Category: Future Science Gearbox

Aug. 18, 2106
BOSTON–A team of international researchers working at M.I.T.’s Laboratory for High-Velocity Quantum-Economic Phenomena announced Monday the first successful isolation, identification, and tagging of a Limited Liability Person, or “LLP” “We’re quite excited to be the first team to isolate an active LLP in the field,” notes Dr. Hillary Yuan, director of the research team, “And not only have we identified an LLP, but we’ve also tagged him, enabling us to follow his migratory habits and learn much more about what life is like for them.”

Limited Liability People, characterized by their immunity to civil and criminal liability, have been the subject of an increasing amount of scientific scrutiny in recent years. A joint U.S.-E.U. initiative, formed last year to fund inquiry into the nature and existence of LLPs, has called the reportedly explosive growth in LLP population “the number one scientifically addressable threat to world economic stability.” “LLPs are, essentially, invisible to the law,” explains U.S. Congressman Ralph Tool (G-New York), a longtime supporter of publicly-funded LLP research. “They are unaccountable. And, if their numbers are growing, that’s a real, tangible risk to the rule of law and to the democratic process. We need to know who they are and where they come from, and we need to know now.”

The isolation at M.I.T. of an LLP, identified by the team as a Mr. Alfred Dumpling of Boca Raton, Florida, marks an important advance in LLP research. Dr. Yuan explains: “There’s a difficult observational problem at the heart of LLP research. LLP who do not engage in conduct that exposes them to liability look pretty much like you and me. In fact, they can’t be distinguished from non-LLPs until they do something that exposes them to liability. But, once they do something that involves potential liability, they start to disappear. That, in fact, is how they avoid liability. The key is to know how they disappear. Then you can go about catching them.”

Working from a theory that postulates that LLPs result when publicly held individuals with super-high wealth densities merge with others of like or greater density, the M.I.T. team began to look at unexplained nano and quantum economic processes dispersed throughout the wake of such mergers. Piecing together these apparently isolated processes, and linking them to similarly fragmented processes in the “dark market,” the researchers were able to track the transactional movements of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of LLPs. “It was like looking at the footprints of the invisible man,” exclaimed one team member. “Well, more like looking at the footprints left by a rioting mob of invisible men. We could see where LLPns had been, but we couldn’t sort out whose footprints were whose.”

Working with the team, Dr. Yuan devised a technique to isolate one of the LLPs. Drawing on classical techniques for observing neutrinos, the team constructed a large, negative net-worth charity in the path of one of the LLP tracks. “We simply established a non-profit organization and began floating bonds as quickly as possible. When Mr. Dumpling, the LLP, passed through the non-profit, he was caught, momentarily, like light in a super-cooled trap. We had the charity’s ‘boardroom’ covered by high-speed, continuous frame cameras, and caught him there for a fraction of a second, sitting on one of the folding metal chairs. From there it wasn’t difficult to identify him and tag him with a seat on the board which would enable us to track him, since we remained in control of all the other seats.”
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Responding to news of the team’s results, Congressman Tool was careful to point out that M.I.T.’s special Lab had received a generous grant from the U.S.-E.U. initiative. “These are important results,” noted Tool. “For more than a century we’ve suspected that there existed a shadowy world of powerful, wealthy, law-defying individuals. Now we’re getting a glimpse into that world. No longer will they labor in secret and reign with impunity.”

March 11, 2118
BOSTON–A team of scientists at the M.I.T. High-Velocity Monetary Object Observatory announced on tuesday the discovery of a “super-dense corporate cluster” localized in mid-town Manhattan. The first structure of its kind to be observed, the cluster raises profound questions about the relationship between the physical and the economic worlds, and lends credence to the controversial new discipline known colloquially as “quantum economics.” “Most great breakthroughs begin with great observations,” notes M.I.T. Assistant Professor Marguerite Fury, leader of the research team. “And this is a truly paradigm-shifting observation. Physics and economics both just got much more interesting.”

The cluster, dubbed AA-1, is a “binary system” consisting of two, interrelated, capital-dense companies and a surrounding cloud of smaller, lighter firms drawn to the two central giants. AA-1 differs from other large-scale corporate partnerships and joint ventures because the two giants involved are linked through a peculiar ownership relationship known as a “mobius control stitch.” Professor Fury explains: “The two giants in AA-1, AOL and Amalgamenture, each own majority stakes in the other. AOL owns 52% of Amalgamenture, and Amalgameture owns more than 60% of AOL. This sort of thing happens occasionally in the course of hostile takeover and defense maneuvers, but usually resolves itself relatively quickly. The AA-1 stitch, though, has persisted for more than 40 years, largely because of the unprecedented size of the two linked companies.”

The “stitch” linking the two companies creates a “control paradox.” “The cluster is characterized both by a management surplus and a management deficit,” explains Professor Fury. “There are too many managers for the interlocked firms, which should be one firm with one management team. At the same time, there are too few managers. The board of directors of each company leads the companies separately, but nobody leads them together. This paradox creates an oscillating control vacuum that sucks in, alternately, firms that are control weak and control strong. The cloud surrounding the stitched giants is thus saturated with merger and spin-off transactions.”

In addition to attracting the swarm of merging and spinning corporations that compose the cluster’s characteristic cloud, AA-1 is also responsible for “spontaneous transaction pair production” attributed to a “large magnitude debt/equity density differential” between the two giants at the focus of the cluster. According to the team, the two giants belong to different “classes.” AOL is a conventional multi-national, characterized by globally disbursed operations, large employee base, and significant current assets and free cashflow. Amalgamature, in contrast, is a “super-leveraged holding firm,” with significant free cashflow, but debt orders of magnitude greater than equity and with nominal staff and a single Manhattan office.

Professor Fury elaborates: “The density differential at the heart of AA-1 generates an asymmetric transaction space in which independent transaction processes form. This sort of formation happens all the time in regular clusters, but the two sides of the transaction collapse into a single process almost instantaneously. In AA-1, for the first time, we’ve been able to observe buyons and sellons before they collapse into a transaction, giving us new and invaluable insight into the way transactions form.”

According to the M.I.T. team, AA-1 is a unique system, at least for now. “We’re very lucky that our discipline is gaining steam at just about the same time that complex monetary objects like AA-1 are forming,” notes Professor Fury, “but AA-1 is just the beginning. We anticipate that the next hundred years will see capital formations that dwarf AA-1 and produce wondrous effects we can’t yet imagine.”

March, 4, 2015
DECATUR, IL–Edible resources giant Archer Daniels Midland today launched a legal and public relations campaign designed to discourage poachers from using new breeds of transgenic weeds to siphon off computer cycles generated by fields planted with SmartCorn, an engineered corn variety equipped with DNA-based computational and networking powers. “We want to make clear that there is zero tolerance for ‘weedhacking,'” declared ADM CTO Alice Montie. “In partnership with Monsanto, the inventor of SmartCorn, we are launching this campaign to educate the public, and to make sure that hackers know that every weed they nurture takes food out of the mouths of hungry children.”

SmartCorn, developed four years ago by Monsanto and University of Nebraska researchers, is one of a number of popular engineered “dual use” crops planted throughout the Midwest. Like ADM’s own Piezowheat, SmartCorn enables growers to harvest a new economy crop while also growing an old economy staple. “Our business, and that of our partner-growers, is enjoying a renaissance thanks to crops like SmartCorn,” explains ADM’s Montie. “In the three years since we’ve started system-wide deployment of SmartCorn, we’ve become the number one supplier of computer cycles to world markets. We’re not just the ‘Supermarket to the World,’ we’re also its Supercomputer.”

ADM’s new campaign targets the practice of “weedhacking,” the use of transgenic weeds with computational capacities like those of SmartCorn to hijack or manipulate fields of the number-crunching crop. Headline-grabbing weedhacking hjinks over the past year, including the introduction of widespread errors into calculations of inventories for WalMart stores and the creation of ‘crop circles’ through directed growth of corn-parasitic weeds, have depressed the market value of both Nebraska and Iowa Corn Cycles. “These hackers have got to face the consequences of their actions,” exclaims Montie. “This isn’t just harmless fun. One DOS attack on a hundred-acre field goes right to our bottom line. When we lose that profit, we have to raise the prices of the underlying crops. At some point, higher prices mean that fewer kids can eat.”

Research carried out at the Universities of Nebraska and Iowa on the weeds favored by hackers, including transgenic versions of Milkweed, Sandbur, Hemp Dogbane, and Leafy Spurge, indicate that each developed as a result of ‘gene flow’ from SmartCorn itself. “The hackers are getting a bit of a bum rap,” notes Iowa Professor Milton Trea. “The weeds inherited their computational and networking functions from the Corn. The SmartCorn genes are acting sort of like rogue genes, inserting themselves easily into other genomes. You can’t blame the ‘weedhackers’ for that.”

Members of the weedhacking community point to research like Trea’s to rebut ADM’s claims. “Most people in the community are just engaged in research into the way these weeds function and how they behave in the environment,” explains one poster in a popular weedhacking forum. “Weedhacking does nothing to interfere with ADM’s business. This campaign is aimed at squashing open, public understanding of these weeds and how they work and communicate. ADM and Monsanto are responsible for these weeds, but they don’t own them. The weeds are free, and we should be free to study them.”

Reached through remailer, Gee Me Crack Corn, a self-described “weedcracker” claiming responsibility for more than 800 DOS attacks and the popular “death’s head” crop circle, remains defiant: “My cracks are legendary. Every crack that makes the news gets more people thinking about what’s going on. ADM and Monsanto are letting understudied genes loose in the environment. Now that’s a crime.”

Jan. 14, 2047
LINCOLN, NE–A team of researchers at the University of Nebraska announced this week the successful growth and testing of a new strain of corn endowed with rudimentary computational abilities. The strain, to be marketed by University of Nebraska sponsor Monsanto under the brand name SmartCorn, makes use of principles of distributed, networked computation to communicate information about the health and condition of the plant and to solve computation-intensive problems. “Our goals with SmartCorn were twofold,” notes Monsanto VP of Corn and Pomegranates Leslie Studebaker, “first, to help growers gather information about their plants, and second, to generate surplus computational cycles that growers could sell on the open market. I’m happy to say that these recent results indicate that we’ve found the solution we were looking for.”

SmartCorn makes use of “genetic” or “DNA” computation in which genetically planned biologic processes function in computer-like ways to solve problems and to generate and follow algorithms. “Basically, SmartCorn includes an additional set of chromosomes responsible for development of computational organelles and structures,” explains Nebraska Professor of Bioinformatics Jules Gasse. “In conjunction with additional modifications to the traditional NovaLink genome, this genetic material gives SmartCorn notable computational power.”

In addition to its computer power, SmartCorn is also equipped with networking functionality. Each stalk dynamically generates “micropollens” that encode information, and tag it with a destination and origin address tied to a stalk-identifying signature composed of a series of genetic polymorphisms. The leaves of each plant “route” information by duplicating and spreading micropollens addressed to other plants, and absorbing and processing instructions and data that match their genetically encoded address.

“We call SmartCorn a smart crop/dumb network solution,” notes Professor Gasse. “We were willing to sacrifice efficiency on the networking side just to get access to the phenomenal computational power involved. Imagine all of the cornfields in the Midwest functioning as one giant super-computer. We would probably be able to discover a new prime number every growing season!”

Growers can communicate with their SmartCorn crops through a pollen-generating interface box that connects to a computer through a standard USB2 port. Using special software, growers can “harvest” the excess processor cycles generated by the crop and auction them off through an automated exchange.

More importantly, growers can also gather information about the health of the crop, and send instructions into the field, including instructions for individual plants. “One of the interactive instruction sets we’re looking at will connect SmartCorn to the irrigation controls so individual plants can request water as-needed,” explains Professor Gasse. “The increase in yield and efficiency alone would be spectacular.”

Contacted about the SmartCorn announcement, FDA officials confirmed that the new plant is undergoing fast-track testing for human consumption-grade use. “We’re very confident on Federal approval,” indicates Monsanto VP Studebaker. “To be frank, we paid more attention to our focus groups, who all rated SmartCorn at least as tasty as NovaLink, and, on average, more flavorful than AuntMableSupreme. That’s the kind of approval we’re looking for.”