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ScienceMarch 29, 2017

The world’s most famous scientist on why we shouldn’t fear the robots

Contributing writer
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Don Rowe speaks to Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, the leading science communicator of our age, about climate change, celebratory ignorance and the rise (or not) of artificial intelligence.  

Stoners worship him, nerds want to be him, the average person wishes they had just a tenth of his IQ – Neil deGrasse Tyson is the closest thing science has to a rockstar right now and likely ever will.

Host of the 2014 remake of Cosmos, the Carl Sagan classic, Tyson is an astrophysicist, podcaster and science communication extraordinaire, breaking down the deep mysteries of the universe in a way that’s accessible even for me, a young boy of middling intelligence and motivation to learn.

He’s also a calm and rational voice in the maelstrom of chaos and bullshit that is modern dialogue, providing reasoned takes on everything from the truth of the moon landing to the chances of a sinister AI becoming your new dad. We spoke by phone ahead of his visit to New Zealand in July.

The Spinoff: Your science journey was fueled in part by an early encounter with Carl Sagan, and now you’re the Cosmos dude, and you’re the leading science communicator. How important do you see your role as being, particularly in the current political and societal conditions we’re enduring?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: That’s a great question. I have a slightly unorthodox perspective on that one. Let me reverse it and say that it’s not that I am playing a role in the public understanding and appreciation of science, it’s more that I’m offering science and people are flocking to it. So, that tells me that this appetite was there all along, and it’s not just me.

In the United States, the number one show on television is called The Big Bang Theory, and if you do a Google search of The Big Bang Theory, the TV show comes in ahead of the origin of the universe usage of the term. So I see myself on a landscape that’s in the role of servant of the public appetite for science and science literacy.

I think it was always there and I think the media never gave the public enough credit for having such interest. Now that it’s being manifested, especially in people 30 and younger, I would say that it’s important that everyone recognises what role science plays in our civilisation. On this wheel that is turning, I’m just a cog.

There are people who would disrupt that, but I think they will rapidly become outnumbered as this next wave of the population, as they become old enough to become heads of companies and heads of agency and heads of government. I actually have very high hopes for the future, in spite of what a lot of people are saying about it, given prevalent politics.

Is there a danger that even as the number of scientifically literate and interested people increase, there’s going to remain that hard core of reactionaries who celebrate ignorance? They’re still important to our society – without workers the machine doesn’t run – so how do we avoid alienating them?

That’s an important and perceptive point. I would say that what matters here is not that everyone becomes a scientist, or everyone becomes a genius, what matters it that no matter what you are in life, that you have some understanding of what science is, and how and why it works. Some understanding, you don’t have to be an active scientist, just have some understanding.

What happens when you have some understanding is that when scientists pose a warning, you’re not frightened or discount what is being said as if they’re somehow an enemy of this community. You embrace it, and say, “Oh my gosh, this person is an expert in a field that I’m not, I can either study it myself to confirm it or take their word for it.” In that way the expertise of everybody is respected.

I’m old enough to remember the 1960s, and there was no time in that era, in spite of how turbulent it was especially in the United States when we were at war with Vietnam and the Cold War with Russia, the Soviet Union, I don’t remember anybody standing in denial of science. No matter how blue collar you were. So this is not an inherent and fundamental divide, it’s some emergent risk that I don’t think has to remain or be there forever.

I think it can change. I don’t have the secret recipe for this but what I do know is that instead of treating people like they’re idiots because they believe one thing versus another, if you empower them to figure things out on their own, then it’s not about your authority being invoked upon them, it’s about you being an educator, or me being an educator, helping them find out what is true in the world. Then I go home, and they go off and search for truth, and in that search is where they learn who are the charlatans and who are not and what might be the best steps to take to preserve this world that we have borrowed from our descendants.

The thing that strikes me about blue-collar people being interested in, or at least not adverse to, science is that there were things like the mythology of the space race and the competitive drive of facing down the Soviets which they could rally around. Now that we’re facing down climate change, how do we convince people that that is a battle worth fighting? Landing on the moon can be comprehended quite easily, climate change not so much.

It’s harder. It’s definitely harder. So one of my fears, which is maybe simultaneously a gift, is that people will only be motivated to do something about the climate if it has economic consequences in their favour. So that’s a fear, but it’s also a gift. Now I’m making this up, but suppose that in the rust belt – the area of the US that used to make steel until the price collapsed and manufacturing was shipped overseas – suppose a major manufacturer of solar panels decided to make a factory there, and then someone else is making green energy, manufacturing windmills, suppose that happened, then there’s an economic pathway to go from what you once were to where you will be.

That pathway is not only green but it’s less likely to be resisted by people who fear that this new world won’t include them. It may be that that kind of solution is necessary for people to embrace the change rather than have people say, “Oh, yeah, I’ll be green even though I lose my coal mining job.” When it comes time to pay your rent and feed your kids, it’s very hard for people to make these kinds of decisions for generations not yet born. It may simply have to be economic.

It reminds me of why and when we stopped slaughtering whales wholesale. Whales were a huge industry, primarily for oil and blubber. The fat content was hugely valuable economically as an energy source. Then we discovered oil in the ground, and from that you can make all manner of energy rich products. So if you were against killing whales at the time and no one was listening to you, people eventually listened but for different reasons.

They had whole other motivations. You got to save the whales, because meanwhile people found an economic replacement for them. So this is the world we live in, and I’m trying to be very pragmatic about this. What I’m hoping is that we can get over the early investment threshold of what it might take for industry to take root and those thresholds then bring in an economy of scale to drop the prices on solar panels and alternative means of generating energy. Then the next wave of civilisation that is sustainable and oil-independent can begin.

That requires a certain amount of empathy for the working class, and I think maybe one of the issues is that they feel as though there is no empathy or respect right now, they’re just written off as rednecks. We have similar issues with dairy reform here. But in terms of other significant societal change, the huge factor that’s rapidly approaching is functional AI. That seems like the thing that is really going to put us into the twilight zone. What strikes you as paranoia around AI, and what are reasonable concerns?

I am fearless regarding AI. Just completely fearless. I’m a contrarian regarding people’s concerns. They’re ready to have AI become our overlords, and I just don’t think that will happen. I see a pathway where that can happen, I just don’t see it actually happening. These are two very different things. So you have to ask, are you actually going to create a humanoid robot that’s smarter than yourself? No you’re not! You know why? Because first of all a humanoid robot isn’t even the most efficient machine you can make for the task ahead. It’s just not.

I remember, growing up, people said, “Oh the bones in the hands and feet are intricate and the pinnacle of evolution,” and then you realise you get arthritis, your knees hurt, your joints hurt. Now in the Olympics you have these guys and these girls with no legs running on these blades, and that’s more efficient than running on human feet. And so if we have tasks for which we invent intelligent computers to solve, that’s how we’re going to use them.

We’re already using them that way. Computers beat us at chess, computers beat us at the culturally-rich game Jeopardy. The questions are all about pop culture, and a computer beat our all time best players. Did civilisation collapse? No! And if you went back thirty years and said a computer will one day beat us at chess and at Jeopardy, people would think that’d be the end of the world, “if they can do that, they can do anything!”

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Computers fly our airplanes. Computers decide all manner of things that we have ceded to them. You can judge whether that is good or bad because maybe it took your job, but there’s a limit to how many jobs you can take, because if it starts taking everyone’s job, nobody has money to buy the product that the computers making. That’s a self-limiting problem in society. So I’m just simply not worried, because I think the actual pathways will not be the pathways that people have specifically selected to be the scariest possible future they can imagine.

Obviously once you reach a sufficient level of AI you can use it for research and experimentation – the computer could be doing the work of 10,000 research scientists in a day. Are there other significant upsides we’re ignoring out of fear and paranoia?

Yes of course! Watson can read thousands of medical papers, and you give Watson certain symptoms, it will prescribe a solution that might not have otherwise been dreamed of by the medical community, but when they look at it’s solution they think, “yes, you made a better decision than any one of us could.” If that’s not AI, I don’t know what is. People are pushing their finish line for what AI is to say, “it’s something else, not what we’ve already seen”, and I’m saying: “bring it on.” If it makes life easier, bring it on. If we can prolong our lives because it figured out a way to do that, bring it on. Elon Musk is worried that it’ll turn us into pets, but I can unplug AI! [laughs]. The things I could do to get AI out of my house … and so, in practice, I’m simply not worried about it, and the upside is huge.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Cosmic Perspective. 
Christchurch – Tuesday 4 July at Horncastle Arena
Auckland – Sunday July 9 at Vector Arena 
Tickets available 12pm Tuesday 4 April from Think Inc.
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A child being treated at Wellington hospital for a respiratory tract infection. Taken from Bryan Bruce’s 2011 documentary ‘Inside Child Poverty’ (Red Sky Television/TV3)
A child being treated at Wellington hospital for a respiratory tract infection. Taken from Bryan Bruce’s 2011 documentary ‘Inside Child Poverty’ (Red Sky Television/TV3)

ScienceMarch 23, 2017

‘These diseases should not exist in wealthy nations’: How the housing crisis is sending NZers to an early grave

Guest writer
A child being treated at Wellington hospital for a respiratory tract infection. Taken from Bryan Bruce’s 2011 documentary ‘Inside Child Poverty’ (Red Sky Television/TV3)
A child being treated at Wellington hospital for a respiratory tract infection. Taken from Bryan Bruce’s 2011 documentary ‘Inside Child Poverty’ (Red Sky Television/TV3)

There are many victims of the spiralling property market, but the worst by far are those children whose health is wrecked for life by substandard, overcrowded accommodation. In this Rent Week reissue, Dr George Laking explains why the housing crisis should come with a health warning.

Warning: contains photos of doctors and gory things.

We loved our scuzzy flat in Central Wellington in the summer of 1991. By day I was learning about housing and health at the School of Medicine. By night I was sleeping in a house where hessian scrim hung from the walls’ roughcut boards. Rain bounced off the backyard trees and through the open sash window. Strategic feline shitting holes dotted the dining room floor. Mum and Dad looked pale.

Similar warm sentiments emerge from the NZ Property Investors Federation today. “I had a dingy student flat, and I loved it,” says their Executive Officer. A student dive is a frequent rite of passage for New Zealand’s monied class. It can be worn in later years as a badge of pride, and admonishment to those with longer term poverty commitments.

laking1
Te kaituhituhi, i te wā a tana pōhara; tōna wāhi ako (the writer, in the time of his penury; and his place of study). Photos: George Laking / Wikimedia Commons

As in real estate, poverty provides medicine with endless points of interest. Key bacterial players include Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, Klebsiella, and Bordetella. The first two are named for their appearance. Coccus is a sphere, strepto a twisted chain, staphylo a grape-like cluster. The second two are named for continental bacteriologists Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs (1834–1913) and Jules Jean Baptiste Vincent Bordet (1870–1961).

Klebs had it in for bacteria. In his view, 1) all bacteria were pathological, 2) bacteria never arose spontaneously, 3) every disease was caused only by bacteria, and 4) bacteria that cause distinguishable disease are distinguishable. Before long, exceptions were found to each of these rules apart from 2). Klebs’ second postulate still stands: bacteria never just “happen”.

Klebs’ and Bordet’s portraits reward a viewing. Those eyes hadn’t just looked into the lenses of slow-exposure Edwardian cameras and microscopes, they’d stared into a septic abyss. Bordet survived into the era of effective antibiotics and a vaccine against the organism that bears his name (Bordetella pertussis, which causes whooping cough).

Ki te mauī: Theodor Klebs; ki te matau: Jules Bordet. Wikimedia Commons
Ki te mauī: Theodor Klebs; ki te matau: Jules Bordet (Theodor Klebs, left, and Jules Bordet). Photos: Wikimedia Commons

I’ve picked these four brands of bacteria because of their links with specific severe preventable illnesses of poverty. Streptococcus, because of its link with rheumatic fever, and the others, because of their link with bronchiectasis.

Textbooks advise that rheumatic fever “occurs after exposure to certain strains of Group A streptococcus”. The microbe mostly causes sore throats and skin infections. The immune system attacks its own tissues, because it confuses them with the microbe. Targets include the skin, joints, brain, and notably, the valves of the heart. Some people have genetics that increase the risk. But as Klebs noted, the one out of four times he was spot on, rheumatic infections never just “happen.” You have to arrange a meeting between Group A streptococcus and people. It works best with poverty and overcrowding.

Rheumatic heart disease is for life. Attacks of fever can make heart valves leak and rupture, requiring emergency surgery. Acute attacks become less frequent, but valves stay damaged. Doctors are taught to ask whether there is trouble keeping up in childhood sports, as failing valves cause breathlessness. Later on they can be infected by different bacteria, leak and rupture, and spread infection more widely in the body. For some reason bacteria that live on the teeth are partial to heart valves. Anyone with such a valve who has dental work must first take an antibiotic.

Bronchiectasis happens when airways (bronchi) in the lung become scarred and widened (ectactic). It is often caused by necrotising (tissue killing) infections of the lung. The main culprits in NZ are Staphylococcus and Bordetella (Klebsiella is more rare for us). Phlegm pools in the ectactic bronchi. The stagnant phlegm itself becomes infected, setting off other infections and asthma. Again, bronchiectasis doesn’t just “happen”. Its preferred habitat is poverty and overcrowding.

The textbooks note that cystic fibrosis causes similar changes in the lungs, but more rapidly. Bronchiectasis is cystic fibrosis on a discount, gifted by poverty rather than genetics. It also is a gift for life, usually until a chest infection wins, sometimes with more spectacular death by lung haemorrhage.

Toto puru ia matua whāiti; pūkawe hāora whakawhānui rerekē (Narrowed aortic valve, left, and abnormally widened bronchi, right). Photos: Wikimedia Commons

New Zealand statistics are kept by the Child and Youth Epidemiology Service. About 4500 New Zealanders have been in hospital with bronchiectasis. This is 11.2 times more likely to be you if you are a Pacific Islander, and 7.5 times so if you’re Māori, compared to New Zealand Europeans. For rheumatic fever, 1500 young people are on a penicillin injection every month to prevent attacks. A hospital stay is 44 times more likely if you are from the Pacific, and 25 times more likely if you are Māori. Similar ratios are seen for members of deciles 9–10, compared with deciles 1–2.

These diseases should not exist in wealthy nations. New Zealand’s rate of bronchiectasis is triple the UK’s, its rheumatic fever rate is 30-fold. Although rheumatic fever has been notifiable since 1984, it took until 2011 for the Ministry of Health to set up a prevention programme. At last there is an effort to make sure any young Pacific, Māori or otherwise at risk person with a sore throat gets the chance to have antibiotics.

But even antibiotics only address a symptom. The underlying causes are poverty and overcrowding. What causes these diseases in New Zealand in 2016? That’s obvious: policy settings that have overheated the housing market.

The usual lament in media reports of house prices is that young couples can’t get ahead and are trapped in rental. This is far from the worst effect. That prize should go to the children whose health is wrecked for life. A straight line connects New Zealand’s housing policy with diseases that should not exist.

So my medical plea to owners of property, me included, is to look forward to the day the housing bubble bursts. Pop a bottle of fermented grape juice on that day, and toast the loosening of poverty’s twisted chains – and their bacterial coating.

Mauri ora!

The home page image for this article shows a child being treated for a respiratory tract infection in Wellington Hospital. It is a still from Bryan Bruce’s 2011 documentary Inside Child Poverty (Red Sky Television/TV3), which you can watch here.

This post is part of Rent Week, our week-long series about why the experience of renting a home in NZ is so terrible, and whether anything can be done to fix it. Read the entire series here.

The Spinoff’s science content is made possible thanks to the support of The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, a national institute devoted to scientific research.