The android is us, maybe?

I’ve been reading Blade Runner (in French) and it’s gotten me to think a lot about human programming. Androids like those in Blade Runner are now a common feature in today’s literature, cinema and television. They provide an instrument to interrogate a number of things, one being how technology can affect us as humans. But a more interesting thing to me is the interrogation of what it means to be human at all. In fictions such as Westworld, Her, and Blade Runner, the robotic “fake” humans reach a level of sentience and that makes the reader or viewer wonder at what point can these creatures still be considered not human? Can they ever be considered human? All their behaviors and memories can be ascribed to programming. They are thus not natural sentient beings. But these fictions also make rethink about my own humanity and how much programming determines my own behaviors, thoughts, emotions and memories as well. Yes, programming of humans. We have within us free will to choose to respond to a situation in very different ways. If I drop a cup and shatter it, I can: get angry, get frustrated, get sad, or I can laugh. What determines which reaction it will be? Perhaps how my day went before the incident. But where’s the free will? Perhaps a bad day at work will “program” me to be grumpy. But can I not re-program myself out of a bad mood so I can react to the broken cup with laughter instead? I think so. I think somewhere in there is some Buddhist thinking too, about the nature of the mind. There might be some science here as well. In research on things like stereotype threat, we see how societal biases and stereotypes can program us to underperform. But that these programs can be buffered by interventions such as value affirmation writing exercises. The documented positive results of these interventions are pretty impressive, all from a 5 minute writing exercise that ends up short circuiting the otherwise negative programming that comes with stereotype threat. So in a way, androids in fiction are a thought experiment of a simplified human that allows us to think about the nature of what it is to be human. Though we are now on track to see androids and artificial intelligences reach a state close to sentience pretty soon. Perhaps all the fiction that has been written on this topic may allow us to be better prepared, ethically and emotionally, to the advent of such new creatures on this planet.

I work at an art school now!

It's been a long time since I've posted here, and no better time that this new lunar year in my new home in Chicago, where I am currently a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). This place is amazing in so many ways, and especially for a scientist that appreciates art as much as I do, it's kind of dreamy. SAIC has a science requirement for its students, so there are loads of science classes offered and lots of scientists teaching here. I am currently teaching a course called the Science of Food. Yum. There is a Scientist in Residence Program, and just last week I got to see the coolest talk on the complicated nature of light from a physicist's (SAIC professor Kathryn Schaffer's) perspective. It was an amazing talk, well illustrated in both words and pictures on a topic that challenges our ability to communicate. How does one draw or describe something like light, which takes up space but is not a material thing, behaves both like a particle and like a wave, is invisible and yet allows us to see? That's where math comes in. But how to talk about the wave function in the equations? It's a challenge that stirs up all we take for granted in describing the physical world around us. And as a science educator, the talk made me think more carefully of how I used illustrations to convey nature to my students. If one is not careful, illustrations may give students the wrong impression about science and the nature of the universe.

The images used in the above poster for the talk, for example, are three different ways to represent light. Light propagates through space as a disturbance in the electric field. An electric field has both a strength and a direction, and the convention has been to indicate direction with an arrow, and strength with an amplitude or height of an arrow, hence the wave shape of how light is normally illustrated. But that can be a deceiving depiction, leading many to think that light actually moves that way in a sinusoidal fashion. It does not! Professor Schaffer prefers the bottom depiction, that conveys strength of the field by the thickness of the arrows, rather than by their length. It still conveys the same information as the top diagram of light, showing how the strength and direction of the fields alter as light moves through.

Now that I'm in a milieu where all sorts of things science and art are explored and discussed, I hope to get back to writing here. More soon to come!