Andrew Thaler

Welcome to the Future: Three Rules for Artificially Intelligent Underwater Robots.

January 27, 2016January 28, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

On January 1, 2016, the Southern Fried Science central server began uploading blog posts apparently circa 2041. Due to a related corruption of the contemporary database, we are, at this time, unable to remove these Field Notes from the Future or prevent the uploading of additional posts. Please enjoy this glimpse into the ocean future while we attempt to rectify the situation.

Underwater robotics has come a long way since I started working on it in the early ‘noughts. From the massive industrial beasts of the old guard to the small, sleak, eminently hackable sprite of the Connected Exploration movement to this new crop of fully autonomous, decision-making and directive setting AI-powered drones of the last few years, everything keeps getting smaller, cheaper, and more capable. It’s a great decade to be exploring the deep.

Last month, we deployed our first swarm of artificially intelligent deep diving robots designed to patrol the abyssal plane, identify regions of unique biodiversity, and recommend critical ecosystems for international protection in advance of biomining operations. What’s unique about this project is that we’ve assigned all decision-making authority directly to the swarm. They get to decide where in the world they go and how and when they sample. This came after years of debate and negotiation with stakeholders from science, conservation, and industry, and has been accepted through international agreement as the most unbiased and equitable solution to the challenge of getting groups with vastly different goals to agree upon dividing up the deep.

The future we wanted to build.

January 26, 2016January 26, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

Twenty-five years ago this month we tried a radical experiment. For 31 days, every single post we made came from the future. This future, to be exact. We explored the nature of change, the fate of our ocean, the cycles of environmentalism–from problem to proposal to success to complacency to new problem. We imagined solutions and their consequences. We envisioned struggles that would continue, and struggles that would fade, unremembered. We shifted the baseline and watched it crumble.

It seems weird, looking back now that the day has come, on those old posts. We got a few things right, and a lot of things wrong.

Damn the paradoxes! Southern Fried Server Update #4

January 25, 2016January 26, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

It is clear now that whatever is driving this flood of future content in inextricably connected to the virus infecting cyborgs in 2041. While human-machine interfaces are something that I have always been interested in, it is not something I write about, and it is certainly not something I would write about on a marine … Read More “Damn the paradoxes! Southern Fried Server Update #4” »

The Cyborg Crisis: new digital virus is fatal to augmented humans

January 24, 2016January 18, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

What began as a relatively benign, though eminently annoying cybernetic virus has evolved into a global catastrophe. Alpha Cloner was just the beginning of a series of increasingly malevolent molecular vectors. Once the code was out, creatives got to work, hacking together more clever, more wicked software packets. The flood gates were open.

Even the barrage of behavior modifying bugs was a distraction. Whoever coded Zero Cloner knew that there would be hundreds of hackers altering their code. They were counting on it.

The genius of Alpha Cloner was not that it tricked augmented humans into queuing up at a food truck. The genius of Alpha Cloner was that the ad hoc fix was for augments to shut off their internal geolocators. This practically guaranteed that the Center for Disease Control and Digital Security would be incapable of tracking the virus as beyond the initial outbreak or document the spread of the Zero Cloner base code–which we now know acts as a critical architecture for further infection. As, one by one, cyborgs opted out of the National Tracking Matrix, the origin and extent of the infection was obscured.

Gliding on starlight: Celestial Navigation for Martian Explorers

January 23, 2016January 15, 2016 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

Uncategorized

Thousands of years ago, merchants on the Arabian Peninsula would cross vast, featureless desert as they traveled from settlement to settlement, selling their goods. They had no roads, no maps, no GPS, yet still they managed to find their mark. They accomplished this tremendous feat of navigation with the help of the stars and a tiny instrument called a kamal.

The kamal was a piece of wood, bone, or ivory, with a piece of string threaded through it at a precise point and measured out to a precise distance. By sighting the kamal against the horizon and the north star, these merchants could maintain a constant latitude as they marchd across the desert, and find their way home. For millennia, this basic principal–that the celestial pole could, with the right instrument, reveal latitude–was the driving force for exploration, trade, and travel. Polynesian sailors used latitude hooks to mark their journey. Portuguese explorers used quadrants to find their way across the Atlantic and around Africa. The age of discovery was already entering its twilight by the time we had figured out longitude–the great scientific puzzle of an generation. For most, simply knowing latitude and cardinal direction was enough to circle the world and return home.

The Martian Circumtropical Expedition kicks off net month, with teams from 17 nations racing to see who will be first to circumnavigate the red planet. Their sandgliders will be outfitted with the most sophisticated expedition gear that their sponsors can afford, costing, at the low end, hundreds of millions of dollars. The budget for China’s team surpasses the GDP of most countries. These will be the best outfitted and most connected explorers in history.

What happens if things go wrong?

Our Gerrymandered Ocean

January 22, 2016January 12, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

Three weeks ago, an armed, irritable, and ill-prepared posse of privateers laid claim to the Deepwater Horizon National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico. Their demands–access to the infamous 30-year-old borehole, as well as new fishing quotas and deregulation of the GoMex Tuna Mariculture industry–are as bizarre as they are indefensible. Gulf oil production has slowed to a crawl. Even if the notorious Macondo Deep were reopened, an act that geologist from within the offshore oil and natural gas industry admit would be catastrophic, there would still be no demand for their crude.

Deregulating tuna mariculture would also be an industry disaster, as federal regulations on the import of foreign tuna is the only thing keeping their sea pens afloat. And you can’t raise quotas on fish that no longer exist.

These privateers are just the latest in the oft-parodied march of Entitlement Militias–cranky young men with few marketable skills who, unable to succeed in the free market, demand vast, and vastly disproportionate, government handouts, paradoxically under an anti-government or anti-federalist banner. Often, they take federal property by force (more accurately the illusion of force, as, historically, they have, to a man (and it’s always men) folded like paper dolls at the first hint of confrontation).

Read More “Our Gerrymandered Ocean” »

E-waste and the promise of Persistent Technology

January 21, 2016January 10, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

The Persistent Technology revolution was a promise unfulfilled.

Technology was liberation. It provided access to education. It connected the world. It created systems that freed us from the harshest injustices in life. That, at least, was the promise uttered by breathless technocrats as they pocketed unimaginable profits from glorified toys for the rich and built ever-widening gaps between those who have, and those who have nothing.

The microprocessor was the equalizer. When our computers, cars, toasters, and power tools were all controlled by by the same underlying architecture, hardware becomes trivial. Upgrade the operating system and your tablet becomes an entirely new device. Continuously improving software would save us from the scourge of electronic waste–the piles of obsolete circuitry slowly leaching metals into the earth or releasing uncounted hydrocarbons into the air as they burn. The “cloud” would be freedom.

Companies began capitalizing on the nascent demand for “Persistent Technologies”, promising cars that would last 20 years and appliances that would outlive their owners (readers of a certain age might smugly note that that kind of longevity existed long before the consumer electronics revolution). Persistent Technology was heralded as the most important environmental innovation in half a century. People lined for weeks to be the first to receive the Forever Phone. The Tesla Infinite had a backorder of over 350,000 units. Persistent Technology would liberate the public from the expense of disposable electronics and save the world from the environmental disaster that those throw-away devices triggered.

It was a fad.

The environmental impact of biomining the deep sea.

January 20, 2016January 19, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

Diversity is resilience.

Or so deep-sea mining newcomer Aronnax Environmental wants you to believe. Arronax will be the first new novel-compound biomining operation to make the dive in almost a decade. The high cost of entry and the onerous permitting process has made competition in the high seas practically non-existent for the big six.

Aronnax enters the game as the “sustainable alternative to destructive biomining”. They claim that their proprietary process is kinder to the seafloor and allows recruitment and recovery following each pass of the mining tool–which they call a swath. The machine itself is a sifter, rather than a dozer, which allows for the collection of environmental DNA while minimizing disturbance to the seafloor. Sifter technology is, in theory, designed to maximize biotic retention, protecting local biodiversity while still achieving 95% comprehensive sampling.

At least, that’s what Aronnax hopes.

Whatever happened to deep-sea mining?

January 19, 2016January 10, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

“In the depths of the ocean, there are mines of zinc, iron, silver and gold that would be quite easy to exploit”

Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

There really should be a rule about starting any more deep-sea mining articles with that Jules Verne quote. Something like 50% of my own articles on the topic begin with that aging line from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There are mines of gold in the deep sea, but, as it turns out, they are not quite so easy to exploit.

Three decades ago, the deep-sea mining industry coalesced around a hydrothermal vent prospect in Papua New Guinea. At the time one of the largest known seafloor massive sulfides, its proximity to shore, as well as its location within the territorial seas of a single nation, made it the ideal spot to launch the first deep-sea mining operation. A decade later the first mining tools touched down on the seafloor.

This is not that story. The rise and fall and fall and rise and fall and rise of deep-sea mining is a tale almost a century old (and one which we have blogged about quite a bit). Like the tide itself, the industry is entirely dependent on the ebb and flow of commodities prices. When copper and gold are down, exploiting the seafloor is prohibitively expensive. When the price eventually rises, the upfront cost and long tail of mobilization means that initial profit projections are woefully obsolete by the time production begins. The Persistent Technology movement managed to handily tank the commodities market for most of the 20’s.

Of course, while the underlying resource proved to be too risky in a volatile commodities market, the technology developed for those first mines went on to be enormously profitable in other sub-sea ventures. Biomining and Rare-Earth Element Shunting wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for these early pioneers. Nor, for that matter, would some non-exploitive industries, like deep aquaculture and thermogradient energy production.

Ride the Digital Slipstream: Southern Fried Server Update #3

January 18, 2016January 10, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Uncategorized

There is a message buried in all of this.

Here is what I know:

The infection didn’t start January 1, the code was already spreading through my servers on December 31. It entered through a security hole in Networked Blogs, the service we use to post articles to Facebook. It is likely that the invasion actually began on Facebook, but I don’t know how. Whatever else it is, the code is not spreading beyond Southern Fried Science. Not even our sister sites on the shared server have been affected. Oceanography for Everyone is safe.

It has control of the @sfriedscience twitter account, likely through WordPress. This is the inevitable consequence of a too-connected world. Our securest systems are only as strong as the weakest systems to which we connect them.

Something is happening to cyborgs in the future. I can’t shake the feeling that this is all somehow connected.

If I were me, and I am me, and I remembered a month, 25 years ago, where my blog was overwhelmed by the future, I would use the opportunity to send a message back.