New Week #76
Are you ready for a whole new kind of augmented reality? Researchers teach a robot to peel a banana. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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To Begin
As with last week, this instalment comes a little later than usual. I had another Wednesday speaking engagement!
This week, a US startup says it’s moving closer to a radical inflection point for augmented reality.
Also, new research suggests we can have economic growth and limit warming to 1.5C. And why it’s good news for humans that an AI has, for the first time, beaten the world’s best bridge players.
Let’s get into it.
👁 A whole new world
This week, a little-known startup announced that it’s approaching a revolutionary leap for augmented reality.
California-based Mojo Vision has been working, since 2015, on a mission to build the world’s first AR contact lenses. Now, the company has launched a new prototype and let a handful of tech journalists give them a try.
There’s still a long way to go: these prototype lenses don’t deliver a full AR experience, and the US Food and Drug Administration hasn’t yet cleared them to be worn in the eye. But they bring together some impressive technology, including the world’s smallest and densest dynamic display, measuring just half a millimetre in diameter.
If you want to dive really deep, check out this extended review from tech publication CNET.
The deeper point here? Via technologies such as this, we’re approaching a transformational inflection point when it comes to AR.
That is, the transition from AR that is mediated by screens, to a version in which a digital layer is projected into the world around us. That means AR as we’ve always dreamed it could be: a representational form that blurs the boundaries between the real and the digital.
The race is on to own this coming transformation. In practice, this means a race to create the platform – AR glasses or contact lenses – that will make it possible. Last year, Snap showcased prototype AR glasses, called Spectacles. And rumours persist that Apple has hundreds of staff working on a secret AR glasses project.
⚡ NWSH Take: True AR contact lenses are clearly still some way off. But when someone finally nails AR glasses or lenses, the implications are vast. // We’ve talked a whole lot, across the last 12 months, about the metaverse. Mostly, we’ve talked about video games and VR. But it may yet turn out that the most compelling version of the metaverse is the kind that Snap and other AR players are building. One in which digital objects are projected across our view of the physical environment. Enter a drinks party and see the names of each person floating above their head. Run with you life-sized AR trainer. Walk down the high street and experience (or get spammed by) a hundred and more promotional messages. // Does all that sound a dream, or a nightmare? A world in which the boundaries between real and virtual are blurred in this way is one we’re only just starting to understand. At the outer edges of all this lies a scary question. If we’re all handed the ability to create our own version of the world around us, what happens to our sense of a single, shared physical reality? It’s a question I addressed at length in The Next Filter Bubble is a Reality Filter Bubble.
📈 Growth factors
A research paper published this week says that economic growth in rich countries is compatible with the goal to limit planetary warning to 1.5C.
The idea that the Global North must enter a phase of planned degrowth to avoid climate catastrophe has gained traction in recent years.
But this paper, 1.5C Climate and Energy Scenarios: Impacts on Economic Growth (download the PDF to read the entire paper) argues that rich countries can get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and continue to grow. Professor Paul Ekins of University College London led a team that modelled the phasing down of coal and other carbon-based energy sources, the deployment of renewables, and the impacts on global heating and economic growth. Multiple scenarios, says Ekins, show pathways to continued growth and a 1.5C limit on heating.
The paper also points to the European Union, which reduced CO2 emissions by 25% between 1990 and 2016, while seeing its economy grow by more than 50%.
⚡ NWSH Take: The degrowth debate will help define this decade — and where we land on it will shape the century that lies ahead. On one side are those who believe rich countries must actively work to shrink their economies. On the other are those who say this would condemn billions, in rich and poor countries alike, to poverty. The debate between them is becoming cantankerous; see this between growth advocate Max Roser and leading degrowther Jason Hickel. // In the end, this debate is one part of a deeper, underlying schism. That is, between those who believe that humanity is poised to transcend all natural limits in the 21st-century, and those who say that the very project to transcend limits has led us to environmental, social, and spiritual crisis. Evidence of the kind supplied by this new report can shed light on the argument. But in the end, this question is fundamentally political. As such, is unlikely to be decided on the basis of evidence.
🍌 The way I peel
Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s ISI Laboratory have used machine learning to teach a robot how to peel a banana.
Automating the useful manipulation of delicate items such as soft fruits is a long-standing robotics challenge. Any robot powerful enough to lift the item will tend to destroy it in seconds. Scientists at the ISI Lab first manually operated the robot to peel hundreds of bananas, creating a bank of training data that an AI could use to teach the robot.
The upshot? On the one hand, this is an impressive technical feat. On the other, we’re talking about peeling a banana.
This work is a powerful signal of the vast challenges to be overcome if we’re to build the kind of home helper robots that were once a staple of Your Home in the 21st-Century futurism. Back in Our Coming Robot Utopia I wrote about Alphabet’s Everyday Robots project, and what we stand to gain and lose if we let these robots into our homes.
🃏 Over the bridge
An AI beat eight former world bridge champions in a livestreamed tournament this week.
Bridge has long been recognised as a greater challenge for AI than chess or Go. That’s because players must operate with incomplete information, and psychological factors, such cooperation and deceit, play a greater role in the game.
French startup NukkAI gathered eight bridge champions in Paris to take on their machine, called NooK. The tournament reportedly marks the first time an AI has beaten a current or former bridge champion. Bridge superfans can watch the entire five-and-half hour marathon here.
Crucially, NooK makes use of a so-called ‘white box’ learning approach that means it is able to show why it makes the decisions it does. This approach, properly known as probabilistic inductive logic programming, was developed 20 years ago by researchers at Imperial College, London.
⚡ NWSH Take: When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess back in 1996, most viewed it as a beat down for human intelligence: ‘the machine takeover has begun’. Now, it’s become clear that these moments are not endings, but beginnings. Take a look at what’s happened since DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the world’s best human Go player in 2016: by playing against that AI, human Go professionals have learned much about the world’s oldest game, and the standard of elite human play has improved to an extent never seen before. The future, in so many domains, is human-machine intelligence. // Meanwhile, we’re building a world in which AIs take an ever greater number of decisions that shape the lives of millions. Do I qualify for a bank loan? What does my life insurance cost? Does my CT scan indicate cancer? Often, it will be a machine that gets to decide. We need to be able to understand, and scrutinise, those decisions. The white box approach to AI makes this possible; it needs further cultivation.
🗓️ Also this week
👾 Fortnite makers Epic Games are now the biggest corporate donor to Ukraine. Epic recently pledged that all proceeds from real-money purchases inside Fortnite would go to relief efforts in Ukraine. The initiative has already raised $70 million, and will run until 3 April.
☀️ Wind and solar generated a record 10% of the world’s energy in 2021. That’s according to a new report from independent climate think tank Ember. They say clean energy sources accounted for 38% of all energy generated, which was more than coal.
🎬 China has cancelled The Matrix actor Keanu Reeves. Major Chinese platforms, including Tencent Video, have removed all content featuring Reeves after he participated in a pro-Tibet concert organised by the Dalai Lama.
₿ A new campaign says that a simple coding change could reduce bitcoin’s energy consumption by 99%. The campaign, Change the Code Not the Climate, is being coordinated by Greenpeace USA and others. A recent study by the New York Times said bitcoin mining already uses more energy each year than Finland.
🌪 The UN wants to roll out a global early warning system for storms and extreme weather. Secretary-General António Guterres says he wants every person on Earth to be covered by the system within five years.
🤷♂️ Elon Musk is says he’s considering starting a new social network. Then again, he also said he’d rescue those boys from that cave using a tiny submarine.
🤳 Instagram has verified 35 virtual influencers. ‘What has previously felt a fringe medium of expression has suddenly become central to our digital experiences’ explains Becky Owen, Head of Creator Innovation at Meta. I wrote about the rise of virtual humans back in NWSH #41.
💸 Ronin Network, a crypto platform that fuels the popular game Axie Infinity, suffered a $615 million hack. In Axie Infinity, gamers battle virtual pets to win cryptocurrency. This week an unknown hacker transferred half a billion dollars worth of currency to themselves, and then disappeared.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,937,188142
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8061406983
💉 Global population vaccinated: 57.7%
🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 25% complete
📖 On this day: On 31 March 1889 the Eiffel Tower is officially opened to the public.
Out of this World
Thanks for reading this week.
Augmented realities are about to leap out of our screens and into the world around us. The implications for our relationship with the environments we inhabit, and with reality, are manifold.
New World Same Humans will keep watching. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!
Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
I’ll be back next week as usual. And I promise that the next instalment of my multi-part essay on virtual reality, The Worlds to Come, is on its way!
Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.