Oct 1 2024
Local to Global:
enabling communities connecting younger generations to older generations of humans
Gullermo and Roger shared a number of anxieties, including the hopeless wars in the middle east and south and central America.
Guillermo is involved in an online community called Sea of Seas: see below for an example of one of their discussions. It connects with the Leonardo LASER networks.
Roger is involved in a weekly discussion group called the Watering hole, half-centered at the University of Texas in Dallas. It is an activity for an emergent Center for the Study of Emergence (C4ES).
Among other topics the group has just published an article titled “Senex”. It points out two obvious emergent phenomena whose auto-poetic impact we underestimate:
- In Texas the number of children per family is 2.6 and dropping
- The number of people who never have children is 20% and growing.
- One observation is that welcoming younger immigrants should be a good idea, not a bad idea like it usually is in Texas (and Spain?)
And
- The number of people over the age of 65 is growing every year as a fraction of the human population. There will be, in a decade or so, over a million people over 100 years old on the planet.
- Pick a number, 80% , will be stupid and need help. But 20%, 200, 000, may not be able to walk but they can do zoom calls and work together on line- with younger people under 25.
This has never happened before in human history. The “republic of letters’ in Europe in the middle ages was mostly middle aged people writing letters in Latin to each other.
Associated issues are:
- Will AI ever be ‘wise’? wisdom is highly local.
- In Texas we usually send our old parents to a retirement or rest home and see them once a year for a holiday.
- In some societies e.g. in some parts of China you put your old parents in a spare room in your apartment and see them for breakfast very day.
- Will AI ever understand how local wisdom is?
- One of the members of the artscilab is a Texan. But he also speaks Japanese. As a teenager playing Japanese games, and manga anime, he learned Japanese and realized that in translation studies the concept of ‘localization’ is crucial.
- What people never talk about is highly locally specific. and AI translation software doesn’t realize that what is not said is as important as what is said.
- AI is learning to interpret ‘tone of voice’; one lab member published an article describing How the AI he wrote could determine the level of “sarcasm’ in spoken and written English (different algorithms for spoken and written sarcasm)
So, this is part of a more general discussion about the need to bridge the local and the global, bridge 100 year olds and 30 year olds and overcome the way human groups silo themselves making desirable outcomes unlikely,
Guillermo and Roger discussed whether these developments could trigger a new Enlightenment or new Renaissance. They decided this was a false comparison; in emergent phenomena like the Senex you cannot predict what exactly will happen; this is the very nature of auto-poesis.
Finally, Roger brought up the topic of the emergence of new/different motivations in his own life. He pointed out that a) he is no longer motivated to get married b) no longer motivated to have children c) no longer looking for a new job.
However, the younger people in the lab do have these motivations that he no longer has. How do people with very different motivations learn to collaborate?
Individual motivation is a process of emergence and demergence.
Guillermo jokingly said that it’s not really measured in years but in lives.
This coincidentally connected to the narrative in the Senex article that referred to Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man”; the authors argued that we should now refer to the “22 ages of people” (not just men).
Guillermo’s sea of seas LASER topic
ARTE, CIENCIA y HUMANIDADES ¿EXISTE UN TERRITORIO COMPARTIDO EN LAS INSTITUCIONES?
Las relaciones interdisciplinares definitivamente han llegado a las instituciones. Son muchos los ejemplos que muestran que la interdisciplinariedad, vestida por sus múltiples formas, se ha asimilado como una buena práctica institucional. Su incorporación en el programa de proyectos europeos ya desde el marco Horizonte 2020, la implantación de programas de residencia de investigaciones híbridas en centros de investigación, o en el ámbito nacional, el desarrollo las Plataformas Temáticas Interdisciplinares, o la aparición de nuevos vicerrectorados universitarios claramente interdisciplinares muestran que el espacio institucional abraza intensamente estás dinámicas híbridas.
Istitut d’ investigació: Institute of Material Science (ICMUV)
Area: Applied Physics
Research group: Unit of Quantum Materials and Devices for Photonics and Energy
Doctor by the Universitat de València with the thesis Niveles de impureza hidrogenoides y sub-bandas electricas bidimensionales en el monoseleniuro de indio de tipo n 1990.
Doctor by the Universitat de València with the thesis Excitones y triones en nanoestructuras cuánticas aisladas de arseniuro de indio 2010. Supervised by Dr. Juan Pascual Martínez Pastor, Dr. J. Benito Alén Millán.