SITALWeek #298
Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, Alice, Bob, and Charlie, and whatever else made me think last week. Please grab me on Twitter with any thoughts or feedback.
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In today’s post: VR makes time fly; social media’s censoring of the marketplace of ideas; learning language models; quantum networks arrive before quantum computing; zero-trust adoption is exploding; leaf-biting bees; giant tortoises; population declines; and lots more below...
Stuff about Innovation and Technology
Every Company is a Software Company
Speaking at their Build developer conference last week, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella noted that traditional companies now hire more software programmers than technology companies: “It’s not about the West Coast of the U.S. or the East Coast of China, but pretty much every company in the world, in every sector”.
Time Flies in VR
Virtual reality causes us to experience time compression – time passing more quickly than we think. A recent study comparing VR vs. on-screen gaming (with a simple maze task) showed time moving about 28% faster in VR. The perception discrepancy might be due to less bodily awareness when we have a more tangible connection to a virtual avatar than our physical body, thus dampening physical signals of time progression (e.g., heart rate). If this phenomenon holds for other VR activities, then VR meetings should be a vastly more pleasant experience compared to Zoom fatigue’s induced time dilation.
Affordable EVs
Lithium ion battery prices dropped 30x between 1991 and 2018, and they are expected to imminently cross under the $100 per kilowatt-hour threshold, which would put EV energy costs at parity with gasoline engines (and battery costs won’t stop dropping there!).
Language Models Without Transcribed Audio
Wav2vec-U is a new language learning model from Facebook that does not require any transcribed audio. Instead, the model takes unannotated audio recordings and uncorrelated text and learns on its own. This is important because many languages lack a large enough tagged speech database for training. And, it’s an important step toward the type of advanced, audio-only universal translator we will need when we meet the aliens 👽 the US government is eager to tell us exist.
Ephemeral Golden Era of Dubbing
With an increasing effort to make locally-produced video content available around the globe, it’s a golden era for actors who dub films into other languages. But, we’re typically left with a slightly disjointed feeling since the words aren’t synced up with actors’ lip movements. Subtitles are of course an option, but they make for rather tedious viewing. In order to provide a more seamless, native-language-like experience, there’s a new deepfake AI tech that can change the actors’ lip movements to match the dubbing (see the video in this Wired article). But, how long will it be before neural nets can dub directly from generic recordings of an actor’s voice, translating both words and emotions with high fidelity? The golden era for dubbers may be coming to an end soon.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie: 3-Node Entangled Network
Researchers in the Netherlands have created the first entanglement-based quantum network of three nodes. By verifying successful information conveyance between the three nodes (Alice, Bob, and Charlie – physicists’ favorite names for all quantum experiments/thought exercises), this advance sets the groundwork for more powerful, multi-node quantum networks. The trick is that Bob sits in the middle of the network and stores a copy of Alice’s qubit (which can be 0 and 1 at the same time, compared to traditional bits that are either 0 or 1), which allows Bob to entangle that qubit with Charlie, thereby entangling Alice and Charlie. Entanglement, or “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein called it, is a little hard to wrap your brain around – there is a short video in the article that shows visually what’s happening. When you see the lines connecting Alice, Bob, and Charlie in the video, just know that in quantum entanglement you don’t need an actual physical connection – once entangled, changes in state are transmitted instantaneously regardless of the intervening distance. It’s likely we will see the benefits of quantum networks long before we see the benefits of quantum computing (which may never come to fruition).
Fully Autonomous Decades Away
Around six years ago, I had frequent conversations with autonomous driving leaders who were quite confident that we’d have fully-autonomous (level 5) vehicles before 2020. Some of those same people are now projecting this achievement is decades away. One of the fundamental problems I see with autonomous driving reaching maturity is that driving involves taking risks. Can we ethically program an AI to take risks? If all vehicles were autonomous and communicated with each other, then there would effectively be no risk. But, unless we are going to mandate a wholesale shift to autonomous, it’s going to be a while before we can eliminate human driver error. An aftermarket sensor package seems an unlikely solution, and replacing vehicles before they’ve reached the end of their lifetime would have a costly environmental impact. This slow churn to autonomous affords more opportunity for incumbent car companies to catch up to autonomous leaders like Waymo and Tesla. It would be interesting for a country to set a deadline for all cars to have interoperable autonomous capabilities. Alternatively, governments could start subsidizing autonomous sensors and processors in all new vehicles, which should assure near-complete inter-vehicle communication within 10-20 years. Low-speed autonomous delivery vehicles, like Nuro, that can operate more like a bicycle than a car still seem relatively safe for real-world operation.
Fed’s Going Zero Trust
The Federal government has a new mandate to move to zero-trust security for its agencies and any companies with which it conducts business. This sweeping modernization of legacy IT systems is similar to Microsoft’s intentions to drop their corporate networks and go zero trust (discussed last Sunday in more detail). Further, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince, speaking at the JP Morgan conference last week, said: “the Biden administration's executive order saying that if you're doing business with the federal government, you have to adopt a zero trust approach to security. And reading it was like reading the Cloudflare product catalog...And I think that, that will very quickly start to get people to say, the old approach of just buying a whole bunch of boxes and sticking them in an IT closet somewhere, that doesn't work anymore because here's a document that says it doesn't.” And, Okta’s CEO Todd McKinnon had this to say on the company’s earnings call last week: “I was meeting with the Chief Security Officer at a very well-known 3-letter agency....And basically, what they were saying is it sounded like -- and literally, a marketing script that Okta would say. They said we were a victim of SolarWinds. They're worried about these other attacks, these exchange leaks, these exchange attacks -- these exchange attacks, etc. We have to go to Zero Trust, and identity is at the core of it all.” When an organization transitions to zero trust, instead of relying on outdated perimeter security like firewalls, it’s assumed the bad guys can somehow gain access, so the focus is shifted to limiting their ability to move around and wreak havoc. And, access security is improved through smarter identity tools and endpoint security. Last I saw, enterprise IT security spending was $150-200B per year, which seems to largely go to waste. Likely, a fraction of that budget could be repurposed with much better results.
Social Media Thwarts Search for Truth
The increased calls to examine the origin of the virus that caused the pandemic has put social media censorship in the spotlight for silencing the lab-leak theories early on. At this point, I don’t think tracking down viral origins will have any benefit for ending the current pandemic; but, the knowledge could have been helpful at the onset and could provide a basis for preventative measures. It’s interesting how the conspiracy to quiet the lab-leak hypothesis was stronger than the lab leak conspiracy theory itself. An author I like, Nicholson Baker, wrote an excellent piece in left-leaning New York Magazine back in January titled: The Lab-Leak Hypothesis with the subheading: “For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if…?” I thought the essay was well written and seemed to be well researched, and it certainly opened my mind. Facebook initially banned posts suggesting the virus leaked from a lab but is now allowing them. A recent article, also in New York Magazine, points out how the circular reference of liberal journalists and scientists on Twitter created a backdrop where the origin couldn’t be seriously probed a year ago. Back in the early days of the pandemic, we referenced (#237) a Nature Medicine article verifying a natural origin of the virus; however, it was later revealed that Nature had suspect ties to China (#240). Now it seems entirely plausible that article we referenced in #237 was a plant orchestrated by Beijing. Back then, it seemed China was doing quite a bit of grassroots deflection by injecting fake news stories into local and social media, but the apparent ease with which they might have co-opted one of the world's most respected scientific publishers is disheartening. If knowing the truth about the origins of the virus would have helped slow or stop the pandemic sooner, then we clearly have an issue here of uneven suppression/elevation in the marketplace of ideas potentially causing significant harm. It seems like, if an idea is new, it should be neither quashed nor amplified (e.g., by algorithms designed to maximize Mark Zuckerberg’s checking account balance) prior to proper vetting. Rather, it should be given room to breathe while the experts (specifically not those in the CCP’s pockets) chew on the data. If an idea has long been disproven, that’s an easier call; but, even then, we should allow new evidence to be evaluated. I don’t have any answers here, but the renewed origins debate is an important spotlight on the risks of social media censorship, and I hope something can be learned from it.
Nitty Gritty of Nanosheets
If you get excited about whether 2nm/3nm chip production will use nanosheets or finFETs, then this overview of the challenges and paths to higher performance chips from Semi Engineering is for you! “A nanosheet FET is an evolutionary step from a finFET. In a nanosheet, a fin from a finFET is placed on its side and is then divided into separate horizontal pieces. Each piece or sheet makes up the channels. The first nanosheet FET will likely have 3 or so sheets. A gate wraps around all of the sheets or channel. Nanosheets implement a gate on four sides of the structure, enabling more control of the current than finFETs.”
Illuminating Real Estate Trends
Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman has a great string of tweets on the oddities of the current housing market, including the notion that dual income households are moving to lower cost areas and becoming single income households, one of many trends exacerbating the undersupply of labor for open jobs.
Miscellaneous Stuff
Jazzing Up Electron Orbitals
The traditional representation of electrons orbiting a nucleus that we all have seen in high school textbooks has always been at best a really misleading model. It’s not even a simplification, it’s just not the way the wave function works. I was excited to see Minute Physics post on YouTube some very cool conceptual representations of the wave function for probabilities of different electron states and characteristics. These new visuals are also not perfect because electrons (and their probability distributions) don’t act like little balls occupying discrete regions of space; rather, the wave function for the electrons is everywhere all at once with varying probabilities (just ask Dr. Heisenberg). That said, Minute Physics figured out a great way to render inspiring, dynamic visual representations of wave functions.
Plant-Biting Bees
Scientists were recently surprised to discover that bumblebees bite leaves of flowering plants in a way that causes them to flower sooner. This behavior is seen when pollen is in short supply. Researchers attempted to mimic the bee-induced damage with forceps and a razor, which resulted in a modest shift in flower production that was much less dramatic than that induced by authentic bee bites (probably due to a specific biochemical signaling from the bees). If we can figure out the exact mechanism/active agent(s), perhaps we could harness the technique to increase agricultural production.
“Extinct” Tortoise Rediscovered
The last time anyone saw a Fernandina giant tortoise, native to the Galápagos, was in 1906. The species was thought to be extinct until recently, when biologists located a 100+ year-old female roaming the rather inhospitable island of Fernandina (an active shield volcano). Her species was confirmed with genetic testing. Scat and prints indicate additional tortoises on the island, and an expedition will be launched with the hope of securing more Fernandinas for a breeding program. There are twelve living Galápagos giant tortoise species (galápago is a Spanish word for tortoise) and the largest can grow to over 800 pounds and 6 feet long, living for well over 100 years. Darwin, who referenced the tortoises as an example of species divergence, would apparently go for rides on the creatures: “I frequently got on their backs, and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away; but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”
Convoluted mRNA Patent Chains
Nature Biotechnology printed a look at the complicated patent chain for various elements of mRNA vaccines. Of particular note is the critical lipid nanoparticle (LNP) that delivers the mRNA to cells before it degrades. The LNP patent traces back to a company called Acuitas, which has a license from Arbutus, which has a license from the University of British Columbia. Moderna is currently trying to challenge the validity of Arbutus’ US patents after a 2018 settlement (in their favor) with Arbutus via the Canadian legal system. Arbutus has licensed LNPs (via Genevant sublicense) to BioNTech/Pfizer, and Acuitas has sublicensed to CureVac.
Retro Special Effects
If you liked Flight of the Navigator as much as I did when I was eight years old, then you’ll enjoy this deep dive on YouTube into the crazy combination of visual effects used to create all the alien technology.
Stuff about Geopolitics, Economics, and the Finance Industry
Welcome Robots and Immigrants!
The NYT has an article filled with eerie anecdotes about the coming global population decline. According to the article, sometime around mid-century there will be more deaths than births; however, I think even that timeline is optimistically far out. Previously fast-growing populations, like India and Mexico, are no longer above replacement birth levels, and how long will it be before the last growth regions, like Africa, see prosperity and equality that drive down birth rates? When populations decline, it's hard for GDP to grow. What would the world look like if, in ten years, the global population began shrinking? Ponder that if you’re worried about a quarter or two of short-term reopening inflation! I can certainly hear the planet breathing a sigh of relief. I’ve covered this topic a lot in the past, but the main thing I expect to happen is wealthier nations will be paying large bounties to entice immigration to keep their economy growing. Perhaps not coincidentally, according to WaPo, concurrent with the current population growth slowdown, automation growth is accelerating. And, the pandemic has significantly accelerated robot implementation and job automation with software, with the US economy producing the same GDP with 8.2M fewer workers.
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