New Week Same Humans #37
An AI artist at London's Design Museum. Blue Origin wants to help NASA get to the moon. 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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This week, a new exhibition in London raises the question: what is art?
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, is at the heart of a fierce argument inside the US Congress.
And a whistleblower says the CCP is secretly testing emotion recognition technologies on Chinese citizens.
Let’s go!
🖼️ AI designed
An AI-fuelled robot artist is exhibiting its – or her? – self-portraits at the prestigious Design Museum in London.
Ai-Da is billed as ‘the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist’; she was created in 2019 by art dealer Aidan Meller and robotics firm Engineered Arts. Ai-Da uses propriety algorithms to generate visual art works, and Meller estimates that she has generated career earnings of over $1 million.
Meanwhile, Dutch artist and NWSH reader Jeroen van der Most has created The Spirit Machine, an AI installation inspired by the 20th-century educationalist Maria Montessori.
The work leverages language model GPT-3 to generate a continuous stream of quotes inspired by Montessori’s work.
⚡ NWSH Take: Ai-Da is great fun, but at the heart of the new Design Museum exhibition is a deep question: can a machine truly create art? // On the one hand, we tend to believe that art depends on the communication of feelings and experiences that only we – conscious, embodied, human – can access. What is art about, if not how it feels to be human? // On the other, if machines start to create work – paintings, music, stories – that generate powerful feelings in us, then at what point does the provenance of that work start become irrelevant? In the end, won’t people simply want the art that speaks to them most powerfully? // There’s something quietly horrifying about the idea that AIs may get better than people at making art that moves us. But once, people would have felt similarly about the idea that an algorithm can be better than your friends at suggesting music you’ll like. We’re a long way from true AI artists right now. But machine intelligence is set to test, and redefine, the boundaries of art in the years to come.
🧑🚀 Billions for Blue Origin?
An argument is raging over plans to hand $10 billion of US government money to Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin.
NASA is committed, via its Artemis project, to put astronauts back on the moon before the decade is out. Blue Origin recently lost out on a contract to build the rocket they’ll fly in; it went to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
But now, a clause in the Endless Frontier Act – a new bill to boost science and technology funding – would order NASA to award the contract twice, just to be safe. And the second recipient would almost certainly be Blue Origin.
The bill is currently being debated in Congress, and some familiar faces are raising protest.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin revealed this week that it has received more than 5,200 bids in its online auction for a seat on the rocket New Shepard, which will fly its first crew into space on 20th July. The highest bid stands at $2.4 million.
⚡ NWSH Take: The battle between two billionaire tech overlords for dominance of space – and for the government dollars they need to get there – is a tale for our times. Specifically, about the increasingly uneasy relationship between society and private capital. // Via the NASA contract, Musk has the funds he needs to continue to develop Starship, the massive rocket he hopes will one day take SpaceX astronauts to Mars. Meanwhile, further billions look set to be funnelled towards Bezos and Blue Origin. // The underlying truth here? We live in a culture that relentlessly cheers the unique, risk-taking genius of Musk and Bezos. But as they eye the frontiers of space, it’s government that’s acting to de-risk their endeavours. Perhaps we should have believed more in the collective all along, including when we allowed them to accumulate private fortunes that rival the GDPs of mid-table nations. // There are Great Works to be done in the 2020s: on space, public health, and climate. Let’s reassert the power of the collective to shape our shared future. We could start by taxing Amazon properly.
📱 Have you tried Faves?
A while back I wrote about joining the smart new social platform Faves, where experts, peers and friends can connect over the content they love.
Since then, some amazing curators have joined – including Silicon Valley leaders, top writers on tech and business, and a host of founders – and the waitlist has exploded to 17,000.
But NWSH readers can skip that queue, and jump straight into the app. Just download Faves from the app store, and enter the code 7822 9013 3285 when prompted.
You’ll discover a whole new kind of social experience, with a fascinating mission to combine human and AI content curation. See you inside the app!
😱 The Ministry of Feelings
China has reportedly been testing emotion recognition technology on Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang.
According to a software engineer turned whistleblower, the technology is in operation in police stations across the province, which is home to 12 million ethnic minority Uyghurs. It’s being used during interrogations, and results that indicate a ‘negative or anxious state of mind’ are being taken as indicators of guilt.
China is accused of serial human rights abuses against its Uyghur population; it’s estimated that over 1 million Uyghurs are held in detention camps – the CCP calls them re-education centres – in Xinjiang.
⚡ NWSH Take: The international community has condemned Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs; China isn’t backing down. This week its foreign minister, Wang Yi, bitterly criticised moves to label what’s happening a genocide, saying ‘our European friends know what is genocide’. // With this news on emotion recognition, we’re forced to confront the full force of what lies ahead: an autocratic state supported by an AI-fuelled surveillance network more powerful than anything a 20th-century dictator could have dreamed about. // Equipped with this kind of technology, how all-encompassing can the CCP’s control of life in China become? And what happens to the Uyghurs? We’re going to find out.
🗓️ Also this week
🪐 This Yale political theorist got her students to write a constitution for a human settlement on Mars. I feel a NWSH Clubhouse session coming on.
🛢️ A Dutch court says energy company Shell must cut its emissions by 45% against 2019 levels. Friends of the Earth say it’s the first time a company has been legally obliged to comply with the Paris climate agreement.
🚗 Germany has passed new laws that will allow driverless cars on public roads in 2022. Testing of autonomous cars is already permitted; this change would see such cars take to roads with no safety driver behind the wheel.
₿ Elon Musk called major bitcoin miners to discuss how to make mining more sustainable. Last week Tesla announced it would no longer accept bitcoin payments due to concerns over the environmental impact of the currency.
💥 UK scientists have taken a step towards the dream of mainstream nuclear fusion power plants. They’ve developed a way to deal with the immense temperatures generated during fusion.
🧑⚕️ Google has struck a deal to get anonymised patient data from US healthcare giant HCA. The tech giant wants to build systems that enhance decisions made by doctors.
✈️ Autonomous plane startup Merlin Labs emerged from stealth mode. The company says it wants to be ‘the definitive autonomy platform for things that fly’.
🔥 Researchers say a network of drones and sensors can detect wildfires before they spread. Drought conditions mean California wildfires have already burned five times more land area in 2021 than they had by this time last year.
🧬 A US geneticist is auctioning his DNA as an NFT. George Church is the co-founder of Nebula Genomics and his DNA is famous; it’s been used in countless scientific studies.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,868,430,281
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7850053036
💉 Global population vaccinated: 5.2%
🗓️ 2021 progress bar: 40% complete
📖 On this day: On 26 May 1967 the Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
A New Way of Seeing
Thanks for reading this week.
The rise of machine intelligence means the emergence of a new way of seeing the world. One that will at times seem alien, and at others strangely beautiful.
In the years ahead, we’re going to have to get used to our machine companions. New World Same Humans will be watching that process as it unfolds.
And there’s one thing you can do to help with that mission: share!
Now that you’ve made it to the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Thanks to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.