Our leaders should use AI, but carefully
I have no problem with government ministers using artificial intelligence to inform themselves. It is positive that UK minister Peter Kyle has done so and explained some of the topics he has explored. It is vital to understand some of the limitations (22 March, p 10).
I have used ChatGPT and learned two important lessons. First, the question you ask it needs to be specific and detailed, including a requirement for references. Ask a short, vague question, such as “how can I reduce the number of UK civil servants?”, and it will almost certainly produce rubbish. Second, if your question is biased, the answer is likely to be so too. Asking “How can I reduce the number of UK civil servants?” presupposes that doing so is desirable 鈥� a bias. Much better, perhaps, to ask “In what ways might the cost effectiveness and efficiency of the UK civil service be improved?”
Back to the idea of a yo-yo universe
Applying the same logic that gave rise to the big bang theory to the apparent slowdown in the accelerating expansion of the cosmos argues for a cyclical universe, in which expansion gives way to progressive contraction, and ultimately to an inconceivably dense, atom-like singularity of the sort that led to the big bang (22 March, p 8).
Humans have long been abusing technology
Annalee Newitz’s comments, saying we shouldn’t blame communication technology for authoritarian regimes abusing social media or the nightmare of AI chatbots generating lies, apply to most inventions. Tempering steel and splitting the atom had the potential to hugely improve our lives, but it didn’t take long for us to kill one another using both. Any technology is only as good or as bad as the people who use it, and it seems to me that, as a species, we are particularly good at finding harmful (or, at best, banal and pointless) uses for new technologies, and then blaming the technology itself (8 March, p 18).
Getting sniffy about the future of nose jobs
The techniques involved in the futuristic “nose job” you imagined could have better uses than smell augmentation. Implanting programmed stem cells and reconnecting neurons could restore normal function to all sorts of organs, eliminating diabetes, paralysis, anosmia, blindness, hearing loss and more. Increased neuroplasticity could help with stroke, dementia and intellectual training. The nose job itself, however, sounds risky without the original sense of smell to fall back on. Better to leave smelling work to trained animals (15 March, p 22).
Little wonder creatures are natural healers (1)
The interview with Jaap de Roode made me wonder why people are surprised that animals do things to treat their ailments. Many have been around a lot longer than us and they have developed an understanding of the healing properties of plants, etc. Humans sought cures for the basic reason that they wanted to survive, so why shouldn’t animals? And plants, for that matter. Sadly, people, particularly in the West, have lost a lot of the knowledge of what plants can do to help health, but animals, through necessity, are still using the natural pharmacy around them (22 March, p 34).
Little wonder creatures are natural healers (2)
This rekindled memories of the start of my veterinary career in north-east Scotland in 1981. It was common then for a suckler beef farm to have an area of “rough ground”: a field of wild bushes, rushes, weeds and, simply put, whatever grew in that region that wasn’t a tree. It was commonly used as a convalescence field for sick cattle, when appropriate. You would see them sniffing through the field looking for particular plants. My father-in-law, a farmer, assumed they were searching for foods that had herbal or medical benefit. These fields are almost all gone now.
How to fool even those savvy about illusions
On the idea of learning to be less fooled by optical illusions, I do some lecture-performances to illusion-savvy audiences about pataphysics, art, zombie theory and so on. I tell them they just can’t trust their brains, and build up to… the M眉ller-Lyer illusion, the one with two identical lines where one looks longer because of the direction of arrow heads. I ask them which is longer, and they can’t believe I am ending on this old clich茅! Smirking, they yell that they are both the same. But this time, they aren’t. One is centimetres longer than the other. You can’t trust your brain. You can have similar fun with cognitive scientists by showing a version of the famous disappearing gorilla video, the original suitably credited, edited to have no gorilla (22 March, p 15).
The editor writes: See page 40 to read about the science of illusions
Old code is probably in your home right now
I enjoyed your look at old code, having written a fair bit myself in the programming language C. Some of that may well still run in home gadgets, maybe even your TV. It isn’t just business systems that are powered by old code (8 March, p 34).
We didn't need Rome to make us civilised
On the suggestion that civilisation is tied to domestic drainage, may I recommend that Trevor Prew take a trip to Orkney in Scotland, to visit the village of Skara Brae, where there is an example of such a system that predates the arrival of the sewer-loving Romans (Letters, 15 March ).
With time on their side, the aliens drew their plans
The void aliens will be coming to get timescape inventor David Wiltshire soon, well before the aliens of the galaxy clusters, who would be disadvantaged by gravity and a passing of 4 billion years less time (according to Wiltshire’s idea) in which to develop their technology (8 March, p 26).