Public Trust in Science

How much trust do people have in different types of scientists?

Apr 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-people-scientists.html

2,780 participants from the United States were asked about trust in 45 different types of scientists, from agronomists to zoologists. 

Participants were quizzed on how they see scientists with regard to:

• Competence: how clever and intelligent they consider scientists
• Assertiveness: how confident and assertive
• Morality: how just and fair
• Warmth: how friendly and caring

On a 7-point scale, with 7 being most trusted:

• political scientists - 3.71
• economists - 4.28
• neuroscientists - 5.53
• and marine biologists  - 5.54

"Nevertheless, one thing is clear: the diversity of scientific fields must be taken into account to more precisely map trust, which is important for understanding how scientific solutions can best find their way to policy."

via University of Amsterdam: Vukašin Gligorić et al, How social evaluations shape trust in 45 types of scientists, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299621

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299621

Image credit: AI Art - Cyberpunk Gasmask 1 - 2022

AI Uber Alles

The hidden pattern machine:

Artificial intelligence reduces a 100,000-equation quantum physics problem to only four equations

Oct 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-09-artificial-intelligence-equation-quantum-physics.html

Quantum mechanically entangled electrons must be dealt with all at once rather than one at a time, making the computational challenge exponentially harder.

Until you have a machine that "has the power to discover hidden patterns."

via the Simons Foundation:  Domenico Di Sante et al, Deep Learning the Functional Renormalization Group, Physical Review Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.136402

https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.136402

Image credit: AI Art - Complicated Machine Illusion by Dan Mumford - 2022

And yet the human is still the model:

Mimicking human sleep as a way to prevent catastrophic forgetting in AI systems

Nov 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-mimicking-human-catastrophic-ai.html

To overcome the problem of catastrophic forgetting, the researchers added code that mimicked REM sleep in the human brain.

via University of California and Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences: Sleep prevents catastrophic forgetting in spiking neural networks by forming a joint synaptic weight representation, PLOS Computational Biology (2022). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010628

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010628

This is how it happens:

ChatGPT is enabling script kiddies to write functional malware

Jan 2023, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chatgpt-is-enabling-script-kiddies-to-write-functional-malware/

AI does more things:

No Linux? No problem. Just get AI to hallucinate it for you

Dec 2022, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/openais-new-chatbot-can-hallucinate-a-linux-shell-or-calling-a-bbs/

First of all it’s not supposed to do this, it’s supposed to be a chat bot; you’re supposed to talk to it. But then we realized that instead of talking to it, we can give it instructions, and make it do things in the virtual world that go far beyond chatting. It was never even taught how to use computer code or recognize it, this all happened by mistake. And that’s how these things happen. 

via OpenAI: ChatGPT - Optimizing Language Model Is for Dialogue, Dec 2022. 

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

Post Script:

I like how we refer to the output as hallucinations, which for the unaware is a direct result of the DeepDream explosion circa 2016.