Making this speculation about the confluence of AI, mental health, work from home, and workers rights.
Image credit: 3D Crab Nebula - Thomas Martin, Danny Milisavljevic and Laurent Drissen
Today, under OSHA, employers are required to maintain a safe and healthy workplace. Whether you're in an organized union or not, if you're a worker, you have rights. Our economy says that you will trade work for money, but you're not supposed to be trading years of your life from unsafe or unhealthy working conditions. Employers therefore have to try not to expose you to vaporized metals or cancer-causing chemicals while you work. But what if you work from home? And what if your job's mental stress is doing more damage than a couple parts per million of cancer gas?
Everyone is thinking about workers rights; you can ask Amazon about that. But workers rights traditionally only protect you while you're at work. A whole lot of people are now working, but not at work. Who protects them? What obligation does an employer have to ensure safe working conditions for you if you're not at work? Should an employer be responsible for the working conditions of your house? Sounds crazy right?
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| Larry Goeb - Mirrored Plasma 2 - lgflickr1 |
Not so fast. Somebody else is entering the chat. It's the healthy buildings movement. You could say it's the sustainability movement, turned inward (finally), and realizing that the most important thing about a building is the user. Advocates for the healthy building movement are pitching their vision to the business community, with a very simple argument -- it affects your bottom line.
The sustainability movement in buildings was pitched as a way to save money on energy costs. The healthy building movement doesn't really care about that. In fact, we're about to flush our buildings with so much fresh air, we'll be taking out loans to pay our renewable energy credit stock portfolio managers.
The healthy building movement is in direct opposition to the sustainability movement (as understood by the general public to mean energy efficiency and not much else, maybe more daylighting, maybe an extra bike rack). It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be, but it goes like this -- use less energy by adding "intelligence" to the thermal conditioning systems. This ends up reducing the amount of overall fresh air entering the building. When you don't have to heat or cool as much outside air, you save.
The problem is the people. Yes, we live on the planet, and burning through less energy by not "wasting" as much energy is good for all of us. But we do spend 90% of our time indoors, and that air is almost always going to be worse than outdoors. We need to focus on the indoor air as much as the outdoor air, after all, they're both rising in carbon dioxide.
Which brings us to the center of the business argument for healthy buildings. More fresh air, and better filtered air, make people less likely to get sick, which means less time off-task. On an annual basis, multiplied times all employees, you lose money in the form of productivity for having sick employees. And we know this can be reduced by changing their work environment. We even know that the relatively benign gas carbon dioxide can diminish executive function at elevated concentrations. Filters can't trap carbon dioxide. The only way to get that out is to dilute the indoor air with outdoor air (which itself may have to be filtered).
The question is this -- how much does it cost to add the extra air to the building, and how much would I gain in the form of productivity from my employees? For most cases, it's a no-brainer.
Healthy Buildings by Joe Allen and John Macomber details the numbers.
Investing in the health, and thus the productivity, of workers via their work environment is going to radically transform the workplace. But the thing is, the workplace is diffusing into a thousand bedrooms and kitchens and backrooms splattered across the map. The workplace becomes anywhere you are.
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| The Wave at Ofelia Plads - Bo Hvidt - 2017 |
This collapses the business case for healthy buildings. But then, at the same time, we have the continued rise of AI-mediated work and the continued recognition of mental health as important. And the next thing you know, OSHA starts citing DSM-5, and we're giving neurorights to algorithms.
But on a more serious note, and before you know it, not only will we be working from home more, we'll be working from an interconnected global super network of neuromorphic robots, using non-invasive optogenetic neural implants combined with pervasive chemosensors that monitor and adjust our cognitive operations, and help us to synchronize with each other and with our semibotic (i.e., semi-biological) digital assistants.
We're going to need some rights for that.
And now, partially-related series of articles about neuromorphic computing:
'This is not science fiction,' say scientists pushing for 'neuro-rights'
Dec 2020, Reuters
"Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday.
A set of “neuro-rights” should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York’s Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards.
Five rights would guard the brain against abuse from new technologies - rights to identity, free will and mental privacy along with the right of equal access to brain augmentation advances and protection from algorithmic bias, the group says.
“If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people,” Yuste said during an online panel at the Web Summit, a global tech conference.
“This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully.”
Team develops component for neuromorphic computer
Dec 2020, phys.org
Make it stop. Neuromorphic means it uses artificial neurons to compute, you know, like how a brain does. Also, magnetic spin waves.
via Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf: L. Körber et al, Nonlocal Stimulation of Three-Magnon Splitting in a Magnetic Vortex, Physical Review Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.207203
New study investigates photonics for artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing
Jan 2021, phys.org
Good explanation of Photonic Neuromorphic Computing:
Professor C David Wright, from the University of Exeter's Department of Engineering, and one of the co-authors of the study explains "Clearly, a new approach is needed — one that can fuse together the core information processing tasks of computing and memory, one that can incorporate directly in hardware the ability to learn, adapt and evolve, and one that does away with energy-sapping and speed-limiting electrical interconnects."
Photonic neuromorphic computing is one such approach. Here, signals are communicated and processed using light rather than electrons, giving access to much higher bandwidths (processor speeds) and vastly reducing energy losses.
Moreover, the researchers try to make the computing hardware itself isomorphic with biological processing system (brains), by developing devices to directly mimic the basic functions of brain neurons and synapses, then connecting these together in networks that can offer fast, parallelised, adaptive processing for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.
Researchers unleash potential of desktop PCs to run simulations of mammals' brains
Feb 2021, phys.org
Not PC master race but CPU vs GPU, that's the real fight:
Dr. James Knight and Prof Thomas Nowotny from the University of Sussex's School of Engineering and Informatics used the latest graphical processing units (GPUs) to give a single desktop PC the capacity to simulate brain models of almost unlimited size.
"This research is a game-changer for computational neuroscience and AI researchers who can now simulate brain circuits on their local workstations, but it also allows people outside academia to turn their gaming PC into a supercomputer and run large neural networks."
via University of Sussex: James C. Knight et al. Larger GPU-accelerated brain simulations with procedural connectivity, Nature Computational Science (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43588-020-00022-7
Research team demonstrates world's fastest optical neuromorphic processor
Jan 2021, phys.org
Time to figure out the difference between CPU, GPU and
TPU? TPU's were made specifically for neuromorphic neural networks.
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| T Djill - Networkers - 2006 |
The first steps toward a quantum brain
Feb 2021, phys.org
The physicists at Radboud University researched whether a piece of hardware could do the same, without the need of software. They discovered that by constructing a network of cobalt atoms on black phosphorus they were able to build a material that stores and processes information in similar ways to the brain, and, even more surprisingly, adapts itself.
via Radboud University Nijmegen: An atomic Boltzmann machine capable of self-adaption, Nature Nanotechnology (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-020-00838-4
New brain-like computing device simulates human learning
Apr 2021, phys.org
Electrochemical "synaptic transistors" simultaneously process and store information just like the human brain.
via Northwestern University: "Mimicking associative learning using an ion-trapping non-volatile synaptic organic electrochemical transistor," Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22680-5
Storing information with light
Jan 2021, phys.org
Neuromorphic Light Hype; brains are the new computers, and light is the new electricity.
Post Script:
Signs of burnout can be detected in sweat
Feb 2021, phys.org
Wearable chemosensors for updating your employer-provided health surveillance policy.
Post Post Script:
Implanted wireless device triggers mice to form instant bond
May 2021, phys.org
