Which Jobs Will Machines Take Over? Movie Critics, Doctors, Truckers...So, what will your second career be? There's no playing coy with it anymore: intelligent machines are coming for our jobs, but rather than let this be a point of fear and the start of even greater class division, Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton Angela Zutavern hopes that human leaders, in politics and in corporations, with be proactive in the face of job automation by re-training displaced workers with new skills that will be highly valued in the AI landscape. She's not just talking about manual laborers, either; job automation will not discriminate on the color of your collar, and doctors and lawyers will be hit just like truck drivers and rote-task professionals. The upside is that machine intelligence will spawn new industries we haven’t even thought of yet, so while it's true you may lose your job, you'll already have teed up a new one—provided we develop appropriate policy sooner rather than later, warns Zutavern. If we do this right, machine learning won’t replace humans, it will augment us, leaving our talents to be put to better use in creative and reasoning tasks, which is where we are yet to be beaten. Angela Zutavern and Josh Sullivan are the authors of The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible.
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So machine intelligence includes two main areas. One is high-performance computing; all the chips you need to do the complex math required, and then artificial intelligence.
Within artificial intelligence all the breakthroughs are happening in the area of machine learning, and machine learning includes the ability for computers to think, learn and act on their own. There are a lot of great examples throughout business, government, and the nonprofit world as well. For example, in the U.S. government, machine learning is completely changing how census workers visit houses to collect the census data. These enumerators in the past would just use their own judgment on what routes to take and when to visit houses and, of course, they often found people not home. In the upcoming 2020 decennial census, machine learning will actually give them the best routes and the best predicted times to find when people are going to be home.
When people ask me if machine intelligence will affect them I turn the question back around and say, “Could you imagine your life or your job without the Internet?” And most people will say no. And I say, that's how machine intelligence will become for us. It's already involved in our personal lives whether it's Amazon recommendation engines or Netflix recommendations, but it will continue to spread not only in our personal and entertainment lives but also in our day-to-day work lives as well.
One example is IT departments in corporations. Many companies spend the majority of their IT budget on IT operations, operations and maintenance, and it's a huge budget line item. Machine intelligence is now able to perform most or all of those mundane routine activities. That frees up an entire skilled workforce to focus on creativity and innovation beyond the jobs that they're doing today.
So, machine intelligence is not about completely removing the person from the equation, it's about machines and humans working together. We never recommend that you completely abandon your judgment as a leader. Many times machine learning is wrong and as leaders we need to recognize that and know when to ask questions and how to adapt. So judgment is still absolutely critical in this equation.
An interesting example is automated trucking company Otto. It was formed by Google engineers and within ten months was bought by Uber for $680 million.
Now what would make a company worth $680 million in ten months? Well, Otto developed a cab-top device that sells for $30,000, and can fully automate any 18-wheeler truck built after 2013. In fact they've already made their first delivery using a self-driving truck: it was 50,000 cans of Budweiser beer, last year.
Right now the truck can't handle every situation, it's really great on the highways, but it has problems in bad weather and on city streets, so for now the drivers continue to ride in the cab, but when they're in on the highway the driver is free to conduct whatever activities they choose—and I love the story of a driver doing yoga while going down the highway—and then the driver takes over in difficult situations.
Doesn't everyone deserve a chance at a good life? | Jim Yong KimAspirations are rising as never before across the world, thanks in large part to smartphones and the internet -- will they be met with opportunity or frustration? As President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim wants to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. He shares how the institution is working to improve the health and financial futures of people in the poorest countries by boosting investment and de-risking development.
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How your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil SethRight now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.
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Knowing How to Tell a Good Story Is Like Having Mind Control | Alan AldaPeople who are natural storytellers make it look easy, but cut to the moment you're in the hot seat—at an interview, a conference, or even in a social setting—and suddenly the suave-ness is not so forthcoming. So what is the key to telling a story that grips a crowd, and takes them emotionally from point A to point B? This has been a point of focus for actor and author Alan Alda throughout his career, and here he draws on two examples from his life: the first about a brilliant nano-scientist who couldn't get anyone to care about his breakthrough invention until he let slip that it was a total accident; and the second is a simple but astounding demonstration that involves a person carrying a glass of water across a stage. Not exactly riveting? Watch and learn, young grasshopper. Alan Alda's most recent book is If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
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I met a nanoscientist at Cornell University who had a really interesting story. He had discovered, with his graduate student, how to make the world’s thinnest glass—it was only one atom thick. The top of it was the same atom as the bottom of it, and he called it “two-dimensional glass.” It was an amazing thing, nobody had ever found a way to make glass this thin before, and it was picked up by one scientific journal.
And it seemed like a more interesting subject than one that would just get that much attention. And a couple of months later he was taking our workshop when we were up at Cornell, and in the course of talking about his discovery we realized that he had discovered how to make the world’s thinnest glass by accident. It wasn't something he was trying to do, an accident happened.
And I said, "You know, this is fascinating. People like us, on the outside, in the public, it's an interesting story to us to know that something so groundbreaking, that helped you understand the structure of glass and might have new uses for glass, that you discovered such a thing by accident. What an interesting story that is."
And also in the meantime he had been cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as having discovered the world's thinnest glass. So now he had two things that would interest the public.
And the next time he gave an interview he started off with the story of how it had been an accident that he discovered this. This human story now led into the technical story about what was the world's thinnest glass, how was it made, and that kind of thing. It became a story that was interesting to other people who don't know the technical details with that familiarity.
And now his story about discovering the glass was picked up by websites and newspapers all over America, all over Great Britain, and venture capitalists started calling him, asking him if they could commercialize this process—just starting with a human story that people on the outside of your work are interested in, because we're all human and we all think in stories. And every experiment has a story. Every life and science has a story and it's so common to hear people, when you say to them in a workshop, “Tell me your story.” They say, “Oh, I don't have a story.” Yes, you do! What's fascinating to you, when you really think about it, about how you got from here to there?
And the most important thing about a story, it turns out—to me, anyway—is the obstacle that you found yourself facing as you were trying to get to your goal. The story is not, “I wanted to get to Toledo, and I went and I got there.” That's okay. It's not much of a story. The story is, “I was headed toward Toledo and the airplanes were shut down, the cars were shut down, the railroad—how was I going to get to Toledo?” That's an interesting story and I want to listen to that. If in the course of that it turns out you discovered a new way to get to Toledo, I want to hear it.
The glass of water exercise is something that I figured out on the way to giving a talk. I wanted to give a talk to writers about what's the essential ingredient of a dramatic story. And I'm in the car with my wife and I said, "I don't know how to start this thing."
She said, "Well, why don't you start with some image." I said, "An image, okay." So an image of a story, a dramatic story, I decided in that moment was: carrying a glass of water across the stage, filled to the brim. So when I got there I said, "Is there somebody relatively brave in the audience? Come on up. Carry this empty glass across the stage."
Science didn't understand my kids' rare disease until I decided to study it | Sharon TerryMeet Sharon Terry, a former college chaplain and stay-at-home mom who took the medical research world by storm when her two young children were diagnosed with a rare disease known as pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE). In this knockout talk, Terry explains how she and her husband became citizen scientists, working midnight shifts at the lab to find the gene behind PXE and establishing mandates that require researchers to share biological samples and work together.
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"Awoo" | Sofi TukkerElectro-pop duo Sofi Tukker dance it out with the TED audience in a performance of their upbeat, rhythmic song "Awoo," featuring Betta Lemme.
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When I die, recompose me | Katrina SpadeWhat if our bodies could help grow new life after we die, instead of being embalmed and buried or turned to ash? Join Katrina Spade as she discusses "recomposition" -- a system that uses the natural decomposition process to turn our deceased into life-giving soil, honoring both the earth and the departed.
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Why Interest-Based Negotiation Will Get You What You Really WantNegotiation is part of life. Whether we're talking about something as grandiose as healthcare or as personal as buying a car, we often spend the vast majority of the negotiation process haggling over the numbers. This is often a bad way to look at it, says Dan Shapiro. And he should know: he's head of the Harvard International Negotiation Project and knows an awful lot about getting two opposing sides to see eye to eye. So what's the best way to do so? Perhaps talking about why each party wants what they want and negotiating from there. When polarized debates come to a head over "use vs them" mentalities, looking at it from this angle—i.e. the nuts and bolts of a position and less so the end result—can humanize each side to the other.
Dan Shapiro's latest book is Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts.
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Transcript: So the classic approach to negotiation is positional bargaining. In positional bargaining I have a position, you have a position, and we each haggle over those positions.
Now the rules to positional bargaining are very clear: You start with an extreme demand but not so extreme that the other side thinks that you’re crazy or bluffing. You can concede stubbornly, and you demonstrate a greater willingness in the other side to walk away from the negotiation table.
So you go to the car dealer. You want to buy a Corvette. The car salesperson says, “$80,000 take it or leave it.”
You say “80? I’ll tell you what: 40, take it or leave it.”
And you start arguing and haggling, crossing your arms. Threatening to leave. An hour later the car salesperson brings that number down to 70. You’ve gone up to 50. You each then demonstrate a greater willingness to walk away from the negotiation table. You say, “You know what? There’s actually another Corvette dealer down the street. Maybe I’ll just go there.”
And the car dealer says, “Well, you know what. You see all these people standing in line here. They all want to buy this Corvette.” You each threaten to walk. But if you don’t walk you might end up typically somewhere in the middle of those two other numbers: 40, 80, you might end up around 60.
However, this probably isn’t the best agreement that you could have come to. All this is doing is arguing over one single factor: a number. And that’s the problem of positional bargaining, is that I might have a lot of other interests at stake but none of them are getting shared within this very strict form of positional bargaining.
There’s another form of negotiation that at the Harvard Negotiation Project some of my colleagues have developed, we call it “Interest Based” negotiation. The idea here is let’s not argue over positions, let’s argue over underlying interests.
“Why do you want the car?”
“Well I want the car because I have three kids, three boys. I want a safe car. I don’t really care about the sunroof. I don’t need to look that cool, you know. But I want a car that’s not that expensive. I want one that’s energy efficient. And these are all of my interests.”
Now the car dealer has his or her own interests. If I ask you right now on camera what day do you think I bought my most recent car— Literally what day—you should know. It was December 31 right at the end of the year, because I knew one of the interests of the car dealer in my area was they needed to get these cars off the lot for the next year’s cars. They were more likely to go lower because they had other interests at stake. So interest based negotiation says don’t just focus on the positions, what you say you want; focus on the underlying interests. And this is just as true in contemporary society. Whether it’s a business example – two people arguing over a contract. Don’t just focus on the positions, focus on the underlying interests. When it comes to policy in the United States or elsewhere you say “This is your position on healthcare. I say this is mine.” Let’s not argue over the positions. What are the underlying interests? Why is that policy the one you want. Then you can extract so much more value when you focus on the level of underlying interests.
How I built a jet suit | Richard BrowningWe've all dreamed of flying -- but for Richard Browning, flight is an obsession. He's built an Iron Man-like suit that leans on an elegant collaboration of mind, body and technology, bringing science fiction dreams a little closer to reality. Learn more about the trial and error process behind his invention and take flight with Browning in an unforgettable demo.
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Why Are Nations So Divided? Trump, Brexit, and the Struggle for StatusThere's a schism between the idealism of globalization—i.e. that a more connected, educated, and mobile world is going to make everything better—and that of populism, which demands a more insular, community orientated way of life and thus and world at large. In 2016, both the U.K. and the U.S. made it overwhelmingly apparently that the schism had reached a boiling point: the UK voted to leave the European Union without, seemingly, any forethought as to what it would do to the economy. And America elected a reality TV star, Donald Trump, who advocated both sexual assault and violence against journalists. Good times! But David Goodhart says we should have seen this coming—that there has been a battle between "Anywhere" and "Somewhere" for decades, and that the issues don't all come down to "elites" versus "non-educated". It moreover comes down to a political system that favors one over the other. So what can we do? Perhaps see the other side for who they really are: one of us, just with a different view on the world.
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How to Control Your Rage, With Buddhist and Michelin Star Chef Eric RipertRead more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/how-buddhism-helped-eric-ripert-tame-his-anger
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So, probably the last place that you think about hope and optimism existing is in prison, but in the last ten years of working there I've come to realize that all humans possess these things—they just need a little coaxing sometimes.
In June 2006 The Actors' Gang Theater Company started an experiment: we decided to take the Sunday night workshop we do with our whole company into prison to work with non-actors, to see what kind of effect our style of theater would have on them.
So the style of theater we work in is a really bastardized version of the Italian tradition of Commedia Dell’Arte. It's masks, white-face, high emotional, physical work, so we call it the “style.”
We took that workshop program into prison and were absolutely astounded by the effect it had on these non-actors and how it started to help them be able to heal their trauma. We've seen this approach transform prison yards, we've seen it break down barriers of race and separation, and that has happened through the courage of these people, picking up the tools that we've offered them and using those tools to transform their emotional lives, and they found a safe space in our work to be able to do that.
And as a result we have a ten percent recidivism rate and an 89 percent drop in in-prison infractions because these people now know how to deal with their emotions. So amazingly, this little engine that could, after ten years is now in ten prisons across California, and for me the thing that makes me so proud is that any day of the week there will be a student-led program happening in a prison. Like right now, there's a program happening in the prison that's led by our students, and we go and check in and support them every six weeks.
Apart from the reentry programs that we have, which is now run by one of our former students—we employed him the day he paroled, to run that reentry program—we are also creating a program for correctional officers, who are often as traumatized as the people that they are overseeing. It's the highest suicide rate of any job.
The real secret of this work, for those of us who are lucky enough to do it, is that we get as much, if not more, from the experience. One of our juvie girls told me the other day, when people come and work with us she always thinks to herself, “Take off your cape,” and this has become out motto now. Take off your cape, because we're not in the business of saving people. We're going in and offering them tools that we know work and as a result changing our own lives.
I've definitely become a better person and a better actor, and these people have literally changed my life. So I'm really honored to introduce the stars of this work: the people. I mean it was an idea, right? I had an idea ten years ago; a lot of people have ideas. It doesn't really mean anything unless people make it happen, and these are the people that made that happen. So I'd like to start off by introducing Chris Bingley.
Chris Bingley: Hello. Good afternoon everyone. I'm Chris Bingley. As Sabra said I returned to the community last Friday from a 12-year prison sentence. Most of my time—honestly there's not a whole lot of programs inside of California prisons—so I just kind of sat around and kind of read books and tried to better myself on my own.
But towards the end of my sentence—I think I've been doing The Actors' Gang for about five years—the Prison Project came in and it gave me a lot of tools. It gave me a lot of tools to deal with prison, to deal with myself, and now that I'm out here it's given me a lot of tools that I'm using out here as well.
Why you should define your fears instead of your goals | Tim FerrissThe hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls "fear-setting." Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot.
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12 truths I learned from life and writing | Anne LamottA few days before she turned 61, writer Anne Lamott decided to write down everything she knew for sure. She dives into the nuances of being a human who lives in a confusing, beautiful, emotional world, offering her characteristic life-affirming wisdom and humor on family, writing, the meaning of God, death and more.
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What happens in your brain when you pay attention? | Mehdi Ordikhani-SeyedlarAttention isn't just about what we focus on -- it's also about what our brains filter out. By investigating patterns in the brain as people try to focus, computational neuroscientist Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar hopes to build computer models that can be used to treat ADHD and help those who have lost the ability to communicate. Hear more about this exciting science in this brief, fascinating talk.
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Why the Best Scientists Are Open-Minded: Jane Goodall and Bali’s Water TemplesRead more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/philip-kitcher-why-the-best-scientists-are-open-minded-jane-goodall-and-balis-water-temples
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So is there a way to define science and separate it from other things? Philosophers for a very long time have been quite dubious about this possibility and I think that’s right—right to be dubious. There are all sorts of things that go under the name of science. There are the natural sciences, there are the social sciences, there are also various applied sciences.
It’s not really very easy to find anything that all of those things have in common with one another that isn’t relatively banal and also common to many of our everyday activities. So we start off thinking about, of course, things like physics and chemistry and biology and earth science and so forth, but then there are also the social sciences, the human sciences, various branches of psychology, economics and so forth. But it’s easy to forget that there are also sciences that do rather specific things, like the kinds of scientific investigations people undertake when they try to restore old works of art or the kinds of research that people take when they try to figure out whether a particular document from the past is a new manuscript by a famous author.
So there are lots and lots of scientific studies and they shade over into relatively familiar things like detective work, and those shade over into the kinds of things that we do when we’re trying to solve quite practical problems in our own lives, when we’re trying to figure out what goes wrong with the plumbing or where we’ve left something. So it’s very, very hard, I think, to say that there’s something distinctive about science that doesn’t also apply to lots and lots and lots of other activities.
There are certainly some ways of criticizing scientific practice, some of which I’ve made myself. But I want to begin with some very familiar ones. I mean some people will say that the science that was produced throughout much of the history of science was distorted because it was produced by a certain class of people. The Royal Society famously wanted its members to be “gentlemen, free and unconfined.” They didn’t like having tradespeople in because they might have a pecuniary interest that would lead them not to respect the truth. And they didn’t let women in until after the Second World War! And actually letting women scientists in makes a big difference, and has made a big difference, to certain areas of science.
The study of our primate relatives, for example, was enormously transformed in the '60s and '70s as a bunch of women primatologists really started to do very serious research and changed our views about all sorts of things. I mean there was this old view that there were these dominant males and all the action was about how the dominant males got to be dominant and how they treated other males and all the rest of it.
And after women began to look very, very carefully at other features of primate societies they discovered that all sorts of things were going on because of the females influencing the mating patterns, and the females would make friends with males that they thought would be helpful and supportive, and this whole view of the sort of hyperaggressive primate beating his chest was completely deflated in favor of all kinds of subtle strategies pursued by both sexes. And that was a complete transformation in our understanding of primate behavior. It’s a wonderful thing to look back and see what a difference people like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Shirley Strum and others have made. So there’s a very, very clear case.
Now there are other kinds of critique that are sometimes launched. I mean people will sometimes say, look there are all of these extremely successful non-Western practices that get dismissed by Western science. Anthropologists will sometimes say, “Look how successful this group is, and its belief system seems to be utterly weird and yet they do very successfully,” and indeed Western scientists sometimes can’t replicate those efforts.
To understand autism, don't look away | Carina Morillo(Full English subtitles are available for this talk -- click the CC button in the bottom right of your screen to turn subtitles on.)
Carina Morillo knew almost nothing about autism when her son Ivan was diagnosed -- only that he didn't speak or respond to words, and that she had to find other ways to connect with him. She shares how she learned to help her son thrive by being curious along with him.
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Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead | Justin DavidsonThere's a creepy transformation taking over our cities, says architecture critic Justin Davidson. From Houston, Texas to Guangzhou, China, shiny towers of concrete and steel covered with glass are cropping up like an invasive species. Rethink your city's anatomy as Davidson explains how the exteriors of building shape the urban experience -- and what we lose when architects stop using the full range of available materials.
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Do Humans Have Free Will, Or Are We Programmed By Society? | Joscha BachFor many years, Joscha Bach could not understand why humans flock so strongly towards religion and ideology. Having grown up in communist East Germany and seeing the people around him buy into nationalistic narratives—that were to him obviously untruthful—made no sense. It was only when the wall came down that he came to understand that people everywhere are buying into various false narratives—as of 2015, 34% of Americans still reject evolution completely. The drive to believe whatever instructions come from above you is not a cognitive error, Bach realized then, but an evolutionary feature—as powerful as it is problematic. The ability for large groups of people to follow one set of rules, to cooperate, is how Homo sapiens established agricultural societies, and is ultimately how we outcompeted other now long-gone nomadic hominin groups. We are a programmable species, says Bach, and we need to belong and conform to a larger entity to survive. As such, Bach sees the debate surrounding free will not as a question of determinism or incompatibilism, but of social conditioning. Perhaps the free will relates to decision-making over physics: are you really free to act in a way that is true, or are you bound by a social code of responsibility that runs thousands of years deep in your genetics? Joscha Bach's latest book is Principles of Synthetic Intelligence.
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Transcript: Like consciousness, free will is often misunderstood because we know it by reference, but it’s difficult to know it by content, what you really mean by free will. A lot of people who immediately feel that free will is related to whether the universe is deterministic or probabilistic. And while physics has some ideas about that—which change every now and then—it’s not part of our experience and I don’t think it makes a difference if the universe forces you randomly to do things or deterministically.
The important thing seems to me that in free will you are responsible for your actions, and responsibility is a social interface. For instance, if I am told that if I do X I go to prison, and this changes my decision whether or not to do X, I’m obviously responsible for my decision because it was an appeal to my responsibility in some sense. Likewise if I do a certain thing that causes harm to other people and they don’t want that harm to happen, that influences my decision. This is a discourse of decision-making that I would call a free will decision.
“Will” is the representation that my nervous system at any level of its functioning has raised a motive to an intention. It has committed to a particular kind of goal that gets integrated into the story of myself, this protocol that I experience as myself in this world. And that was what I experienced as will, as a willed decision, and this decision is free in as much as this decision can be influenced by discourse.
So to me, free will is a social notion. It means that this interface of social interaction, of discourse, of thinking about things, about this interface of knowledge, language, conceptual thought, is relevant for that decision. If you have a decision in which it doesn’t play a role, for instance, because you are addicted to something and you cannot stop doing it even if you want to, then this decision I would say is not free.
I grew up in eastern Germany, it was communist eastern Germany and it was a very weird ideological country. A country that believed in stories about how the world works that I, as a nerd, thought obviously not quite true. I had difficultly believing the official stories about how the world works. It was like some weird kind of religion. And then the wall came down and it didn’t surprise me in the least. And then we entered a new dream, a new shared model of the world that was not quite true, and I realized that most people now fall for this new model. It was very interesting to see this for me and if you look, for instance, at the U.S., the majority of U.S. Americans do not believe in the theory of evolution despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The majority of people on this planet are religious even though there doesn’t seem to be very good evidence for a multitude of creator gods and so on, in my view at least. And if it existed, if a creator god existed, it would be very hard for me to understand why this creator god really does care about whether I worship it or all these things that we attribute to creator gods by religion. So it’s very hard for me, in some sense, to intuitively understand why humans are religious and why humans are ideological.
Job Automation: Are Writers, Artists, and Musicians Replaceable?You're probably reading this from either a smartphone or a laptop. It's no small secret that the device you're looking at can create works of art... if you put your mind to it. But therein lies the point that Andrew McAfee makes in this video: you need to put your own creativity into the computer for it to work. Interestingly enough, computers are pretty adept at creating architecture and music. This is largely because what is pleasing to the quote-unquote "Western aesthetic mind" is easy to replicate. Music follows a formula, as does pleasing architecture and design. But when AI tries to replicate the human condition, or relate in any way to emotions and feelings, that is where even the smartest computer brains fails. Great news for all us writers out there. Not so great for all the graphic designers, though!
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Just about every time that I get involved in a discussion or a conversation about technological progress and how it can take away jobs from people and how it can automate away things that people used to do, one of the first things that people talk about this irreplaceable human skill is creativity, is coming up with some kind of eureka. And I think that is simultaneously correct and not correct at all. And let me talk first about the way that it's not correct at all. There are lots of different definitions of creativity out there. One of them that I walk around with is the ability to come up with a powerful or a useful legitimately novel idea. I think that's what creative people, whether they are innovators or entrepreneurs or investors or musicians or painters, a lot of what I think of as creativity is this eureka, this coming up with something that's valuable or valued and also pretty novel. Machines can do that now by any definition they can do that in lots of different domains. There's a rapidly growing field called generative design and what that means is if you feed into a modern piece of technology the specifications that you want this building to be able to handle or this heat exchanger or the frame of a car or some kind of part out there in the physical world that has to meet some performance specifications or fit inside some performance envelope we've got software that will generate a part that will do that admirably.
And what's interesting is when you couple that software to a 3-D printer you print out these arbitrarily complex shapes that do exactly what you want them to do. They're typically very, very high performing, they're typically very efficient. They very often look different than what a human designer would come up with. When I look at the parts that get churned out by generative design software they look skulls or skeletons or exoskeletons that you see in nature and I was initially surprised by that. I don't think I should be surprised by that, the forms that nature produces are by definition really, really useful and really efficient because they've survived all the evolutionary challenges in history so far and arrived at this point so they're really beautiful objects. Generative design software can turn out objects like that now that remind me a lot of things that we see in the natural world. They look different than what human designers come up with. They perform better in many cases than what human designers come up with. I would call the work of design a very creative endeavor. We have technology that's now good at that.
There's also technology that can compose music in almost any style that you suggest. And there's an interesting phenomenon going on there: when people know in advance that they're going to be listening to computer generated music they very often dismiss it as shallow or trivial or obviously not coming from a human composer's mind and heart. When listeners don't know in advance that they're listening to computer generated music they very often find it as evocative, as beautiful, as moving as anything a human being would come up with. I guess we shouldn't be so surprised by that. Human taste in music is not this great unknown. We know some of the rules about what western listeners, for example, find appealing in music. You can bake those rules into software, hit go and generate a lot of music. So again, that's an endeavor where I would've thought of it as creative and computers are clearly doing at least an adequate job, possibly a really, really good job. However, what we haven't seen yet are computers that can turn out lyrics on top of that music that sound anything except either really, really silly or flat out nonsensical and ridiculous.
How to see past your own perspective and find truth | Michael Patrick LynchThe more we read and watch online, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake. It's as if we know more but understand less, says philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch. In this talk, he dares us to take active steps to burst our filter bubbles and participate in the common reality that actually underpins everything.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: How to Teach Science? Leverage the Power of Pop CulturePop culture is a great way to frame new information. And a teacher like Neil can make a huge difference. Why spend hours explaining something in great detail when you can simply use what they already know? Pop culture is a great scaffold to build and hang information off of argues Neil deGrasse Tyson. For example: you need to understand basic laws of gravity in order to play Angry Birds, so why spend hours explaining Newton's Law when you can just fling a red bird at a pig? In this video, Neil uses a great anecdote about watching a football game and realizing that physics and science play a huge part in it whether the audience knows it or not.
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I guess I'm lucky that my chosen profession is astrophysics because unlike so many other fields of study, especially academic fields of study, in my field we have an essentially completely transparent lexicon so I don't have to translate anything, hardly anything. If I show you a photograph of the sun and you see spots on the sun you say, "What do you call those?" And I say, "We call them sunspots." I show you a picture of Jupiter, "There's that red spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter what do you call that?" "We call that Jupiter's red spot." "There is this place for you to fall in and you don't come out and light doesn't escape what do you guys call that?" "Black hole." So I don't see myself translating anything. I don't have to. I celebrate discovery using all the language that is fundamental to my field and what it means is to the person listening they don't have to slog through, navigate through vocabulary to gain access to the interesting idea that's sitting on the other side of it.
So let's take biology, for example. They discovered deoxyribonucleic acid. Now, if you don't know biology these are just syllables coming out of your mouth. Well, what is it? Well, it encodes to the identity of life and it's in the shape of a double helix. So fortunately - double helix - that's a word and there's nothing else really that's a double helix so that's kind of a translated term for deoxyribonucleic acid, but notice you spend all this time just getting through the word before you get to an understanding or a conversation about what it does and how it does it and why. So I'm lucky that my field does not have this lexicon challenge for the educator. But what I also do is I have come to recognize the obvious that everyone exists with a certain pop-culture scaffold that they carry with them. That's the definition of pop culture. So it's not everyone but it's most people. There's a common base of knowledge that we can all reference. We all know what football is in America. We know what we mean when we say football. What is baseball? Who is Beyoncé? Who is Donald Trump? Who is Hillary Clinton? What is the capital building? There are things we just know as part of pop culture. And I say hum, if you already know that then if I clad that…
Once I've recognize that you are walking around with a pop-culture scaffold I can then clad that scaffold, if I think about how to do it, I can clad that scaffold with real and genuine science and you will care about it because I'm attaching it to something that I know in advance you already do care about or already do know about. Just as a quick example I was channel surfing, came across a football game that had just ended in a tie; they went into overtime. I had 15 minutes to kill before my movie came on. I said I'll sit there and watch this overtime period. And I'm watching it and there's the requisite exchange of possession before you go into sudden death overtime.
CRISPR Babies: Eugenics, Ethics, and Why Regulation Efforts Could Be Too LateRead more at BigThink.com:
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Well, when we think about designer humans or “CRISPR babies” as we've seen in the media, this sparks some people's imagination to think about what one might want to do with a technology like this, maybe not today and maybe not next year but in the future.
And it's one thing to talk about being able to remove mutations from the human population that cause genetic disease—and I think for many people that would be a desirable thing to do—On the other hand I think it's a very different discussion to think about using a technology like this to create enhanced human beings, people that are taller or have a certain eye color or other kinds of physical or intellectual traits that might be considered desirable.
And it sort of immediately brings up sort of the whole area of eugenics and sort of access to technology, who gets access, who pays for it, who decies? Who decides whether or not to do such a thing? Should companies be allowed to offer this as a service to parents who want to do this so should they be regulated in some way? There's a lot of very interesting and challenging questions I think that go along with that. And then there's the whole question of, since this is a technology that is widely available—I really call it a democratizing technology because it's not very expensive to use and labs worldwide have been able to easily deploy it in different systems—So then how do we think about a global regulation?
Is it even possible to come to some kind of consensus globally? I'm not sure, honestly, of the answer to that.
I think that it's certainly important to be having this discussion with our colleagues in other countries and fortunately that's happening.
But are we going to be able to control what people are doing in every jurisdiction? I think no way, and so I think it's one of those things that it's one of the aspects of this technology that we have to grapple with, is the fact that it's widely available and that people will start using it in different ways, potentially even in the future to create genetically altered humans.
Lawrence Krauss on How to Develop Your Critical Thinking SkillsStrange answers aren’t inherently wrong, and satisfying answers aren’t inherently right, says Lawrence Krauss in this critical thinking crash course. The astrophysicist explains how principles of scientific skepticism can be applied beyond the laboratory; it can be a filter for the nonsense and misinformation we encounter each and every day. Here, he establishes a handful of core questions that critical thinkers ask themselves, which can be used to challenge your misconceptions and sense of comfort, question inconsistency, and think past your brain's evolved biases. Piece by piece, you can systematically remove nonsense from your life. Lawrence Krauss' most recent book is The Greatest Story Ever Told -- So Far: Why Are We Here?
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One of my favorite quotes, which I've used in my writing, comes from the former publisher of The New York Times who said, "I'd like to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out." And that's the key point. We have to skeptically assess the information we receive, we can't be gullible because when we get a lot of information it's absolutely certain that some of that information is wrong and so we have to always filter what we get and we have to ask ourselves the following question: how open does my brain have to be to accept that information? Does it have to fall out? And by that I mean, when someone tells you something you have to ask: is this consistent with my experience? Is it consistent with the experience of other people around me? And if it isn't then probably there's a good reason to be skeptical about it—it's probably wrong. If it makes predictions that also appear to be in disagreement with things that you observe around you, you should question it. And so we should never take anything on faith. That's really the mantra of science, if you want, that faith is the enemy of science. We often talk about a loss of faith in the world today; you don't lose anything by losing faith. What you gain is reality.
And so skepticism plays a key role in science simply because we also are hardwired to want to believe, we're hardwired to want to find reasons for things. In the savanna in Africa, the trees could be rustling and you could choose to say, 'Well there's no reason for that,' or, 'Maybe it's due to a lion.' And those individuals who thought there might be no reason never lived long enough to survive to procreate, and so it's not too surprising we want to find explanations for everything and we create them if we need to, to satisfy ourselves, because we need to make sense of the world around us. And what we have to understand is, what makes sense to the universe is not the same as what makes sense to us and we can't impose our beliefs on the universe. And the way we get around that inherent bias is by constantly questioning both ourselves and all the information we receive from others. That's what we do in science and it works beautifully in the real world as well.
When you're presented with questions or answers about any problem there are a few questions you can ask yourself, that you should ask yourself right away. First of all, you can ask yourself, 'Do I like this answer?' And if you do you should be suspicious because you're much more likely to accept something that appeals to you whether it's right or not. So if you inherently like something in some sense that's a reason to be almost more suspicious of it, if you're a scientist. But then you can ask the question, when you're presented with information, is that information consistent with what I know already based on data I've taken about the world around me? And by data, it's not just scientists. If you're a child—all children do this—you put your hand in a flame, okay, the second time you know not to because you have the data that it hurt the first time. And if someone that tells you, 'That flame isn't going to hurt,' you have the data to assess that that's probably wrong. So you want to ask yourself: is that information consistent with what I know to be true already?
And the other thing to do, especially if you get information from a source you don't know, is to look at many different sources and compare them and see if they all agree. If they all agree it doesn't guarantee it's right but if there's vast disagreement between the different sources then it's highly likely that you can't at least rely on that information to be true. It's the same way science works: science doesn't prove what's absolutely true, what it does is prove what's absolutely false.
Sexual Questions That Women and Men Love to Google | Seth Stephens-DavidowitzSex is a touchy subject. What people say about their sex lives—what they "self-report"—can bear little relation to the truth of the matter. Men famously inflate their number of sexual encounters while women, in a telling double standard, reduce their number of partners. So how can we strip away the social status that clings to our conversations about sex? Anonymous Google searches! Here, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reveals what people tell Google in the privacy and anonymity of their online searches. Many of the truism we hold about sex are seemingly overturned in revealing and humorous style.
His new book can be found on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2tNvDnb
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Transcript: There are a couple of things that Google search has revealed about sex. One is the lack of sex. So the number one complaint in a marriage is that it’s a sexless marriage. A much more common search than “loveless marriage” or “unhappy marriage.” The number one complaint that everybody has about their partner whether it’s a husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend is that “the partner won’t have sex with me”. That beats the second complaint that “the partner won’t text me back.” And some of the searches go a little against conventional wisdom. There are twice as many complaints that “my boyfriend won’t have sex with me” than that “my girlfriend won’t have sex with me.” And I think we usually think, you know, the conventional wisdom is that men want sex all the time and women are more withholding or prudish. But I think the data from Google goes against that.
I think the other thing that is revealed in Google search is widespread insecurity about one’s body.
And with men it tends to focus on one particular area which may not be so surprising. Maybe you can guess like where men might be most insecure. It is their genital region. So men ask more questions about their penis than any other body part on Google. And it’s basically always how to make it longer.
And one of the top questions men ask about their penis is how big is my penis, which is not clear why they’re asking Google that, right? Like that’s not really the way to find out.
But some of it seems needless because women rarely search about a partner’s penis. For every 170 searches that a man makes about his own penis a woman makes one about a partner’s penis. And women when they’re complaining about a partner’s genitals they’re about as likely to complain that it’s too big as too small—even though like men never search on Google for ways to make it smaller.
And then women, not surprisingly, also have a lot of insecurity around their bodies, and they make about seven million searches every year for breast implants. Only about 300,000 women actually get breast implants. So a lot more women look into it than go through with it.
And women make almost as many searches insecure around their genitals as men do insecure around their genitals. And with women the big insecurity, which I did not know but I learned from this data, is odor. That’s kind of like a big theme.
Yes, like men and women are kind of in their own little world, in their own heads I think.
So men their second biggest insecurity after their size is the length of their sexual encounters, and premature ejaculation and how to make it last longer.
And then women when they search are frequently looking how to make it go quicker.
So it’s kind of an interesting contrast. Again I think you do see that a lot of people are kind of stuck in their own heads and very insecure and anxious.
How Your Brain Is Getting Hacked: Facebook, Tinder, Slot Machines | Tristan HarrisRead more at BigThink.com:
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One thing we don't talk about is that—it's sort of hard to talk about this—our minds have theses kind of back doors.
There's kind of—if you're human and you wake up and you open your eyes there is a certain set of dimensions to your experience that can be manipulated.
When I was a kid I was a magician, and you learn all about these limits, that short-term memory is about this long and there's different reaction times, and if you ask people certain questions in certain ways you can control the answer. And this is just the structure of being human. To be human means that you are persuadable in every single moment.
I mean the thing about magic, as an example, it’s that magic works on everybody, sleight of hand, right?
It doesn't matter what language you speak, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, it's not about what someone knows: it's about how your mind actually works.
So knowing this, it turns out that there's this whole playbook of persuasive techniques that actually I learned when I was at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and that most people in Silicon Valley in the tech industry learned as ways of getting your attention.
So one example is: we are all vulnerable to social approval. We really care what other people think of us. So for example, when you upload a new profile photo of yourself on Facebook, that's a moment where our mind is very vulnerable to knowing, “what do other people think of my new profile photo?”
And so when we get new likes on our profile photo, Facebook—knowing this—could actually message me and say, “oh, you have new likes on your profile photo.” And it knows that we'll be vulnerable to that moment because we all really care about when we're tagged in a photo or when we have a new profile photo.
And the thing is that they control the dial, the technology companies control the dial for when and how long your profile photo shows up on other people's newsfeeds, so they can orchestrate it so that other people more often end up liking your profile photo over a delayed period of time, for example, so that you end up having to more frequently come back and see what the new likes are.
And the problem is that they don't do this because they're evil, they do it because, again, they're in this race for our attention.
And we should also ask, is that necessarily such a bad thing if they're orchestrating it so that other people like my photo? I mean that might feel good to me.
So we have to have a new conversation about, as these technology companies use these techniques, these vulnerabilities in our minds, when is that actually aligned and good for us? When is that ethical? When is that honest? When is that fair? And when is that dishonest and unfair? Because they're actually manipulating our minds in a way that doesn't add up to our spending our time well on the screen.
Well, so another vulnerability in our mind is something called a variable schedule reward, and that's like a slot machine in Las Vegas. It turns out that slot machines make more money in the United States than baseball, movies and theme parks combined.
People become addicted to slot machines, I think it's two to three times faster than any other kind of gambling in a casino. So it's insane. And why is that?
Because it's very simple: you just pull a lever, and sometimes you get a reward and sometimes you don't. And the more random it is and the more variable it is the more addictive it becomes.
And the thing is, that that turns our phone into a slot machine, because every time we check our phone we're playing the slot machine to see “what did I get?”
Every time that we check our email, we're playing the slot machine to see, “What did I get? Did I get invited to an interview at Big Think or did I just get another newsletter?”
Or if you're on a dating site like Tindr and when you're swiping, each swipe is: you're playing the slot machine to see “did I get a match?”, I'm playing the slot machine to see, “did I get a match?”
And the problem is that this dynamic, these variable schedule rewards or this slot machine mechanic, is so powerful that it's the best thing at addicting people and putting you in the zone.
The True Value of Coding: It Teaches You to Think DifferentlyRead more at BigThink.com:
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I was a high school computer science teacher for 17 years. I taught at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, California.
I taught during the dotcom boom, I taught during the dotcom bust, and I taught during sort of the recovery of the tech industry afterwards, and I did see the interest in what I was teaching fluctuate.
It would go up and down every year largely tied to the economy, which was a little bit weird to me. And even as a school, you know, when I began to teach in the late 90s the school itself actually had a computer requirement. You were required to take a certain number of computer classes before you were allowed to graduate. They got rid of that requirement. They got rid of that requirement because at some point they felt like computer literacy was so important that it ought to be integrated in all the other subjects. So it shouldn’t be a thing in and of itself.
So in the beginning I agreed with that. But after seeing how it played out I don’t think it was as effective as we wanted it to be, you know. I think that computers are still a fairly specialized type of knowledge, computer science. And teachers today still—I don’t think we’ve been trained on how to integrate computer science well into the other subjects.
So ultimately what ended up happening at that school site was we would graduate students who would know how to use computers but would not necessarily understand how they worked or even understand how to maximize what they could get out of the computer.
As a computer science teacher, something I used to talk to parents about—especially during the dotcom bust when interest in my class started to evaporate— Coding is not about training students how to type into a computer. That’s the least of it. Coding is actually really about training students to think in a certain way. It’s about training students to take large and complex problems and break them up into small pieces. It’s about training students to take things that are vague, that are difficult to wrap your mind around, and putting them into concrete sequential steps.
And that sort of thinking, that sort of skill, that sort of mental skill is applicable no matter what you do in life, you know. What you’re talking about right now, about how the future economy is going to require more knowledge work—we don’t know what computers are going to look like, right?
We don’t know, we don’t even know what coding is going to look like. But I can guarantee you that the coding mentality, the type of thinking that’s required in order to code well that will become increasingly valuable as we go on.
I think logic is really important. I think when you teach kids computer science you are touching on a lot of principles of logic. And in terms of students knowing how to use computers but not necessarily understanding why they work, I think that’s largely a product of the success of the computer field, you know.
Within computer science there’s this idea of abstraction, where you separate the interface of something from the internals of it. And that’s something that I talked about in my computer science classes when I was teaching. You do that because it makes the computer itself, it makes whatever you’re making easier to use, right?
The user just has to have like a working mental model of what the interface looks like. They don’t have to know anything about the guts underneath. But unfortunately what you miss out on in that is the mental development in your thinking that comes with understanding the guts, right?
When you understand the guts it’s not just for using that tool, it’s actually to change what’s inside of your skull. It’s actually to change your brain. It makes you a better thinker. It makes you a better problem solver to understand those things.
So I think there’s a place—I think there’s a place for abstraction, but my hope is that every student, before they graduate from high school they’ll have a chance to wrestle with those guts, to be able to really understand how a computer works from the inside. How both software and hardware work from the inside.
Artificial Intelligence Is the New Science of Human Consciousness | Joscha BachRead more at BigThink.com:
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I think right now everybody is already perceiving that this is the decade of AI. And there is nothing like artificial intelligence that drives the digitization of the world. Historically artificial intelligence has always been the pioneer battallion of computer science.
When something was new and untested it was done in the field of AI, because it was seen as something that requires intelligence in some way, a new way of modeling things. Intelligence can be understood to a very large degree as the ability to model new systems, to model new problems.
And so it’s natural that even narrow AI is about making models of the world. For instance our current generation of deep-learning systems are already modeling things. They’re not modeling things quite in the same way with the same power as human minds can do it—They’re mostly classifiers, not simulators of complete worlds. But they’re slowly getting there, and by making these models we are, of course, digitizing things. We are making things accessible in data domains. We are making these models accessible to each other by computers and by AI systems.
And AI systems provide extensions to all our minds. Already now Google is something like my exo-cortex. It’s something that allows me to act as vast resources of information that get integrated in the way I think and extend my abilities. If I forget how to use a certain command in a programming language, it’s there at my fingertips, and I entirely rely on this like every other programmer on this planet. This is something that is incredibly powerful, and was not possible when we started out programming, when we had to store everything in our own brains.
I think consciousness is a very difficult concept to understand because we mostly know it by reference. We can point at it. But it’s very hard for us to understand what it actually is.
And I think at this point the best model that I’ve come up with—what we mean by consciousness—it is a model of a model of a model.
That is: our new cortex makes a model of our interactions with the environment. And part of our new cortex makes a model of that model, that is, it tries to find out how we interact with the environment so we can take this into account when we interaction with the environment. And then you have a model of this model of our model which means we have something that represents the features of that model, and we call this the Self.
And the self is integrated with something like an intentional protocol. So we have a model of the things that we attended to, the things that we became aware of: why we process things and why we interact with the environment. And this protocol, this memory of what we attended to is what we typically associate with consciousness. So in some sense we are not conscious in actuality in the here and now, because that’s not really possible for a process that needs to do many things over time in order to retrieve items from memory and process them and do something with them.
Consciousness is actually a memory. It’s a construct that is reinvented in our brain several times a minute.
And when we think about being conscious of something it means that we have a model of that thing that makes it operable, that we can use.
You are not really aware of what the world is like. The world out there is some weird [viewed?] quantum graph. It’s something that we cannot possibly really understand —first of all because we as observers cannot really measure it. We don’t have access to the full vector of the universe.
What we get access to is a few bits that our senses can measure in the environment. And from these bits our brain tries to derive a function that allows us to predict the next observable bits.
So in some sense all these concepts that we have in our mind, all these experiences that we have—sounds, people, ideas and so on— are not features of the world out there. There are no sounds in the world out there, no colors and so on. These are all features of our mental representations. They’re used to predict the next set of bits that are going to hit our retina or our eardrums.
I think the main reason why AI was started was that it was a science to understand the mind. It was meant to take over where psychology stopped making progress. Sometime after Piaget, at this point in the 1950s psychology was in this thrall of behaviorism. That means that it only focused on observable behavior. And in some sense psychology has not fully recovered from this. Even now “thinking” is not really a term in psychology, and we don’t have good ways to study thoughts and mental processes. What we study is human behavior in psychology. And in neuroscience we mostly study brains, nervous systems.
The Neuroscience of Creativity, Perception, and Confirmation Bias | Beau LottoTo ensure your survival, your brain evolved to avoid one thing: uncertainty. As neuroscientist Beau Lotto points out, if your ancestors wondered for too long whether that noise was a predator or not, you wouldn't be here right now. Our brains are geared to make fast assumptions, and questioning them in many cases quite literally equates to death. No wonder we're so hardwired for confirmation bias. No wonder we'd rather stick to the status quo than risk the uncertainty of a better political model, a fairer financial system, or a healthier relationship pattern. But here's the catch: as our brains evolved toward certainty, we simultaneously evolved away from creativity—that's no coincidence; creativity starts with a question, with uncertainty, not with a cut and dried answer. To be creative, we have to unlearn millions of years of evolution. Creativity asks us to do that which is hardest: to question our assumptions, to doubt what we believe to be true. That is the only way to see differently. And if you think creativity is a chaotic and wild force, think again, says Beau Lotto. It just looks that way from the outside. The brain cannot make great leaps, it can only move linearly through mental possibilities. When a creative person forges a connection between two things that are, to your mind, so far apart, that's a case of high-level logic. They have moved through steps that are invisible to you, perhaps because they are more open-minded and well-practiced in questioning their assumptions. Creativity, it seems, is another (highly sophisticated) form of logic. Beau Lotto is the author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently.
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Transcript: Every behavior that we do, we do to reduce uncertainty. We do it to increase certainty. When you go down below in a boat and your eyes are moving and registering the boat, and your eyes are saying, “Oh, we’re standing still,” but your inner ears are saying, “No, no, we’re moving.” And your brain cannot deal with that conflict so it gets ill.
The stress resulting from uncertainty is tremendous in our society. It increases brain cell death. It decreases plasticity. It makes you a more extreme version of yourself. We do almost everything to avoid uncertainty. And yet the irony is that that’s the only place we can go if we’re ever going to see differently. And that’s why creativity, seeing differently, always begins in the same way: it begins with a question. It begins with not knowing. It begins with a 'why?'. It begins with a 'what if?'.
And I should also say that these assumptions are essential for your survival. Every time you take a step your brain has hundreds of assumptions: that the floor is not going to give way, that your legs aren’t going to give way, that that’s not a hole, it’s a surface. So these assumptions keep us alive. But they can also get in the way, because what was once useful may no longer be useful. So your brain evolved to evolve. It's adapted to adapt. So a deep question is: how is it possible to ever see differently if everything you see is a reflex grounded in your history of assumptions?
Our assumptions—and the process of vision—is both our constraint and our savior at the same time. Because our brain evolved to take what is meaningless and make it meaningful. If you’re not sure that was a predator, it was too late. So your brain evolved to take this meaningless data and make meaning from it, and that’s the process of creating perception. And then we hold on to those assumptions. They create attractor states in your brain, right, and they become very stable. So how could we see differently? It’s by engaging the process of creating perception.
Well the first step in that is to not just admit but embody the fact that everything you do right now is grounded in your assumptions—not sometimes, but all the time. Because if you don’t accept that then you’ll never create the possibility of seeing differently.
So much of 'Deviate', if people walk away with anything, it’s knowing the process of perception and in some sense I want them to know less at the end than they think they know now, because nothing interesting begins with knowing, it begins with not knowing. Because the next step is to then identify your assumptions—because most of everything that we do, we don’t know why we do what we do—and then the final step is to question those assumptions.
But questioning assumptions is incredibly difficult, because to question assumptions, to doubt what you assumed to be true already, especially if that assumption defines who you are, is to do the one thing that our brain evolved to avoid, which is uncertainty.
Is Race Genetic or Socially Constructed? | Philip KitcherHow many different races are there? Pick a number, any number, says philosophy professor Philip Kitcher. Wherever there is an agenda there is a division to be made; race is a social construct with scientific levers. "If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from biological science and psychological science over the last century, it’s that there’s an enormous amount of variation within the groups that we’ve traditionally thought of as races, far more than there is between the groups we’ve traditionally thought of as races." This makes sense; historically, we've drawn the line wherever it has suited the mainstream agenda. Humanity can be divided into two races, which would see Africans, Europeans and most Asians as one unified race. Or it could be divided into three races, which would separate Africans into their own group. You can keep dividing humanity down into more and more refined biological groups until you have 10 or 20 or 30 different races. But what would be the purpose? Our mistake has always been confusing groups for classes anyhow. Philip Kitcher is the co-author of The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts.
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Transcript: So what should we make of the concept of race? There are a lot of anthropologists who would say we should just throw this concept away completely. There’s no basis for it. And those people are responding to what many scholars call essentialist notions of race. There’s something about this particular group of people, perhaps about their anatomy or their physiology or their brains or their genes or something like this, that differentiates them from various other groups of people. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from biological science and psychological science over the last century it’s that there’s an enormous amount of variation within the groups that we’ve traditionally thought of as races, far more than there is between the groups we’ve traditionally thought of as races.
It turns out that if you look at things from a genetic point of view the certain kinds of molecular sequences are more common in some groups than in other groups. That’s because during the course of human history these groups have been separated from one another. They haven’t intermarried and that’s given various chances for various kinds of genetic material to become prevalent in some groups but not in others. But the first thing to say about that is that these differences are trivial! Largely trivial; there are some cases, such as well known diseases that tend to affect some groups more than others, that is not trivial for the sufferers. But by and large these differences are perfectly trivial.
Now about 15 years ago a tremendously brilliant study was done by researchers at Stanford that actually divided the human population into groups that the researchers themselves called interbreeding populations. They didn’t want to call them races but very quickly the popular press picked this up and started referring to them as races.
So you might start out with the human population and ask the following question: on the basis of biological evidence, gene frequencies, molecular frequencies of DNA sequences in different populations, what would you get if you wanted to divide the population into two? Well you’d get actually Africans and most Asians, central and western Asia, and Europeans as forming one group, and the rest of the human populations forming another group. Now what would happen if you did it into three groups? Well then you’d get the Africans separated out from the Eurasian population. What would happen if you did it for four groups? Five groups? Six groups? Seven groups? Eight groups? Nine groups? The first five or so of these give you something like sort of standard racial groups with a few odd little twists. The sixth gives you—as there’s sixth of these groups—gives you a tiny little population that has been isolated because of mountain barriers in Asia.
Now those are genuine divisions that have come out of our human history and that are still present in the DNA sequences of the genomes of various people. But whether we want to draw any distinctions at all within the human population is completely up to us. Remember how I did this: I said 'If you want to divide the human population into two, to three, to four, to five, to six, to seven, this biology will tell you how to make the biologically significant decisions.' But why should we want to do that? Is there a point in doing that?
CRISPR's Gene Drive Could Revive Extinct Species–or Create New Ones | Jennifer DoudnaGene-editing tool CRISPR is already poised to be one of the biggest inventions of the 21st century, and co-creator Jennifer Doudna already has big ideas for different ways to use it. There's a potential here, she explains, that scientists could possibly resurrect extinct species... and even invent new ones. The idea might sound wholly familiar to those who've seen the modern classic Jurassic Park (featuring Jeff Goldblum at his cultural zenith playing a mathematician, we might add): dinosaur DNA could be reproduced and in 20 years humanity really could have a dinosaur theme park. But Jennifer Doudna also understands how harmful this technology could be if in the wrong hands.
Jennifer Doudna's most recent book is A Crack in Creation Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution.
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Gene drives are ways that a gene editor can be used to spread a genetic trait through a population quickly, and a research lab in California was recently able to use this kind of strategy to spread a trait through a population of fruit flies in a laboratory setting very quickly. And I think what amazed many people—many scientists—was how efficient this was at creating effectively a new strain of fruit flies that had a different genetic trait in every individual.
I think that this potential to use that kind of spreading of a genetic trait is both exciting in terms of controlling vectors that can spread disease, but it also makes a lot of people nervous because of the potential to spread a trait that might become something that would be deleterious somehow in the environment.
So for example, imagine that it were possible to spread a trait that wiped out mosquitoes or created a population of insects that were somehow damaging in the environment. I think that those are applications of this technology that are very important to discuss and to think about before we sort of forge ahead and release animals like that into the environment.
So for people that have seen Jurassic Park (or if you have kids like me you've seen it many times) it's sort of a really interesting idea, sort of this was Michael Crichton's idea in the book and in the movie, to think about being able to take bits and pieces of DNA that come from extinct animals and somehow piece them back together perhaps using sequences of DNA from existing animals to create genomes that would allow once-extinct animals to be alive again—and could that really be done?
And I think that the CRISPR technology offers scientists a tool now where, at least in principle, maybe not to the level that it was in the film Jurassic Park, but in principle could allow introduction of new genes into existing genomes that would recreate animals that have traits that have been lost by extinction.
And so a number of scientists have been thinking about this. I think George Church is one of the prominent scientists who's been discussing this in the context of de-extinction of woolly mammoths, could you actually take DNA that's been sequenced from the remains of woolly mammoths and use elephant DNA to recreate these animals somehow?
And it's sort of a fascinating idea. Now whether that would actually work—I think there's a lot of technical challenges to doing that experiment, but could we do things like bringing back the carrier pigeon or animals that might have gone extinct very recently where we have close genetic relatives that we could actually study?
To me it's an interesting idea because of the potential for understanding genetic networks and what genes are really doing, how they really give rise to certain traits. I think one thing to appreciate is that in most cases the traits that we observe in animals or in ourselves are coming from interactions of many, many genes. It's not just one gene that gives rise to somebody's height or intelligence or anything else, it's really a whole network of genes that are interacting.
And to start to understand that I think would be very exciting and potentially could be done using this kind of strategy of introducing genes from extinct animals back into existing animals. And it's hard to say how soon that will be a reality, but I think the potential to learn a lot about the genetics of living systems is exciting.
3 Brain Systems That Control Your Behavior: Reptilian, Limbic, Neo Cortex | Robert SapolskyRead more at BigThink.com:
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How to design a library that makes kids want to read | Michael BierutWhen Michael Bierut was tapped to design a logo for public school libraries, he had no idea he was embarking on a years-long passion project. In this often hilarious talk, he recalls his obsessive quest to bring energy, learning, art and graphics into these magical spaces where school librarians can inspire new generations of readers and thinkers.
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Songs that bring history to life | Rhiannon GiddensRhiannon Giddens pours the emotional weight of American history into her music. Listen as she performs traditional folk ballads — including "Waterboy," "Up Above My Head," and "Lonesome Road" by Sister Rosetta Tharp — and one glorious original song, "Come Love Come," inspired by Civil War-era slave narratives.
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No one should die because they live too far from a doctor | Raj PanjabiIllness is universal — but access to care is not. Physician Raj Panjabi has a bold vision to bring health care to everyone, everywhere. With the 2017 TED Prize, Panjabi is building the Community Health Academy, a global platform that aims to modernize how community health workers learn vital skills, creating jobs along the way.
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Goal Setting Is a Hamster Wheel. Learn to Set Systems Instead. | Adam AlterYou've just achieved a goal you've been working towards for two years. You did it! Congratulations. Someone asks you: how does it feel? "Kind of anti-climactic, actually," you say. This scenario is quite common among those who have achieved even the highest benchmarks in business, athletics, or art, says Adam Alter, and it's because the goal setting process is broken. With long-term goals particularly, you spend the large majority of the time in a failure state, awaiting what could be a mere second of success down the track. This can be a hollow and unrewarding process. Alter suggests swapping quantitative goals (I will write 1,000 words of my novel per day. I will run 1km further every week) for qualitative systems—like writing every morning with no word target, or running in a new environment each week—that nourish you psychologically, and are independently rewarding each time you do them. Adam Alter is the author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.
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Transcript: Goal setting is fascinating because it's sort of a broken process in many respects. This is the way a goal works: You say to yourself, “When I achieve (whatever the thing is), that's how I'll know I'll have succeeded, and I'm going to do everything I can to get to that point as quickly as possible.” What that means is you exist in a failure state for a long time until you reach that goal, if it's a long-range goal. And so as you evaluate your process all you get is the negative feedback of not having achieved that goal. Perhaps as you move closer to it there's some positive feedback, but if the goal is really the end state that you're seeking out, there's a lot of failure before you get there. And now here's the thing: when you do get there it's a massive anti-climax.
So there are people who achieve the highest highs; people who achieve the highest highs in athletics, in business, and if you talk to them and you ask them to describe what it's like to reach their goals they say things like, “I got there and it was an incredible anti-climax. The minute I got there I had to start something new, I had to find a new goal.” And that's partly because there's something really unsatisfying about the moment of reaching the goal. Unless it has its own benefits that come from reaching the goal, if it's just a sort of signpost; that doesn't do much for us, it doesn't nourish us psychologically. And what that ends up meaning is that we have to try to find something new.
So really if you look at life as a series of goals, which for many of us it is, it's a period of being unsuccessful in achieving the goal, then hitting the goal, then feeling like you haven't really got much from that goal, going to the next one—and it's a sort of series of escalating goals.
A really good example of this is, say, smart watches or Fitbits or exercise watches. People, when they get those watches, a lot of them hit on the number 10,000. “I want to walk 10,000 steps.” When you do that, the thing will beep; you'll feel pretty good about it for a minute but then that feels a little hollow and the goal escalates over time. People will describe going from 10 to 11 to 12 to 14,000 steps to the point where they're moving through injuries, through stress-related injuries, because the goal is there; they respond to the goal more than they do to their internal cues, and basically there's something really unfulfilling about that.
The reason the goal keeps escalating and becoming more and more intense is because when they achieve the goal they don't actually get anything for that achievement, and so goals, generally I think, are in many ways broken processes.
I think part of the problem with goals is that they don't tell you how to get to where you're going. A better thing to do is to use a system. So the idea behind a system rather than a goal is that a system is saying things like, “I’m a writer, my goal is to finish writing this book but I'm not going to think about it in that way. Eventually I'll have 100,000 words, but my system will be that for an hour every morning I will sit in front of my computer screen and I will type. It doesn't matter what that looks like. I'm not going to evaluate the number of words. I'm not going to set some benchmark, some artificial number or benchmark that I should reach, what I'm going to do is just say, 'Here's my system: an hour a day in front of the screen. I'll do what I can—bam.'”
Am I not human? A call for criminal justice reform | Marlon PetersonFor a crime he committed in his early twenties, the courts sentenced Marlon Peterson to 10 years in prison -- and, as he says, a lifetime of irrelevance. While behind bars, Peterson found redemption through a penpal mentorship program with students from Brooklyn. In this brave talk, he reminds us why we should invest in the humanity of those people society would like to disregard and discard.
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The refugee crisis is a test of our character | David MilibandSixty-five million people were displaced from their homes by conflict and disaster in 2016. It's not just a crisis; it's a test of who we are and what we stand for, says David Miliband -- and each of us has a personal responsibility to help solve it. In this must-watch talk, Miliband gives us specific, tangible ways to help refugees and turn empathy and altruism into action.
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Don't fear intelligent machines. Work with them | Garry KasparovWe must face our fears if we want to get the most out of technology -- and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of humanity, says Garry Kasparov. One of the greatest chess players in history, Kasparov lost a memorable match to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. Now he shares his vision for a future where intelligent machines help us turn our grandest dreams into reality.
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How pollution is changing the ocean's chemistry | Triona McGrathAs we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more of it is dissolving in the oceans, leading to drastic changes in the water's chemistry. Triona McGrath researches this process, known as ocean acidification, and in this talk she takes us for a dive into an oceanographer's world. Learn more about how the "evil twin of climate change" is impacting the ocean — and the life that depends on it.
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Why Buy Things You Only Use Once? Enter the Subscription Economy. | Kevin KellyCould you imagine owning nothing? Depending on your stance on the concept of ownership, Kevin Kelly has a either a startling window into the future or an idea that will make your head spin. Take the so-called "sharing economy" and apply it to all the objects in your house. Would you join a Netflix for kitchen appliances, or would you rather spend $200 a pop on something you'll use once a year? Would you subscribe to a camping equipment provider paying maybe $35 a month or would you rather spend a grand on a tent you'll use two to three nights in the summer? Kelly's sharing idea isn't new (Uber, the aforementioned Netflix, AirBnB, the list goes on) but applied to the very objects that are probably surrounding you right now, it sure makes a ton of sense. "Imagine owning next to nothing," Kelly says in our interview. For the collectors and materially motivated amongst us... that might be difficult concept to swallow.
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More and more of the things that we find valuable weigh less and less. More and more of their value is in the things that don’t have any weight or mass. These intangibles are really what becomes the driver of our economy and if we can deliver these intangibles anytime, anywhere to anybody that instant aspect of them means that we, in fact, don’t have to own them anymore. So I really don’t own any movies. I subscribe to Netflix. I don’t really own much music. I have Spotify or Pandora, Apple Music. And increasingly that’s going to be true for games and books.
And if it’s true for all those things that we can make intangible very easily, it also is true that the benefits of subscribing to something rather than owning them are moving to the physical world as well. And we can see something like Uber as an example of that where if you can summon a car anytime, anywhere you want to, why would you own it? It’s going to be as good and maybe even better than owning because ownership has a lot of liabilities – storing, cleaning, maintaining, upgrading that we actually don’t really want to have. If we can subscribe and not own a car but have all the benefits of using a car what about other things? How far can that go? And we can kind of imagine pushing this to some far logical extreme where maybe some individual in the future doesn’t really own very much of anything. They can access or subscribe to everything in their lives. Maybe we can put all these together in kind of an extreme form and imagine a day in the life of somebody who is going about without owning any of the things that we normally associate with owning. Maybe even like clothes. So the way that would go is if you could have instant delivery to your box somewhere within a few hours of anything that you need anywhere you were in the world maybe you subscribe to clothes and clothes come to you. You wear them once, they’re taken away, they’re recycled and cleaned and they’re given to someone else who may only wear them once. And with clothes this is already happening in the high end of tuxedos and things that we know we only wear occasionally but can even go into daily wear as well if again it was something that was being recycled and cleaned and sent on to someone else whose body was scanned and digitized, and we knew from experience that these clothes were going to fit their body particularly.
And you could have digital avatars where you could try clothes on. If we could imagine clothes, why not furniture? Why not toys? Toys are used for a short time by kids as they grow up and maybe they could be subscribed to instead of being purchased. What about tools or kitchen stuff that you only use occasionally? The turkey roaster that you could summon on Thanksgiving, have delivered to your house within an hour. You use it, give it back, they clean it, they store it and they’ll be ready to deliver it to you whenever you need it again. Camping equipment: Everybody wants the latest and the greatest high tech this year’s most sophisticated camping technology. Why would you buy camping equipment when you only use it occasionally and you could subscribe to the best instead. So we can kind of multiply this again and again to this vision where we’re moving from ownership to access. If you can get access to things, instant delivery, maybe even 3D printing. Things given and manufactured and put in front of you on demand then that in many ways for most people becomes better than owning it.
The Truth about Job-Taking Machines, Globalization, and Mexican Trade | Robert KaplanThe US economy has spawned a vicious cycle that few people are talking about, but it's one that affects us all. You, right now, are likely caught in that ugly loop. In fact, it's what may one day send you packing from your job. It's called technology-enabled disruption. And the worst part? (There's a worse part!?) You contributed to it in a big way, explains Robert S. Kaplan. Advancements in retail technology gave consumers the power to shop smarter and put pricing pressure on manufacturers. That pressure is "rippling back, through impacts on workers and their wages, and maybe encouraging businesses to increasingly replace workers with technology," says Kaplan. In a nutshell: every time a consumer finds a bargain, a robot gets a job.
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So listen, during almost my entire lifetime globalization has been a key element of our economy. It started decades ago as many industries wound up—manufacturing in particular—off-shoring jobs to take advantage of lower labor rates in other countries. And so we lost manufacturing jobs in this country due to globalization. But the other part of globalization is increasingly the S&P 500, the 500 largest companies domiciled in the United States, are increasingly finding a larger share of their revenues and profits are coming from outside the United States.
And the other part is our trade relationships, the nature of them, are changing due to globalization. I’ll take Mexico as an example. Right now, of the imports to the U.S. from Mexico, 40 percent of those imports is U.S. content. So what is that about? It means these are not just trade relationships. These are integrated supply chains and logistics that, in our judgment at the Dallas Fed, are making the U.S. more competitive, likely actually adding jobs in the United States and keeping those jobs from going elsewhere, most likely to Asia.
The last part of globalization that we have to—a couple of more parts I’ll talk about is China is much bigger today than it was 10 years ago and 20 years ago, and I mean much bigger as a percentage of global GDP. China has been growing at much higher rates consistently than almost any other country in the world except for maybe India. It means they are a larger percentage of global GDP and they’re a much larger percentage of global GDP growth. Okay, what’s the impact of that?
They have been—in order to get that growth, and they’ve been growing recently, about 6.5 percent. Unfortunately in order to achieve that growth they’ve been growing debt to GDP. In other words they have been leveraging in various sectors to either build infrastructure or to build capacity in many state-owned enterprises. The impact of that is they’ve got dramatic overcapacity in a number of their industries which creates global overcapacity. And so China bears watching. The world is going to have to get accustomed to lower levels of growth from China and also because of currency outflows. That has the potential, because the world is much more financially integrated, currency outflows in China, which is what happened in the first quarter of 2016, have the potential to create ripple effects and spillovers throughout the world and this happened in the first quarter of 2016 where we saw financial turmoil in China translate into rapidly tightening financial conditions globally. So those are a number of elements of globalization. What’s the point of it all? The point of it all is: you have to think about the economy in a much more global way. Globalization is likely putting downward pressure on prices because we have more overcapacity. And also our trading relationships have to be thought about differently because, particularly in this hemisphere, it’s actually helping U.S. companies become more globally competitive and therefore is likely growing jobs in the United States. So as a central banker, it’s no longer an option in thinking about U.S. monetary policy to think just about the United States. I have to understand economic conditions around the world and the inner relationships between economies and financial markets around the world because the ripple effects, the spillovers, are much more likely to happen.
How to find a wonderful idea | OK GoWhere does OK Go come up with ideas like dancing in zero gravity, performing in ultra slow motion or constructing a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine for their music videos? In between live performances of "This Too Shall Pass" and "The One Moment," lead singer and director Damian Kulash takes us inside the band's creative process, showing us how to look for wonder and surprise.
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A secret weapon against Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases | Nina FedoroffWhere did Zika come from, and what can we do about it? Molecular biologist Nina Fedoroff takes us around the world to understand Zika's origins and how it spread, proposing a controversial way to stop the virus -- and other deadly diseases -- by preventing infected mosquitoes from multiplying.
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Why I speak up about living with epilepsy | Sitawa WafulaOnce homebound by epilepsy, mental health advocate Sitawa Wafula found her strength in writing about it. Now, she advocates for others who are yet to find their voices, cutting through stigma and exclusion to talk about what it's like to live with the condition.
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Poverty isn't a lack of character; it's a lack of cash | Rutger Bregman"Ideas can and do change the world," says historian Rutger Bregman, sharing his case for a provocative one: guaranteed basic income. Learn more about the idea's 500-year history and a forgotten modern experiment where it actually worked -- and imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all.
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The Science of Learning: How to Turn Information into IntelligenceCramming for a test and having a hard time understanding something? Might be best to go away and come back after a while. Your brain is constantly fluctuating between a "learning" mode and an "understanding" mode. When you're sitting there reading (and re-reading!) a textbook, unable to make sense of it, your brain is actually learning. It just takes the decompressing part of your brain for it to all be unpacked. It's called the neural chunk theory and you can learn to utilize it to your advantage by learning how to study differently; small bursts of inactivity and breaks can really make a big difference in how to memorize seemingly difficult information by combining bigger and bigger "chunks" of information until you understand the big picture. It's fascinating stuff.
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A very important idea that people are often unaware of is the fact that we have two completely different ways of seeing the world, two different neural networks we access when we’re perceiving things.
So what this means is when we first sit down to learn something—for example, we’re going to study math. You sit down and you focus on it. So you focus and you’re activating task-positive networks. And then what happens is you’re working away and then you start to get frustrated. You can’t figure out what’s going on. What’s happening is you’re focusing and you’re using one small area of your brain to analyze the material. But it isn’t the right circuit to actually understand and comprehend the material. So you get frustrated. You finally give up, and then when you give up and get your attention off it it turns out that you activate a completely different type of or set of neural circuits. That’s the default mode network and the related neural circuits. So what happens is you stop thinking about it, you relax, you go off for a walk, you take a shower. You’re doing something different. And in the background this default mode network is doing some sort of neural processing on the side. And then what happens is you come back and voila, suddenly the information makes sense. And, in fact, it can suddenly seem so easy that you can’t figure out why you didn’t understand it before. So learning often involves going back and forth between these two different neural modes – focus mode and what I often call diffuse mode which involves **** resting states. You can only be in one mode at the same time
So you might wonder, is there a certain task that is more appropriate for focus mode or diffuse mode? The reality is that learning involves going back and forth between these two modes. You often have to focus at first in order to sort of load that information into your brain and then you do something different, get your attention off it and that’s when that background processing occurs. And this happens no matter what you’re learning. Whether you’re learning something in math and science, you’re learning a new language, learning music, a dance. Even learning to back up a car. And think about it this way. Here’s a very important related idea and that is that when you’re learning something new you want to create a well practiced neural pattern that you can easily draw to mind when you need it. So this is called a neural chunk and chunking theory is incredibly important in learning. So, for example, if you are trying to learn to back up a car when you first begin it’s crazy, right. You’re looking all around. Do you look in this mirror or this mirror or do you look behind you? What do you do? It’s this crazy set of information. But after you’ve practiced a while you develop this very nice sort of pattern that’s well practiced. So all you have to do is think I’m going to back up a car. Instantly that pattern comes to mind and you’re able to back up a car. Not only are you doing that but you’re maybe talking to friends, listening to the radio. It’s that well practiced neural chunk that makes it seem easy. So it’s important in any kind of learning to create these well practiced patterns. And the bigger the library of these patterns, the more well practiced sort of deeper and broader they are as neural patterns in your mind, the more expertise you have in that topic.
And chunking was first sort of thought of or explored by Nobel Prize Winner [Herbert] Simon who found that, if you’re a chess master, that the higher you’re ranking in chess, the more patterns of chess you have memorized. So you could access more and more patterns of chess.
When Black women walk, things change | T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa GarrisonT. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, founders of the health nonprofit GirlTrek, are on a mission to reduce the leading causes of preventable death among Black women -- and build communities in the process. How? By getting one million women and girls to prioritize their self-care, lacing up their shoes and walking in the direction of their healthiest, most fulfilled lives.
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Universal Mathematics: All Life on Earth Is Bound by One Spooky AlgorithmRead more at BigThink.com:
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The Neuroscience of Lies, Honesty, and Self-Control | Robert SapolskyRead more at BigThink.com:
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So when we look at the world’s ills one of the biggest sources of it is us failing to do the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do—giving in to temptation, giving in to impulse. Giving in to emotional sort of immediacy. And the part of the brain that’s most central to whether or not that happens is the frontal cortex. Most recently evolved part of the brain, we’ve got more of it proportionally or more complexly than any other primate species out there. It’s the part of the brain that does impulse control, long term planning, emotional regulation. It does all the stuff where it’s the frontal cortex that whispers in your ear saying, “Do you really really want to do that right now? If you do that you’re going to regret it. It seems like a great idea.” Frontal cortex about that.
Okay, so when we look at our moments of life where there’s that enormous temptation to do the impulsive thing and—what’s going to determine whether the world will be freed of impulsive horrors?
“If only we could all get stronger frontal cortices trained in childhood to be able to hold out where you could have one marshmallow right now but if you wait you can get two later, and training from early age so that your frontal cortex has the most like fabulous aerobic metabolism ever, and it could just make you—“
And what the studies suggest is: at all sorts of junctures of doing the harder thing yes, having a really robust studly frontal cortex may do you a lot of good there.
But when you do sort of the truly difficult thing, when you see people who are the ones who run into the burning building to save the child and they leap into the river when everybody else is standing there like headless chickens—When you look at those people they’re not doing it because they’ve got the most amazing frontal cortexes on earth that could reason through the long-term consequences of “oh, what if nobody in society came to the aid of strangers?”
What they do is: they do it automatically.
You ask anybody who does one of these heroic acts what were you thinking when you jumped in the river. And the answer is always the same: “I wasn’t thinking. Before I knew it I had jumped in.”
When we do our most amazingly wondrous altruistic acts it’s not because we’ve got the most incredible frontal cortexes on earth that could like reason us. It’s because it’s out of the realm of the frontal cortex and it’s out of the realm of temptation and limbic stuff. We do the harder thing in a case like that because for us it’s not the harder thing. It’s become automatic, and that’s where you see it. You see the best success with temptation when it isn’t tempting, when it’s automatic, when we’ve distracted ourselves. All of that frontal like “work your way through the right decision” gets you only so far.
A fabulous study addressing this. This was work by a guy at Harvard named Josh Green who put people in a study in a brain scanner, of some task where if they got it right they get a reward afterward. So there’s an incentive to get it right. And this wonderful manipulative setup where at various points people were under the impression that there was a glitch in the system and the computer wasn’t registering their answers, so all they had to do was think what their answer was and then tell you afterward when they heard the correct answer had they had the right answer or not.
Why school should start later for teens | Wendy TroxelTeens don't get enough sleep, and it's not because of Snapchat, social lives or hormones -- it's because of public policy, says Wendy Troxel. Drawing from her experience as a sleep researcher, clinician and mother of a teenager, Troxel discusses how early school start times deprive adolescents of sleep during the time of their lives when they need it most.
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A climate solution where all sides can win | Ted HalsteadWhy are we so deadlocked on climate, and what would it take to overcome the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress? Policy entrepreneur Ted Halstead proposes a transformative solution based on the conservative principles of free markets and limited government. Learn more about how this carbon dividends plan could trigger an international domino effect towards a more popular, cost-effective and equitable climate solution.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Dark Matter, Dark Gravity, Ghost Particles, & the Essence of All ObjectsThere's something fundamental we all need to understand about dark matter—it may not actually be matter at all. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a bone to pick with this misnomer that is distracting physicists and the public from the real discoveries to be made. Scientists know very little about "dark matter", and in fact it can only be observed indirectly by its effect on other objects. Tyson has a few suggestions for its re-naming: how about "Fred", he jokes, which is a name devoid of any implied meaning—suitable for our current level of knowledge. But if you want it to sound sexy and be accurate, then the way to go is dark gravity, according to Tyson. Why? Because when you add up everything in the universe—the stars, moons, gas clouds, black holes, everything—85% of gravity is unaccounted for. That is so-called "dark matter". What makes it so interesting isn't the wild-goose-chase question of whether or not it exists, but why it doesn't interact with ordinary, known matter? On the way to explaining that dark matter "doesn't give a rats ass about us," Tyson explores ghost particles, the essence of objects, and why we haven't found any dark matter planets. Tyson's new book is Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.
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What makes life worth living in the face of death | Lucy KalanithiIn this deeply moving talk, Lucy Kalanithi reflects on life and purpose, sharing the story of her late husband, Paul, a young neurosurgeon who turned to writing after his terminal cancer diagnosis. "Engaging in the full range of experience -- living and dying, love and loss -- is what we get to do," Kalanithi says. "Being human doesn't happen despite suffering -- it happens within it."
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Why Atheists and Believers Are Actually Agnostic | Bill NyeWould a world full of atheists be best? Some people dream of the day religion fades away, but for others the mere hypothetical is a form of blasphemy. Imagine, just like John Lennon asked us to: would it be heaven on Earth? Would it be complete chaos? No one can accurately answer this question, just as no one can really know whether or not there is a god—technically speaking, we're all agnostics, explains Bill Nye. What we do know is that community underpins religion, and communities are essential for humanity's progress and existence. God or no god, we need to understand that we're all in this together, urges Nye. Communities—whether they're anchored in faith, science, art, or altruism—are essential to the future of humankind. Bill Nye's most recent book is Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World.
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Transcript: Wendy: Hey Bill. My name is Wendy and my question is: would the world be a better place if everyone was an atheist or had no beliefs in god or religion?
Bill Nye: Wendy, this is a great question. Practically, I don’t know. People get a lot of community out of religions. They get a lot of friendship and they have extended families as a result of religion. And my atheist friends—and, you know the old saying: “some of my best friends are atheists”—I mean I do have a large circle of atheist friends. We’re all very supportive. We have our own community in a different way.
So I think what we want is to transcend families, extended families and tribes to an understanding that everybody in the world is in this together. That all of our tribes are in this together. People from different religious traditions, we’re all in this together.
And whether or not there is one god that makes decisions for you, whether or not there is one god that influences your life based on what you’ve done in past lives, whether or not there is no god, these are all questions that are very important to ponder individually. But in the bigger picture I’m not going to claim the world would be better with or without communities. I think the communities and interactions of tribes, or tribal-style nations and groups, is very important to the future of humankind.
So as you may know, I am not a believer. I’m a non-believer. I spend a lot of time trying to understand my place in the cosmos and I’ve reached my own conclusions. But I’m the first to say that ultimately we are all agnostic. This is to say you can’t know whether or not there is a giant entity running the show or choosing to not run the show. You can’t know. So we all are, I believe, best served by just living good lives. Trying to leave the world better than we found it. That’s a great question. Whew.
3 principles for creating safer AI | Stuart RussellHow can we harness the power of superintelligent AI while also preventing the catastrophe of robotic takeover? As we move closer toward creating all-knowing machines, AI pioneer Stuart Russell is working on something a bit different: robots with uncertainty. Hear his vision for human-compatible AI that can solve problems using common sense, altruism and other human values.
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Google Searches May Be the Best Measure of Human Nature Yet | Seth Stephens-DavidowitzSeth Stephens-Davidowitz has a sneaking suspicion that we might not be all that honest with each other. Instead, we seem to be far more honest with a website. The things that people type into the Google search bar, Stephens-Davidowitz says, reveal far more about a person than any in-depth interviewer could ever dream of. Even how racist someone can be. What's alarming is that prior to the 2008 election, Stephens-Davidowitz saw a big uptick in racist searches coming from alarming places. He had expected the South to make perhaps a portion of these searches, but he was shocked to see the searches coming from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and more. And to cap that off, most of those searches were hardly fringe searches: they matched the amount of bigger-name searches like Lakers, migraines, and The Daily Show. Stephens-Davidowitz is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.
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So, the past 80 years if you want to know what people want, why they do the things they do, what they’re going to do, you ask them in a survey. But people may lie to surveys. But it’s been shown that people are really, really honest on certain internet sources, particularly their Google searches, so they tell Google things they might not tell to anybody else. They might not tell family members, friends, surveys, even themselves sometimes. And by mining this data we can get better insights into who we are.
All the data I analyze is anonymous and aggregate, but you can see patterns in this. So, for example, before an election if you ask people in a survey, “Are you going to vote,” pretty much everybody says yes, or a huge percentage of people say yes, even if they have absolutely no intention to vote just because it makes them feel good to tell a survey that they’re voting.
But you can actually see—based on where searches for how to vote or where to vote are highest—how high turnout really will be in different parts of the country. And that’s a very accurate predictor of who is actually going to vote.
When I started this research I measured how frequently people made racist searches in the United States. And the searches I looked at were very, very strikingly racist searches looking for basically jokes mocking African Americans. And I was struck by how frequently people are making these searches. In the time period I was looking at, it was as frequent as searches for “Lakers” and “migraine” and “Daily Show” — so not a fringe search. And I was also shocked by where these searches were located. If you had asked me, 'Where’s racism highest in the United States?' before I saw this Google data I would have said the South.
If you think of our country’s history, of slavery, the Civil War, we usually think of racism as a Southern issue. But the places with the highest racist search volumes included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York, industrial Michigan.
The real divide in racism these days is not north versus south. It’s east versus west, where you get a lot less of this west of the Mississippi River as compared to east of the Mississippi River.
And then if you remember the 2008 election, all the way back then when Barack Obama was elected president, after the election there was this question: did people care that he was black? And Gallup asked people and some other surveys asked people and 98 percent, 99 percent of Americans said “No, no, no, no—of course not. This was not a factor in our voting decision.”
But you actually see very, very clearly in the data that Obama did far worse than other previous Democratic candidates in places with higher racist search volumes. And this isn’t explained by anything else in the data. It’s not explained by demographics or gun ownership or church attendance or liberalism. The main factor that predicts where Obama did worse than other Democrats is how frequently they made racist searches on Google.
Anyway, this data kind of languished I think on my website for a while, but then during the 2016 Republican Primary some data journalists got data on where Trump was doing best in the Republican Primary. Trump, of course, was saying some very, very racially charged things and people were expecting that these were gaffes, that he would collapse because he was saying things that you are not supposed to say, you know: retweeting false statistics about how frequently African Americans commit crimes, or not repudiating support from a former leader of the KKK, saying that Black Lives Matter protestors should be roughed up. And then what these data journalists found is, the single highest predictor of where Trump was doing well was the measure of racist searches on Google.
How human noise affects ocean habitats | Kate StaffordOceanographer Kate Stafford lowers us into the sonically rich depths of the Arctic Ocean, where ice groans, whales sing to communicate over vast distances -- and climate change and human noise threaten to alter the environment in ways we don't understand. Learn more about why this underwater soundscape matters and what we might do to protect it.
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Capitalism 2.0 Will Include a Healthy Dose of Socialism | Eric WeinsteinRead more at BigThink.com:
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Transcript: I get asked a lot about the state of capitalism and I think that for those members of society of a certain age we think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with socialism perhaps or even communism.But we never really saw that capitalism might be defeated by its own child – technology. And I think that what we find is that even the most diehard free market economists usually save place for what they call market failure.
That is, markets really only work when the value of something and the price of that object or service coincide. So the key question is: what causes value and price to get out of alignment? And, in fact, every government on earth has a form of levying taxes of some form, because at some level there are certain things that need to be paid for that cannot, in fact, be priced where they must be valued.
So, for example, raising a standing army is tough because if somebody chooses not to pay for it it’s very difficult to exclude them from the protection of that army. So that in general—what we find is that these market failures are found in every economy, but they are also hopefully a small portion of the economic activity so that we can deal with them as a special edge case.
Now the problem with this is that technology appears to do something about figuring out the size of that small slice and making it rather large. So, for example, if I record a piece of music, once upon a time if you wanted a high quality version of that music you had to go to the folks who actually pressed the record albums.
But now I can record music with arbitrary fidelity and share it as a small file. And my having a copy of that file doesn’t preclude anyone else from copying the file and using it themselves. There’s no question that the number of times I use that file doesn’t really degrade the file because it’s, in fact, digital. So in that situation musicians were among the first to feel the earth crumble beneath their feet and they had to find new business models because, in fact, they found that they had gone from producing a private good where price and value coincided to producing a public good.
And the idea of taxing people to pay for both an army and their diet of jazz and rock n’ roll probably didn’t make a lot of sense.
So the danger is that more and more things are being turned into small files, and that means that the portion of the pie that is private goods is likely to shrink. This is one of several different forces.
Another one that I talked about in an essay called Anthropic Capitalism is that software has some very peculiar features.
Traditionally technology has moved us from low value occupations into higher value occupations. So while we always decry the loss of jobs we usually create new jobs which are more fulfilling and less taxing.
And therefore those who have cried wolf when they’ve seen technology laying waste to the previous occupations, those people have usually just been wrong. The problem with software is that software spends most of its time in loops. Almost all code can be broken into two kinds of code. Code that runs once and never repeats and code that loops over and over and over. Unfortunately what jobs are is usually some form of a loop where somebody goes to work and does some version of whatever it is they’ve been trained to do every day. Now the danger of that is that what we didn’t realize is that our technical training for occupations maneuvers the entire population into the crosshairs of software. It’s not just a question in this case of being moved from lower value repetitive behaviors into higher ones.
Why Schools Should Teach Skepticism Above Obedience | Lawrence Krauss“You can can get more information in your cell phone now than you can in any school, but you can also get more misinformation,” says American-Canadian theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss. And he’s right: we’re in an era where any human can access a previously unimaginable wealth of knowledge. This access has grown faster than our ability to process it critically, however, and what we lack is any decent filter to weed out erroneous or partisan information. Children are the most susceptible to this, and Krauss argues that teaching children how to question information—essentially, how to make children skeptics—may save humanity from a dumbing-down. Lawrence Krauss' most recent book is The Greatest Story Ever Told -- So Far: Why Are We Here?
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One of the biggest surprises of the Internet is we thought when the Internet came out it would provide everyone new fundamental tools to learn about the world around them, and it would actually remove the censorship and information that we get. Before the Internet we used to get our news from three TV stations and it was carefully edited and carefully described, and after the Internet came out you could search news sources from around the world—great! The problem is the Internet also became a source of misinformation. There's that very famous cartoon that says, “On the Internet no one knows if you're a dog," with a dog typing on a typewriter. You don't know the source of your information, which is the beauty of it. It was the reason it was actually created by particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, or at least CERN the laboratory where that now is, because thousands of physicists needed to communicate with information without caring about where the source came from.
But the fact that the source is shielded is, of course, a great concern nowadays in the political world among other things, and so we have to think about ways that we can address that.
Now, of course, information providers can try and work on that too, but we basically all have our own responsibility to become our own filters. And that's why it seems to me the educational system has to provide those tools, those filtering tools. And that's one of the reasons why I think science is so important because of its built-in filtering tools.
It recognizes that we all want to believe, and as Richard Feynman said, "The person you have to question most is yourself.” Knowing that you want to believe when you read something that validates your beliefs, you should be skeptical of it and your beliefs and you should look out for other sources.
So we have to train people that one source on the Internet is not good enough, you have to search broadly to see if it's validated. More over, you have to empirically test those ideas. If claims are made, you could look out and look at the data to see if those claims are validated.
We all have this new responsibility, because we have a sudden wealth of information, to become our own filters. And I can't see any way that we can move into an Internet-guided world where democracy remains vibrant if the public doesn't have the tools to distinguish sense from nonsense. And for me that's one of the reasons why I talk about science, because I think it provides us one of the key tools to do that.
One things seems very clear to me: education should not be left to private enterprise anymore than police or fire or military or in my opinion health because they're fundamental rights of people. And in a society that has the financial resources to provide individuals a safe and secure environment, which is really what government is all about, part of that is to educate young people. It's a right for every young person in a society, in a modern advanced industrial society, to receive an education. And that means not that we can't have the option of private education, but we have to ensure that students are provided opportunities to become the most productive adults they can be in a modern complex society.
That by the way doesn't mean treating science and other things as purely information, that's a mistake. We used to feel that schools were places that imparted information. Well, I can get more information in my cell phone now than I could in any school, but I could also get more misinformation. What we need to recognize is that science is not just a bunch of facts, but it's a process for deriving facts and it's a process to tell sense from nonsense.
3 Warnings to Stop Global Catastrophe: CRISPR, AI, & Robots | Richard ClarkeLow probability events, such as an extinction-level asteroid striking the Earth's surface, deserve more attention than their unlikelihood would suggest. The reason? The magnitude of their impact is so severe that it risks the survival of the human species. Career global security expert Richard Clarke identifies three potential game changing events that could affect the wellbeing of humanity itself: the gene editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, which could create superhumans and thereby establish a worldwide caste system; artificial intelligence capable of writing its own software superior to the programming abilities of humans; and robotic technology that could throw humans out of work and destabilize the world economy as we know it.
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The subtitle of our book is Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. Cassandra in Greek mythology was someone cursed by the gods, who could accurately see the future but would never be believed. When we say “Cassandras” throughout the book, we’re talking about people who can accurately see the future. People who are right—Cassandra was right—people who are right about the future but are being ignored.
Having derived what we think are the lessons learned from past Cassandra events, we then looked at people today who were predicting things and being ignored.
And we looked at issues first and then tried to see if there was someone warning about them. So the book is about people, 14 people: Seven who we known were Cassandras, and seven who we are examining to find out if they are.
Usually Cassandras are people who are not directly involved in the thing that they worry about. There are people who observe it. Then there are people who study it. But in the case of Jennifer Doudna at the University of California Berkeley, she’s the person who created it and she’s also our Cassandra.
The “it” in this case is CRISPR-Cas9, a method that she invented—and I’m sure someday will get a Nobel prize for—a method of doing gene editing that allows for removal of genetic defects in the strain or addition into a strain of new capabilities. Now this is going to revolutionize human life. It’s already beginning. It’s going to mean that all of the genetic defects that have caused so much pain and suffering for people for millions of years, all of that could potentially be removed.
So why does the great woman who invented this wake up in the middle of the night worrying about it? What she told us was she’s afraid that she might have become Dr. Frankenstein. That the technique that she developed could be misused in horrible ways. It could be misused, for example, to create biological weapons, to create new forms of threat to human beings, threats for which we don’t have any known antidote.
Or it could simply be used to create human beings of far superior capability. Not just taking genes and removing defects but adding new super capabilities. And so one scenario we discussed with her was what if the North Koreans or the Chinese decided that they would create super soldiers? Physically large people with great athletic ability designed to be soldiers, designed to be aggressive, designed to be able to fight for long periods of time.
Or what if they simply created people who were brilliant at computer programming and had IQs off the charts? What if in the process of that kind of gene editing we created a caste society where some people were genetically designed to do menial tasks and didn’t have the capability of doing anything else? And other people were designed to be the rulers with huge IQs and the capability of understanding things beyond the pale for lesser humans. That’s something that scared the creator of CRISPR-Cas9 and it scared us.
When we heard Jennifer's story, we asked ourselves, "does she fit the template of a Cassandra that we developed in the first half of the book looking at the first seven?" Is she an expert? Absolutely. She is the expert. She created it. Is she data-driven? Yes. She has a wealth of data on CRISPR-Cas9 and what it can do. Is she predicting something that is first-occurrence syndrome? Something that's never happened before? And the answer to that is "yes." Is it kind of outlandish? Is the stuff of Hollywood fiction? Yes it is. What about the audience—the decisions maker? One of the things we saw with the earlier Cassandras was it wasn't always clear there was a decision maker. People always pointed at each other saying "that's your job, or at least it's not my job." And in this case, making decisions about what gene editing can happen, and can't happen, and enforcing that is a matter of law, and international law, and it's not at all clear whose job that is.
The biology of our best and worst selves | Robert SapolskyHow can humans be so compassionate and altruistic -- and also so brutal and violent? To understand why we do what we do, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky looks at extreme context, examining actions on timescales from seconds to millions of years before they occurred. In this fascinating talk, he shares his cutting edge research into the biology that drives our worst and best behaviors.
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A tribute to nurses | Carolyn JonesCarolyn Jones spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses across America, traveling to places dealing with some of the nation's biggest public health issues. She shares personal stories of unwavering dedication in this celebration of the everyday heroes who work at the front lines of health care.
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Hey Bill Nye, Do You Believe In Free Will?Author, orator, and all-around ‘science guy’ Bill Nye has been asked a lot of questions in his 30 years on the air. But this time around, Bill gets asked a question almost Biblical in nature: is there such a thing as true free will? Of course, Bill gets right down to the nitty gritty and tells us what exactly is going on in our brains as we begin to make any decision. Is the idea of “choice” real or is choice just an idea in our heads? Are our brains inventing our own answers before we’ve even thought them through? The answer might surprise you.
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Transcript: Hey Bill. It’s Pete from Atlanta, Georgia, and I was wondering if you believe in free will? It feels like the idea of choice is the biggest argument for free will, but is choice real or is it just an idea in our heads? If I look at my life I feel like I’m here through a series of single decisions and it just kind of feels very linear and kind of on a track. But I’m not so sure. What do you think about it? Thanks.
BILL NYE: So is there such a thing as free will? The answer is clearly “it depends what you mean.” So I am so compelled by these tests where they have brain scans going on, working real time, and then the subject is asked to make a choice. And they can see on the brain scan that the choice has already been made before the person is able to articulate it or even watch the choice had been made have it bounce back and forth and then settle on another choice.
This is a wonderful question, but that there is no free will—that, to me, is an extraordinary claim, because I feel that I have made choices – and this might be what you’re driving at—I feel that I have made choices freely based on things that have happened around me, based on the environment and my experiences and my perception of the experiences of others.
So in other words if there really were absolutely no free will could you then predict what every single person in the universe or on Earth is going to do and where he or she will end up. And then furthermore can that not be influenced by some cosmic force or forces that we can’t assess? It could be. It just doesn’t seem reasonable.
I think much more reasonable is: our brains are complicated, and they got this big or as big as they are organically through evolution, with layer being added upon layer.
So our ability to choose is often confused. Our ability to make choices is often affected by the environment, by our experiences and by biochemistry, the shape of our brain. So I think the answer is clearly “some of each.”
A summer school kids actually want to attend | Karim AbouelnagaIn the US, most kids have a very long summer break, during which they forget an awful lot of what they learned during the school year. This "summer slump" affects kids from low-income neighborhoods most, setting them back almost three months. TED Fellow Karim Abouelnaga has a plan to reverse this learning loss. Learn how he's helping kids improve their chances for a brighter future.
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Consciousness Is a Narrative Created by Your Unconscious Mind | Dean BuonomanoRead more at BigThink.com:
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Why Don’t Humans Live for More than 100 Years? | Physicist Geoffrey WestRead more at BigThink.com:
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You can determine, calculate many things about organisms, about their growth patterns, how they grow, how long they take to mature—and in particular one that concerns many of us,and that is: how long we live? What determines our longevity?
And, in fact, that’s what got me into this work originally was I became very intrigued in my fifties about the phenomenon of aging and of dying that I became more and more conscious that things had been changing in my life in terms of my body and my physiology. And that already I’d had friends die. And so I became intrigued as to “what is that?”
And I also became intrigued very much as a physicist not asking what is the mechanism, the systematics about aging and immortality, but the very question “What determines 100 years for the lifespan of a human being? Why is it a hundred years, not a thousand years or a million years?” And also related to that, why is it that a mouse, which is made of pretty much the same stuff as we are (I mean we’re almost identical really in some kind of coarse grained level looking at things), how come a mouse only lives two to three years?
So what is determining all this? And if you have this theory of networks underlying these scaling laws, manifesting themselves as scaling laws, you first ask: is there a scaling law for lifespan?
So this is work that had already been done by many people; was to look at lifespan as a function of size, for a bunch of mammals in particular but organisms in general, just as we looked at how metabolic rate scales across these animals.
And what was discovered, what had been discovered was that lifespan also increases following these quarter power scaling laws—that it increased systematically. The one difference by the way, and maybe I’ll say a few words about this in a moment, is that there’s much more scatter among the data for lifespan compared to things like metabolic rate.
So even though there is a kind of predictability—that is, you give me the size of a mammal, I will tell you on the average how long that mammal will live—there’s much more variance around that number than there is for saying “you tell me the size of a mammal, I will tell you what it’s metabolic rate is and what the length of its aorta is, how many children it should have” and so on, where there’s much less variance. The variance is much tighter. Lifespan has much more variance.
Now where does that number come from? So you have this theory that the scaling of metabolic rate and these many other quantities—and by the way there’s probably 50 or 75 such measurable quantities—these are determined by the constraints of flows in networks such as the circulatory system.
So one of the things you immediately realize about those flows is that they are what we call “dissipative,” which simply means they involve wear and tear just as, you know, outside in those streets outside this building there’s a lot of traffic going back and forth on the roads and those roads wear out. They have to be repaired. The roadways have to be repaired and the subways have to be repaired. They wear out from the traffic so to speak. And so it is the traffic through our multiple network systems produce wear and tear. And the most damaging wear and tear occurs at the terminal units, the terminal points of these networks because they’re the smallest tubes like in our capillaries or within our cells and pushing fluid, pushing blood corpuscles or whatever it is, big molecules through them—has deleterious effects of various kinds.
That causes damage, and that damage is calculable because you have a theory. The theory is telling you what the flow rates and so on and all the sizes are and so on. So these are calculable. Now so you can calculate the rate at which wear and tear is occurring, and you can also calculate something else that is going on, and that is: while it’s being damaged there’s also repair going on. And we do repair ourselves. But that repair is also determined by metabolism. That’s where the energy comes from to do repairs.
So you can determine all these things and then you can postulate that the system will become nonviable, that is it can no longer be sustained when a given fraction of un-repaired damages occur. So the system eventually just cannot be sustained and so that gives you a calculation of maximum lifespan. This is the, you know, if you were to do the best you possibly could this is as long as you could possibly live for a given size of mammal.
And if you do that you can understand where, roughly speaking, this hundred years for a human being comes from. But more importantly or equally importantly you can determine what the parameters are, the knobs that you could conceivably turn to change that lifespan.
There's no shame in taking care of your mental health | Sangu DelleWhen stress got to be too much for TED Fellow Sangu Delle, he had to confront his own deep prejudice: that men shouldn't take care of their mental health. In a personal talk, Delle shares how he learned to handle anxiety in a society that's uncomfortable with emotions. As he says: "Being honest about how we feel doesn't make us weak — it makes us human."
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How to exploit democracy | Laura GalanteHacking, fake news, information bubbles ... all these and more have become part of the vernacular in recent years. But as cyberspace analyst Laura Galante describes in this alarming talk, the real target of anyone looking to influence geopolitics is dastardly simple: it's you.
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Why Controlling the Masses Through Media No Longer Works | Jordan GreenhallWhen television took over from print and radio as the dominant media in the second half of the 20th century, a hierarchy evolved in which the privileged few with TV camera access spoke to the masses. This top-down dissemination of news and opinion not only shaped information, but it also shaped the psychology of those people, and of anyone who has lived with one foot in the TV broadcast era, and the other in the new dynamic brought on by the Internet. That established top-down directive—and society's conditioning to widely accept what is presented to them by experts—is what Neurohacker CEO Jordan Greenhall describes as the Blue Church: "The Blue Church is a kind of narrative/ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “Deep State” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States," writes Greenhall on Medium. Greenhall is careful to point out that control is not necessarily always a bad thing: it is how hundreds of millions of individuals are able to make collective decisions and engage in effective collective actions to advance their society.
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I don't want to go into the history but there's actually a really neat history of exactly why and how a particular set of ideas became so important in the latter half of the 20th century. I'll give you just one example, but the idea of operational management, which was innovated during the heat of World War II and largely to do things like make strategic decisions about how we were going to go about moving ships across the Atlantic or run bombing raids on Germany using statistics, actually applying statistics to analyze the effectiveness of different approaches and then therefore making decisions based on statistics. And so operational management was very effective in the military theater and the people who had learned those techniques after the war percolated out into the broader economy and started applying those techniques in things like deciding how to run their businesses. So that's the basic framework of the order that we built up until now.
Now, the idea of the Blue Church is trying to get a sense of what it is that is the essence of the control structure. By control I don't mean necessarily anything bad I just mean the mechanism by which we're able to make collective decisions and engage in effective collective actions, the thing that holds our decision and action structure together. The control structure that still is the one that we're operating under that came out of that timeframe and the proposition is that, in addition to—and this is one piece but it's a very important piece—that there's a dominant role played by the structure of media. We're actually in the process of breaking that apart right here so this is good. We know that there's a particular dynamic associated with the kinds of media that are broadcast where one individual or group, because of the nature of the medium, so for example broadcast television in the day of three networks there was only three people who got to be the anchors who communicated out to the entire population. It was a massive asymmetry between the speaker and the listener and there's no interaction. So I am in a position of listening, you're in a position of speaking and there's 30 million of me and one of you.
Now, that's actually a very important dynamic. If you don't understand the fact of that and its importance you're going to have a very hard time understanding what actually happened during the latter half of the 20th century as, in particular, television emerged as the dominant medium displacing radio and newspapers. And by the way, you also have a hard time understanding what's happening now has the Internet is now emerging as the dominant medium replacing television. Just understanding that transition and what it implies and means at a deep level is sort of fundamental for predicting future states.
This is what democracy looks like | Anthony D. RomeroIn a quest to make sense of the political environment in the United States in 2017, lawyer and ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero turned to a surprising place — a 14th-century fresco by Italian Renaissance master Ambrogio Lorenzetti. What could a 700-year-old painting possibly teach us about life today? Turns out, a lot. Romero explains all in a talk that's as striking as the painting itself.
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Behind the lies of Holocaust denial | Deborah Lipstadt"There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies," says historian Deborah Lipstadt, telling the remarkable story of her research into Holocaust deniers -- and their deliberate distortion of history. Lipstadt encourages us all to go on the offensive against those who assault the truth and facts. "Truth is not relative," she says.
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Science in service to the public good | Siddhartha RoyWe give scientists and engineers great technical training, but we're not as good at teaching ethical decision-making or building character. Take, for example, the environmental crisis that recently unfolded in Flint, Michigan -- and the professionals there who did nothing to fix it. Siddhartha Roy helped prove that Flint's water was contaminated, and he tells a story of science in service to the public good, calling on the next generation of scientists and engineers to dedicate their work to protecting people and the planet.
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On tennis, love and motherhood | Serena Williams and Gayle KingTwenty-three Grand Slam titles later, tennis superstar Serena Williams sits down with journalist Gayle King to share a warm, mischievous conversation about her life, love, wins and losses -- starting with the story of how she accidentally shared her pregnancy news with the world.
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AI Can Now Self-Reproduce—Should Humans Be Worried? | Eric WeinsteinThose among us who fear world domination at the metallic hands of super-intelligent AI have gotten a few steps ahead of themselves. We might actually be outsmarted first by fairly dumb AI, says Eric Weinstein. Humans rarely create products with a reproductive system—you never have to worry about waking up one morning to see that your car has spawned a new car on the driveway (and if it did: cha-ching!), but artificial intelligence has the capability to respond to selective pressures, to self-replicate and spawn daughter programs that we may not easily be able to terminate. Furthermore, there are examples in nature of organisms without brains parasitizing more complex and intelligent organisms, like the mirror orchid. Rather than spend its energy producing costly nectar as a lure, it merely fools the bee into mating with its lower petal through pattern imitation: this orchid hijacks the bee's brain to meet its own agenda. Weinstein believes all the elements necessary for AI programs to parasitize humans and have us serve its needs already exists, and although it may be a "crazy-sounding future problem which no humans have ever encountered," Weinstein thinks it would be wise to devote energy to these possibilities that are not as often in the limelight.
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Transcript: There are a bunch of questions next to or adjacent to general artificial intelligence that have not gotten enough alarm because, in fact, there’s a crowding out of mindshare. I think that we don’t really appreciate how rare the concept of selection is in the machines and creations that we make. So in general, if I have two cars in the driveway I don’t worry that if the moon is in the right place in the sky and the mood is just right that there’ll be a third car at a later point, because in general I have to go to a factory to get a new car. I don’t have a reproductive system built into my sedan. Now almost all of the other physiological systems—what are there, perhaps 11?—have a mirror.
So my car has a brain, so it’s got a neurological system. It’s got a skeletal system in its steel, but it lacks a reproductive system.So you could ask the question: are humans capable of making any machines that are really self-replicative? And the fact of the matter is that it’s very tough to do at the atomic layer but there is a command in many computer languages called Spawn. And Spawn can effectively create daughter programs from a running program.
Now as soon as you have the ability to reproduce you have the possibility that systems of selective pressures can act because the abstraction of life will be just as easily handled whether it’s based in our nucleotides, in our A, C, Ts and Gs, or whether it’s based in our bits and our computer programs. So one of the great dangers is that what we will end up doing is creating artificial life, allowing systems of selective pressures to act on it and finding that we have been evolving computer programs that we may have no easy ability to terminate, even if they’re not fully intelligent.
Further if we look to natural selection and sexual selection in the biological world we find some very strange systems, plants or animals with no mature brain to speak of effectively outsmart species which do have a brain by hijacking the victim species’ brain to serve the non-thinking species. So, for example, I’m very partial to the mirror orchid which is an orchid whose bottom petal typically resembles the female of a pollinator species. And because the male in that pollinator species detects a sexual possibility the flower does not need to give up costly and energetic nectar in order to attract the pollinator. And so if the plant can fool the pollinator to attempt to mate with this pseudo-female in the form of its bottom petal, it can effectively reproduce without having to offer a treat or a gift to the pollinator but, in fact, parasitizes its energy. Now how is it able to do this? Because if a pollinator is fooled then that plant is rewarded. So the plant is actually using the brain of the pollinator species, let’s say a wasp or a bee, to improve the wax replica, if you will, which it uses to seduce the males.
Time Paradox: Why Pleasure Is Fleeting and Pain Endures | Dean BuonomanoRead more at BigThink.com:
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Transcript: So I think something almost everybody can relate to is the mismatch that we all experience between objective time and subjective time.
So everybody’s familiar with this notion that “time flies when you’re having fun” or “a watched pot never boils”. When you’re tightly engaged in a task, or where you’re doing something that you find enjoyable, time—we say time seems to fly by. Which means that your internal clock is probably going a bit slower than an external clock because you’re surprised that maybe an hour has elapsed in external time, but your internal clock is telling you “No, maybe only 15 minutes have gone by.”
Now in order to understand that, it’s very important for us to distinguish between two types of timing. One we call “Prospective Timing” and one we call “Retrospective Timing”. So this relates to something called the Vacation Paradox.
So maybe you’re on vacation, you’re in Athens for the first time. During the day you’re experiencing a bunch of new events and new sights and sounds, and as it’s going by—that is prospectively it seems to be flying by. In retrospect however, maybe the next day or you’re back from vacation looking back upon that, it seems to be a long day. So retrospectively it seems that it was an extended period of time. And this is something that was pointed out as far back as William James in his Principles of Neuroscience over a hundred years ago.
And the point is that retrospectively we’re not so much telling time but we’re rebuilding or estimating how much time has elapsed based on the number of experiences we have in memory. So retrospectively you’re more estimating how much time has elapsed, if there was a period full of new memories then you’re left with the impression that it was a long period of time retrospectively. But prospectively as it was taking place you were paying attention to some sort of internal clock in our brain, which you were looking at or querying, that was telling you that not much time has elapsed, because you weren’t paying much attention to time.
So on the other hand when you’re very bored or in an anxious state people experience time as dragging or going slow (again, prospectively). If you’re very anxious, you’re waiting to hear from somebody who you know is at the hospital or you just got an important telephone call and you’re waiting for somebody to call you back, time seems to drag. It seems to be going slowly. Of course prospectively you’re attending to time. You’re very—you’re at the airport, the airplane is delayed, you’re very bored, you’re waiting for news about whether you’re going to make your trip or not and then you find out it’s going to be in six hours, now you’re just in sort of this on hold mode in which time seems to be dragging, going very slowly, prospectively.
You look back on that, and that’s merely a blip in time. Because retrospectively there’s not many items in your memory. There’s nothing particularly exciting about visiting the airport bathroom for the first time so that doesn’t stick in your memory. So you’re left with this feeling retrospectively that time actually was not very long lasting. So you have this paradox in which retrospectively time seemed to have not occupied much of your conscious experience but prospectively you were aware of it dragging.
