Know This

by Mr. John Brockman

  Fecal Microbiota Transplantations, or FMTs, have been shown to cure Clostridium difficile infections in 90 percent of cases, a condition notoriously difficult to treat any other way. We don’t know exactly how FMTs work, other than that the introduction of microbiota (poop) from a healthy individual somehow causes the gut of an afflicted patient to regain its microbial diversity and rein in the rampant bacteria.

  It appears that our gut microbes produce a wide variety of neurotransmitters that influence our brains, and vice versa, much more than previously believed. There is evidence that in addition to mood, a number of brain disorders may be caused by microbial imbalance. The evidence is so strong that FMT banks, such as OpenBiome, have started screening donors for psychiatric problems along with a variety of health issues. Consequently, it is now harder to qualify as a fecal-bank donor than to get into MIT or Harvard. Perhaps machines can help us here, as they do everywhere else; Robogut is making headway in creating synthetic poop.

  It has been shown that mice without gut microbes socialize less than mice with proper gut biomes, causing scientists to theorize that while socialization doesn’t help the fitness of mice, their social behavior and their habit of eating each other’s feces may be driven by the microbes “wanting” to be shared among the mice.

  Many of our favorite foods are really the favorite foods of our gut microbes, which turn those foods into things our bodies need and like. Also, it appears that oligosaccharides—abundant in breast milk and regarded as metabolically “inert”—selectively feed some of our “good” gut microbes. Not only are microbes more abundant in the human body than human cells, it seems they may be the reason we do many of the things we do. They may well be as important, if not more important, in many of our body’s processes than our own cells are.

  However, not all microbes are good for us. In fact, most are neutral and some are bad for us. Take, for example, Toxoplasma gondii, which causes infected rats to lose their natural fear of cats because this parasitic protozoan needs to get inside cats to reproduce. Or rabies, which causes animals to attack other animals to increase transmission.

  And the microbes are everywhere. The detergents we use have eliminated the ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) on our skin—bacteria present on the skin of the Yanomami, indigenes of the Amazon rain forest. Pre-modern-hygiene tribes like the Yanomami do not suffer from acne or most forms of inflammatory skin diseases. In a study of more than 1,000 Kitavan islanders of Papua New Guinea, there was not a single such case. There is increasing evidence that allergies and many other modern ailments arose only after the invention of modern hygiene.

  The microbes in the air are also part of the system. Studies show that infection rates in hospitals decrease if you open a window and let the diverse outdoor microbes in, compared with such rates in hospital environments that filter and sterilize the air. Microbes in the soil are an essential part of the nutrient system for plants, and the microbes in the plants allow the plants to convert the nutrients into flavors and nutrients for us. Using artificial fertilizers that destroy the microbial flora of our soil and “enriching” our blank calories with oversimplistic vitamins that happen to be the molecule du jour are doubtless the opposite of what we should be doing.

  The human gut, particularly the colon, has the highest recorded microbial density of any known microbial habitat. Our gut is almost the perfect environment to support the biodiversity and complexity that is our gut biome. The temperatures are well regulated, with us, the human hosts, able to survive in extreme conditions and sharing microbes with these varied environments. From the perspective of the microbes, we are an almost perfectly evolved life-support system. It may be arrogant to think of the microbes as some sort of “little helpers;” perhaps it’s more accurate to think of ourselves as architectural innovations created by the microbes.

  Hi, Guys

  Alan Alda

  Actor; writer; director; Visiting Professor, Stony Brook University School of Journalism; author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

  This year I had the wonderful and shocking awareness that I’m not only connected to microbes but, in a way, I’m so dependent on them that I sort of am them.

  Darwin gave me the understanding that I’m related to the rest of the beasts of the Earth, but work on the microbiome, released in 2015, impressed me with how much a part of me microbes really are and how much I look to them for my very existence.

  It started with the spooky information a short while back that there are ten times as many of them in me as there are me in me—at least if you compare the number of their cells in me to the number of mine in me.

  From what I read, they’re so specialized that the microbes in the crook of my arm are more like the ones in the crook of your arm than they are like the microbes in my own hand.

  Then came the discovery that before long I’ll be able to get a fecal transplant, or maybe simply take a poo pill, to relieve all kinds of disturbances in my body—possibly even obesity, should it ever win the war against my self-control.

  And there was the equally strange news that I give off a cloud of microbes wherever I go—and if they settle on a surface, someone could take a reading and record a kind of fingerprint of my personal microbiome after I’d left the scene.

  They’re ubiquitous little guys. There are, I believe, more of them pound for pound than any other living thing on Earth, and we can’t even see them.

  And they’re powerful. One kind of microbe expands when wet, and a pound or two of them could lift a car a couple of feet off the ground. You could change your tire with them.

  We’ve planted a flag on a new New World. The last frontier has just changed again, from outer space, to the brain, to an invisible world without which there would be no world as we know it.

  Hi, guys.

  The Anti-democratic Trend

  Dirk Helbing

  Professor of Computational Social Science, ETH Zurich

  The digital revolution progresses at full pace and reshapes our societies. Many countries have invested in data-driven governance. The common idea is that more data is more knowledge, more knowledge is more power, and more power is more success. This magic formula has promoted the concept of a digitally empowered benevolent dictator, or “wise king,” able to predict and control the world in an optimal way. This seems the main reason for the massive collection of personal data, which companies and governments alike have engaged in.

  The concept of the benevolent dictator implies that democracy would be overhauled. I agree that democracy deserves a digital upgrade, but in recent years many voices in the IT industry have claimed that democracy is outdated and needs to be bulldozed. Similar arguments have come from politicians in various countries. Democracy is now in acute danger of ending, in response to challenges such as climate change, resource shortages, and terrorism. A number of countries come to mind.

  However, recent data-driven analyses show that democracy is not a luxury. Rather, it pays off. A 2015 study by Heinrich Nax and Anke Schorr, using high-performance computers, reveals that “the growth of countries that democratize is generally faster and more sustained. The only exceptions are short-term incentives to de-democratize for the richest and most democratic countries, but such de-democratizations come with reduced growth beyond the short-run.”* In other words, demolishing democracy would be a costly mistake.

  The anti-democratic trend in many countries is dangerous and needs to be stopped. First, because it would further sociopolitical instability and end in revolution or war. (Similar instabilities have already occurred, in the transition from agricultural to industrial society and from that to the service society.) Second, because the magic formula noted above is based on flawed assumptions.

  Society is not a machine. It cannot be steered, like a car. Interaction—and the resulting complex dynamics of the system—changes everything. We know this, for example, from spontaneous breakdowns of traffic flow. Even if we could read the minds of all drivers, such p
hantom traffic jams could not be prevented. But there is a way to prevent them, using suitable driver-assistant systems: distributed-control approaches, Internet of Things technology, realtime data, and suitable realtime feedback, together with knowledge gained from complexity science.

  The paradigm of data-driven optimization might work if we knew the right goal function; moreover, the world would have to change slowly enough and things would have to be sufficiently simple and predictable. These conditions are not being fulfilled. As we continue to network the world, its complexity grows faster than the data volume, outstripping the processing power and the data that can be transmitted. Many aspects of our world are emergent and hardly predictable. Innovation is burgeoning and we need even more of it! Not even the goal function is obvious: Should it be GNP per capita or sustainability, power or peace, average life span or happiness? In such cases, (co-)evolution, adaptation, and resilience are the right paradigms, not optimization.

  Decision makers around the globe must recognize the need to preserve democracy and replace information systems based on mass surveillance and brute-force data mining. They need to argue for interdisciplinary and global collaboration, for approaches built on transparency and trust, for open and participatory systems, because those mobilize the capacity of an entire society. They need to promote systems based on diversity and pluralism to foster innovation, societal resilience, and collective intelligence.

  If we don’t manage to get things right, we may lose many societal, economic, legal and cultural achievements of the past centuries; we might see one of the darkest periods of human history, something much worse than 1984’s “Big Brother is Watching You”—a society in which we lose our freedom, enslaved by a “citizen score” that gives us plus or minus points for everything we do, where governments and big corporations determine how we should live our lives.

  The Age of Awareness

  Quentin Hardy

  Deputy technology editor, New York Times

  We are entering the Age of Awareness, marked by machine intelligence everywhere. It is a world instrumented with sensors that constantly describe the location and state of billions of people and objects, transmitting, analyzing, and sharing this information in cloud computing systems that span the globe. We are aware of innumerable interactions and increasingly capable of statistically projecting outcomes.

  The scientific breakthroughs will depend not just on these tools but equally on the system into which they are integrated. The biggest changes and breakthroughs from the instrumented world bring together once disparate sectors of computing, which, by working in unison, create new approaches to product design, learning, and work.

  The sectors include mobility, sensors, cloud computing, and data analysis, whether by machine learning or artificial intelligence. Sensors don’t just give us new information about nature and society, they inform the configuration of cloud systems; the behavior of the analysis algorithms is likewise affected by the success of the changes they make to the cloud system, the sensors, and the external environment.

  The result is a kind of flywheel world, in which data that were once stored and fetched now operate in streams, perpetually informing, changing, and being changed. The accelerating rate of change and increasing pace of discovery is a result of this shift. On a pragmatic level, it means that we will design much of the world to be in a potential state, not a fixed one. The focus of economic value is on changes that continually result from these interactions. Another outcome of this world of continual response and adaptation is the end of the 2,500-year-old (and increasingly suspect) Aristotelian project of creating a state of final knowledge. Instead, we truly live in change, pursuing the best optimization of knowledge.

  Inside the flywheel world, the eternal present of consciousness within a solitary self is being modified by a highly connected and global data storage of the past, computation of the present, and statistical projection of the future.

  We already see our human habits changing with the new technology, much the way print once re-oriented political and religious consciousness, or society changed to suit industrial patterns. As people, we are starting to imitate a software-intensive cloud computing system. Billions of people are gaining near-infinite abilities to communicate across languages to billions of other people. Artificial intelligence agents within those systems will track people, teaching and assisting them, and to yet-unknown extents reporting on the individuals to corporate (and possibly government) masters.

  Learning is increasingly a function of microcourses that teach what you need to know and (thanks to analysis in the system) what you need to know next. We perceive life’s genetic code as an information system, and we are learning how to manipulate it, either to hack the human body or to use DNA for unimaginably small and powerful computers that could extend greatly our powers of awareness and control.

  Unique among times when technology has changed worldviews, this Age of Awareness knows that it is remaking the consciousness and expectations of being human. Gutenberg in 1450, or an industrialist in 1810, had no awareness of an effect on humans wrought by new technologies. Everyone now building the instrumented, self-aware planet can see and analyze the effects of their labor. That does not, to date, significantly improve our ability to plan or control its outcomes.

  A Large-Scale Personality Research Method

  Nathalie Nahai

  Web psychologist; author, Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion

  The most important news of 2015 for me came in June, with the publication of “Automatic Personality Assessment Through Social Media Language” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. For those working at the intersection of psychology and technology, the results of this study confirmed what many of us had been anticipating: the validation of a cheap, naturalistic, large-scale research method designed to assess and interpret the linguistic interactions that millions of us engage in online, every single day.

  With a sample of over 66,000 active social-media participants, the researchers used a rich, open-vocabulary approach to build a predictive model of personality, using the “Big Five” personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The methodology they employed yielded more accurate language-based predictions of personality than any other study to date, demonstrating not only a robust alternative to existing approaches but also that this kind of research can now be accomplished on an unprecedented scale and level of accuracy.

  General insights into a population’s personalities may not seem particularly consequential. We might know, for example, that individuals who score highly for extraversion prefer using more positive emotional words (such as “amazing,” “great,” “happy”), whereas those who score higher in neuroticism tend to use first-person singulars (such as I, me, mine) with greater frequency. But it’s not until we get multiple data points at scale that a more profound picture emerges.

  Considering the ease with which we can create unique profiles for users with little more than a few cookies and an IP address, we are now in the unique position of being able to cluster traits together and compile overall personality dispositions for millions of users, which can then be stored in psychometric databases. In fact, several companies have already begun this task, with commercial applications in mind.

  Given that certain personality dispositions are associated with a range of predictable life outcomes (for instance, a propensity to risk-taking behaviors within high-scoring extravert populations), it’s conceivable that such data could be used to affect the quality of our lives for good and for bad. This is where the importance of the research kicks in.

  On the positive side: If we can design programs that make predictions about our personality by assessing publicly available data (our written interactions across social-media channels), this may prompt us to discover more about our motivations, our behaviors, and ourselves. It may also lead to smarter advertising and applications that will better serv
e our needs.

  On the negative side: Outside the realm of academic research, such data-mining practices do not yet require consent and could therefore be used by any entity able to profile and categorize people (whether as citizens, customers, or potential employees) without their knowledge and beyond their control. Such information could then be used to determine whether to grant certain people access to particular services (such as lines of credit or medical insurance), career paths, and even citizenship.

  Given the predictive potential of such a system, it is of vital importance that this news enter the public discourse, so that we are all better equipped to understand how the information we share online may be used to reveal potentially intimate aspects of ourselves. Only then can we make an informed choice as to how (or whether) to engage online.

  The Conquest of Human Scale

  Charles Seife

  Professor of journalism, New York University; former staff writer, Science; author, Virtual Unreality

  It was just one among dozens and dozens of revelations about the National Security Agency, barely enough to cause a stir in the papers. Yet it is a herald of a new era.

  In May 2014, journalists revealed that the NSA was recording and archiving every single cell-phone conversation that took place in the Bahamas. Now, the Bahamas isn’t a very big place, with only a few hundred thousand people on the islands at any given time. Nor is it often the source of international headlines. So, at first glance, the NSA’s achievement might not look like much. But in capturing—and storing—all of the Bahamas’ cell-phone conversations in real time, the NSA has managed to transform a significant proportion of the day-to-day interactions of a society into data—into information that can be analyzed and transformed and correlated and used to understand the people who produced it. This was something unthinkable even a decade or two ago, yet almost unnoticed, the processing power of computers, the scale of their memory banks, and the cheapness and ubiquity of their sensors are making civilization-scale data-gathering almost routine.