New Week Same Humans #20
Reddit users go to war with Wall Street. Big Tech employees get real about remote work. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the Wednesday update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 14,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮
💡 This week’s Sunday instalment examined the trap set for us by the consumer society. Go here to read Tyrannised By Our Preferences.💡
Heard of meme stocks?
You’ll understand everything when you read this week’s story on how Reddit users sent a fading electronics retailer’s share price to the stars.
Also, new data gives a glimpse of how much work knowledge workers are getting done at home. And AI experts prove that if we create a superintelligent machine, we won’t be able to contain it.
Plus, find out how much SpaceX will charge you for a flight to the International Space Station.
Let’s do this!
🧑💻 Shirking from home?
More from the Chronicles of our New Remote Work Utopia.
A new and anonymous survey of remote working Big Tech employees – think FB, Google, Microsoft – saw 42% admit to doing just one to four hours of ‘real work’ per day.
The survey, by professional social network Blind, found only 15% reported putting in an eight hour shift.
Meanwhile, The National Association for Business Economics surveyed businesses in the US and found that only one in ten expect all employees to return to the office once the pandemic is over.
⚡ NWSH Take: No judgement! Working from home during a pandemic is hard. Still, findings such as this one will reinvigorate a longstanding debate. // Back in the early days of online there was a miniature moral panic about cyberloafing: employees surfing the web (that’s what we called it back then) instead of doing their work. It died down. But in this new WFH home world, employers will wonder anew: my staff are at their desks, but are they working? // The internet, famously, has not boosted economic productivity as expected; we’ve long tried to understand why. Perhaps we have seen a big productivity gain, but knowledge workers are spending most of it on intra-working day YouTube and Twitter? After all, when Microsoft Japan trialled a four-day week in 2019, they got more done. // The upshot? We need a reckoning on the new relationship between information, time, and productivity in a connected world.
🤑 All Your Meme Stocks Are Belong To Us
Missed the bitcoin train? Don’t worry: get into meme stocks instead (this is not investment advice, your capital is at risk, etc, etc).
In what is indisputably this week’s maddest story, an army of amateur traders on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets collaborated this week to drive up the share price of US video game retailer GameStop. Sales are falling at the embattled retail chain, which planned to close 450 stores this year. But since last Thursday its share price has soared by over 750% to $321 per share.
The mechanics get complex, but essentially: thousands of Redditors acted in concert to buy GameStop shares and put the price on a rocket ship. Why? Partly to make money. Partly for the LOLZ: we gamed capitalism. In short: buying GameStop became a meme.
But the story taps into something deeper. That is, the emerging battle between solo online traders and legacy institutional investors. The latter were betting heavily that GameStop shares would fall in 2020. So far this year, those bets have cost them over $6 billion; Redditors have proclaimed victory in threads with titles such as ‘We Are the Captains Now’.
Can the NWSH community pick the next meme stock? Hey, I can dream.
👋 See me in the club
New World Same Humans is coming to Clubhouse!
An early heads up that on Friday 5 February I’ll host the first NWSH event inside this year’s breakout social network. The brilliant conference curator and newsletter writer Monique van Dusseldorp will be my co-host.
Monique and I will be talking the week in tech, trends, and our shared future. Special guests, and further details, to be announced. Put the date in your diary and join the conversation!
🤖 Halt and catch fire
If we build a superintelligent AI, will it destroy us?
A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute's Center for Humans and Machines in Berlin say: quite possibly. In a new paper they find that one of the best-known ideas on how to control a superintelligence – devised by the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing – does not compute.
Turing’s idea was to use containment algorithms: special instructions designed to halt an AI if it started to behave in undesirable ways.
But in the new paper Superintelligence Cannot be Contained, the researchers use computability theory to prove that any algorithm able to do this job may shut itself down before it does the AI.
So, that’s out the window.
⚡ NWSH Take: Questions around safety have haunted AI researchers since the discipline’s earliest days: hence Turing’s work on containment. Now, it seems the problem is harder than even he imagined. As Google et al do ever more with AI, these questions are fast leaving the realms of speculation and becoming practical considerations. // A related problem: how will we know when an AI achieves superintelligence? Back in NWSH #27 I wrote about how questions around whether AIs are ‘minds’ or have ‘true intelligence’ are more complex than many allow. My take? As AI weaves itself through the fabric of our lives, those questions will, for most of us, fade away. We’ll see an intelligence revolution by degrees, which leads people step-by-step towards accepting the idea that machines have minds, and a form of awareness, of their own.
🗓️ Also this week
🧠 Police in Dubai used a ‘memory print’ to help crack a murder case. Brainwave mapping technology demonstrated that one of the suspects remembered the knife used in the killing. In recent years, researchers have started to better understand the brainwave patterns associated with memories.
🚅 Virgin HyperLoop unveiled its vision for passenger experience. The company hopes to bring its supersonic, ultra-green trains into commercial operation across Europe by 2030.
💪 Google workers around the world are banding together to form a new union. The coalition, called Alpha Global, represents workers from 13 countries including the US, UK, and Germany. In a launch statement, Alpha Global said Alphabet had lost touch with its famous ‘don’t be evil’ manifesto.
📱 New guidance from Apple says iPhones should be kept at least six inches away from pacemakers and implanted defibrillators. Magnets inside the phones may interfere with the medical devices.
💉 An AI botched a rollout of coronavirus vaccine to doctors in the US. Healthcare organisation Stanford Medicine’s algorithm was meant to determine who got the vaccine first, but it left out some doctors working in close contact with Covid patients.
🦾 A government-appointed panel says the US should not agree to ban the production of autonomous robot soldiers. The panel, led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, says AI soldiers may make fewer lethal mistakes than their human counterparts.
🤐 TikTok influencers in Russia are getting paid to flood the platform with anti-protest propaganda. Moscow and other cities have seen huge rallies in support of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in recent days.
🧑🚀 Space tourism startup Axiom will fly the first private crew to the International Space Station. An US real estate mogul, a Canadian investor, and an Israeli former pilot are paying $55 million each for a seat on the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, set to launch early in 2022.
🎤 Brian Wilson loved this remote cover version of the Beach Boys classic ‘Good Vibrations’. And while we’re talking covers, check out this brilliant mashup of ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis and ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋♀️ Global population: 7,841,932,668
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7768602433
💉 Global population vaccinated: 0.92%
🗓️ 2021 progress bar: 7% complete
📖 On this day: On 27th January 1880 Thomas Edison received a patent for the incandescent lamp.
Ready for launch
Just $55 million for a trip with SpaceX to the ISS.
I bet you even get a complementary glass of orange juice to pass the time before liftoff.
NWSH can’t promise you orange juice. But in 2021, it will take you on an exciting journey to the outer reaches of our shared future.
New content and events are coming; see the Clubhouse announcement above.
In the meantime, there’s one thing you can do to help us all. Our community becomes more useful to each of us as it becomes larger and more diverse. To help, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d also enjoy it? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time.
Your membership of this community is valued. I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Thanks to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.