“People often say that the probability of life forming by chance is so low there must have been intelligent design or a miracle. I find that anathema,” he says. “Religious people have got to move on and get away from the idea that there’s a superbeing who fits it all up. What I find more congenial and much more intellectually respectable is the notion of fundamental laws of organisation that turn matter into life – a life principle built into the laws of the universe.”
He concedes: “It is wishful thinking because at this stage I can’t demonstrate it. But if we live in a universe in which the emergence of life is built into it in a fundamental way then we can feel more at home in the universe. It’s no substitute for a caring superbeing watching over us. It won’t help us deal with the problem of death, and it doesn’t help in a moral crisis, but it would certainly be more comforting than to believe we live in an empty, sterile universe.”
Ian Sample, 'I predict a great revolution': inside the struggle to define life
“The basic hypothesis is this,” Davies says. “We have fundamental laws of information that bring life into being from an incoherent mish-mash of chemicals. The remarkable properties we associate with life are not going to come about by accident.”
The proposal takes some unpacking. Davies believes that the laws of nature as we know them today are insufficient to explain what life is and how it came about. We need to find new laws, he says, or at least new principles, which describe how information courses around living creatures. Those rules may not only nail down what life is, but actively favour its emergence.
[...] Davies suspects that information is the answer because it seems increasingly fundamental to both physics and biology. In recent years, physicists have shown that information is more than the bits and bytes that course through computers. Information can be converted into energy, for example, such that physicists now build little information engines and information-powered refrigerators, if not with the appearance their names suggest.
[...] Davies believes that life will turn out to bear telltale patterns of information processing that distinguish it from non-life. Few people would argue that a computer is alive no matter how the ones and zeroes zip around inside it. What Davies suspects is that life exploits, and arises from, particular patterns of information flow.
Ian Sample, 'I predict a great revolution': inside the struggle to define life
The more insidious impact of deepfakes, along with other synthetic media and fake news, is to create a zero-trust society, where people cannot, or no longer bother to, distinguish truth from falsehood. And when trust is eroded, it is easier to raise doubts about specific events.
Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms
Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms
Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.
Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological…
The technology could vastly improve lives, the economist says – but only if the tech titans that control it are properly regulated. ‘What we have now is totally inadequate’
It must be hard for Joseph Stiglitz to remain an optimist in the face of the grim future he fears may be coming. The Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank has thought carefully about how artificial intelligence will affect our lives. On the back of the technology, we could build ourselves a richer society and perhaps enjoy a shorter working week, he says. But there are countless pitfalls to avoid on the way. The ones Stiglitz has in mind are hardly trivial. He worries about hamfisted moves that lead to routine exploitation in our daily lives, that leave society more divided than ever and threaten the fundamentals of democracy.
“Artificial intelligence and robotisation have the potential to increase the productivity of the economy and, in principle, that could make everybody better off,” he says. “But only if they are well managed.”
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Stiglitz won the Nobel prize for economics in 2001 for his analyses of imperfect information in markets. A year later, he published Globalisation and Its Discontents, a book that laid bare his disillusion with the International Monetary Fund – the World Bank’s sister organisation – and, by extension, the US Treasury. Trade negotiations, he argued, were driven by multinationals at the expense of workers and ordinary citizens. “What I want to emphasise is that it is time to focus on the public-policy issues surrounding AI, because the concerns are a continuation of the concerns that globalisation and innovation have brought us. We were slow to grasp what they were doing and we shouldn’t make that mistake again.”
Beyond the impact of AI on work, Stiglitz sees more insidious forces at play. Armed with AI, tech firms can extract meaning from the data we hand over when we search, buy and message our friends. It is used ostensibly to deliver a more personalised service. That is one perspective. Another is that our data is used against us.
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It is the potential for datasets to be combined that most worries Stiglitz. For example, retailers can now track customers via their smartphones as they move around stores and can gather data on what catches their eye and which displays they walk straight past.
“In your interactions with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, they gather an awful lot of data about you. If that data is combined with other data, then companies have a great deal of information about you as an individual – more information than you have on yourself,” he says.
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Stiglitz poses a question that he suspects tech firms have faced internally. “Which is the easier way to make a buck: figuring out a better way to exploit somebody, or making a better product? With the new AI, it looks like the answer is finding a better way to exploit somebody.”
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So far, Stiglitz argues, neither governments nor tech firms have done enough to prevent such abuses. “What we have now is totally inadequate,” he says. “There is nothing to circumscribe that kind of bad behaviour and we have enough evidence that there are people who are willing to do it, who have no moral compunction.”
In the US in particular, there has been a willingness to leave tech firms to thrash out decent rules of behaviour and adhere to them, Stiglitz believes. One of the many reasons is that the complexity of the technology can make it intimidating. “It overwhelms a lot of people and their response is: ‘We can’t do it, the government can’t do it, we have to leave it to the tech giants.’”
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Taxes are not enough. To Stiglitz, this is about labour bargaining power, intellectual property rights, redefining and enforcing competition laws, corporate governance laws and the way the financial system operates. “It’s a much broader agenda than just redistribution,” he says.
He is not a fan of universal basic income, a proposal under which everyone receives a no-strings handout to cover the costs of living. Advocates argue that, as tech firms gather ever more wealth, UBI could help to redistribute the proceeds and ensure that everyone benefits. But, to Stiglitz, UBI is a cop-out. He does not believe it is what most people want.
Stephen Hawking, science's brightest star, dies aged 76
Stephen Hawking, science’s brightest star, dies aged 76
This article titled “Stephen Hawking, science’s brightest star, dies aged 76” was written by Ian Sample Science editor, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 14th March 2018 16.01 Asia/Kolkata
Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76.
Stephen Hawking, science's brightest star, dies aged 76
Stephen Hawking, science’s brightest star, dies aged 76
This article titled “Stephen Hawking, science’s brightest star, dies aged 76” was written by Ian Sample Science editor, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 14th March 2018 16.01 Asia/Kolkata
Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76.
Stephen Hawking, science's brightest star, dies aged 76
Stephen Hawking, science’s brightest star, dies aged 76
This article titled “Stephen Hawking, science’s brightest star, dies aged 76” was written by Ian Sample Science editor, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 14th March 2018 16.01 Asia/Kolkata Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76. Related: A brief history of Stephen…
