MULTIVERSES

AI is already changing the world. It's tempting to assume that AI will be so transformative that we'll inevitably fail to harness it correctly, succumbing to its Promethean flames.

While caution is due, it's instructive to note that in many respects AI does not create entirely new challenges but rather exacerbates or uncovers existing ones. This is one of the key themes that emerge in this discussion with John Zerilli. John is a philosopher specializing in AI, Data, and the Rule of Law at the University of Edinburgh, and he also holds positions at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI and the Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge.

For instance, John points out that some of the demands we make of AI with respect to fairness are simply impossible to fulfill — not due to some technological or moral failing on the part of AI, but that our demands are in mathematical conflict. No procedure, whether executed by a human or a machine, can consistently meet these requirements. We have AI research to thank for illuminating this.

In contrast, concerns over a 'responsibility gap' in AI seem to overlook the legal and social progress made over the last centuries, which has, for example, allowed us to detach culpability from individuals and assign it to corporations instead.

John also notes that some of the dangers of AI may be more commonplace than we imagine — such as the use of deep fakes to supercharge hacking, or our psychological tendency to become complacent with processes that mostly work, leading us to an unwarranted reliance on AI.

Notes:

• A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence
• John's Edinburgh research page 
• Twitter @JohnZerilli
• Mulltiverses.xyz website  
• Brian Hedden's article on fairness

(00:00) Intro

(3:25) Discussion starts: risk

(12:36) Robots are scary, embedded AI is anodyne

(15:00) But robots failing is cute

(16:50) Should we build errors into AI? — catch trials

(26:62) Responsibility

(29:11) There is no responsibility gap

(42:40) Should we move faster to introduce self-driving cars?

(45:22) Fairness

(1:05:00) AI as a cognitive prosthetic

(1:18:14) Will we lose ourselves among all our cognitive prosthetics?

Plants have transformed the surface of the earth and the contents of our atmosphere. To do this they've developed elaborate systems of roots and branches which (sometimes) follow uncanny mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence.

Our guest this week, Sandy Hetherington, leads Edinburgh's Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group. They take a no-holds-barred approach to understanding plant development by combining genomics, fossil records, herbaria, and 3D modeling.

Dig in!

• Show notes: multiverses.xyz
• Sandy's Twitter: @sandy_heth 
• Hetherington lab Twitter  @MPEG_Edinburgh 
• In New Scientist on (lack of) spiral forms in ancient plant leaves 
• BBC article on Herbaria
• The Guardian on Sany's work on plant roots
  
  (00:00) Intro
  (2:15) Discussion starts

Does the Earth contain enormous clean energy reserves? For many years the received logic was that hydrogen does not occur naturally in significant quantities without being bound to other atoms (such as in H20, water, or CH4, methane). To obtain the gas — whether as a fuel or for use in fertilizers — we need to strip it from those molecules, typically by electrolysis and steam reformation. But our understanding may be ripe for change.

Rūta Karolytė is at the vanguard of prospectors looking for large, naturally occurring reservoirs of hydrogen. She’s a researcher from Oxford specializing in the geochemistry of the Earth and she enlightens us to the mechanisms that are likely to be producing hydrogen in the crust: radiolysis and serpentinization.

In reviewing the evidence for naturally occurring hydrogen Ruta leads us through exotic terrain: a Soviet-era theory of hydrocarbon production, fairy rings, hydrothermal vents, and chemosynthetic life.

If Rūta and her colleagues are correct, the tapping of natural hydrogen could have transformative consequences for the Hydrogen economy such as cutting out the substantial fossil fuel emissions associated with deriving fertilizers from methane or creating a cheap basis for building synthetic fuels.

In the first half of the show, we also delve into carbon sequestration — another cool climate topic. But I’ve got so excited writing up the first half, that I’ll leave it here.

Notes:

• Rūta's Twitter: @rkarolyte
• Show notes at multiverses.xyz

Outline:

(00:00) Introduction

(3:00) Geological carbon sequestration

(50:40) Natural hydrogen

Thought experiments have played a starring role in physics. They seem, sometimes, to pluck knowledge out of thin air. This is the starting point for my discussion this week with the philosopher Harald Wiltsche: what are thought experiments?

How do they function — are they platonic laboratories with no moorings in observations or a way of supercharging our reasoning about phenomena?

What do they deliver? Much emphasis has been put on the paradigm-shattering insights of Einstein where thought experiments appear like midwives in the production of new theories. But they can also function in explaining those theories, in ensuring they are understood.

This leads to the question: what is understanding? Harald argues that it’s the ability to manipulate or deploy knowledge backed up by a mental model. He reasons that thought experiments can help us to make sense of the abstraction of mathematical models.

We discuss many topics: the mathematization of science with Galileo, where thought experiments go wrong, transcendental arguments, the danger of losing sight of physical phenomena, and the links between Husserl and Mach. The theme that we dance to is this: there are lots of forms of reasoning that can work well within physics and we need equal pluralism in our philosophy of science to understand its startling, uncanny success in modeling nature.

• Harald's website haraldwiltsche.com  where you can find many of his papers and the introduction to his book with Phillipp Berghoffer on Phenomenological Approaches to Physics
• Twitter @haraldwiltsche
• Show notes on multiverses.xyz

Genomics is leading a revolution in our understanding of disease. But the ways we pursue genomics research and the use we make of that knowledge demand careful thinking.

Anna is a researcher at The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, she holds a PhD in Systems Biology from Oxford (where we met) and has worked in medtech startups. As someone who has looked at genomics from multiple perspectives, she’s an excellent guide to this rocky terrain.

Anna emphasizes the challenges and importance of polygenic traits and Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS). While they are key tools in understanding and predicting traits, they are subject to misinterpretation and misuse if not properly defined. The concept of 'race' and more recently ‘continental ancestry group’ often used in the calculation of PRSs can lead to misguided or even harmful assumptions, potentially propagating racist ideologies. Instead, Anna suggests the use of Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARG) to better represent an individual's genetic ancestry.

Through ARG, we can achieve a more scientifically accurate and ethically sound basis for research. As we continue to make leaps in genomics and potentially influence traits like intelligence or strength, the importance of ethical, legal, and social implications becomes increasingly crucial. As we learn to wield our scientific tools, we need to understand how we should use them.

• Anna's Twitter: @ACFLewis
• Show notes on multiverses.xyz
• Anna's website: acflewis.com
• Undark article on genetic ancestry
• Anna et al on getting genetic ancestry right  for science and society

Christian Bök is an award-winning poet pushing the boundaries of the medium and exploring the capabilities of language itself. Rather than focusing on self-expression, Christian uses poetry as a laboratory for understanding language — probing its plasticity and character.

His notable work, the bestseller Eunoia, draws inspiration from the avant-garde rules of Oulipo and takes it a step further by restricting each chapter to only one vowel. This constraint leads to the creation of such singular phrases as "Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script."

For the past two decades, Christian has pursued an even more ambitious project, The Xenotext. This project involves enciphering an "alien text" within the DNA of a resilient bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans. One goal of The Xenotext is to create a text that could outlast human civilization. To add to the genomic challenge Christian has set a remarkable rule: the symbols of the text should be interpretable in two different ways, resulting in two poems that are encoded within the same string.

Christian combines scientific techniques, trial and error, and computer programming to construct his poems, adhering to the rules he has established within his own poetic universe. Furthermore, he transforms art back into science by employing gene-editing to inscribe his poetic creation into the "book of life," the DNA of a living organism.

Instead of looking back and inwards (the ideal of “emotion recollected in tranquility”, Christian looks outwards and to the future, fusing science and art to produce uncanny, unforgettable verse.

References:

• Christian’s website: umlautmachine.net
• His Twitter: @christianbok
• More detailed notes from this episode at: multiverses.xyz

Is the fate of the universe predetermined? Many physicists and philosophers argue it is, particularly those who adopt the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Our guest this week is Ruediger Schack. With Christopher Fuchs and Carlton Caves, he is one of the originators of a new way of interpreting quantum mechanics, QBism, according to which we — as agents — are co-creators of the world. Destiny is shaped by our hands.

Ruediger is a professor of mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and works on problems in quantum information and quantum cryptography, but also seeks to understand what the equations say about the world.

One of the central claims of QBism is that the wavefunction is a representation of knowledge, not physical reality, as such the “collapse of the wavefunction” due to agent interactions is nothing more than Bayesian updating: observations lead us to update our knowledge.

We unpack the ideas of QBism — that reality is not objective, but inter-subjective, using ideas from phenomenology best summarised in Merleau-Ponty’s comment “there is no world without a being in the world”. We also dive into some of the objections to QBism.

This was a foray into foreign waters for me, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Notes:

• More detail on multiverses.xyz
• Ruediger's article on QBism in The Conversation
• Ruediger's paper on Merleau-Ponty and QBism 
• Chris Timpson's talk on QBism on YouTube

Science and poetry are sometimes caricatured as opposing paradigms: the emotional expression of the self versus the objective representation of nature. But science can be poetic, and poetry scientific. Our guest this week, Sam Illingworth, bridges these worlds. He’s researched scientists who were also poets, and organized workshops for scientists and laypeople using the medium of poetry to create an equitable and open dialogue.

In addition to being an Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, Sam is the founder of Consilience, a peer-reviewed journal publishing poetry (which presents such beautifully titled gems as What You Don't See on David Attenborough is All the Waiting) and hosts the Poetry of Science podcast where, each week, he writes a poem in response to recent scientific research.

• Notes at: multiverses.xyz
• You can find Sam’s podcast, The Science of Poetry at: https://scipoetry.podbean.com/
• His website is here: https://www.samillingworth.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/samillingworth
• His book A Sonnet To Science

Space and time appear in charts as axes oblivious to the points they demarcate. Similarly, we may feel that we, and all the objects of our worlds, are like such points — and spacetime is a container in which we sit.

Julian Barbour is a physicist who has spent six decades arguing against this. He takes the relationist approach of Leibniz and Mach: there is no space without objects and no time without change. Rather space is just the geometric relationships between things.

Julian has pioneered theories that recover the predictions of Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity that drop their invocation of imperceptible space, time, and spacetime. Recently he has taken an iconoclastic approach to the arrow of time — looking to a new measure of structure, complexity, and the expansion of the universe instead of the traditional accounts in terms of entropy.

Find more  at:

• The podcast home: multiverses.xyz
• Julian's website: platonia.com
• Julian's books: The Discovery of Dynamics, The End of Time, The Janus Point

We live in a branching universe. If it can happen, it does happen.

These are the almost incredible claims of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yet today’s guest, David Wallace, makes a case that this is the most grounded way of reading our best theory of nature.

While at first sight quantum mechanics seems to say that things (famously, cats!) can occupy impossible states, David argues that a careful reading shows we can take seriously “superpositions” (these apparently weird states) not only at the microscopic level but all the way up to the scale of the universe.

This way of thinking about quantum mechanics was first proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett, David has made important contributions — particularly in the “preferred basis” or “counting problem” which asks how many worlds are there; and also in understanding how a deterministic theory of the world appears indeterministic — probabilistic — to agents.

David has PhDs in both physics and philosophy from the University of Oxford and currently holds the Mellon Chair in Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

• References and discussion on the Multiverses website
• David Wallace’s research page — https://sites.pitt.edu/~dmw121/
• The Emergent Multiverse — the most comprehensive book so far on the Many Worlds intepretation
• Very Short Introduction to The Philosophy of Physics — does what it says on the tin (very well!)