The new face of science -- and attacking "citizen science."

We'll do a weekend science roundup, showing some of our tremendous advances... plus a strange look at citizen science. Starting with...

... foresight through AI: UC Berkeley researchers have developed a robotic learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before. Useful for a myriad functions like self-driving cars… but also the underlying skill that led to human consciousness.

“Facebook’s new “proactive detection” artificial intelligence technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk or their friends, or contact local first-responders.” Before you howl, remember that Facebook postings are semi-public. Still, this dances along the edge of disturbing. “The idea of Facebook proactively scanning the content of people’s posts could trigger some dystopian fears about how else the technology could be applied. Facebook didn’t have answers about how it would avoid scanning for political dissent or petty crime…” 

In The Myth of a Superhuman AI, Kevin Kelly likens AI transcendentalism to cargo cults. Kelly writes, "When I asked Ray Kurzweil, the exponential wizard himself, where the evidence for exponential AI was, he wrote to me that AI does not increase explosively but rather by levels. He said: 

“It takes an exponential improvement both in computation and algorithmic complexity to add each additional level to the hierarchy…. So we can expect to add levels linearly because it requires exponentially more complexity to add each additional layer, and we are indeed making exponential progress in our ability to do this. We are not that many levels away from being comparable to what the neocortex can do, so my 2029 date continues to look comfortable to me.”

Comfortable... with a series of expected exponential transformations? Especially as the most recent one -- Moore's Law -- is collapsing as we speak?  Still,  I do believe many kinds of AI are coming. Conversational (and even guilt-tripping) emulation programs are sure to convince millions, even billions, that it is here before 2022, even if experts tell us that it isn't.

== More science-related... or at least cool ==

This used to be a “Secret site” where A&E had Episode #1 of our pilot series The Architechs. Come to comments below if you know another way folks can view it! Especially since AandE and the History Channel couldn't care less.

Skeletal studies – comparing bone density during the first 5000 years of the agricultural era  - suggest that, in contrast to men, rigorous manual labor was a more important component of prehistoric women’s behavior than was terrestrial mobility through thousands of years of European agriculture, at levels far exceeding those of modern women, even modern athletes. They worked and foaled until they dropped. It beggars the imagination that some women dislike the technology and science that finally gave them a break. And that includes especially technologies that help keep bad men accountable.

== Haters of a good thing ==

Trust this modern, cynical era to interpret every good thing as having a dark and foreboding cloud.  I’ve long touted our entry into a rising Age of Amateurs, in which no fine art from the past (from glass-making, sword-smithing and weaving to raising heirloom plant varieties) goes today without an avid hobbyist community. The perfect answer to those cynics who declare ours to be a “decadent” era. And yes, I’ve included amateur science, serving on many advisory panels helping today’s scientific “priesthood” to be unlike any predecessor, welcoming the eager participation and input of citizens and amateurs.

Crowd-sourced or citizen science has opened up avenues for public participation in research projects and environmental monitoring - such as bird counts, classifying galaxies, folding proteins, hunting for exoplanets, or identifying cancer cells.

And yet, this article in Aeon, Citizen Science - a front for Big Business? portrays all of this as – dig it – a bad thing!  “GalaxyZoo, a non-profit, amateur astronomy project initially set up with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, asks participants to scan millions of celestial images for common galactic morphologies; to keep their attention, players can spell out words with constellations, or win points for certain cute galactic structures. Smartfin, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, gets surfers to attach a sensor to their boards and collect data on salinity, temperature and the like, all of which is pinged back to Scripps once the surfer makes it back to the beach and hooks up the fin to a smartphone. Hundreds of ‘camera traps’, scattered around the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, capture images of creatures that can then be identified by users at Snapshot Serengeti, thus keeping track of animal populations; to amuse themselves, people can attach comments to their favourite photographs (lolgoats, perhaps, rather than lolcats),” writes Philip Miroski.

Yes? And…? We’re all waiting for the “but” you're implying. Go on? 

Providing that "but" with zeal, Miroski continues, “It would be one thing if the citizen science was, in fact, a grassroots political ferment growing from the bottom up. However, let’s look at who’s behind a sample of recent initiatives: the National Science Foundation in the United States, which funded the PBS series The Crowd & the Cloud (2017); US congress, which passed enabling legislation for citizen science in the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act (AICA) (2017); the Pentagon’s DARPA, which donated $10 million after 2012 to introduce biohacker spaces in more than 1,000 high schools; an NGO called the European Citizen Science Association; and various foundations with deep pockets dedicated to something called open science. Not much space left for the average Joe. Indeed, the ‘citizen’ herself seems almost entirely absent from this crowded phalanx of bureaucratic programmes and entrepreneurial interventions, all united in their fervour to found a republic in which citizen science can flourish.”

Oh… my.  Major institutions are adapting to a new and more open era, in which average citizens have both enthusiasm and intelligence to participate in solving civilizations’s problems… (as predicted here)... and this is interpreted by Mirowski as a vile plot!

“The irony is that some of the individuals who do take part appear to be motivated by a burning distrust of the government or else a rebel anarchism set against large corporations – sentiments that are common among cadres of biohackers. Yet it’s those very governments and corporations that are injecting the money and ginning up the momentum behind the movement. Something doesn’t stack up.” - continues the article.

Yes, something doesn't stack, and it's reflexive cynicism.  Now, most anti-modernity rants do often play off of some genuine complaints. There are places in this landscape where amateur scientists are already contributing so effectively that real commercial value is being attained.  For example, those who devote the “spare cycles” of their home computers to protein-folding problems have already contributed to the development of commercial products, yet there exists no provision for sharing the rewards from any new drug discoveries.

Mirowski writes: “One example is PatientsLikeMe, where patients targeted via advocacy groups upload details about their experience of illness and treatment, which is then sold on to pharmaceutical companies to provide alternative data to conventional clinical trials. It’s an extension of the sharing economy into the heart of scientific research; where once we had to pay for work, now it’s simply a situation in which networks can activate and channel people’s spare resources (labour, time, capital, narcissism) for the benefit of the network as a whole – especially the owner of the platform, who ends up profiting from all this activity. It’s a bit like Match.com meets Amazon, all for citizen science. The winner in this scenario is the startup impresario and the venture capitalist; it’s hard to see exactly what the citizen gets out of it.”

Zooniverse Citizen Science

Underneath the stunning oversimplification of that remark – (We all benefit from the advancement of science about human health) – there lies a set of genuine problems: preservation of individual patient privacy; and the simmering notion that every use of our data ought to come back to us… fair is fair. 

In fact, I am participating in some efforts to develop such reciprocality – perhaps via some modern micro-payments system. Or else using blockchain “coins or tokens” to track when an individual’s particular suggestion for a protein folding resulting in a billion-dollar new drug.  These are things that badly need developing, and I don’t mind articles warning of the need.

But overall, this article is a perfect example of what’s gone wrong with some wings of today’s intelligencia. Unable to accept even the concept of a good thing, the reaction of these fellows is reflexive outrage at anything that might be attracting zeal, or joy or enthusiasm or optimism in this world. 

Note that I am well aware that our far-worse, existential danger is from a neo-feudalist - even fascist/confederate - right! But we need agility to turn our heads and note when some of our "allies" are - at-best - being really unhelpful.

To explore the vast range of Citizen Science opportunities, see projects listed on Zooniverse, SciStarter, Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, the Citizen Science Center, and the Citizen Science Alliance.