The Last Word

By: | August 11, 2018

August 6-10, 2018

In a personal archaeology, your memories are the artifacts, writes Craig this week. And they are all rooted in place.

Guest Melinda Wenner Moyer did us all a favour and brought together some of science writing’s greats to ask which of their stories we should read—and likely didn’t find the first time.

I went to Mexico for a very short time and recorded some snippets of internal monologue there.

Beavers are the spirit animals of the creature known as the tech bro, says Rose. And it’s not a flattering comparison.

And finally, Sally explains Roko’s Basilisk, “Pascal’s wager for the Soylent set.”

Redux: Who’s afraid of Roko’s Basilisk?

By: | August 10, 2018

It looks like the Basilisk definitely got him, so it’s worth resurfacing the explainer I wrote earlier this year.

 

If you’re like most people, you haven’t heard of Roko’s Basilisk. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered the phrase “timeless decision theory”, and  immediately stopped looking into it.

However, if you did manage to slog through the perils of rational philosophy, you now understand Roko’s Basilisk. Congratulations! Your reward is a lifetime of terrorised agony, enslaved to a being that does not yet exist but that will torture you for all eternity should you deviate even for a moment from doing its bidding. According to internet folklore.

The internet has no shortage of BS and creepy urban legends, but because Roko’s Basilisk involves AI and the future of technology, otherwise-credible people insist that the threat is real – and so dangerous that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the moderator of rationalist forum Less Wrong, fastidiously scrubbed all mention of the term from the site. “The original version of [Roko’s] post caused actual psychological damage to at least some readers,” he wrote. “Please discontinue all further discussion of the banned topic.”

Intrigued? Yeah, me too. So despite the warnings, I set out to try to understand Roko’s Basilisk. By doing so, was I sealing my fate forever? And worse – have I put YOU in mortal danger?

This is a science blog so I’m going to put the spoiler right at the top – Roko’s Basilisk is stupid. Unless the sum of all your fears is to be annoyed by watered-down philosophy and reheated thought experiments, it is not hazardous to keep reading. However, although a terrorising AI is unlikely to reach back from the future to enslave you, there are some surprisingly convincing reasons to fear Roko’s Basilisk. Continue reading →

On Beavers, Nature’s Perfect Tech Analogy

By: | August 9, 2018

a brown beaver with some grass

If you know anything about beavers, it’s likely that they build dams. Natures engineers, they’re called. Eager beavers are up and at ‘em, ready to build complex structures with the simplest materials in just the right spot to stop a river from flowing. In fact, engineering schools across the country — MIT, Oregon State, American River College to name a few — use the beaver as a mascot for this reason. What better animal to represent future engineers than one that builds?

Well, I recently read a book called Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge by Ashely Shew that made clear that beavers are in fact the perfect mascot for technologists in Silicon Valley, but not in the way they might like.

Continue reading →

Fleeting impressions of Puerto Vallarta

By: | August 8, 2018

I pack four books and a magazine for a three-day trip. Then I buy more at the airport. I forget to pack a change of trousers. This will come back to bite me when I vomit on a boat.

The first thing I do when I land is get hoodwinked by not one, but two time-share salespeople in quick succession. I just want a taxi. Finally I find someone who not only promises but also delivers the taxi. When I arrive at the hotel, the concierge assures me I paid an order of magnitude more than the regulated tariff. I am not cut out for places that require assertion of will.

Lightning plays over the ocean as I lie down. In the middle of the night it wakes me and I figure out the curtain situation. Still at 5am the storm is raging. Aren’t storms episodic by definition? Don’t clouds run out of friction when they rub themselves raw? The morning ocean pretends it never happened.

Two dolphins take turns hopping out of the water outside my hotel window. I’ve never seen a dolphin in the wild. I rush out on my balcony in my underwear and annunciate, “Oh my GOD,” alone, atheistically. And then 15 seconds later I decide I’m done watching dolphins and it’s time to return to my Chinese homework. I did the exact same when I first saw the Northern Lights—exclamation, balcony, underwear, early-onset apathy and all. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Forgotten Stories

By: | August 7, 2018

Every science journalist has a mixed portfolio. Some stories go viral. Others feel as if they’re read by five people including your parents. Our pieces also have a spectrum of meaningfulness. I’ve published articles to pay the bills that I hardly remember writing — I stumble across them sometimes, years later, and am shocked to see my byline — and I’ve written stories I will never forget. Maybe the reporting blew open my mind, wasn’t what I expected. Maybe what I discovered inspired me to see the world differently. Maybe it was just plain fun.

Sometimes, the axes of visibility and meaning intersect in a sad way. The stories my robot self wrote end up #3 on Reddit, while the ones I pour my heart into get ignored. I mourn these forgotten stories. I feel like I’ve created new life, and when I finally get to release my precious being into the wild, instead of flapping its wings and soaring it flails and crashes headfirst into my car windshield.

This post is a eulogy for these stories. Many of us have them. I know because I’ve reached out to a handful of science writers and they’ve told me, oh yes, we mourn these stories, too. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 4, 2018

A satellite map of smoke wreathing the west coast of the USA

July 30 – August 3: Climate, sex, and death edition

Everyone is getting nervous about the climate these days, or the weather, or the fires, or the droughts, or all the opaque but undeniable links that bind them. Emma is not so much nervous as she is furious. We’ve known about climate change – and the small and big ways it would mess with our lives – for so long. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Why did we do nothing?

If all this talk of the climate apocalypse is stressing you out, distract yourself. Consider, for example, the sheer awesomeness of dinosaurs – as Michelle does with her young daughter who has just discovered the joy of them. On the other hand, if thoughts of extinction are a bit too “on the nose” this week, why not go for a walk, suggests Helen. It will cure what ails you. If that fails, you can’t go wrong with Cassie’s story about worm sex. Fornicating worms – is there anything more distracting, especially when they climb onto your sidewalk by the hundreds, writhing and groping with their pointy little heads?

If all else fails, pray for rain. “With each passing week, the sun grows more intense, until its rays feel like a curse. Grasses and flowers shrivel. The ground crackles like a piece of kiln-fired pottery. Every living thing is thirsty,” writes LWON guest Krista Langlois. Then, the skies open and the North American monsoon season comes like a climax.

 

 

Guest Post: Downpour in a dry land

By: | August 3, 2018

It’s July, and I’m sitting in a backyard in Flagstaff, Arizona, when I feel something wet hit my arm. It’s the first drop of rain that’s touched my skin in months, and the pleasure is exquisite. Not just the pleasure of water touching my moisture-starved body, but the sight of thunderclouds after weeks of uninterrupted blue skies. The smell of rain hitting dry pavement. The building drumbeat of a summer storm.

Except this isn’t an ordinary summer storm. It’s the start of monsoon season in the American Southwest.

Although the word monsoon—from the Arabic “mausim,” meaning season—conjures images of tropical downpours in places like India and Southeast Asia, the North American Monsoon is equally prolific. Each summer, high pressure sitting over the southern plains circulates moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into Mexico and the Southwest, where it gathers into powerful, cyclical storms that strike most afternoons from July to September, dropping up to half the region’s rainfall. What makes the monsoon so physically satisfying, however, isn’t just the water. It’s the long, slow build up that starts months earlier, with the onset of spring. Continue reading →

Redux: My Daughter, the Dinosaur

By: | August 2, 2018

In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear. My daughter stood next to the disembodied T. rex skull and peered delightedly into its mouth, ready to climb in. “Holy cow!” she said.

As we left, she was quiet. And then she said, to no one in particular, “I don’t know whether to eat or be eaten.” Continue reading →