jurisdiction as a ‘payment system’ or ‘taxable voucher’ and being enfolded into the traditional financial world, with VAT now levied in Germany, Sweden, and Finland, and discussions ensuing in other countries.

Esprit of Financial Empowerment
Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency movement asks ‘who should be in charge of printing money?’ and suggests individuals not governments. Alt.currencies are just another step in the long tradition of decentralization, access, and self-empowerment in the financial industry that includes web-based stock trading and portfolio management, real estate and mortgage transactions, and peer-to-peer lending, and that is also emerging in other sectors like education with MOOCs, and health and biology with citizen science, biohacking labs, and synthetic biology liberating research from institutions.

Update: Dec 18, 2013 - With market-crashing volatility and regulatory oversight, bitcoin is already seeming short-lived: "Bitcoin value drops 40% after more bad news from China"

Rethinking Major Web Properties in Glassware

Google Glass is starting to become even more exiting as a platform as more developers are investigating the functionality and building new apps.

A few key elements are that first it is important to recognize that Glass is a completely new and different technology platform. Glass is not just a cell phone for your face or another smartwatch, but a true cognitive augmentation platform and a critical moment in the continuous always-on information climate. A higher-resolution experience of life could be available in an information-rich environment. The eyes and ears senses are always on and augmented. Passive information can be ambiently contributed to any situation in real-time.

The current applications for Glass include picture-taking, video, maps, directions, search, and hangouts, but as usual with a new platform, the future apps that will harness the functionality in new ways are yet to be imagined. For example, what are some of the new ways of being social in the moment? 

All major web properties will need to rethink themselves in Glass – what is Glass-Instagram, Glass-Facebook, Glass-CRM, Glass-Tivo? 

App creation could ramp up quickly as development can be either native Android (Glass runs on the Android O/S), or standard web (e.g.; html5, css), particularly with this weekend's release of the Mirror API.

What are Cognitive Nanorobots?

Cognitive nanorobots are an extension of the more familiar idea of medical nanorobots.

Medical nanorobots are a range of medical solutions using nanoscale electronics. Medical nanorobots span the continuum from nanoparticles in current pharmaceutical use that disgorge cargo in cellular destinations per simple onboard logic instructions to optically-stimulated channelrhodopsin proteins for real-time live biological intervention to the more elaborate conceptualization of many species of future medical nanorobots such as respirocytes, clottocytes, vasculoids, and microbivores that could perform a variety of biophysical clean-up, maintenance, and augmentation functions in the body.

In the most basic sense, cognitive nanorobots are the analog to medical nanorobots, nanorobots deployed in the specific context of facilitating, aiding, and improving the processes of cognition like perception and memory, a sort of NanoNeuroProsthetics.

Cognition is just another biological function, a process that can possibly be identified, managed, and ameliorated. Robert Freitas in the Nanomedicine text books has already begun to explore the issue of nanorobot biocompatibility with neural cells, and outlined the different levels of concern and response for them: mechanical, physiological, immunological, cytological, and biochemical.

In summary, one initial way to consider and classify cognitive nanorobots is as a special case of medical nanorobots.

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