Editor's pick: Could owning an AI amount to slavery?
Zoltan Istvan discusses whether artificial intelligences should have the right to vote, but glosses over several issues that this would raise (17/24/31 December 2016, p 18). He fails to address the issue of defining “intelligence”. How would we recognise it in a novel life form when we can't agree on recognising it in life forms we know: whales, ants, crows?
Assuming that we manage to create a qualified AI, for it to vote we would need to have the will to grant it sociopolitical status equivalent to humans. That hasn't worked out well for those sentient species we have identified and experimented on.
If such an AI were truly conscious and self-aware we must grant it citizenship to avoid a human citizen controlling more than one vote by buying voting AIs, or corporations from voting by AI proxy. It would also help determine whether a vote counts for the location of the server or the AI if they are different.
The biggest issue, though, is that if an AI met the above requirements, owning it would constitute slavery.
In defence of organic food and carbon counts
Michael Le Page, arguing that we should ditch organic food, ignores the costs and benefits of organic agriculture and conventional agriculture, which uses pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers (3 December 2016, p 21).
Healthy soil is a miniature ecosystem with microorganisms and invertebrates, fungi and organic matter. And fungi are important symbionts for crops.
Conventional agriculture degrades soil, promotes soil loss and decreases fertility. For example, when European immigrants began farming the US prairie, soils were fertile, up to 45 centimetres deep, and ecosystems were diverse. Now those soils are depleted, and tonnes are lost from each hectare every year. Worldwide, 30 per cent of arable land is now so degraded it is unusable.
Prairie soils sequester huge amounts of organic matter. Organic farmers foster soil health. Increasing organic content is the best way to increase soil health, and doing so thus ameliorates global warming through carbon sequestration. Almost half the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been caused by deforestation and release of carbon from sinks, including agricultural soils.
Soils managed using organic methods can also produce higher yields. Combined with the lower overheads of organic methods, as chemicals aren't needed, farmers can make profit from fewer acres.
Finally, pesticides and herbicides have potentially dangerous effects as oestrogen mimics. Reproductive cancers as endocrine disrupters.
In defence of organic food and carbon counts
Le Page mentions the opportunity of labelling the climate change impact of consumer products. At the we now have a decade of experience in working with global businesses to do exactly this, and have experienced the practical challenges in communicating the relative carbon emissions of different consumer products.
The ability to compare carbon footprint claims is already proving influential in private and public sector procurement, where sustainability is becoming one of the key criteria for competition. Influencing the average shopper is undoubtedly more difficult.
Research shows that price and quality remain by far the biggest influencers on purchasing decisions, but where all other things are equal then environmental concerns can tip the balance.
First class post
You might find this interesting… And by interesting I mean… TERRIFYING
Emma Smyth to the spread of infection resistant to all available antibiotics (21 January, p 20)
Antigravity would cause more problems than that
Joshua Howgego describes work to check whether antimatter particles may have negative gravitational mass (7 January, p 28). If any do, this would raise an interesting question for particles that are their own antiparticle.
For the massless photon there is no problem, but the π0 boson has inertial mass and is its own antiparticle. This can only be the case for bosons – particles with integer “spin”. It cannot for fermions, with half-integer spin, which include electrons and protons. Could the gravitational mass of all bosons be zero?
It is difficult enough to measure the gravitational mass of an antiproton; the thought of trying to measure it for an inertially massive and unstable boson is mind-boggling.
Pushy males and brainy females' survival
Female mosquito fish grow bigger brains to help avoid the rough attentions of over-endowed males (17/24/31 December 2016, p 12). A few pages later you report brainy female wild red deer living longer and producing more offspring (p 15). Could there be a connection here? Time for the cervidologists to get out their measuring tapes, but not during the rut, I think.
Why might mothers cradle babies on the left?
Never mind the “contrasting talents of each half of the brain” as an explanation for mothers cradling babies on the left (14 January, p 10). There's a much simpler explanation.
Having borne and brought up three babies, I have no doubt that this is the babies' own preference. They settle more quickly on the left side, I believe, because there they can easily sense their mother's heartbeat. This reminds them of the womb, and reassures them that their lifeline (their mother) is still functioning.
Why might mothers cradle babies on the left?
There is perhaps a simpler reason for mothers to cradle their baby on the left. The majority of women are right-handed and holding the baby with the left arm leaves the right hand free. It would be interesting to know if a left-handed mother prefers to cradle her baby on the right.
The editor writes:
• Many readers offered thoughts about the introductory mention of human mothers' left-sidedness in our story about infants' preference in 11 mammal species. Researchers who have looked into this specific question find evidence in support of the hypothesis that it's all about mothers monitoring infants, and vice versa: see for example .
Theory is broken, so the impossible is undefined
Certainly by our current understanding there is very little chance of circumventing the enormous problems of energy, distance and time involved in interstellar travel, as Geraint Lewis writes (26 November 2016, p 20). But since we know that our current understanding is based upon two incomplete and conflicting descriptions – general relativity and quantum mechanics – there is an unquantifiable amount of doubt about this supposition.
Racism has roots in society and reporting
Caroline Williams mentions the idea we are all “a little bit racist” (10 December 2016, p 26). This misses the point that we are brought up in a society where racism is entrenched in the media. Many of those convicted under anti-terror legislation in the UK are white racists, but they get little media coverage compared with the mere arrest of Muslims, which often doesn't lead to convictions.
No one is born racist, or “tribal” – we all learn that from the behaviour of those around us from an early age. You see who your parents socialise with, and learn from their behaviour and that of others around you. Sadly, that also includes the media.
A sense of horses' endurance and stamina
Catherine de Lange describes humans being able to outrun horses (10 December 2016, p 33). My horse and I won the 1966 160-kilometre endurance ride in 11 hours and 24 minutes. The course climbs 2200 metres. The record time is now about 9 hours.
The horse's task in this race is roughly equivalent to an 80-kilogram runner doing four hilly marathons in a half day, with a 20 kg child strapped to their back. Horses' superior abilities are supported by the same cooling system we are endowed with: the ability to sweat.
A sense of horses' endurance and stamina
De Lange says that humans can run faster and further, under a wide range of conditions, than any other animal. But she only briefly mentioned walking, although humans are also very efficient at walking, a “mystery of evolution” that Kate Douglas has previously discussed (24 March 2012, p 36).
Running is fine when you have your prey in sight, but the ability to walk for hours is more useful when tracking your prey before you can see it.
Humans can also carry loads while walking long distances and it was our ability to carry all our household needs, day after day over great distances, that allowed us to spread throughout the world.
On the internet, nobody knows anything of you
Sally Adee suggests that online we just need to relax and be ourselves, as faking it causes us stress (17 September 2016, p 22). The researchers perhaps made a poor choice in studying Facebook, as this particular social medium is usually used to keep in touch with people one knows in “real life”.
It is often said that you can be who you want to be online – but the importance of this is felt primarily by those who cannot be who they truly are offline.
Other venues, such as web forums, are online homes for those of us who cannot express our real selves offline. In real life, I try to pass as far as possible as cisgendered and neurotypical. This is exhausting and isolating.
Online, I find communities where real-world norms are discarded and I can be my true agendered autistic self.