Editor's pick: Sense and security require digital maturity
You suggest that the US National Security Agency was part of the problem that caused the wildfire spread of malware across the UK National Health Service and beyond (20 May, p 3). But not having an adequate plan for malware is the real problem. Blaming the NSA is like blaming the tree when you crash your car into it. If the tree had not been there, you would not have hit it; but the usual reason you hit a tree is that your driving skills are inadequate.
You say that a chronic problem is the underfunding of the NHS. Of course. But just as buying a new car won't improve your driving skills, we need to think clearly about how the NHS should use its resources. Low digital maturity across our political systems explains the low funding and low priority that dependable IT has.
If the NHS fixes its Windows systems and keeps using other kit that depends on old versions of software this won't stop the next malware. What will is digital maturity.
The simplest solution is much stricter procurement, with enforced service standards. How can hospitals have let their suppliers walk away from a safety-critical service without support? The next part of the solution is to require IT people in healthcare to have decent computer science qualifications. Computer science and criminal understanding of computers are changing too fast for the NHS to have anything less than lots of PhDs to keep up. That will require funding to make these jobs attractive to appropriate graduates. It would probably be cheaper than the recent fiasco and the next one. Blaming the NSA is not terribly helpful.
The editor writes:
• There is plenty of blame to go round, as our leader made clear. But the NSA, uniquely, could have stopped this problem before it started.
Why consciousness may require sleep and dreams
Bob Holmes's discussion of the point of consciousness is a refreshing new take on the theme (13 May, p 28). He reports Bruno van Swinderen's suggestion that selective attention is correlated with sleep behaviour: animals that show selective attention appear to need sleep. This is an interesting hypothesis for testing, but there are good reasons to expect that it may be largely true.
Selective attention is valuable to help animals respond to incoming sense data. Perception depends on pattern recognition, and pattern recognition depends on some pre-existing prototype patterns or weightings in a neural network. Natural neural networks are bound to be self-training.
In the early 1990s, Geoffrey Hinton and others constructed that were capable of training themselves. These depended on a “wake” phase to create a “representation” of the pattern and a “sleep” phase producing “fantasies” of possible sense data. The result was a system that trained itself very successfully to recognise handwritten characters and digits.
The key to the process was the alternation between sleep and waking, with different (and complementary) adjustments being made in the two phases. This seems to support the idea that sleep is essential behaviour for intelligence.
Why consciousness may require sleep and dreams
Thank you for a very thought-provoking and long-overdue insight into consciousness. The fact that we are not unique in having consciousness makes it plain that our consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal activity and so puts to rest the idea that we have a spirit separate from our bodies. It also gives us a different way to think about artificial intelligence and whether we should fear robots taking us over. Computers or robots may be logical, fast and “intelligent”, but they have a long way to go before they even approach rudimentary consciousness. Perhaps someone should devise a new Turing test for consciousness in AI.
First class post
So the use of sleep deprivation on detainees has long-term harm? Asking for a friend
D'ericka Henrie implications of the brain “eating itself” after chronic sleep deprivation (27 May, p 8)
We can expect hostile artificial intelligence
Will future artificial intelligences turn against us, beyond taking our jobs (20 May, p 7)? I think last month's attack on the UK National Health Service and other organisations gives a clear answer.
While this was instigated by criminal humans, it gives a clue about what a hostile AI system could easily do in future. Once we have self-motivated and self-aware AI, cybercriminals and rogue states will not hesitate to adapt and use it to their own ends. Once loose on the internet with its own motivations and goals, it will cause unprecedented damage.
Forget ETs, where are their robot probes?
Never mind the little green creatures who are unaccountably absent (13 May, p 24). Where are the automated probes?
Any intelligent civilisation should be able to produce a self-replicating intelligent probe for every planet in its galaxy within a few million years. There should be thousands of them watching over Earth, even if only one planet in a hundred million produces intelligent life that persists. So, sadly, Geraint Lewis may be right that most civilisations die out before they reach the stage of building such probes.
Dreaming in colour by the waters of Alph
Alice Klein reports that people who grow up without colour television cannot easily dream in colour (13 May, p 17). What, neither the painter Titian, nor the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge – who didn't quite “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / He dreamed it up in black and white / Because they didn't have TV”? How did they see the world?
One can dream without specifying colours, just as a writer telling a story may or may not choose to describe what the characters are wearing, or the weather. That is not the same as dreaming in black and white.
Don't interrupt me, my daydreaming is vital
I was horrified to read of stop lights in offices warning staff not to interrupt colleagues who are typing at high speed, and a green light encouraging them to talk when typing slows (6 May, p 9).
When I am typing at high speed, I am doing routine stuff that can easily be stopped and restarted, but a slower speed means I need to think carefully and should be left alone. So I was relieved to read of the benefits of daydreaming for creativity (20 May, p 26). My co-workers know that if I am staring blankly out of the window, I am solving some complex problem and must not be disturbed. Maybe I should just swap those red and green lights.
Name the problem with our air quality
Much recent coverage of our problematic air quality fails to mention that the World Health Organization recently that evidence shows that diesel exhaust causes cancer (for example 6 May, p 35). Its carcinogenicity is attributable largely to particulates depositing free radicals in the lungs. The transport and other special lobbies are much happier to talk about nitrogen oxides – which are probably less dangerous and certainly more easily reduced.
The lack-of-opioid crisis hurts people too
Suing the manufacturers of opioid drugs is no help with the problem of abuse (13 May, p 25). While everybody gets their knickers in a twist about this, take a moment to shed a tear for those caught up in another crisis – the non-opioid crisis.
This is the crisis affecting those who are suffering from long-term, intractable pain for which there is no apparent relief. Opioids work, but physicians aren't prescribing them out of fear of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
In the meantime, people commit suicide in order to end the pain.
An unexpected culinary twist to knot theory
Steve Dalton suggests loose laces are due to the difference between kinds of knots (Letters, 13 May). Piotr Pieranski and his colleagues have calculated the theoretical breaking strength of various knotted strands and suggested that another component of shoelaces' breaking is the degree to which the knot is pulled tight. In 2001, they using high-speed camera studies of knots – and since their initial choice of fishing line broke too quickly, ended up using knots tied in spaghetti.
Theory robs me of entertaining plots
As an amateur science-fiction writer, I was excited to read that the difficulty in detecting dark matter may be due to it – or gravity – being an emergent phenomenon of a suite of particles (18 March, p 28). Could that mean dark chemistry? Dark life? A dark intelligence thinking: “I wonder if these gravitational anomalies are caused by a suite of ‘phantom’ particles we cannot yet detect? I wonder if there is ‘phantom’ chemistry? I wonder if…”?
Modified Newtonian dynamics would kill these great possibilities, although it does seem to be the winning theory to me. Darn.
The Arctic has been warmer than this
Fred Pearce writes that a new Arctic is being created – “perhaps the most profound change to the look of our planet for millions of years…” (8 April, p 33). But what about the 10,000 years ago, when Arctic temperatures were about 1.6°C warmer than now on average? Or the 125,000 years ago, when there were forests where we have tundra, and hippos in the Thames?