Optimistic activism

How can we use tech to build the better world we all know is possible? HopeMechanic is a maybe-regular roundup of some of the signals that spark ideas and give hope.

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Headlines in rebellion:

• Powerful nations from Vietnam to Nigeria demand data sovereignty from big tech
• Switzerland creates a carbon-neutral, open source, privacy-first AI model
• Good people find an easy way of reducing AI energy consumption 90% without impacting accuracy
• A bunch of AI companies like Perplexity and OpenAI try to farm your data with their own browsers, but Europe develops the blueprint for a privacy-first tech stack called Eurostack
• AI Results are killing traffic from search engines for some publishers, though Google denies it's an overall trend.

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What this means for your project / business / movement:

• AI models are starting to compete on privacy, ethics and climate impact. This is excellent news. Upshot: It’s too early to tie your project to a particular AI model. Use transferable tools and watch this space as better models emerge.
• Focus on community. As these data-hungry machines make the internet a greasier place to be, the drive for genuine connections between people will only increase. How can you project enhance community or put community at its centre? Build your growth strategy around how you can improve or increase the connections in people's lives.
• Tell your story. We’re already seeing “more human” content get rewarded by the LinkedIn algorithm, but we weren't put on this earth to be rewarded by an algorithm. Tell your story online or offline because there is power in being witnessed, and other people will resonate with it and feel less alone.
• Nail Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for your website, also known as Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) or AI Opimisation (AIO), so that you come up at the top of search results for the people you want to help. Rather than replacing your search engine marketing strategy with an AI strategy, incorporate GEO into your SEO work to reach more people. Here's a tool I built that does it for you.

In More Depth:

• Someone stored an image on a bird, and the future is animal-machine hybrids.

Images like PNGs can be converted by a computer into a long chain of numbers and letters, which another computer or website reads and turns back into a picture. Numbers and letters can be converted into musical notes, which this guy played on his phone to a starling - one of those birds (like a mockingbird) that repeats the sounds back to you. The bird repeated the sound incredibly accurately, allowing the original 176 KB image to be perfectly recreated from its song. This level of lossless quality is better than what most analogue audio technologies like tape recorders can achieve!

Apart from being completely ridiculous, this raises some really fascinating ideas. With neural networks and things like that driving AI development, we're working SO HARD to get machines to behave like human brains, because after 4 billion years of R&D our planetary evolution seems to have figured out brains as the most effective way to store and process information while reducing energy consumption. The energy consumption of AI is appalling, so the thought behind biomimicry is that the closer we can replicate nature / animals / biological organisms in our designs of technology, the more we can benefit from those millennia of trial and error that the planet has been through, and get some of the gains without having to redo all that testing. Why don't phones sprout little legs and move themselves 4 inches sideways into the sunlight to solar charge when we put them down? All animals move to fuel themselves from renewable, readily available sources of energy like fruit and protein, why are we so insistent on outdated tech that doesn't?

Here with this image-bird, we have the first example of "data storage" that doesn't melt an ice cap. We don't drill oil to make plastic to store it on a disk or a drive, we don't mine for precious metals, we don't suck up water to cool our servers - a bird fuels itself with food, pollinates and distributes seeds to grow more food, and then dies without contributing to planetary waste.

Scale it up. Can we store an album on an elephant? A movie on a whale? (Orca whales imitate sounds played to them by researchers). Instead of making machines more like animals should we be asking how to make animals more like machines? Could this (horrifying) question unlock some climate-positive possibilities for the technology we all use?

https://www.techspot.com/news/108846-can-bird-store-reproduce-data-starling-may-have.html

• People are attaching tiny robot backpacks to cockroaches and I can not stop laughing

This is a REAL STORY. Researchers have started turning cockroaches into drones by attaching tiny robot backpacks to them and then setting them loose to gather data. The idea is that they can help militaries map unknown terrains and things like that, and they've ALREADY BEEN DEPLOYED in some crisis zones after natural disasters to locate survivors. Cockroach robots. Scurrying around with little tiny robot backpacks.

The best part about this story is that they've got the backpack assembly time down from over an hour to just over a minute, which means that it was SOMEONE'S JOB TO SPEND OVER AN HOUR PUTTING A BACKPACK ON A COCKROACH. This just has me in tears of laughter.

What’s the worst way this could be used?

• Total surveillance. If they can turn a cockroach into a drone, then we can assume that mosquito-sized drones are on our doorstep. And mosquitos can get anywhere (this is the entire plot of the Ant Man movies.)

What’s the best way this could be used?

• We think a lot about building large data sets and looking at the world at a macro scale, but this opens up ways to look at microecologies in more detail too which could be just as informative.
• We could do some incredible observation-based science if we could attach tiny backpacks to butterflies and fish and see environments that humans can't enter. Maybe we'll finally see where eels breed.

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