Notes: Controlling the Weather and Aging More Slowly

As longtime readers know, I have about 50 e-magazines that I curate on Flipboard.  Each day I read (mostly skimming) about articles on a wide range of topics that are of interest to me.  Here is a sampling of recent articles that I find particularly noteworthy and thought-provoking.

Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth.  This is a particularly troubling fact.  Another proof, as if we needed it, of our presence in the Anthropocene.  This is a staggering situation that no one has any power to address.  Inevitably, it will continue to occur because there's nothing to stop it and the source of the acceleration is only speeding up.  "Roads, houses, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printer paper, coffee mugs, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of daily life now weigh in at approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons—equal to the combined dry weight of all plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists on the planet. The creation of this human-made mass has rapidly accelerated over the past 120 years: Artificial objects have gone from just 3 percent of the world’s biomass in 1900 to on par with it today. And the amount of new stuff being produced every week is equivalent to the average body weight of all 7.7 billion people."  Good God, what a force in the world.

Conspiracy theories may seem irrational - but they fulfill a basic human need.  According to this article, one reason there are COVID-19 deniers or QAnon followers or so many have a tendency to reject scientific evidence is that we need to feel like we have some sort of control over our lives.  If random events are interpreted as planned ("the Wuhan virus was created in a lab") then we feel safer, things happen as a result of someone's control.  Social media now enables us to create "bubbles" of reality, each with its own standards for evaluating evidence and expertise.  So, empirical facts are not as important to most people as feeling safe.

China to expand weather modification program to cover area larger than India.  China can control the weather - in small areas.  It can make it rain.  Make it be dry.  Now it is expanding this program greatly with the intent to deploy and operate a weather modification system within its borders by 2025.  This is being advertised as a way to offer "comprehensive prevention against safety concerns."  I assume that means mitigating the damaging effects of typhoons, monsoons, and tornadoes.  Cloud seeding is nothing new but the Chinese seem to have taken it to another level.  I wonder if this ability will only be used for the benefit of others.  Just another example that we are now living in the Anthropocene.

Drug Reverses Age-Related Cognitive Decline Within Days.  The drug ISRIB shows a lot of promise.  It also changes the fundamentals of how we look at cognitive decline in the brain.  It suggests that our mental and emotional capacities are still present in the brain after decline, it is just that they have become closed-off, inaccessible to us.  That's the theory anyway since this drug seems to allow for reopening our mental capabilities.

When Objects Become Extensions of You.  In this article MIT Press discusses how the human brain inherently makes you perceive of a tool in your hand as if it were a part of your body.  The psychological study described here reminds me of Martin Heidegger's concept of "ready-to-hand," something I will write more about in the near future. 

Computers Evolve a New Path Toward Human Intelligence.  The development of Artificial Intelligence is a complex issue that is underappreciated in our society given the exponential acceleration of the pace of technological change in our society.  The information here explores the evolution of computer algorithms, their growing sophistication, and the inevitability that AI will start "teaching" itself in the near future.  One of the possibilities is that what "intelligence" means will evolve as AI begins to interact more with human intelligence.  "Such open-ended exploration might lead to human-level intelligence via paths we never would have anticipated — or a variety of alien intelligences that could teach us a lot about intelligence in general."  I am keeping an eye on these developments because 1) no governing body in the world is paying attention to the radical possibilities of this and 2) I see our future "reality" as greatly expanding over what mainstream religion, philosophy, and psychology is considering today - a hybrid of human and silicon.

The Ruling Elite's War on Truth.  A straightforward examination of how both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for "the seizure of power by corporations and billionaires." Clearly, wealthy elities have a "seat at the table" of governing that the typical voter does not, except in mass.  The trouble is, it has never been easier for corporations to manipulate the masses.  "When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as propaganda. They will target, I fear through violence, the Democratic Party politicians, mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as Trump and the Republican Party."

Sure Looks Like Humans Found a Way to Reverse Aging.  I have read about and followed information on telomeres for many years now.  It is no news that the length of our telemores controls the speed at which our body's organs age.  But this study is the clearest evidence yet that humans can control the length of the telomeres.  This is fantastic.  Of course, it does not solve our health issues like viruses, diabetes, stroke, heart attack, or genetic predispositions.  It simply shows that we can slow down the aging of our organs including the brain.  That will completely change the world all by itself.

Where did Trump make election gains?  Since my final note on the general election it has become apparent that Trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016.  He received the most votes ever by a sitting president.  Period.  And he still lost.  This interesting map shows where he made his gains (in red) and also where he performed worse in 2020 (in blue).  Interestingly enough, Trump made significant gains in Florida and the New York City area.  I spend a couple of days studying this map, of and on, when it first came out.

How to stay human in the era of artificial intelligence.  An interesting TED talk by a specialist in the field of AI.  This is a great "State of the Union" overview of where we are now with AI and how fast this is all changing.  He highlights that "digital butlers" will be "increasingly making decisions about us, for us, and on our behalf."  This will offer unprecedented advantages to humanity.  But the speaker worries about how far our "appetite for convenience and consumption" will be manipulated by AI, just as Tinder chooses life partners and Facebook offers you the news today.  The speaker argues that we must expand the human capabilities of our "invisible algorithmic decision-making," something AI cannot reach.  Empathy is one such area that AI cannot offer.  There are steps to be taken for maintaining our humanity in an increasingly artificial world.  A slightly disturbing yet hopeful talk.

The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand.  As much as anything, our reality is populated by vast systems behaving automatically in financial markets, resource distribution, and our social interaction.  "No one’s driving. And if we hope to retake the wheel, we’re going to have to understand, intimately, all of the ways we’ve lost control. This is the first entry in a series — called, yes, No One’s Driving — that aims to do exactly that. Each month, we’ll examine a technological system that has grown too complex to be understood by, well, just about any one person, and break down how it has spiraled out of control, why that is dangerous, and what we might do about it."  I believe humans intuitively feel danger with regard to modern complexity - and that is justified.

Your Brain Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does.  A neuroscientist explains the predictive power of the brain and why that is an evolutionary advantage.  Not only that, but we can actually undertake some measure of control over what the brain will predict tomorrow.  But first we have to understand how the neurological habit of brain prediction works.  "An important consideration here: where do your brain’s predictions come from? Those predictions come from not just your own past experiences, but what you read and what you see in the news and what you watch on television and the social media that you're exposed to. That's where your predictions come from—from a world that others curate for you. As you get older, you have some choice in curating that world by what you expose yourself to (and what you don’t). We're getting into Lesson Seven in the book: we're social animals and we learn from each other. We don't just learn by doing, we also learn by telling stories and listening to one another. We communicate our own experiences to other people and other people learn from those experiences. So we don't have to go through the painful process of learning everything on our own. This social learning has serious benefits, but it also has some risks. This is one aspect of free will that few people talk about: You can broaden your experiences today to predict differently tomorrow. Effective control over your behavior requires that you broaden the horizon of time. Having control of your actions isn't only about avoiding certain actions 'in the heat of the moment'—it’s also about seeding your brain to have more flexibility in constructing your predictions before the heat of the moment."

So there is plenty going on in the world and a lot to consider that has little to do with the daily routine to news.  It is amazing how widely our human capacity for control is expanding as well as how fast AI is evolving, more and more without our direct input.  My sense of wonder with life is inspired by all the possibilities, whether good or questionable, that these topics and others like them bestow upon an attentive person.