# Edge 2016 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-do-you-consider-the-most-interesting-recent-scientific-news-what-makes-it) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-do-you-consider-the-most-interesting-recent-scientific-news-what-makes-it) - **Archive year:** 2016 - **Response rows represented:** 199 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 199 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 4 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 4 - **Not yet promoted:** 195 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE2016-001 — Early Life Adversity and Collective Outcomes — Linda Wilbrecht > A growing body of work now effectively models this "twins raised apart" situation in genetically identical strains of inbred mice or genetically similar rats. Rodents get us away from our cultural biases and can be raised in conditions that model human experience of adversity and scarcity in infancy and childhood. In one early life stress model, the mother rodent is not given adequate nesting material and moves about the cage restlessly, presumably in search of more bedding. In other models, the rodent pups are separated from the mother for portions of the day or are housed alone after weaning. These offspring are then compared to offspring that have been housed with adequate nesting material and have not been separated more than briefly from their mother or siblings. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Early Life Adversity and Collective Outcomes](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27323) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-002 — Q-Bio — Nigel Goldenfeld > You know what a mathematician is, but what about the term “model organism”? It refers to how researchers attempt to uncover biological knowledge, by deep study, manipulation and control of a carefully-chosen organism. An example would be the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which is probably the most widely-used laboratory organism for studying multicellular eukaryotes, because generations of researchers have discovered ingenious ways to manipulate its genetics and watch the cells as they grow. It’s almost unthinkable to associate a mathematician with a model organism! So what’s the story? Here’s a vignette that makes a serious point. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Q-Bio](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26800) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-003 — This Is The Science News Essay You Want To Read — Marti Hearst > Scientists and engineers continue to make progress in the battle against the overload of confusing choices that plague modern society. In response to well-known studies from the 1990s and 2000s which found that, when presented with too many choices, people often opt to choose nothing at all; efforts in both the research and commercial worlds became focused around mining behavioral “big data.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [This Is The Science News Essay You Want To Read](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26797) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-004 — An Unexpected, Very Haunting Signal — Gerald Holton > The exciting big news for many in the physics community worldwide is that at the collider at CERN an unexpected, very haunting signal of a possible new particle was found, one that would not fit into any part of the current high-energy theory. An entirely new region in experiment and theory might open up, making the finding of the Higgs an old story. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Author, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [An Unexpected, Very Haunting Signal](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26796) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-005 — Society Is Not A Machine, Optimization Not The Right Paradigm! — Dirk Helbing > The digital revolution progresses at full pace and reshapes our societies. Many countries have invested in data-driven governance. The common idea is that "more data is more knowledge, more knowledge is more power, and more power is more success." This "magic formula" has promoted the concept of a digitally empowered "benevolent dictator" or "wise king," able to predict and control the world in an optimal way. It seems to be the main reason for the massive collection of personal data, which companies and governments alike have engaged in. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computational Social Science, ETH Zurich; TU Delft, The Netherlands - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Society Is Not A Machine, Optimization Not The Right Paradigm!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26795) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-006 — Differentiable Programming — David Dalrymple > Over the past few years, a raft of classic challenges in artificial intelligence which had stood unsolved for decades were conquered, almost without warning, through an approach long disparaged by AI purists for its "statistical" flavor: it's essentially about learning probability distributions from large volumes of data, rather than examining humans' problem-solving techniques and attempting to encode them in executable form. The formidable tasks it has solved range from object classification and speech recognition, to generating descriptive captions for photos and synthesizing images in the style of famous artists—even guiding robots to perform tasks for which they were never programmed! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research affiliate, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Differentiable Programming](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26794) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-007 — The Rule Of Anomalies — Stephon H. Alexander > In 2012, I spent a year on sabbatical at Princeton due to an invitation by David Spergel, one of the lead scientists of the WMAP space satellite. The satellite was designed to make, at the time, the most precise measurements of the afterglow of the Big Bang, the ripples in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), which according our standard model of cosmology would later develop into the vast structures in our universe, to which there is remarkable agreement. Our best theory of the early universe, cosmic inflation, is armed with the most precise physics known to us, general relativity and quantum field theory. Both theories have been independently tested with beyond hair-thin accuracy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics at Brown University; Author, The Jazz of Physics - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Rule Of Anomalies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26793) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-008 — The (Much Anticipated) Dawn Of Understanding — Thalia Wheatley > Every year, neuroscience reveals the anatomical and functional brain differences associated with expressing a given trait or tendency, whether psychopathy, altruism, extroversion, or conscientiousness. Researchers electrically stimulating one brain area cause a patient to experience a strong surge of motivation. Zapping a different area causes another patient to become less self-aware. Disease can disorient a patient's moral compass or create illusions of agency. Environmental influences, from what we eat to who we see, provide inputs that interact with and shape our neural activity—the activity that instantiates all our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Finding by finding, the ghost in the machine is being unmasked as a native biological system—like a drawn-out ending of a scientific Scooby Doo. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The (Much Anticipated) Dawn Of Understanding](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26792) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-009 — How To Be Bad Together: Antisocial Punishment of Pro-social Cooperators — Gloria Origgi > As an Italian with first-hand experience living in a country where, if you behave well, you are socially and legally sanctioned, this news was exciting, even inspiring … perhaps cooperation is not an inherent virtue of the human species. Perhaps, in many circumstances, we prefer to stay with those who share our selfishness and weaknesses and to avoid pro-social altruistic individuals. Perhaps it's not abnormal to live outside a circle of empathy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher and Researcher, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Author, Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How To Be Bad Together: Antisocial Punishment of Pro-social Cooperators](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26791) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-010 — Quantum Entanglement Is Independent Of Space And Time — Anton Zeilinger > The point is that the predictions of quantum mechanics are independent of the relative arrangement in space and time of the individual measurements. Fully independent of their distance, independent of which is earlier or later etc. One has perfect correlations between all of an entangled system even as these correlations cannot be explained by properties carried by the system before measurement. So quantum mechanics transgresses space and time in a very deep sense. We would be well advised to reconsider the foundations of space and time in a conceptual way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel laureate (2022 - Physics); Physicist, University of Vienna; Scientific Director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information; President, Austrian Academy of Sciences; Author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Quantum Entanglement Is Independent Of Space And Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26790) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-011 — Early Life Adversity, Individual Decision Making And Collective Outcomes — Unattributed Edge contributor > A growing body of work now effectively models this “twins raised apart” situation in genetically identical strains of inbred mice or genetically similar rats. Rodents get us away from our cultural biases and can be raised in conditions that model human experience of adversity and scarcity in infancy and childhood. In one early life stress model, the mother rodent is not given adequate nesting material and moves about the cage restlessly, presumably in search of more bedding. In other models, the rodent pups are separated from the mother for portions of the day or are housed alone after weaning. These offspring are then compared to offspring that have been housed with adequate nesting material and have not been separated more than briefly from their mother or siblings. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Early Life Adversity, Individual Decision Making And Collective Outcomes](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26789) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-012 — Microbial Attractions — Pamela Rosenkranz > We, alongside mice and other mammals, are only intermediary hosts—cats are its main target. In this unconscious ménage a trois the parasite wants the mouse to be attracted to the cat, so it travels up to the region of the mouse’s brain where sexual arousal occurs, and there it lets that mouse react to the scent of the pheromones of the cat. This again makes the mouse dizzy and lets it approach the cat instead of fleeing, so that the cat can much more easily catch it and ingest it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Microbial Attractions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26788) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-013 — A World That Counts — Alex "Sandy" Pentland > More concretely, the vast majority of humanity now has a two-way digital connection that can send voice, text, and most recently, images and digital sensor data because cell phone networks have spread nearly everywhere. Information is suddenly something that is potentially available to everyone. The Data Revolution combines this enormous new stream of data about human life and behavior with traditional data sources, enabling a new science of “social physics” that can let us detect and monitor changes in the human condition, and to provide precise, non-traditional interventions to aid human development. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, MIT; Director, MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs; Author, Social Physics - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A World That Counts](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26787) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-014 — r > g: Increasing Inequality of Wealth and Income is a Runaway Process — S. Abbas Raza > The only solution to this growing problem, it seems, is the redistribution of the wealth concentrating within a tiny elite using instruments such as aggressive progressive taxation (such as exists in some European countries that show a much better distribution of wealth), but the difficulty here is the obvious one that political policymaking is itself greatly affected by the level of inequality. This vicious positive-feedback loop makes things even worse. It is clearly the case now in the United States that not only can the rich hugely influence government policy directly but also that elite forces shape public opinion and affect election outcomes with large-scale propaganda efforts through media they own or control. This double-edged sword attacks and shreds democracy itself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Editor, 3QuarksDaily.com - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [r > g: Increasing Inequality of Wealth and Income is a Runaway Process](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26786) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-015 — The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was — Paul J. Steinhardt > The prevailing view has been that the Big Bang was a violent high-energy event during which space, time, matter and energy were suddenly created from nothing in a distorted, non-uniform distribution. To account for the undistorted nearly uniform universe we actually observe, many cosmologists hypothesize a period of rapid stretching (inflation) just after the bang when the concentration of energy and matter was still very high. If there were inflationary stretching only, the universe would become perfectly smooth, but there is always quantum physics in addition to stretching and quantum physics resists perfect smoothness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26785) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-016 — The Hermeneutic Hypercycle — Maximilian Schich > The most exciting news in our scientific quest to understand the nature of culture is not a single result, but a fundamental change in the metabolism of research: With increasing availability of cultural data, more and more robust quantification nurtures further qualitative insight; taken together, the results inspire novel conceptual and mathematical models, which in turn put into question and allow for accelerated modification of existing data models; Closing the loop, better models lead to more efficient collection of even more cultural data. In short, the hermeneutic circle is replaced by a hermeneutic hypercycle. Driven by the quantification of non-intuitive dynamics, cultural science is accelerated in an auto-catalytic manner. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor in Arts and Technology, The University of Texas at Dallas - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Hermeneutic Hypercycle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26784) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-017 — Computational Complexity And The Nature Of Reality — Amanda Gefter > The connection becomes more intriguing when viewed in terms of information. For maximally entangled particles, the information they carry resides simultaneously in both particles but in neither alone; informationally speaking, no space separates one from the other. For particles that are slightly less than maximally entangled, we might say there is some space between them. As particles become less and less entangled, information becomes more and more localized, words like “here” and “there” begin to apply and ordinary space emerges. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Computational Complexity And The Nature Of Reality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26783) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-018 — The Mother Of All Addictions — Helen Fisher > Falling in love activates the same basic brain system for wanting (the Reward System—specifically the mesolimbic dopamine pathway), as do all drugs of abuse, including addiction to heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine. Because this central neural network becomes active when addicted to any drug of abuse, I have long wondered whether feelings of romantic love can smother a drug craving; whether a drug craving can smother feelings of romantic love instead; or whether these two very different cravings might even work together—sensitizing this brain network to make the drug addict more receptive to romantic love and/or make the lover more prone to other forms of addiction. In short: how does this central brain system accommodate two different cravings at once? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Mother Of All Addictions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26782) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-019 — The Breathtaking Future Of A Connected World — Christopher J. Anderson > What's unique and significant is that we have a roadmap. It's now clear that we will not need to physically wire the planet. Satellites, possibly aided by drones and balloons, are about to get the job done a lot faster. We can therefore be certain that a massive transformation is about to hit. We better get ready. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, TED conferences, TED Talks; author, TED Talks - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Breathtaking Future Of A Connected World](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26781) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-020 — Synthetic Learning — Kevin Kelly > Learning, like many other attributes we thought only humans owned, turns out to be something we can program machines to do. Learning can be automated. While simple second-order learning (learning how to learn) was once rare and precious, it will now become routine and common. Just like tireless powerful motors, and speedy communications a century ago, learning will quickly become the norm in our built world. All kinds of simple things will learn. Automated synthetic learning won't make your oven as smart as you, but it will make better bread. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Synthetic Learning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26780) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-021 — Memory Is a Labile Fabrication — Kate Jeffery > The therapeutic potential of this is exciting—imagine being able to surgically reduce the pain of a traumatic memory? But we could also reach into the brain and change a person’s past, and in doing so change who they are. These are technologies to use with care. However, one could argue that the fabricated and labile nature of our memories means that perhaps we aren’t really who we think we are, anyway. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience, Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University College London - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Memory Is a Labile Fabrication](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26779) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-022 — Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being — June Gruber > We know that emotions can influence individual well-being. Indeed, scientific progress has unveiled how human emotions—from exuberance to sorrow and even compassion—can optimize as well as hinder individual-level health outcomes. Across numerous studies we see that the intensity and flexibility of our emotions has robust effects on a wide range of cross-sectional and longitudinal well-being outcomes for the individual person. Furthermore, an optimal diversity of (both positive and negative) emotional experiences in everyday life promotes greater subjective well-being and decreased psychopathology symptoms. But are the effects of emotion on well-being specific to these types of individual-level outcomes? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26778) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-023 — That Dress — Susan Blackmore > Was it a step too far when some articles suggested that #thedress could prompt a "world-wide existential crisis" over the nature of reality? Not at all, for color perception really is strange. When philosophers ponder the mysteries of consciousness they may refer to qualia—private, subjective qualities of experience. An enduring example is “the redness of red” because the experience of seeing color provokes all those questions that make the study of consciousness so difficult. Is someone else’s red like mine? How could I find out? And why, when all this extraordinary neural machinery is doing its job, is there subjective experience at all? I would guess that “that dress” has yet more fun to provide. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [That Dress](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26777) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-024 — Send In The Drones — Diana Reiss > It is inspiring to envision all the observations and discoveries that may be in store for us through our deployment of these remote observers, individually or in swarms. In my field, a future generation of cetacean seeking drones may be around the corner—drones programmed to find cetacean shaped forms and follow them. This is a new era of wildlife observation and monitoring. One can envision using a small fleet of “journalist drones” to monitor and provide real time video feeds on the welfare of various species, in our oceans, on our savannahs and in our jungles. We might call it Whole World Watching (WWW) and create a global awareness and a more immediate connection with the other species that share our planet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Department of Psychology Hunter College; Author, The Dolphin in the Mirror - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Send In The Drones](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26775) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-025 — Pluto Now, Then On To 550 A.U. — Gregory Benford > Hearty New Horizons now zooms along at about 15 kilometers a second, or more usefully said, at about three Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between Earth and our sun) in a year, relative to the sun. The focus spot of the sun is 550 AU out, as Einstein predicted in 1936. New Horizons will take 180 years to get to that focus and be long dead as its nuclear power supply fades. So future missions to put a telescope out there demands speeds ten or more times faster. (Voyager, flying after thirty-eight plus years, is only 108 AU away from earth.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Pluto Now, Then On To 550 A.U.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26774) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-026 — Broke People Ignoring $20 Bills On The Sidewalk — Michael Vassar > I'm OK with people not behaving like Homo Economicus, but if broke people are becoming less economically rational with time, this suggests that people don't feel that they can predict the future in basic respects. That they aren't relying on savings to provide for their basic needs. Who can blame them for financial recklessness? Theory, as well as practice, tells us that their leaders have been setting an ever worse example for generations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, MetaMed Research - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Broke People Ignoring $20 Bills On The Sidewalk](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26773) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-027 — Technobiophilic Cities — Scott Sampson > Interestingly, both views of our collective urban future highlight the importance of an informed and engaged citizenry. Digital technologies and big data have potential to put control back in the hands of individuals—for example, through greater participation in local governance (“E-Governance”). Similarly, citizen scientists and citizen naturalists can play important roles restoring plants and animals, as well as monitoring these species and making adjustments to improve the quality and quantity of nearby nature. Here, then, is a potent pathway to help people act on the basis of robust scientific data (and boost science literacy along the way). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President & CEO, Science World British Columbia; Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; Author, How To Raise A Wild Child - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Technobiophilic Cities](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26771) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-028 — We Are Not Unique In The Universe, But We Are Very Much Alone — Andrian Kreye > Even though the recent wave of anachronistic space age glamour overshadows the great news about exoplanets, they are great symbols of a shift in global consciousness. With all escape routes now officially closing (planet HD 189733b being just one sensational example of the forbidding nature of space), the realization that mankind has to make the best out of its home planet starts to become common knowledge not only in progressive circles. Climate talks in Paris have shown that the political will to take action finally transcends borders, ideologies and national interests. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [We Are Not Unique In The Universe, But We Are Very Much Alone](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26770) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-029 — Self-Driving Genes Are Coming — Stewart Brand > The new biotech tool called “gene drive” changes our relation to wild species profoundly. Any gene (or set of genes) can be forced to “drive” through an entire wild population. It doesn’t matter if the trait the genes control is deleterious to the organism. With one genetic tweak to its germline, a species can even be compelled to go extinct. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Self-Driving Genes Are Coming](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26769) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-030 — The Epidemic Of Absence — Matt Ridley > Take hay fever. It is plainly a modern disease, far more common in urban, middle-class people than it used to be in peasants in the past, or still is in subsistence farmers in Africa today. There's really good timeline data on this, chronicling the appearance of allergies as civilization advances, province by province or village by village. And there’s really good evidence that what causes this is the suppression of parasites. You can see this happen in eastern Europe and in Africa in real time: get rid of worms and a few years later children start getting hay fever. Moises Velasquez-Manoff chronicles this in glorious detail in his fine book An Epidemic of Absence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Writer; Fellow, Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences; Author,The Evolution of Everything - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Epidemic Of Absence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26768) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-031 — The Strongest Prejudice Was Identified — Jonathan Haidt > In another study they had participants read pairs of fabricated resumes of graduating high school seniors and select one to receive a scholarship. Race made a difference—Black and White participants generally preferred to award the scholarship to the student with the stereotypically Black name. But Party made an even bigger difference, and always in a tribal way: 80 percent of the time, partisans selected the candidate whose resume showed that they were on their side, and it made little difference whether their co-partisan had a higher or lower GPA than the cross-partisan candidate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Strongest Prejudice Was Identified](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26766) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-032 — The Conquest Of Human Scale — Charles Seife > Pretty much anything that can be digitized or digitally collected, and numbers in the billions or trillions or quadrillions, can now be archived and analyzed. All our communications, all our purchases, our travels and our daily routines are all now, to at least some degree, sitting on banks of computer memory. We no longer have to guess, to sample, to model; it's all there for the taking. It's only as this data begins to shine light into every corner of our society that we will recognize how much of our existence has been in darkness—or how different life will be in a world without shade. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Conquest Of Human Scale](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26764) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-033 — Looking Where The Light Isn’t — Brian G. Keating > Neutrinos change their flavor (generation-type) from one flavor to another as they sail through the cosmos. This is phenomenon is called “oscillation”. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”. Their work devastatingly refutes claims presented in John Updike’s poem “Cosmic Gall”. Sorry John—while they remain small, neutrinos do have mass after all. Thanks to Kajita and McDonald, not only do we know neutrinos have mass, their work gives us a lower limit on their masses. At least one of the three neutrinos must have a mass bigger than about one-twentieth of an electron volt (physicists use Einstein’s relationship E=mc2 to convert masses to equivalent energies). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California, San Diego; Author, Losing the Nobel Prize - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Looking Where The Light Isn’t](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26759) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-034 — Deep Science — Brian Knutson > The decade of the brain is maturing into the century of the mind. New bioengineering techniques can resolve and perturb brain activity with unprecedented specificity and scope (including neural control with optogenetics, circuit visualization with fiber photometry, receptor manipulation with DREADDs, gene sculpting with CRISPR/Cas9, and whole brain mapping with CLARITY). These technical advances have captured well-deserved media coverage and inspired support for brain mapping initiatives. But conceptual advances are also needed. More rapid progress might occur by complementing existing “broad science” initiatives with “deep science” approaches capable of bridging the chasms that separate different levels of analysis. Thus, some of the most interesting neuroscientific news on the horizon might highlight not only new scientific content (for example, tools and findings) but also new scientific approaches (for example, deep versus broad science approaches). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Deep Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26758) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-035 — Replacing Magic With Mechanism? — Ross Anderson > In a second class of emergence models, the long-range order comes from an underlying thermodynamics. Gerhard Groessing has a model in which long-range order emerges from subquantum statistical physics; Ariel Caticha has a model with a similar flavor, which derives quantum mechanics as entropic dynamics. Ana Maria Cetto looks to the zero-point field and sets out to characterise active zero-point field modes that sustain entangled states. Bei-Lok Hu adds a stochastic term to semiclassical gravity, whose effect after renormalisation is nonlocal dissipation with colored noise. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Replacing Magic With Mechanism?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26757) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-036 — Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy — Eric R. Weinstein > In short, what today’s flexible software is threatening is to “free” us from the drudgery of all repetitive tasks rather than those of lowest value, pushing us away from expertise (A) which we know how to impart, toward ingenious Rube Goldberg like opportunities (B) unsupported by any proven educational model. This shift in emphasis from jobs to opportunities is great news for a tiny number of creatives of today, but deeply troubling for a majority who depend on stable and cyclical work to feed families. The opportunities of the future should be many and lavishly rewarded, but it is unlikely that they will ever return in the form of stable jobs. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26756) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-037 — Interdisciplinary Social Research — Ziyad Marar > In terms of sheer unfulfilled promise, interdisciplinary research has to stand as one of the most frustrating examples in the world of social research. The promise can be put simply. The challenges we face in modern society, from responding to climate change through to anti-microbial resistance via so many issues to do with economic, social, political, and cultural well being do not come in disciplinary packages. They are complex and require an integrated response drawing on different levels of enquiry. And yet we persist in organizing ourselves in academic siloes and risk looking like those blind men groping an elephant. As Garry Brewer pithily observed back in 1999, “The world has problems, universities have departments.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President of Global Publishing, SAGE; Author, Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Interdisciplinary Social Research](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26755) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-038 — The Origin Of Europeans — Gregory Cochran > About five thousand years ago, Indo-Europeans arrived out of the East, raising hell and cattle. At least some of them were probably blond or red-headed. In northern Europe they replaced those first farmers, root and branch. Germany had been dotted with small villages before their arrival—immediately afterwards, no buildings. Mitochondrial variants carried by 1 in 4 of those first farmers are carried by 1 in 400 Europeans today, and the then-dominant Y-chromosomes are now found at the few percent level on islands and mountain valleys—refugia. It couldn’t have been pretty. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Consultant; Adaptive Optics and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah; Coauthor (with Henry Harpending), The 10,000 Year Explosion - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Origin Of Europeans](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26754) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-039 — Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Work And Could Supplant Fossil Fuels — Carl Page > Plasma physicists understand hot thermonuclear fusion in great detail. Plasma interactions involve few moving parts, and the environment is random so it's effect is zeroed out. In contrast, modeling the LENR mechanism will involve solid-state quantum mechanics in a system of a million parts, being driven far out of equilibrium. In LENR a nano-scale particle accelerator can't be left out of the model. A theory for LENR will rely on intellectual tools that illuminate x-ray lasers or high temperature superconductors or semiconductors. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Serial Entrepreneur; Co-founder, eGroups - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Work And Could Supplant Fossil Fuels](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26753) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-040 — Religious Morality Is Mostly Below The Belt — Michael McCullough > Both theories predict that strongly religious people will espouse stricter moral standards than less religious people will—and virtually every survey ever conducted supports this prediction. Religious belief seemingly influences people’s views on topics as varied as government spending, immigration, social inequality, the death penalty, and euthanasia, not to mention homosexuality, same-sex marriage, abortion, pornography, and the role of women in society, but for most of the issues that are not explicitly related to sex, marriage, and reproduction, religion’s influence appears to be rather slight. For the sex-related issues, however, religion’s apparent influence tends to be much stronger. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director, Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory, University of Miami; Author, The Kindness of Strangers - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Religious Morality Is Mostly Below The Belt](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26752) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-041 — The Infancy Of Meta-Science — Jonathan Schooler > Although I am enthusiastic about the meta-scientific goals that this study exemplifies, I worry that major limitations in its design and implementation may have produced a misleadingly pessimistic assessment of the health of the field of psychology. Numerous factors may have contributed to an underestimation of the reliability of the findings, including: variations in the skills and motivations of the replicating scientists, limitations in the statistical power of the replications, and perhaps most importantly, questions regarding the fidelity with which the original methods were reproduced. Although the authors attempted to vet their replication procedure with the originating lab, many of the replicated studies were conducted without the originating lab’s endorsement, and these unapproved efforts disproportionately contributed to the low replication estimate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Infancy Of Meta-Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26751) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-042 — The Dematerialization Of Consumption — Rory Sutherland > Some people have contested these findings, of course. (Other people believe they are true, but wish that they weren't widely known.) But there is enough evidence worldwide to show that patterns of consumption and status-seeking do change, and that intangible goods are replacing physical ones in many domains. Not only are there the obvious, comparatively trivial examples where, say, music and film downloads have replaced CDs and DVDs, but car-mileage seems to have peaked, as have car purchases. Astoundingly to anyone who has seen American Graffiti, half of US eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver's license. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy London; Columnist, the Spectator; Author, Alchemy - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Dematerialization Of Consumption](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26750) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-043 — The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, But Worth It — Hazel Rose Markus > Beyond knowledge of the other and the appreciation of difference, the Platinum Rule requires something even harder—holding my own perspective at bay while thinking and feeling my way into the position of the other and then creating space for this perspective. Such effort requires a confluence of cognitive, affective and motivational forces. Some researchers call this psychological work perspective taking, some empathy, some compassion, still others social or emotional intelligence. Whatever the label, the results are worth the effort. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; Co-author, Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World, and Co-founder, Stanford SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions). - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, But Worth It](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26749) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-044 — Einstein Was Wrong — Hans Halvorson > For those of us schooled in classical physics, the notion of local causality might seem central to a rational outlook on the physical world. For example, I don’t take reports of telekinesis seriously—and not because I’ve taken the time to examine all the experiments that have tried to confirm its existence. No, I don’t take reports of telekinesis seriously because it seems irrational to believe in some sort of causality that doesn’t involve things moving through space and time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Einstein Was Wrong](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26748) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-045 — The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women — David M. Buss > Gender differences in sexual psychology are only part of the problem. Additional elements of the mating mind exacerbate it. A key cause stems from the qualities women seek in committed mateships. Most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they are. The flip side is that men are less exacting on precisely these dimensions, choosing to prioritize, for better or worse, other evolved criteria such as youth and appearance. So the initial sex ratio imbalance among educated groups gets worse for high achieving women. They end up being forced to compete for the limited pool of educated men not just with their more numerous educated rivals, but also with less educated women whom men find desirable on other dimensions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26747) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-046 — Fecal Microbiota Transplantation — Joichi Ito > It appears that our gut microbes produce a wide variety of neurotransmitters that influence our brains, and vice versa, much more than previously believed. There is evidence that, in addition to mood, a number of brain disorders may be caused by microbial imbalance. The evidence is so strong that FMT banks such as OpenBiome have started screening donors for psychiatric problems in addition to a wide variety of health issues. Consequently, it is now harder to qualify as a donor to a fecal bank than it is to get into MIT or Harvard. Perhaps machines can help us here as they do everywhere else; Robogut is making headway in creating synthetic poop. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, MIT Media Lab; Coauthor (with Jeff Howe), Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Fecal Microbiota Transplantation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26746) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-047 — New Experimental Probes Of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—And Beyond? — Steve Giddings > One of the most profound puzzles in modern physics is to describe the quantum nature of spacetime. A real challenge here is that of finding helpful experimental guidance. Interestingly, we are just now on the verge of gaining key new experimental information about classical spacetime, in new and important regimes—and this tantalizingly also offers a possibility of learning about quantum spacetime as well. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [New Experimental Probes Of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—And Beyond?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26744) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-048 — The Brain Is A Strange Planet — Dustin Yellin > According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Our culture has potential to realize a seismic shift in consciousness and rebalance environmental and social scales. We’ve invented the story of this world—the cities we live in, the language and symbols we use to articulate thoughts, the love we nurture to propel us forward. A shift in perspective may be all it takes to convince us the greatest threat to humanity comes not from another people in another land, but from all people, everywhere. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Founder, Pioneer Works - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Brain Is A Strange Planet](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26743) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-049 — Simplicity — Neil Turok > Our most powerful-ever microscope, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has just found the Higgs boson. This particle is the basic quantum of the Higgs field, a medium which pervades space and endows particles with mass and properties like electric charge. As fundamental to our understanding of particle physics as the Higgs field is, it is equally important to our understanding of cosmology. It makes a big contribution to the energy in empty space, the so-called dark energy, which astronomical observations reveal to be a weirdly tiny, yet positive, number. Furthermore, according to the LHC measurements and the standard model of particle physics, the Higgs field is delicately poised on the threshold of instability in today’s universe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Niels Bohr Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Simplicity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26742) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-050 — Morality Is Made Of Meat — Oliver Scott Curry > Morality is made of meat. It is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. Which problems? Caring for families, working in teams, trading favors, resolving conflicts. Which solutions? Love, loyalty, reciprocity, respect. The solutions arose first as instincts, designed by natural selection; later, they were augmented and extended by human ingenuity, and transmitted as culture. These mechanisms motivate social, cooperative, and altruistic behavior; and they provide the criteria by which we evaluate the behavior of others. And why is morality felt to be so important? Because, for a social species like us, the benefits of cooperation (and the opportunity costs of its absence) can hardly be overstated. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Researcher, Director, The Oxford Morals Project, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Morality Is Made Of Meat](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26741) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-051 — Pluto Is A Bump In The Road — Nicholas A. Christakis > The captivating photos of Pluto occupied a week or so in the news cycle in the middle of the summer, and we’ve moved on. What really amazes me about the news from Pluto is that there are not more people who find this accomplishment astonishing, that there is not even more sustained support for space exploration. NASA’s entirely sensible push to make both manned and unmanned space exploration reliable, standardized, and safe has also had the unfortunate side effect of making it routine and even boring for many people. For me, this fact— brought into relief once again by the mapping of Pluto—is the real newsworthy part of this discovery. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University; Co-author, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Pluto Is A Bump In The Road](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26740) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-052 — Tabby's Star — Yuri Milner > Second, the anomaly was not discovered by astronomers. It was flagged up by “citizen scientists” from the Planet Hunters project, scanning the Kepler data for signs of unknown extrasolar planets. This is a significant development in 21st-century science: its gradual broadening beyond academia, research institutions and corporations to include the general public. Open data has allowed ordinary people to sample the immense harvest of data collected by instruments like the Kepler telescope. Distributed computing enables them to use their personal computer power to analyse that data. And programs such as Planet Hunters invite them to use their critical faculties to find interesting patterns. We are witnessing the early steps of a revolution in the scientific process: the growth of a planet-wide network of specialists, laypeople, and computers, collaborating to create scientific knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist; Entrepreneur & Venture Capitalist; Science Philanthropist - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Tabby's Star](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26739) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-053 — Doing More With Less — Freeman Dyson > The Dragonfly Observatory recently finished a search for faint dwarf galaxies orbiting within the gravitational field of our own galaxy. About fifty dwarf companions to our galaxy were discovered, more than were expected from computer models of galactic evolution. Each dwarf galaxy is embedded in a halo of dark matter whose mass can be determined from the observed velocities of the visible stars. The dwarf galaxies have about a hundred times more dark mass than visible mass, compared with the ratio of ten to one between dark and visible mass in our own galaxy. The Dragonfly observations reveal a universe with an intense fine-structure of dark-matter clumps, much clumpier than the standard theory of big-bang cosmology had predicted. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Doing More With Less](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26738) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-054 — Our Collective Blind Spot — Jennifer Jacquet > The mounting evidence for producer culpability in climate change has happened relatively quickly, but its timing remains embarrassing. Over the last couple decades of the climate wars, scientists have been blamed in so many ways for the lack of action on climate change. They have been accused of being bad communicators, of emphasizing uncertainty, and of depressing and scaring people. I find none of these lines of argument particularly convincing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, NYU; Author, Is Shame Necessary? - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Our Collective Blind Spot](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26737) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-055 — Complete Head Transplants — Kai Krause > My stance on the ethical side is biased by a personal moment: In the mid-90s I visited Stephen Hawking in Cambridge for a project and he later visited in Santa Barbara—both interactions, up-close, left me with an overpowering impression. There was that metaphor of "the mind being trapped in a body," playing out in all its deep and poignant extreme—the most intelligent of minds weighed down so utterly by the near useless shell of a body. A deep sadness would overcome anyone witnessing that, far beyond the Hollywood movie adaption. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Complete Head Transplants](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26736) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-056 — There Is (Already) Life On Mars — Michael I. Norton > This year, members of the Mashco-Piro tribe—previously viewed as one of the few remaining "uncontacted" peoples—emerged to make increasing contact with the outside world. But this was less than a heart-warming story: as is so often the case with such contact, members of the tribe were vulnerable to unfamiliar diseases such as influenza. These active efforts to become "contacted" create a problem for countries like Brazil which have initiated far-sighted "no contact" policies to allow such tribes to choose seclusion. As José Carlos Meirelles, an Indian protection agent in Brazil, put it: "If they are seeking contact, we must welcome them in the best manner possible. We must take care of their health, block out the boundaries of their territory, give them some time to adjust to the madness of our world." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Director of Research, Harvard Business School; Co-author (with Elizabeth Dunn), Happy Money - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [There Is (Already) Life On Mars](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26734) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-057 — Everything Is Computation — Joscha Bach > A growing number of physicists understand that the universe is not mathematical, but computational, and physics is in the business of finding an algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The switch from uncomputable, mathematical notions (such as continuous space) makes progress possible. Climate science, molecular genetics, and AI are computational sciences. Sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are not: they still seem to be confused by the apparent dichotomy between mechanism (rigid, moving parts) and the objects of their study. They are looking for social, behavioral, chemical, neural regularities, where they should be looking for computational ones. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, MIT Media Lab, Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Everything Is Computation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26733) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-058 — Hope Beyond The Higgs Boson — Sarah Demers > The Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) energy-breaking run was launched with a vengeance in 2010, following an incident that damaged the machine in 2008 and a cautious year in 2009. The 2011-2012 dataset delivered the discovery of the Higgs boson. As data streamed in, particle physicists around the world clustered in conversations around espresso machines and would land on this sobering scenario: What if we find the Higgs boson and nothing else? In other words, what if we neatly categorize the particles predicted by the Standard Model, incorporating the Higgs mechanism to provide mass, but have no progress toward understanding the nature of dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, or any clues to explain the 96 percent of the matter/energy content universe that is not incorporated in the theory? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Horace D. Taft Associate Professor of Physics, Yale University - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Hope Beyond The Higgs Boson](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26732) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-059 — Hi, Guys — Alan Alda > Then came the discovery that before long I’ll be able to get a fecal transplant, or maybe simply take a poo pill, to relieve all kinds of disturbances in my body—possibly even obesity, should it ever win the war against my self control. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Actor; Writer; Director; Host, PBS program Brains on Trial; Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Hi, Guys](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26731) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-060 — A Compelling Explanation For Science Misconduct — Leo M. Chalupa > There certainly were plenty of remarkable discoveries this past year, my favorite demonstrating that running promotes the generation of new neurons in the aging brain. That prompted me to get back on the treadmill after a hiatus of more than a year. But the big scientific news story for me was not any single event. Rather I have been struck by the emergence over the past several years of two seemingly disparate yet related trends in the scientific world. Neither of these has made front-page news, although both are well known to those of us in the science business. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Compelling Explanation For Science Misconduct](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26730) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-061 — One Hundred Years Of Failure — Seth Lloyd > 2015 marks the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's announcement of the theory of general relativity. General relativity describes the force of gravity in terms of the curvature of space and time: the presence of matter warps the underlying fabric of the universe, causing light to curve and clocks to slow down in the presence of matter. General relativity supplies us with a physical theory that allows us to describe the cosmos as a whole; it predicts the existence of exotic objects such as black holes; it even supports closed timelike curves that in principle allow travel backward in time. General relativity is a tremendous scientific success story, and its hundredth anniversary has been marked by multiple articles, television shows, scientific conferences, and more to celebrate Einstein's achievement. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [One Hundred Years Of Failure](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26729) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-062 — Energy Of Nothing — Andrei Linde > Back in 1998, two groups of astrophysicists studying supernovae made one of the most important experimental discoveries of the 20th century: They found that empty space, vacuum, is not entirely empty. Each cubic centimeter of empty space contains about 10-29 grams of invisible matter, or, equivalently, vacuum energy. This is almost nothing, 29 orders of magnitude smaller than the mass of matter in a cubic centimeter of water, 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the proton mass. If the whole Earth would be made of such matter, it would weight less than a gram. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Father of Eternal Chaotic Inflation; Inaugural Recipient, Fundamental Physics Prize - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Energy Of Nothing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26727) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-063 — The Twin Tides Of Change — Timo Hannay > As for our place in nature, so too for our relationship with technology. Recent progress in artificial intelligence and bionics, in particular, have led to a great deal of soul-searching about who—or what—is in charge, and even what it means to be human. The industrial revolution saw machines replace human physical labor, but now that they are replacing mental labor too, what will be left for people to do? Even those who don't fear for their jobs might be angry when they discover that their new boss is an algorithm. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Managing Director, SchoolDash; Co-organizer, Sci Foo Camp - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Twin Tides Of Change](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26726) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-064 — The Broadening Scope Of Science — Tania Lombrozo > The first reason comes down to what psychologist Paul Bloom calls “intuitive dualism.” Intuitive dualism is the belief that mind and body, and therefore mind and brain, are fundamentally different—so different, that it’s surprising to learn of the carefully orchestrated correspondence revealed by the “findings” summarized above. It’s wrong to equate mind with brain (perhaps, to quote Marvin Minsky, “the mind is what the brain does”), but we ought to reject the Cartesian commitments that underlie intuitive dualism—no matter how intuitive they feel. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Broadening Scope Of Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26725) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-065 — Carpe Diem — Ernst Pöppel > In poetry we often find representations of such implicit knowledge and intuition with high scientific value opening new windows of potential discoveries. It just has to be harvested. If read (better even spoken) with an open mind, poetry can serve as a direct bridge, an effortless link between the different cultures. Thus, poetry does not belong to the humanities only, (if at all); poems in all languages express anthropological universals and cultural specifics in a unique way, and they provide insights into the human nature, the mode of thinking and experiencing, often shadowed by a castrated scientific language. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Research Group Systems, Neuroscience and Cognitive Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany; Guest Professor, Peking University, China - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Carpe Diem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26724) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-066 — Magnet Meridian Contemporary — Koo Jeong - A > Aristotle discussed magnetism with Thales of Miletus. Oriental medicine refers to the meridian circles and has been treating by using the magnetic field before the invention of the acupuncture needle in the Iron Age. As the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce has been quoted “All history is the contemporary history.”—the magnet’s cryptographic character, relevant from mimicking, daily objects, the computer network, medical devices, and space expeditions through electromagnetic fields that linked multiple cultural devices in our saturated era—these scientific developments, as a decorous bridge between the 21st and the 22nd century, will still innovate the world by giving a resolution. Far from the extreme division of its character, the magnet espoused technology and contemporary in which “laissez faire” free trade would make peace in our world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Magnet Meridian Contemporary](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26723) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-067 — Diversity In Science — Gino Segre > In a recent U.S. Supreme Court hearing regarding affirmative action in higher education, a Justice posed the question, “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” If physics were the work of robots, the answer would be none. But physics, as all of science, is approached with the biases and perspectives that make us human. Both disciplined and spontaneous, science is an intuitive as well as a systematic undertaking. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Diversity In Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26722) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-068 — People Are Animals — Laura Betzig > Workers in the first civilizations did not. There were apiaries in ancient Israel, the land of milk and honey, where David made his son Solomon a king in front of an assembly of eunuchs; and there were apiaries in Egypt, where pharaohs put bees on their cartouches, and may have collected civil servants who lacked generative powers. There were more beekeepers in Mantua, where Publius Vergilius Maro grew up. For the benefit of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, he remembered how honeybees fought and foraged for their monarch, made honey and nursed their larvae. In the end, unmarried soldiers, unmarried slaves, and the unmanned attendants of the sacred bedchamber effectively ran that empire. And the emperor bred. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Historian - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [People Are Animals](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26721) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-069 — Rethinking Authority With The Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment — Melanie Swan > Cryptocitizen sensibility and the blockchain news of the new invite the possibility of our greater exercise of freedom and autonomy, and rethinking authority. In a Crypto Copernican turn, we can shift the assumed locus of authority from being outside ourselves in external parties to instead residing within our own self. This is the Enlightenment that Kant was after, an advance not just in knowledge but also in authority-taking. A Cambrian explosion of experimentation in new models of economics and governance could ensue. Blockchains, being simultaneously global and local, could coordinate the effort, equitably joining the diversity of every permutation of micropolis with the cohesion of the macropolis, in connected human activity on digital smartnetworks. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosophy and Economic Theory, the New School for Social Research - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Rethinking Authority With The Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26720) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-070 — Science Made This Possible — Bruce Parker > In writing scientific news, more emphasis should be put on the way science has made modern life possible. If only we could put “Science made this possible” at the end of every scientific story, every technology story, and every story about our everyday activities. If only we could put “Science made this possible” signs on every appliance, drug, car, computer, game machine, and other necessities of life that people buy. Maybe that might eventually make a difference. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visiting Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology; Author, The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Science Made This Possible](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26719) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-071 — Fundamentally Newsworthy — Stuart Firestein > The all-consuming news story in biology this year—this decade really—is the discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 system and its practical application for gene editing. At least three other essays in this book mention or refer to this new technology; there have been numerous articles in the popular press. Most of that attention has been directed at the tremendous and potentially dangerous power of this new technology: it allows "editing" the DNA of genomes, including those of humans, in a way that would be permanent—that is heritable through generations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chair, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University; Fellow, AAAS - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Fundamentally Newsworthy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26718) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-072 — The Decline Of Cancer — A. C. Grayling > In a great year for science it is hard to restrict applause to just one area, but a worthy one is cancer research, which has seen a number of advances. Genetic manipulation has rapidly reversed colorectal cancer in mice, a Dutch team has developed a highly accurate blood test for cancer, a general cure for cancer is promised by the discovery that attaching malaria proteins to cancerous cells destroys them, the Mayo Clinic has found a way of short-circuiting cancer cell growth by using a certain junction protein (PLEKHA7), early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer looks more possible following the identification of a protein on particles released by cancer cells in the pancreas, low-toxicity nano-pills for treatment of breast cancer look to be on the way, and the FDA has approved Palbociclid for breast cancer treatment. There may have been other announcements in the oncology field this year, but the cumulative effect of these developments would appear to support the claim made by a leading oncologist that within a generation no one under the age of eighty will die of cancer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Master of the New College of the Humanities; Supernumerary Fellow, St Anne's College, Oxford; Author, War: An Enquiry - **Extract length:** 180 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Decline Of Cancer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26717) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-073 — Weapons Technology Powered Human Evolution — Timothy Taylor > Alongside the biological changes runs a history, or prehistory, of technology. It has usually been supposed that this technology, surviving mainly as modified stone artifacts, was a product of the higher brain power that our human ancestors displayed. According to Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis, female hominins favored innovative male hunters, and the incremental growth in intelligence led, ultimately, to material innovation (hence the evocative but not taxonomic term, Homo faber—Man the Maker). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Weapons Technology Powered Human Evolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26715) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-074 — The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering — John Tooby > The second thing to remember is that physics is perpetually hurling us off these summits, assaulting the organization that is necessary to our existence. Entropy not only ages and kills us as individuals, but also successfully attacks each parent’s germ line. Indeed, the real news is that a number of methods have converged on the estimate that every human child contains roughly 100 new mutations—genetic changes that were not present in their parents. To be sure, many of these occur in inert regions, or are otherwise “silent” and so do no harm. But a few are very harmful individually; and although the remainder are individually small in effect, collectively they plague each individual with debilitating infirmities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26714) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-075 — Paleo-DNA and De-Extinction — W. Tecumseh Fitch > Paleo-DNA sequencing has changed not only our understanding of Neanderthals, but of ourselves. Neanderthals were not modern humans: they lacked the rapid cultural progress characterizing our species, and thus presumably some of our cognitive capacities. But what precisely were these differences? Do these differences make us, the survivors, "human?" Or were Neanderthals human, but "differently abled?" Certainly, with the bodies of Olympic wrestlers and brains slightly larger than modern humans, they'd be first picks for your rugby scrum; perhaps they had unique cognitive abilities as well. Progress will be rapid in addressing these issues, because each new insight into the genetic basis of the human brain yields parallel insights into our understanding of Neanderthal brains—and of the cognitive differences between the two. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna; Author, The Evolution of Language - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Paleo-DNA and De-Extinction](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26713) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-076 — A New Algorithm Makes Us Rethink What Computers Can—and Cannot—Do — John Naughton > The most interesting news came late in 2015—on November 10, to be precise, when László Babai of the University of Chicago announced that he had come up with a new algorithm for solving the graph-isomorphism problem. This algorithm appears to be much more efficient than the previous “best” algorithm, which has ruled for over thirty years. Since graph isomorphism is one of the great unsolved problems in computer science, if Babai’s claim stands up to the kind of intensive peer-review to which it will now be subjected then the implications are fascinating, not least because we may need to rethink our assumptions about what computers can and cannot do. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge; Director, Wolfson College Press Fellowship Programme; Columnist, the Observer; Author, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [A New Algorithm Makes Us Rethink What Computers Can—and Cannot—Do](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26712) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-077 — J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology — Stuart Pimm > The biodiversity section starts with a statement that the “earth’s resources are also being plundered because of short-sighted approaches to the economy, commerce and production.” It tells us that deforestation is a major driver of species loss. As for the importance of the topic, it explains why a diversity of species are import as sources of food, medicines and other uses, while “different species contain genes which could be key resources in years ahead for meeting human needs and regulating environmental problems.” A high rate of extinction raises ethical issues, particularly those involving where our current actions limit what future generations can use or enjoy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology, Duke University; Author, The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26711) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-078 — Macro-Criminal Networks — Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran > Crime in its various expression is always news. From corruption to terrorism and several types of trafficking activities, crime affects our way of life while hampering development in various countries. However, computational power today reveals the—bad—news of huge, resilient, and decentralized criminal macro-structures. Understanding this phenomenon and its related concepts and consequences, is critical for achieving global security in years to come. It is important to commit and allocate the right scientific, institutional, and economic resources to deal with this transnational phenomenon that we just recently understand, although it today underlies the evolution of various countries. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Director, Scientific Vortex, Inc. - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Macro-Criminal Networks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26710) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-079 — Pointing Is A Prerequisite For Language — Nick Enfield > Comparative psychology finds that pointing (in its full-blown form) is unique to our species. Few non-human species appear to be able to comprehend pointing (notably, domestic dogs can follow pointing while our closest relatives among the great apes cannot), and there is little evidence of pointing occuring spontaneously between members of any species other than our own. It appears that only humans have the social-cognitive infrastructure needed to support the kind of cooperative and prosocial motivations that pointing gestures presuppose. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney; Author, How We Talk - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Pointing Is A Prerequisite For Language](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26709) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-080 — Use of 3D printing in the medical field — Syed Tasnim Raza > Now comes 3D printing, adding another dimension to imaging of human body. In its current form, using computer aided design (CAD programs), engineers develop a three-dimensional computer model of any object to be “printed,” (or built), which is then translated into a series of two-dimensional “slices” of the object. The 3D Printer can then “print” or lay thousands of layers (similar to ink or toner onto paper in a 2D printer) until the vertical dimension is achieved and the object is built. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Medical Director, Cardiac Surgery Step-Down Unit at Columbia University Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Use of 3D printing in the medical field](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26708) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-081 — The Predictive Brain — Lisa Feldman Barrett > The predictive brain presents us with an unprecedented opportunity for new discoveries about how a human brain creates a human mind. New evidence suggests that thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, decision-making, categorization, imagination, and many other mental phenomena, which historically are treated as distinct brain processes, can all be united by a single mechanism, prediction. Even our theory of human nature is up for grabs, as prediction deprives us of our most cherished narrative: the epic battle between rationality and emotions to control behavior. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University; Research Neuroscientist, Massachusetts General Hospital; Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Author, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Predictive Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26707) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-082 — True Breakthroughs Become Part Of The Culture — Lisa Randall > Artificial intelligence and robotics too will show many new developments. But this is probably advances in the second category since a lot of the real news about the role of automation will occur behind the scenes, where technology will make some tasks we already do simpler or more effective or where technology will replace workers and reduce or at the very least dramatically change the nature of employment. We’ll read about drones and medical robotics and advances in AI but those factory robots won’t be big news, except to the families who find themselves on unemployment lines and perhaps for a few days on the business pages. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [True Breakthroughs Become Part Of The Culture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26706) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-083 — Science Itself — Paul Bloom > The most exciting recent scientific news is about science itself: how it is funded, how scientists communicate with another, how findings get distributed to the public—and how it can go wrong. My own field of psychology has been Patient Zero here, with well-publicized cases of fraud, failures to replicate important studies, and a host of concerns, some of them well-founded, about how we do our experiments and analyze our results. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Science Itself](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26704) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-084 — The News That Wasn’t There — Antony Garrett Lisi > One of the strongest motivations for constructing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), along with finding the Higgs, was to find superparticles. In order for SUSY to help the Standard Model’s naturalness problem, superparticles should exist at energies reachable by the LHC. During the collider’s first run, the anticipation of superparticles at CERN was palpable—it felt as if a ballroom had been set up, complete with a banner: “Welcome home SUSY!” But superparticles have not shown up to the party. The fact that the expected superparticles have not been seen puts many theorists, including string theorists, in a scientifically uncomfortable position. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The News That Wasn’t There](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26703) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-085 — Space Exploration, New and Old — Robert Provine > Surprising images of dwarf planet Pluto from a flyby of the New Horizons spacecraft put space exploration back in the headlines as one of the biggest science stories of 2015. Instead of a barren, frigid globe, Plato proved to be colorful, contrasty, and complex, with diverse geological structure including mountains, valleys, and plains of water and nitrogen ice, evidence of past and present glacial flows, possible volcanoes spewing water ice from a warmer core, and a thin atmosphere that extends hundreds of miles above the planetary surface. Similar insights are being gleaned from Chiron and the smaller of Pluto's five moons. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Space Exploration, New and Old](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26702) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-086 — Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics! — Aubrey de Grey > We’ve been hearing the tales of doom for quite a few years now: the breathtaking promiscuity of bacteria, which allows them to mix and match their DNA with others’ to an extent that puts Genghis Khan to shame, has increasingly allowed them to accumulate genetic resistance to more and more of our antibiotics. It’s been trumpeted for decades that the rate at which this occurs can be slowed by careful use, especially by not ceasing a course of antibiotics early—but inevitably there is a lack of compliance, and here we are with MRSA, rife in hospitals worldwide, and other major species becoming more broadly antibiotic-resistant with every passing year. The bulk of high-profile expert commentary on this topic is becoming direr with ever passing year. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26701) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-087 — The Ongoing Battles With Pathogens — Robert Kurzban > Consider the case of malaria, a focus of current efforts. Inserting a gene that inhibits the spread of malaria into a mosquito genome is helpful, but to only a limited degree: if the gene doesn’t spread in wild populations, then its effects will be fleeting. If, however, mosquitoes are released that have the gene in question as well as genes that facilitate the spread of the gene, then the effects can be long-lasting. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UPenn; Director, Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP); Author, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Ongoing Battles With Pathogens](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26700) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-088 — Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream: A Complex Convolution — Thomas Metzinger > The real news, however, may be that the general public will gradually acquire a new and intuitive understanding of what their very own conscious experience really is and what it always has been. VR is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear as real as possible—ideally, by creating a subjective sense of “presence” in the user. Interestingly, some of our best theories of the human mind and conscious experience describe it in a very similar way: Leading theoretical neurobiologists like Karl Friston and eminent philosophers like Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark describe it as the constant creation of internal models of the world, virtual neural representations of reality which express probability density functions and work by continuously generating hypotheses about the hidden causes of sensory input, minimizing their prediction error. In 1995, Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo already pointed out how conscious experience exactly is a virtual model of the world, a dynamic internal simulation, which in standard situations cannot be experienced as a virtual model because it is phenomenally transparent—we “look through it” as if we were in direct and immediate contact with reality. What is historically new, and what creates not only novel psychological risks but also entirely new ethical and legal dimensions, is that one virtual reality gets ever more deeply embedded into another virtual reality: The conscious mind of human beings, which has evolved under very specific conditions and over millions of years, now gets causally coupled and informationally woven into technical systems for representing possible realities. Increasingly, consciousness is not only culturally and socially embedded, but also shaped by a specific technological niche that, over time, quickly acquires rapid, autonomous dynamics and ever new properties. This creates a complex convolution, a nested form of information flow in which the biological mind and its technological niche influence each other in ways we are just beginning to understand. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Adjunct Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study; Author, The Ego Tunnel - **Extract length:** 318 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream: A Complex Convolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26699) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-089 — Neuro-news — Noga Arikha > Yet truly newsworthy neuroscience does get reported. The publication in a June 2015 issue of Nature of the discovery of a lymphatic system within the central nervous system is hugely important, and was acknowledged as such in more mainstream venues. Science Daily titled its report of the discovery “Missing link found between brain, immune system; major disease implications,” with the blurb, “In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. The discovery could have profound implications for diseases from autism to Alzheimer's to multiple sclerosis.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Fellow, Warburg Insitute (London); Research Associate, Institut Jean Nicod of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris); Author, The Ceiling Outside - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Neuro-news](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26698) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-090 — Blue Marble 2.0 — Giulio Boccaletti > One of the crucial applications of this technology has been to diagnose groundwater storage in the great aquifers of the world. Water is of course of a different density to the surrounding rock, thus leading to slight effects on the gravitational field, which GRACE can detect. Global hydrological assessments have always been hampered by the complex and local nature of the resource, making syntheses of the state of the world difficult to construct and of limited utility. When they do exist, they tend to be encyclopedic in nature, often published in ponderous, static volumes, listing individual rivers and nations as chapters, and based on single numbers, painstakingly inferred, compiled or estimated from sparse measurements and models: hardly an evocative synthesis to stimulate a humanist debate on our place on the planet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy; Author, Water: A Biography - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Blue Marble 2.0](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26697) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-091 — We Fear the Wrong Things — David G. Myers > Underlying our exaggerated fears is the “availability heuristic”: We fear what’s readily available in memory. Vivid, cognitively available images—a horrific air crash, a mass slaughter—distort our judgments of risk. Thus, we remember—and fear—disasters (tornadoes, air crashes, attacks) that kill people dramatically, in bunches, while fearing too little the threats that claim lives one by one. We hardly notice the half-million children quietly dying each year from rotavirus, Bill Gates once observed—the equivalent of four 747s full of children every day. And we discount the future (and its future weapon of mass destruction, climate change). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [We Fear the Wrong Things](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26696) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-092 — Psychology’s Crisis — Ellen Winner > In reaction to these jarring findings, journals are now changing their policies. No longer will they accept single studies with small sample sizes and p values hovering just below .05. But this is just the first step. Because new policies will result in fewer publications per researcher, universities will have to change their hiring, tenure, and rewards systems, and granting and award-giving agencies will have to do so too. We will need to stop the lazy practice of counting publications and citations and instead read critically for quality. That takes time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, Boston College; Author, How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Psychology’s Crisis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26695) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-093 — A Call To Action — Hans Ulrich Obrist > The publication in 2015 of a new paper from Leicester University, "The Anthropocene Biosphere," provides more evidence that the changes wrought upon the climate by human civilization are set to bring down a sixth mass extinction. According to the paper’s co-author, geologist Peter Haff, we have already entered a period of fundamental changes to the planetary system that may continue to change the world beyond our imagination, a fear echoed by Adelaide University’s John Long in the New Scientist last month. All of us can provide anecdotal evidence of the shifts that are changing our environment. Today I received a call from a friend in Engadin, Switzerland, where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In late December, at an altitude of 2,000 metres, there is no snow. In Hyde Park, the daffodils are in bloom. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Co-author (with Rem Koolhas), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Call To Action](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26694) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-094 — A Collective Realization—We May All Die Horribly — Robert Sapolsky > Then came the doctor, back from treating Ebola in West Africa, on the loose in New York City, going to a bowling alley in Brooklyn the evening before he developed symptoms. And the returning nurse who either did or didn’t represent a health risk, and who refused to be quarantined, biking around her Maine town for photographers, asymptomatic and virus free, wearing her bike helmet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A Collective Realization—We May All Die Horribly](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26693) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-095 — Blinded By Data — Gary Klein > Scientists appreciate the tradeoff between Type I errors (detecting effects that aren’t actually present — false positives) and Type II errors (failing to detect an effect that is present — false negatives). When you put more energy into reducing Type I errors, you run the risk of increasing Type II errors, missing findings and discoveries. Thus we might change the required significance level from .05 to .01, or even .001, to reduce the chances of a false positive but in so doing we would greatly increase the false negatives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC; Author, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Blinded By Data](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26692) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-096 — Fatty Foods Are Good For Your Health — Peter Turchin > In light of the new knowledge it is clear why Americans are getting fatter by eating low-fat diets. When you eliminate fatty foods that your body and—especially—brain need, your body will start sending you persistent signals that you are malnourished. So you will overeat on foods other than fatty ones. The extra, unnecessary calories that you consume (probably from carbohydrates) will be stored as fat. As a result, you will be unhappy, unhealthy, and overweight. You can avoid those extra pounds, of course, if you have a steely will (which few people have)—then you will not be overweight, merely unhappy and unhealthy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Scientist, University of Connecticut; Author, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Fatty Foods Are Good For Your Health](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26691) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-097 — Unpublicized Implications Of Hawking Black Hole Evaporation — Frank Tipler > The absence of event horizons also incidentally, almost in passing, resolves the problem of how the information inside a black hole gets out: if there are no event horizons, there is literally no barrier to getting out. We should keep in mind that the assumption that a black hole is bounded by an event horizon is just that: an assumption, not an observed fact. If the universe ends in a Big Crunch, the information inside a black hole just would not get out until near the Big Crunch. No observation today can show that the information is forever bound to being inside the black hole. A claim that event horizons exist is like a guy’s claim that he is immortal: one would have to wait until the end of time to confirm the claim. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Unpublicized Implications Of Hawking Black Hole Evaporation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26690) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-098 — Deep Learning, Semantics, And Society — Steve Omohundro > Deep learning neural networks are the most exciting recent technological and scientific development. Technologically, they are soundly beating competing approaches in a wide variety of contests including speech recognition, image recognition, image captioning, sentiment analysis, translation, drug discovery, and video game performance. This has led to massive investments by the big technology companies and the formation of more than 300 deep learning startups with more than $1.5 billion of investment. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist, Self-Aware Systems; Co-founder, Center for Complex Systems Research - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Deep Learning, Semantics, And Society](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26689) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-099 — Progress In Rocketry — George Dyson > At the close of the year 2015, in close succession, two rockets left the ground, crossed the Karman line (at 100 km altitude) into space, and return intact under their own power to a soft landing on the surface of the earth. In the space business, new rockets are launched at regular intervals, but the now-imminent launch of a used rocket is important news. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Progress In Rocketry](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26688) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-100 — The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up — Max Tegmark > In other words, it was OK for wisdom to sometimes lag behind in the race, because it would catch up when needed. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and future strong artificial intelligence, however, learning from mistakes is not a desirable strategy: we want to develop our wisdom in advance so that we can get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we’ll have. In other words, we need to change our approach to tech risk from reactive to proactive. Wisdom needs to progress faster. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute; President, Future of Life Institute; Author, Life 3.0 - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26687) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-101 — Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice — Laurence C. Smith > Through unprecedented new images, field measurements, and modeling capabilities, we now know that Greenland and Antarctica, remote as they are, have already begun the process of redefining the world’s coastlines. More than a billion people—and untold impacts to economies, ecosystems, and cultural legacies—will be altered, displaced or lost in the coming generations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 52 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26685) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-102 — Human Chimeras — David Haig > A man (non-dad) conceived a child that did not match his (non-dad's) genotype, but the child's DNA was consistent with the child being the grandson of dad's parents. The proposed explanation is that dad had a twin brother (twin-dad) who was never born but whose cells colonized non-dad's testes when non-dad was a fetus. The cells of twin-dad produced the sperm that conceived the child. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** George Putnam Professor of Biology, Harvard University; Author, From Darwin to Derrida - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Human Chimeras](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26684) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-103 — The 6 Billion Letters Of Our Genome — Eric Topol > In 2015, we crossed the threshold of the first million people who had their genomes sequenced. Beyond that, based on the fast pace of progress in sequencing technology, it is projected that we’ll hit 1 billion people sequenced by 2025. That seems formidable, but quite likely given that the velocity of DNA reading innovation has exceeded Moore’s Law. However, the big problem we have is not amassing billions of people’s genome sequences. It is how to understand the significance of each of the 6 billion letters that comprise a human genome. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Translational Science Institute; Author, The Patient Will See You Now - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The 6 Billion Letters Of Our Genome](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26683) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-104 — The Truthiness Of Scientific Research — Judith Rich Harris > In Woody Allen's movie "Sleeper," set 200 years in the future, a scientist explains that people used to think that wheat germ was healthy and that steak, cream pie, and hot fudge were unhealthy—"precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true." It's a joke that hits too close to home. Bad science gives science a bad name. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Truthiness Of Scientific Research](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26682) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-105 — Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases — Bruce Hood > The nature of the human mind is to categorize the world; to carve Nature up at its joints as it were, but in reality, experience is continuous. Moreover, the boundaries we create are more for our benefit than as a reflection of any true structures that exist. As complex biological systems, we evolved to navigate the complex world around us and thus developed the capacity to represent it in the most useful way as discrete categories. This is a fundamental feature of our nervous system from the input of raw sensory signals to the output of behavior and cognition. Forcing Nature into discrete categories optimizes the processing demands and the number of responses that need to be made, so it makes perfect sense from an engineering perspective. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26681) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-106 — Mathematics And Reality — Clifford Pickover > In 1931, mathematician Kurt Gödel determined that some statements are “undecidable,” suggesting that it is impossible to prove them either true or false. From another perspective, in his first incompleteness theorem, Gödel recognized that there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. We now leap forward more than eighty years and learn that Gödel’s same principle appears to make it impossible to calculate an important property of a material, namely the gaps between the lowest energy levels of its electrons. Although this finding seems to concern an idealized model of the atoms in a material, some quantum-information theorists such as Toby Cubitt suggest that this finding limits the extent to which we can predict the behavior of certain real materials and particles. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Mathematics And Reality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26680) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-107 — The News Is Not The News — Frank Wilczek > In that spirit, the most significant event of the 20th century is the discovery of the laws of matter in general. That discovery has three components: the frameworks of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the specific forces laws embodied in our core theory, often called the standard model. For purposes of chemistry and engineering—plausibly, for all practical purposes—we've learned what Nature has on offer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The News Is Not The News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26679) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-108 — Artificial Intelligence — Rodney A. Brooks > The first class of stories is about the science, where many researchers are now vocally pointing out that there is a lot more science to be done in order to come up with learning algorithms that mimic the broad capabilities of humans and animals. Deep learning by itself will not solve many of the learning problems that are necessary for general Artificial Intelligence, for instance where spatial or deductive reasoning is involved. Further, all the breakthrough results we have seen in AI have been years in the making, and there is no scientific reason to expect there to be a sudden and sustained series of them, despite the enthusiasm from young researchers who were not around of the last three waves of such predictions in the 1950's, 1960's, and 1980's. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Artificial Intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26678) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-109 — Bugs R Us — Nina Jablonski > While it’s too early to tell if the changing bacteria are the cause or the result of these problems, the discovery of robust associations between bacterial profiles and disease states opens the door for new treatments and targeted preventive measures. The body’s microbiota also affects and is affected by the body’s epigenome, the chemical factors influencing gene expression. Thus, the bugs on us and in us are controlling the normal action of genes in the cells of our bodies, and changes in the proportions or overall numbers of bacterial affect how our cells work and respond to stress. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist and Paleobiologist; Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Bugs R Us](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26676) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-110 — 3 Decarbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs and Some Lessons Learned — Bill Joy > Current lithium-ion batteries use a flammable liquid electrolyte and typically incorporate materials that further increase the fire danger. Most contain expensive metals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. 2015 brings publication of the existence of a new polymer electrolyte, invented by Michael Zimmerman of Ionic Materials, that is the first solid to have commercially practical ionic conductivity at room temperature. The polymer is also inherently safe, self-extinguishing when set on fire. It creates a substantially different chemical environment than a liquid, supporting novel and abundant cathode materials such as sulfur, which is high capacity, light, and inexpensive, and novel and inexpensive metal anodes, thereby supporting multivalent species such as Zn2+. Many desirable battery chemistries, infeasible with liquid electrolytes, are newly possible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-Founder, Former Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems; Partner Emeritus, Greentech Venture Group, KPCB - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [3 Decarbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs and Some Lessons Learned](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26675) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-111 — Growing A Brain In A Dish — Simon Baron-Cohen > Now we can see the power of adding iPSC to the scientist’s tool kit for getting answers to questions. If you want to observe the living human brain, you can study the brain from the person you are interested in, and you can gather as much information about that person as you want: IQ, personality, precise diagnosis, or anything else you want. You can even look at the effects of different drugs or molecules on the neuron, without having to do these arguably unethical drug studies on an animal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge; Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge; Author, The Pattern Seekers - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Growing A Brain In A Dish](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26674) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-112 — A New Space Age Takes Off…And Returns To Earth Again — Peter Schwartz > While they both solved the very hard problem of controlling the vehicle at slow speed on a column of turbulent gas, the Space X achievement will be more consequential in the near future. The Blue Origin rocket could only fly to an altitude of 60 miles before returning to Earth and is intended mainly for tourism. The Space X vehicle, Falcon 9, could and did launch a second stage that can achieve Earth orbit. And Space X already ferries supplies and may soon be carrying astronauts to the Space Station orbiting the Earth. So the ability to reuse their most expensive component will reduce their launch costs by as much as 90 percent and over time those costs will continue to decline. Boeing and Lockheed should be worried. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Futurist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com; Author, Inevitable Surprises - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [A New Space Age Takes Off…And Returns To Earth Again](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26673) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-113 — Seeing Our Cyborg Selves — Thomas A. Bass > We are still rolling down the track created by Moore’s law, which means that news about science and technology will continue to focus on computers getting smaller, smarter, faster, and increasingly integrated into the fabric of our everyday lives—in fact, integrated into our bodies as prosthetic organs and eyes. Our cyborg selves are being created out of advances not only in computers but also in computer peripherals. This is the technology that allows computers to hear, touch, and see. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of English and Journalism, State University of New York, Albany; Author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved US - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Seeing Our Cyborg Selves](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26672) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-114 — Bayesian Program Learning — John C. Mather > You may not like it! But artificial intelligence jumped a bit closer this year with the development of “Bayesian Program Learning,” by Lake, Salakhutdinov, and Tenenbaum, published in Science. It’s news because for decades I’ve been hearing about how hard it is to achieve artificial intelligence, and the most successful methods have used serious brute force. Methods based on understanding the symbols and logic of things and language have had a tough time. The challenge is to invent a computer representation of complex information, and then enable a machine to learn that information from examples and evidence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Prize in Physics; Senior Astrophysicist, Observational Cosmology Laboratory, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Coauthor (with John Boslough), The Very First Light - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Bayesian Program Learning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26671) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-115 — The State Of The World Isn’t Nearly As Bad As You Think — Steven R. Quartz > Instead, I want to suggest three reasons why I think it’s such important scientific news. First, while these long-term trends may not resuscitate an old-fashioned notion of progress—certainly not one suggesting that history possesses intrinsic directionality—they do call out for a better understanding (and recognition) of the technological and cultural dynamics driving long-term patterns of historical change. What is even more intriguing to me is their stark demonstration of how deeply our cognitive and emotional biases distort our worldview. In particular, we have good evidence that we don’t remember the past as it was. Instead, we systematically edit it, typically omitting the bad and highlighting the good, leading to cognitive biases, such as “rosy retrospection.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Philosophy, Caltech; Co-author, Cool - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The State Of The World Isn’t Nearly As Bad As You Think](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26669) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-116 — Gene Editing Will Transform Life Utterly — Randolph Nesse > Specters from the Disney cartoon The Sorcerer’s Apprentice come to mind. How will a species with limited ability to control itself use such vast new power? The answer will determine the future of our species and life on this planet. In a remarkable demonstration of transparency and foresight, the National Academy of Sciences organized a meeting earlier this month with sibling organizations from the UK and China to discuss the opportunities and threats. The risks were taken seriously, but there was little consensus on where this technology will take us, and how or if we can control it. It seems likely that it will transform our species and life itself, fast. How, no one knows. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Gene Editing Will Transform Life Utterly](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26668) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Evolution/Gene Editing May Transform Our Species Faster Than We Can Govern It by Randolph Nesse|Gene Editing May Transform Our Species Faster Than We Can Govern It by Randolph Nesse]] ### EDGE2016-117 — A Genuine Science Of Learning — Keith Devlin > What is missing is any insight into what is actually going on in the student’s mind—something that can be very different from what the evidence shows, as was dramatically illustrated for mathematics learning several decades ago by a study now famously referred to as “Benny’s Rules,” where a child who had aced a whole progressive battery of programmed learning cycles was found (by a lengthy, human–human working session) to have constructed an elaborate internal, rule-based “mathematics” that enabled him to pass all the tests with flying honors, but which was completely false, and bore no relation to actual mathematics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Genuine Science Of Learning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26667) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-118 — The Rejection of Science Itself — Douglas Rushkoff > I’m most interested by the news that an increasing number of people are rejecting science, altogether. With 31% of Americans believing that human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning, and only 35% percent agreeing that evolution happened through natural processes, it’s no wonder that parents reject immunization for their children and voters support candidates who value fervor over fact. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Rejection of Science Itself](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26666) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-119 — Breakthrough Listen — Martin Rees > The history of human technological civilization is measured in centuries—and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, which will then persist and continue to evolve for billions of years. This suggests that if we were to detect ET, it would be far more likely to be inorganic. We would be most unlikely to “catch” it in the brief sliver of time when it took organic form. A generic feature of these scenarios is that “organic” human-level intelligence is just a brief prelude before the machines take over. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Breakthrough Listen](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26665) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-120 — The Ironies of Higher Arithmetic — Jim Holt > In principle, checking a proof in mathematics shouldn't require any intelligence or insight. It's something a machine could do. In practice, though, a mathematician never writes out the sort of austerely detailed "formal" proof that a computer might check. Life is too short. Instead, she (lady-friend of mine) offers a more or less elaborate argument that such a formal proof exists—an argument that, she hopes, will persuade her peers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author and Essayist, New York Times. New Yorker, Slate; Author, Why Does the World Exist? - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Ironies of Higher Arithmetic](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26664) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-121 — Feces Standard Money (FSM) — Jaeweon Cho > Every morning we can put our powder into reactors located in our village to supply food for the microorganisms that can produce various energies such as methane and biodiesel. We can receive a certain amount of FSM in exchange for the powdered feces, and use the FSM to obtain any equivalent value within a system. Feces, like gold, is limited and precious; nobody can make more than a certain limit, and it can be converted to energy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Engineering, UNIST; Director, Science Walden Center - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Feces Standard Money (FSM)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26660) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-122 — The Epistemic Trainwreck Of Soft-Side Psychology — Philip Tetlock > In our rushed quest to establish our scientific capacity to surprise smart outsiders plus help those who had long gotten the short end of the status stick, soft-siders had forgotten the normative formula that Robert Merton formulated in 1942 for successful social science, the CUDOS norms for protecting us from absurdities like Stalinist genetics and Aryan physics. The road to scientific hell is paved with political intentions, sometimes maniacally evil ones and sometimes profoundly well intentioned ones. If you value science as a purely epistemic game, the effects are equally corrosive. When you replace the pursuit of truth with the protection of dogma, you get politically-religiously tainted knowledge. Mertonian science imposes monastic discipline: it bars even flirting with ideologues. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in Wharton, Psychology and Political Science; Author, Expert Political Judgment; (with Dan Gardner) Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (forthcoming, Sept. 2015) - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Epistemic Trainwreck Of Soft-Side Psychology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26659) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-123 — Theodiversity — Ara Norenzayan > Theodiversity once was the exclusive subject matter of the humanities. But it is now a focal point of a budding science-humanities collaboration. The religious diversification of humankind in historical time poses fascinating questions and challenges for the new science of cultural evolution. Also, these are times of renewed anxieties about real or imagined cultural conflict between religions, and between religions and secular modernity. This is why quantifiable, evidence-based, and nuanced understanding of the complexities of theodiversity are important now more than ever. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of British Columbia; Author, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Theodiversity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26658) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-124 — Cognitive Science Transforms Moral Philosophy — Stephen J. Stich > At the beginning of the current century that began to change. Prompted by the interdisciplinary zeitgeist, young philosophers (and a few who weren’t so young) resolved to master the methods of contemporary psychology and neuroscience and use them to explore questions about the mind that philosophers had been debating for centuries. On the other side of the disciplinary divide, psychologists, neuroscientists and researchers interested in the evolution of the mind began to engage with the philosophical tradition more seriously. What began as a trickle of papers that were both scientifically and philosophically sophisticated has turned into a flood. Hundreds of papers are published every year, and moral psychology has become a hot topic. There are many examples of this extraordinary work. I’ll mention just three. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Cognitive Science Transforms Moral Philosophy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26657) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-125 — News About How The Phyiscal World Operates — Leonard Susskind > First of all from the experimental front there is news from the LHC—the big particle collider in Europe. There is evidence of a new particle. What a new particle means at this stage is a small bump in a data distribution. It could be real or it could be a statistical fluke, but if it is real it does represent something new. Unlike the Higgs particle it is not part of the standard model of particle physics. In fact, to my knowledge the new particle does not fit neatly into any theoretical framework, such as supersymmetry or technicolor, and its not a black hole or a graviton. So far it just seem to be an extra particle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics, Stanford; Author, The Theoretical Minimum series - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [News About How The Phyiscal World Operates](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26656) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-126 — The Universe Surprised Us, Close To Home, In Unexpected Places, And Unexpected Ways — Lawrence M. Krauss > We are accustomed to recognizing that at the extremes of scale, the Universe is a mysterious place. For example, Dark Energy—the energy of empty space—appears to dominate the dynamics of the Universe on its largest scales, producing a gravitational repulsion that is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. Or, on small scales, we currently have no idea why the newly discovered Higgs particle is as light as it is, one of the reasons the four forces in nature have the vastly different strengths we measure on laboratory scales. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Universe Surprised Us, Close To Home, In Unexpected Places, And Unexpected Ways](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26655) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-127 — The En-Gendering Of Genius — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein > I realize that discussing the FAB hypothesis will be seen as small stuff compared to such big news as, say, the icecaps melting at a faster rate than anticipated. And that is why, in responding to this year’s Edge Question, I first began to write about the icecaps. But perhaps the insignificant measure we assign to the under-estimation of the creative potential of more than half our population is itself a manifestation of the problem. And what could be a greater boon to humanity than increasing the, um, man-power of those making important contributions, not only to science but to our culture at large? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher, Novelist; Recipient, 2014 National Humanities Medal; Author, Plato at the Googleplex; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The En-Gendering Of Genius](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26654) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-128 — News About Science News — Sheizaf Rafaeli > The most important changes with regard to news are, themselves, social. News, including science news is collected, collated, curated, and consumed by ever-growing circles of stakeholders. During our lifetime, or even the past decade, the Science-News-Society axis has been redrawn entirely. Instead of being a trickle down, so called “broad”-cast experience, news is now a bottom-up phenomenon. Fewer "invisible colleges," and many more public arenas for science. News about discoveries, innovations, controversies and evidence are increasingly grass-roots generated and ranked, and universally more accessible. Economics of tuition and budget play a role, as does the evolving perception of the structure of knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Director, The Center for Internet Research, University of Haifa, Israel - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [News About Science News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26652) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-129 — Intellectual Convergence — Adam Alter > The answer depends largely on whether the team adopts a telephoto zoom lens or a wide-angle lens. A telephoto zoom lens focuses on narrower causes, like the tendency for financial stability to diminish stress hormones and improve brain functioning. A team that uses this lens will tend to focus on specific people who earn more or less money each year, and any differences in how their brains function and how they behave. In contrast, a team that adopts a wide-angle lens will focus on broader differences. Perhaps people who earn more also live in safer neighborhoods with superior infrastructure and social support. Though each team adopts a different level of analysis and arrives at a different answer, both answers can be right at the same time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU; Author, Irresistible - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Intellectual Convergence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26651) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-130 — The Continually New You — Stephen M. Kosslyn > Finding something new in psychology is always easy. The journals are overflowing with reports of gripping new findings, many of which invite continued reflection. But a problem has recently come to the fore: Many of these findings probably won’t replicate. In fact, many of the findings already in the literature have turned out not to replicate—they were statistical flukes, not accurate insights into the nature of the mind and behavior. But this does not mean that we should throw up our hands and walk away from the field. Rather, many findings have turned out to be robust, and many have deep implications that will continue to stimulate and inform. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Continually New You](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26650) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-131 — A Science Of The Consequences — Luca De Biase > The old way to answer was more or less the following: science is about finding out how things are; ethics or policy will serve the purpose of deciding what to do about them. That kind of answer does not help anymore, because science is very much able to change how things are. It is self-governing and, in this regard, science decides about human life, while the growing demand for a science based policy enables science to take part in the decision making process. If a scientific narrative converges with both the laissez-faire ideology and the idea of complexity, the decision making process becomes more and more difficult and the situation seems to go out of control. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Editor, Nova 24, of Il Sole 24 Ore - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [A Science Of The Consequences](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26649) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-132 — Sub-Prime Science — Nicholas Humphrey > The reality is that science itself has always been affected by “this human interest stuff.” Personal vendettas, political and religious biases, stubborn adherence to pet ideas have in the past led even some of the greatest scientists to massage experimental data and skew theoretical interpretations. Happily, the body of scientific knowledge has continued to live and grow despite such human aberrations. In general scientists continue to play by the rules. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Sub-Prime Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26648) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-133 — The Creation Of A "No Ethnic Majority" Society — David Berreby > Throughout the history of the United States, white people have been its dominant ethnic group. The exact definition of this "race" has changed over time, as successive waves of immigrants (Germans in the 18th century, Irish in the 19th, Italians and Jews in the late 19th and early 20th) worked to be included in the privileged category (as recounted, for example, in Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White). Whatever "whiteness" meant, though, its predominance persisted—both statistically (as the absolute majority of the population) and culturally (as the no-asterisk default definition of American). Even today, long after the legal structure of discrimination was undone, advantages attach to white identity when seeking work, housing, education, or in any encounter with authority. Not unrelatedly, life expectancy for whites is greater than for African-Americans. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Creation Of A "No Ethnic Majority" Society](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26646) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-134 — Fear Of Dread Risks — Gerd Gigerenzer > For that reason terrorists strike twice. First with physical force, and second by capitalizing on our brains, that is, our propensity for dread risk fear. After 9/11, many Americans avoided flying and used their cars instead. As a consequence, some 1,600 people died from the resulting automobile accidents, which is more than the total number of individuals who were killed aboard the four hijacked planes. That can be called Osama bin Laden’s second strike. All those people could still be alive if they had flown instead of driven, seeing as there was no single deadly accident on commercial airline flights in the US for a number of years thereafter. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Author, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Fear Of Dread Risks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26645) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-135 — The Greatest Environmental Disaster in the World Today: Air Pollution — Richard Muller > People suggest a switch from coal to solar, but it is too expensive for China to afford. In 2015, solar power contributed less than 0.2% to their energy use, and solar plants are going bankrupt as the Chinese subsidies are withdrawn. Wind is expanding, but its intermittency is a big problem, and the use of energy storage drives up cost. Hydro is hardly an environmental choice; the 3-Gorges Dam displaced 1.2 million people (voluntarily, the Chinese tell us) and destroyed 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1350 villages. Their new Mekong River dam is expected to wreak havoc throughout Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, UC Berkeley; Author, Now: The Physics of Time - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Greatest Environmental Disaster in the World Today: Air Pollution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26644) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-136 — Interconnectedness — Irene Pepperberg > John Donne wrote these words almost 400 years ago and, aside from the sexism of the male pronoun, his words are as true now as they were then. I believe they will be just as true in the future, and apply to scientific discovery as well as to philosophy: the interconnectedness of humans, and of humans and their environment that science is demonstrating today is just the beginning of what we will discover and is the news very likely to be discussed in the future. A few examples will suffice to explain my reasoning. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Interconnectedness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26643) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-137 — The Most Powerful Carcinogen May Be Entropy — George Johnson > Cancer is often described as a sped-up version of Darwinian evolution. Through a series of advantageous mutations, the tumor—this hopeful monster—becomes fitter and fitter within the ecosystem of your body. Some of the mutations are inherited while others are environmental—the result of a confusion of outside influences. Much less talked about is a third category: the mutations that arise spontaneously from the random copying errors occurring every time a cell divides. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author; The Cancer Chronicles, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments; Columnist, The New York Times - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Most Powerful Carcinogen May Be Entropy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26642) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-138 — The Great Convergence — Quentin Hardy > The sectors include mobility, sensors, cloud computing, and data analysis, whether by machine learning or artificial intelligence. Sensors don’t just give us new information about nature and society, they inform the configuration of cloud systems, and the behavior of the analysis algorithms is likewise affected by the success with which it alters the other two. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Deputy Technology Editor, The New York Times; Former Lecturer, U.C. Berkeley's School of Information - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Great Convergence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26641) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-139 — We Are Not Special — Kurt Gray > The MIT physicist Jeremy England has suggested that life is merely an inevitable consequence of thermodynamics. He argues that living systems are simply the best way of dissipating energy from an external energy source; bacteria, beetles and humans are just the most efficient way to use up sunlight. According to England, the process of entropy means that molecules that sit long enough under a heat lamp will eventually structure themselves to metabolize, move, and self-replicate—i.e., to become alive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Co-author (with Daniel Wegner), The Mind Club - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [We Are Not Special](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26640) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-140 — Programming Reality — Neil Gershenfeld > Some discoveries arrive as an event, like the flash of a light bulb; some are best understood in retrospect as the accumulation of a body of work, where the advance is to take it seriously. This is one of those. Digitizing communication and computation required a few decades each, leading to a revolution in how knowledge is created and shared. The coverage now of 3D printing and the maker movement is only the visible tip of a much bigger iceberg, digitizing not just design descriptions for computer-controlled manufacturing machines (which is decades old), but digitizing the designs themselves by specifying the assembly of digital materials. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Programming Reality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26639) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-141 — DNA Programming — Paul Dolan > At a time when groundbreaking discoveries seem almost commonplace, it is difficult to predict which scientific news is important enough to "stay news" for longer than a few days. To stick around, it would have to potentially redefine "who and what we are." One of the recent scientific advancements that, in my mind, fulfills these prerequisites is decoding and reprogramming DNA via bioinformatics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Behavioral Scientist, LSE; Author, Happy Ever After - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [DNA Programming](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26638) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-142 — How Widely Should We Draw The Circle? — Scott Aaronson > Instead of expanding my “circle of interest” to encompass the future of civilization, I could also contract it more tightly, around my fellow theoretical computer scientists. In that case, 2015 was the year that Lazslo Babai of the University of Chicago announced the first “provably fast” algorithm for one of the central problems in computing: graph isomorphism. This problem is to determine whether two networks of nodes and links are “isomorphic” (that is, whether they become the same if you relabel the nodes). For networks with N nodes, the best previous algorithm—which Babai also helped to discover, thirty years ago—took a number of steps that grew exponentially with the square root of N. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin; Author, Quantum Computing Since Democritus - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26637) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-143 — I, For One — Joshua Bongard > The same neural machinery that enables us (if we so choose) to imagine the emotional or physical pain suffered by another also allows us to predict how our current choices will influence our future selves. This is known as prospection. But humans are also lazy; we make choices now that we come to regret later. (I’m guilty of that right now: rather than actually building our future robot overlords, I’m daydreaming about them instead.) Machines could help us here too. Imagine neural implants that can directly stimulate the pain and pleasure centers of the brain. Such a device could make you feel sick before your first bite into that bacon cheeseburger rather than after you’ve finished it. A passive aggressive comment to a colleague or loved one would result in an immediate fillip to the inside of the skull. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cyril G. Veinott Green and Gold Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont Author, How the Body Shapes the Way We Think - **Extract length:** 139 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [I, For One](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26636) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-144 — Imaging Deep Learning — Andy Clark > The world is increasingly full of deep architectures—multi-level artificial neural networks used to discover (via "deep learning") patterns in large datasets such as images and texts. But the power and prevalence of these deep architectures masks a major problem—the problem of knowledge-opacity. Such architectures learn to do wonderful things, but they do not (without further coaxing) reveal just what knowledge they are relying upon when they do them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Imaging Deep Learning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26635) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-145 — Modernity Is Winning — Gregory Paul > What very few recognize is how the fusion news is tied to a much more prominent story. A major Pew analysis released this year projects a rise in theism in many developing nations in coming decades. This followed a major Pew survey showing a rapid rise of nontheism at the expense of religion in the United States. This has contributed to a common opinion that while religion has been and is continuing to sink in the western democracies, it’s making a comeback in less stable and prosperous nations in a historical rebuff to modernity. The resulting reactionary theism is often adopting a virulent form that afflicts the secular democracies and threatens the future of modern civilization. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Researcher; Author, The Princeton Field Guide of Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Modernity Is Winning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26634) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-146 — The Thin Line Between Mental Illness And Mental Health — Joel Gold > In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer is psychiatrically hospitalized by mistake. His hand is stamped "Insane." When his psychiatrists come to believe he is not and release him, they stamp his hand "Not Insane." But sanity is not binary; it is a spectrum on which we all lie. Overt madness might be hard to miss, but what is its opposite? There is clear evidence that large numbers of people who have no psychiatric diagnosis and are not in need of psychiatric treatment experience symptoms of psychosis, notably hallucinations and delusions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Coauthor (with Ian Gold), Suspicious Minds - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Thin Line Between Mental Illness And Mental Health](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26633) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-147 — Open Water–The Internet Of Visible Thought — Peter Gabriel > Recording more and more images and corresponding brain patterns boosts the vocabulary in the individual’s visual dictionary of thought. Accuracy greatly increases with the quantity and quality of data and of the decoding algorithms. Jepsen has persuaded me that this is realisable within a decade, within the cost points of consumer electronics, and in a form that appeals to non-techies. Laborious techniques and huge, power-hungry, multi-million-dollar systems based on magnetic fields will be succeeded by optical techniques where the advantages of consumer electronics can really assert themselves; the power of AI algorithms will do the rest. This science-fiction future is not only realisable, but because of enormous potential benefits, will inevitably be realised. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Musician - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Open Water–The Internet Of Visible Thought](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26632) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-148 — The Neural Net Reloaded — Jamshed Bharucha > Rosenblatt developed the perceptron in the 1950s. He built on foundational work in the 1940 by McCulloch and Pitts, who showed how patterns could be handled by networks of neurons, and Donald Hebb, who hypothesized that the connection between neurons is strengthened when connected neurons are active. The buzz created by the perceptron can be relived by reading "Electronic ‘Brain’ Teaches Itself," published by the New York Times on July 13, 1958. The Times quoted Rosenblatt saying that Perceptron "will grow wiser as it gains experience," adding that "the Navy said it would use the principle to build the first Perceptron ‘thinking machines’ that will be able to read or write." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; President Emeritus, Cooper Union - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Neural Net Reloaded](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26629) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-149 — Neural Hacking, Handprints, And The Empathy Deficit — Daniel Goleman > For one: Epigenetics. Once the human genome was mapped, the next step has been figuring out how it works, including what turns on and off all those bits of genetic code. Here, everything from our metabolism, to our diet, to our environment and what habits we learn comes into play. A developing story here will be neuroplasticity, a case in point of epigenetics. First considered seriously a decade or so ago, neuroplasticity—the brain’s constant reshaping through repeated experiences—presents a potential for neural hacking apps. As neuroscientists like Judd Brewer at Yale and Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin have shown, we can choose which elements of brain function we want to strengthen through sustained mind training. Do you want to have better emotion regulation, enhance your concentration and memory, or become more compassionate? Each of these goals means strengthening distinct neural circuitry through specific, bespoke mental exercise, which might one day become a new kind of daily fitness routine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 160 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Neural Hacking, Handprints, And The Empathy Deficit](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26628) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-150 — News That Stayed News — Mary Catherine Bateson > On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to this planet. That was very big news, the beginning of an era of space exploration involving multiple launchings and satellites spending long periods in orbit, launched from many nations. In the weeks after Sputnik, however, another news story played out that led to a range of other actions based on the recognition that US education was falling behind, not only in science but in other fields of education as well, such as geography and foreign languages. This is still true. We are not behind at the cutting edge, but we are behind in a general, broad-based understanding of science, and this is not tolerable for a democracy in an increasingly technological world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emerita, George Mason University; Visiting Scholar, Sloan Center on Aging & Work, Boston College; Author, Composing a Further Life - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [News That Stayed News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26627) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-151 — Toddlers Can Master Computers — Alison Gopnik > In the first few years of life we learn about the way the physical, biological, and psychological world work. Even though our everyday theories of the world depend on our experience, by the time we’re adults we simply take them for granted—they’re part of the unquestioned background of our lives. When technological, culturally specific knowledge is learned early it becomes part of the background too. In our culture children learn how to use numbers and letters before they are five, in rural Guatemala, they learn how to use a machete. These abilities require subtle and complicated knowledge, but it’s a kind of knowledge that adults in the culture hardly notice (though it may startle visitors from another culture). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Toddlers Can Master Computers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26626) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-152 — Big Data And Better Government — Margaret Levi > Big data gives business, government, and social scientists access to information never available before. With the right tools of analysis—which are improving exponentially as I write—big data will transform the way we understand the world and the means we use to fix problems. The US and other governments are building the capacity to use big data as a basis for determining best practices; university-based research programs are generating appropriate analytic tools; and various non-profits around the world are linking technology, data, and citizens to enhance the implementation of government programs and services. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sara Miller McCune Director, Center For Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, professor, Stanford University; Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies, University of Washington - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Big Data And Better Government](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26625) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-153 — The Democratization of Science — Michael Shermer > A lot has happened in twenty-five years. While some Third Culture products remain topical (AI, human genetics, and cyberspace) and others have faded from consciousness (chaos, fractals, and Gaia), the culture of science as a redefining force endures and expands into the nooks and crannies of society through ever growing avenues of communication, pulling everyone in to participate. A quarter century ago the Third Culture penetrated the public primarily through books and television; to these technologies of knowledge Third Culture apostles spread the gospel through ebooks and audio books, digital books and virtual libraries, blogs and microblogs, podcasts and videocasts, file sharing and video sharing, social networks and forums, MOOCs and remote audio and video courses, virtual classrooms and even virtual universities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Democratization of Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26624) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-154 — Neuroprediction — Abigail Marsh > The Cartesian wall between mind and brain has fallen. Its disintegration has been aided by the emergence of a wealth of new techniques in collecting and analyzing neurobiological data, including neuroprediction, which is the use of human brain imaging data to predict how the brain’s owner will feel or behave in the future. The reality of neuroprediction requires accepting the fact that human thoughts and choices are a reflection of basic biological processes. It also has the potential to transform fields like mental health and criminal justice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Georgetown University - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Neuroprediction](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26623) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-155 — Juice — James Croak > Batteries need not have the energy density of gasoline in order to replace it as the physics of harnessing gasoline power are lame, only 15 percent of the energy in one’s tank motors the car down the highway. The rest is lost to heat, engine and transmission weight, friction, and idling. As a practical matter, batteries in the labs are already beyond useable energy density of fossil fuels, an energy density that results in a 500 mile range for an electric car with a modest battery, probably more for a small plane. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Juice](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26622) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-156 — The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research — Buddhini Samarasinghe > Since 430 BC we have known of biological structures and processes that protect the body against disease; but even today we are just beginning to understand how deeply involved they are in our lives. The immune system’s cellular sentries weave an intricate early warning network through the body; its signaling molecules—the cytokines—trigger and modulate our response to infection, including inflammation; it is involved in even so humble a process as the clotting of blood in a wound. Today we are beginning to grasp how—from cancer to diabetes, from heart disease to malaria, from dementia to depression—the immune system is involved at a fundamental level, providing us with the framework to understand, and to better treat these wide-ranging ailments. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Molecular Biologist - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26621) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-157 — The State Of The Brain — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Why the brain? Brains are the most complex devices in the known universe and up until now our attempts to understand how brains work have fallen short. It will take a major international effort to crack the neural code. Europe weighed in earlier with the Human Brain Project and Japan later announced a Brain/MINDS project to develop a transgenic nonhuman primate model. China is also planning an ambitious brain project. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The State Of The Brain](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26620) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Neurotechnologies Will Match the Complexity of the Brain by Terrence J. Sejnowski|Neurotechnologies Will Match the Complexity of the Brain by Terrence J. Sejnowski]] ### EDGE2016-158 — Cancer Drugs For Brain Diseases — Todd C. Sacktor > First, unlike any other treatment, the drug appears to work close to the root cause of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is one of the few neurodegenerative disorders for which there is any effective treatment. In Parkinson’s, the neurons that supply the brain with the neurotransmitter, dopamine, degenerate. The mainstay of treatment for the disease has been to replace that missing dopamine with a pill that provides a chemical that is converted in the brain into dopamine. This "dopamine replacement therapy" treats the symptoms of Parkinson’s—the tremors, the stiffness, and the slowness of movements—but not its root cause. So the death of the dopamine-containing neurons continues unabated, and the pills only work well for around seven years. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Neurology, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Cancer Drugs For Brain Diseases](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26619) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-159 — Sensors: Accelerating The Pace Of Scientific Discovery — Paul Saffo > For the last half-century, digital technology has delivered the most powerful tools in the form of processors, networking, and sensors. Processing came first, providing the brains for space probes and the computational bulldozers needed for tackling computation-intensive research. Then with the advent of the Arpanet, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, networking became a powerful medium for accessing and sharing scientific knowledge—and connecting remotely to everything from supercomputers to telescopes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Sensors: Accelerating The Pace Of Scientific Discovery](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26618) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-160 — The News Behind The News — Alun Anderson > The new technique, developed by Yiyang Gong and colleagues in Mark Schintzer’s lab at Stanford University, and published in the journal Science, builds on past tools for imaging nerve impulses. One well-established method takes advantage of the calcium ions which rush into a nerve cell as a signal speeds by. Special chemicals that give off light when they interact with calcium make that electrical activity visible, but they're not fast or sensitive enough to capture the speed with which the brain works. The new technique goes further by using a rhodopsin protein (called Ace), which is very sensitive to voltage changes in the nerve cell membrane, fused to another protein (mNeon), which can fluoresce very brightly. The combination is both fast and bright. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The News Behind The News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26617) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-161 — Human Progress Quantified — Steven Pinker > Fortunately, as the bugs in human cognition have become common knowledge, the workaround—objective data—has become more prevalent, and in many spheres of life, observers are replacing gut feelings with quantitative analysis. Sports have been revolutionized by Moneyball, policy by Nudge, punditry by 538.com, forecasting by tournaments and prediction markets, philanthropy by effective altruism, the healing arts by evidence-based medicine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Human Progress Quantified](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26616) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-162 — We Know All The Particles And Forces That We’re Made Of — Sean Carroll > There is a lot we don't understand in physics: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, what happens at the Big Bang or inside a black hole, why the particles and forces have the characteristics they do. We certainly don't know even a fraction of what there is to learn about how the elementary particles and forces come together to make complex structures, from molecules to nation-states. But there are some things we do know—and that includes the identity and behavior of all of the pieces underlying the world of our everyday experience. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, Something Deeply Hidden - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [We Know All The Particles And Forces That We’re Made Of](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26611) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-163 — No News Is Astounding News — Lee Smolin > Since 1973, our knowledge of elementary particles and fundamental forces has been expressed in what we call the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics. This reduces all phenomena, save gravity, to twelve fundamental particles interacting via three forces. This Standard Model has been confirmed in all experiments to date. This includes new measurements announced this month by two teams of experimentalists operating the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), working at nearly twice the energy as previous experiments. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [No News Is Astounding News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26610) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-164 — The Facility Whose Data May Help Formulate And Test Ideas About A Final Theory Of Our Universe Is Now Working — Gordon Kane > The theory did not tell us how massive the superpartners should be. Naively there were arguments they should not be too heavy (“naturalness”), so they could be searched for with enthusiasm at every higher energy that became accessible, but so far they have not been found. In the past decade or so string- and M-theories have been better understood, and now provide clues to how heavy the superpartners should be. String-theories and M-theories differ technically in ways not important for us here. To be mathematically consistent, and part of a quantum theory of gravity and the other forces, they must have 9 or 10 space dimensions (and one time dimension). To predict superpartner masses, they must be projected onto our world with three space dimensions, and there are known techniques to do that. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Particle Physicist and Cosmologist; Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan; Author, Supersymmetry and Beyond - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Facility Whose Data May Help Formulate And Test Ideas About A Final Theory Of Our Universe Is Now Working](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26607) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-165 — The Healthy Diet U-Turn — Ed Regis > For years, Americans had been told by the experts to avoid fats at all costs and at every opportunity, as if these foodstuffs were the antichrists of nutrition. A diet low in fats and rich in carbohydrates, supposedly, was the way to go in order to achieve a sleek and gazelle-like body and physiological enlightenment. In consequence, no-fat or low-fat foods became all the rage, and for a long time the only kind of yogurt you could find on grocery shelves was the jelly-like zero-fat variety, and the only available canned tuna was packed not in olive oil but in water, as if the poor creature was still swimming. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Monsters - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Healthy Diet U-Turn](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26606) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-166 — Designer Humans — Mark Pagel > Just imagine, no more Huntington’s, chorea, no more sickle-cell anemia, no more cystic fibrosis, or a raft of other heritable disorders. But what about desirable traits— eye and hair color, personality and temperament, and even intelligence? The first of these—eye and hair color—are already easily within CRISPR’s grasp. The others are probably caused only partially by genes anyway, and even then potentially by scores or possibly hundreds of genes, each exerting a small effect. But who is to say we won’t figure out even these complicated cases one day? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Reading University, UK; Fellow, Royal Society; Author, Wired for Culture - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Designer Humans](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26605) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-167 — Adjusting To Feathered Dinosaurs — John McWhorter > Second, the feathered Velociraptor coaxes us to tease apart the viscerally attractive from the empirically sound. The truth is that the sleek versions of bipedal dinosaurs look "cool"—streamlined, shiny, reptilian in a good way. Nothing has made this clearer than the Velociraptors brought to life in the Jurassic Park films. For these creatures to instead look more like ostriches, sloshing their feathers around and looking vaguely uncomfortable, doesn’t quite square with how we are used to seeing dinosaurs. Yet that’s the way it was. The sleek-looking Velociraptor, or little "Compies" of the Jurassic Park films (Compsognathus), or any number of other dinosaurs of that general build, are now "old school" in the same way as Brontosauruses lolling around in swamps (they didn’t) and Tyrannosauruses dragging their tails on the ground. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Adjusting To Feathered Dinosaurs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26604) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-168 — Gigantic Black Holes At The Center Of Galaxies — Carlo Rovelli > Evidence has recently piled up that there is a gigantic black hole, Sagittarius A*, with a mass 4 million times that of our Sun, at the center of our galaxy. Similar black holes appear to exist at the center of most galaxies. Some are even much bigger—with masses billions times that of our Sun. Can you imagine a black hole a billion times the size of our Sun? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Gigantic Black Holes At The Center Of Galaxies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26603) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-169 — The Trust Metric — John Gottman > As a relationship researcher and couples-family therapist, I have known for decades that trust is the number one issue that concerns couples today. Consistent with this truth is the finding that the major trait people search for in trying to find a mate is trustworthiness. Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking book Bowling Alone began documenting this amazing field of scientific research. It is based on a very simple question. Sociologists have used a yes/no survey question: "In general, would you say that you trust people?" It turns out that regions of the USA, and countries throughout the world vary widely in the percentage of people who answer that question by saying "yes." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Co-founder, The Gottman Relationship Institute; Author, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Trust Metric](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26601) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-170 — Optogenetics — Christian Keysers > A small number of experiments have demonstrated the potential of this technique. For instance, mice were made to experience fear. Using optogenetics, the pattern of neural activity that was triggered during the original experience was later reactivated, and the mice froze in fear once again. Neuroscience has become a protagonist. The science fiction scenario of "total recall," in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was implanted with memories he never had, now becomes tangible. In another set of experiments, the activity of cells in one animal's brain was recorded and imposed on corresponding cells in the brain of another animal's that was then able to take decisions based on what the other animal was feeling. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Director, Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience; Author, The Empathic Brain - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Optogenetics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26600) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Recording and Recreating Neurons Could Change Who We Are by Christian Keysers|Recording and Recreating Neurons Could Change Who We Are by Christian Keysers]] ### EDGE2016-171 — Advanced Ligo And Advanced Virgo — Paul Davies > In the last few months, a laser system designed to pick up the passage of gravitational waves emanating from violent astronomical events has been upgraded, and rumors abound that it has already "seen something." The system concerned, called Advanced Ligo (for Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory), uses laser beams to spot almost inconceivably minute gravitational effects. In Europe, its counterpart, Advanced Virgo, is also limbering up. Advanced Ligo and Advanced Virgo are refinements of existing systems that have proved the technology but lack the sensitivity to detect bursts of gravitational waves from supernovas or colliding neutron stars on a routine basis. The stage is now set to move to that phase. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Advanced Ligo And Advanced Virgo](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26599) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-172 — The Longevity Of News — Diana Deutsch > A prime example of "important" scientific news that turned out to be mistaken is the "discovery" of N-rays by the physicist René Blondlot in 1903. This was hailed as a major breakthrough, and led rapidly to the publication of dozens of other papers claiming to confirm Blondlot’s findings. Yet N-rays were soon discredited, and are now referred to primarily as an example of a phenomenon in perceptual psychology—we perceive what we expect to perceive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of California, San Diego; Author, Musical Illusions and Phantom Words - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Longevity Of News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26598) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-173 — Weather Prediction Has Quietly Gotten A Lot Better — Samuel Arbesman > According to a recent paper on this topic, “Advances in numerical weather prediction represent a quiet revolution because they have resulted from a steady accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological advances over many years that, with only a few exceptions, have not been associated with the aura of fundamental physics breakthroughs.” Despite these advances seeming to be profoundly unsexy, these predictive systems have yielded enormous progress. Our skill at forecasting the weather has grown significantly over the past few decades—something that will change how we think about the enormously complex system of the weather. Forecasting ability has been increasing in accuracy by about an additional day per decade for those made several days into the future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Complexity Scientist; Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital; Author, Overcomplicated - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Weather Prediction Has Quietly Gotten A Lot Better](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26597) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-174 — Life Diverging… — Juan Enriquez > In redesigning our own environment, we create and nurture completely unnatural creatures. These range from miniature pigs the size of Chihuahuas and corn that cannot self-replicate to the big tom turkeys that breed our Thanksgiving meals, animals so grossly exaggerated that they are unable to copulate naturally and require artificial insemination. No humans, no big Thanksgiving turkey breasts; today’s beasts are, on average, 225% larger than they were in the 1930s. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Life Diverging…](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26595) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Evolution/Humanity Has Created a Third Evolutionary Tree of Life by Juan Enriquez|Humanity Has Created a Third Evolutionary Tree of Life by Juan Enriquez]] ### EDGE2016-175 — The Universe Is Infinite — Rudy Rucker > If you’re afraid of infinity, you might say something like this: "So, okay, maybe we’re in a vast infinite space, but it’s mostly empty. Our universe is just a finite number of galaxies rushing away from each other inside this empty infinite space—like a solitary skyrocket exploding and sending out a doomed shower of sparks." But many cosmologists say, no, there are an infinite number of galaxies in our infinite space. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Universe Is Infinite](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26594) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-176 — People Kill Because It’s The Right Thing To Do — James J. O'Donnell > In a way, we all know this, by way of the exceptions we permit. Augustine’s theory of the Just War arose because his god demonstrably approved of some wars. When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, he had divine approval, "thou shalt not kill" be damned. To Augustine’s credit and others in that tradition, the Just War theory represents hard work to resist as much licit violence as possible. To their discredit, it represents their decision to cave in to questionable evidence and put a stamp of approval on slaughter. (Am I hallucinating to remember a small thumbnail woodcut of Augustine in the margin of a Time essay on the debates over the justice of the Vietnam War? If my hallucination is correct, then I remember shuddering at the sight.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [People Kill Because It’s The Right Thing To Do](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26593) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-177 — Global Warming: Once Again, A Most Serious Challenge To Our Species — Milford H. Wolpoff > Prior episodes of significant global warming within the Pleistocene, more-or-less the last 2 million years, have invariably followed cooling periods with glacial advances. During the Pleistocene, the human lineage, within the genus Homo, successfully adapted to changing environments (including climate) and evolved to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the changes, even as populations of Homo reacted to the constraints environmental changes created. Human populations evolved diverse adaptations to the different climates and ecological circumstances they encountered, but the improvements in communication skills, planning depth, and retention of deep history with tales, poems, song, and other aspects of cultural behavior dispersed throughout humanity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Global Warming: Once Again, A Most Serious Challenge To Our Species](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26591) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-178 — Harnessing Our Natural Defenses Against Cancer — Michael Hochberg > Despite decades of research, the Holy Grail of a cure still eludes us, in part because of the fundamental, unstable nature of cancer—it easily produces variant cells that resist chemotherapies and this often results in relapse. Cancer is also difficult because different cancer types differ considerably in their biology, meaning that a single drug is unlikely to be effective against more than one or a few cancer types. Finally, even within a cancer type, different patients can have differences in how their cancers react to a given drug. What this all means is that "one drug that cures all," is not one drug, and unfortunately for metastatic cancer, often not a cure. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionist, CNRS, Santa Fe Institute, Institute for Advanced Study Toulouse - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Harnessing Our Natural Defenses Against Cancer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26590) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-179 — Super Massive Black Holes — Jeremy Bernstein > The most interesting thing I learned was the presence of super massive black holes at the center of galaxies including our own. Where did they come from? At what stage were they created? They are not the collapse of a star. I have not heard an explanation that makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe they are pre-Big Bang relics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, Stevens Institute of Technology; Former Staff Writer, The New Yorker - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Super Massive Black Holes](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26589) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-180 — Extraterrestrials Don’t Land On Earth! — David Christian > Here on Earth, life got going more or less as soon as our young planet was cool enough to have liquid water. That’s fast, and hints that simple forms of life may be common. Four billion years later, large, intelligent creatures have appeared, and lots of them. One of those species crossed a critical threshold when it evolved such a powerful form of language that its members began to share their ideas and accumulate more and more information from generation to generation. As a result of its ability to learn collectively, that species (us) has built an astonishing store of knowledge, which enables us to control more and more of our environment, until now we dominate the planet. We have become a planet-changing species and we now live in what many scholars call the "Anthropocene Epoch." We’ve even launched a few of us short distances into space, and sent robots throughout our solar system. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Big History Institute and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, Origin Story - **Extract length:** 154 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Extraterrestrials Don’t Land On Earth!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26588) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-181 — Datasets Over Algorithms — Alexander Wissner-Gross > If correct, this hypothesis would have foundational implications for future progress in AI. Most importantly, the prioritized cultivation of high-quality training datasets might allow an order-of-magnitude speedup in AI breakthroughs over purely algorithmic advances. For example, we might already possess the algorithms and hardware that will enable machines in a few years to author human-level long-form creative compositions, complete standardized human examinations, or even pass the Turing Test, if only we trained them with the right writing, examination, and conversational datasets. Additionally, the nascent problem of ensuring AI friendliness might be addressed by focusing on dataset rather than algorithmic friendliness—a potentially simpler approach. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Inventor; Entrepreneur; Investor - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Datasets Over Algorithms](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26587) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-182 — The Word: First As Art, Then As Science — Brian Christian > Thinking about the means by which language works on the mind, Pound described a three-part taxonomy. First is phanopoeia—think "phantoms": the images that a word or phrase conjures in the reader's mind. Pound's own "petals on a wet black bough" is a perfect illustration. This, he says, is the poetic capacity most likely to survive translation. Second is melopoeia—think "melody": the music words make. This encompasses rhyme and meter, alliteration and assonance, the things we take to be the classic backbones of poetic form. Though fiendishly difficult to translate faithfully, he notes, it doesn't necessarily need to be, as this is the poetic capacity most likely to be appreciated even in a language you don't know. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Most Human Human; Co-author (with Tom Griffiths), The Alignment Problem - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Word: First As Art, Then As Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26584) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-183 — Cellular Alchemy — Roger Highfield > When it comes to people, this will pave the way for model systems to test drugs, the creation of T cells designed to fight cancer, a way to create a patient's own disease-free cells for therapies, humanized pig organs, and so on. Work by Mitinori Saitou of Kyoto University in Japan and Azim Surani in the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge has even shown that these reprogrammed embryonic cells can even be turned into "immortal" germline cells. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Cellular Alchemy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26580) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-184 — The Convergence Of Images And Technology — Victoria Wyatt > Innovations in data visualization underscore the value of visual imagery in representing intangibles. Again, technology makes it possible. Computers find non-linear patterns in space and time embedded in huge datasets. Programs such as spatial mapping make these complex connections vivid. Scientists have long used visualizations to portray natural systems. Increasingly, social and cultural researchers choose similar software to embody subjective human experience. Today, interactive maps show dynamic networks in process, not frozen instants of artificial stasis. As technology opens new avenues for exploration of relationships, disciplines across academia embrace fresh questions in emerging forms. To focus on intangibles, these questions demand the power of imagery. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of History in Art, University of Victoria - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Convergence Of Images And Technology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26579) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-185 — Glaciers — Robert Trivers > Glaciers throughout the world are melting at an unprecedented rate. Glaciers throughout the world will continue to melt at an unprecedented rate. Try living with an average sea level 5+ meters higher. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University; Author, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist - **Extract length:** 32 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Glaciers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26578) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-186 — Life In The Milky Way — Mario Livio > The publication of this empirically-based estimate marked a critical point at which the quest for extrasolar life transitioned from mere speculation to an actual science. The realization that planets that could, in principle at least, support life has turned the search for extrasolar life almost into an obsession for many astronomers. The plans for the near future in this field envisage a two-pronged attack. On one hand, a series of upcoming and planned telescopes (in space and on the ground) will look for biosignatures—characteristics imprinted by life processes—in the atmospheres of planets in the HZ of their host stars. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Astrophysicist; Author, Why?: What Makes Us Curious - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Life In The Milky Way](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26577) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-187 — Systems Medicine — Stuart A. Kauffman > We can empirically climb “clinical “fitness landscapes,” each described with many variables, where peaks represent good treatments by one or many variables, from one or a set of drugs to environmental factors. In fact, almost anecdotal evidence, a kind of “learning by doing,” can search such rugged clinical landscapes. More, Bayesian and other models of the underlying multi-causal mechanisms can guide our empirical search. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Systems Medicine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26575) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-188 — A Cheap, Naturalistic, Large-Scale Research Method Designed To Assess And Interpret Our Social Media Linguistic Interactions — Nathalie Nahai > On the negative side, however, outside the realm of academic research, such data mining practices do not yet require consent, and could therefore be used by any entity with the adequate capabilities to profile and categorize people (whether as citizens, customers, or potential employees) without their knowledge and beyond their control. Such information could then be used to determine whether to grant certain people access to particular services (such as lines of credit or medical insurance), career paths, and even citizenship. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Web Psychologist, Speaker; Author, Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [A Cheap, Naturalistic, Large-Scale Research Method Designed To Assess And Interpret Our Social Media Linguistic Interactions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26573) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-189 — High Tech Stone Age — Tor Nørretranders > The flat, peer-to-peer based network of relationships found in hunter-gatherer cultures is ideal for regulating hunting and gathering. But the advent of agriculture meant centralization with cities, depots, kings, and control. Thus, social structure lost the dependence on bottom-up self-organization and became reliant on top-down, rule based societies. They are very good at many things, but not good for keeping civil society vibrant and alive. Also, regulating common resources is sometimes difficult for the anonymous state and market. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [High Tech Stone Age](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26571) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-190 — The Mindful Opening And Meeting Of Minds — Christine Finn > For transparency, I am also a blonde, white, woman who has practiced meditation for 20 years. For much of that time I hesitated to admit it. I came to it as a postgrad working on an unfunded interdisciplinary thesis. Fizzy with discoveries in the fuzzy zone, I needed to corral my brain if I was to defend my argument as both art, and science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Mindful Opening And Meeting Of Minds](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26569) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-191 — A Robust Challenge To The Value Of A University Education — Steve Fuller > An alternative would be to make all university examinations tests in counterfactual reasoning. In effect, students would be provided access to the field’s current state of knowledge—the sort of thing that they would normally regurgitate as exam answers—and then be asked to respond to scenarios in which the assumptions behind the answers are suspended in various ways. Thus, students would be tested at once for their sense of how the current state of knowledge hangs together and their ability to reassemble that knowledge strategically under a state of induced uncertainty. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick; Author, The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Robust Challenge To The Value Of A University Education](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26568) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-192 — Nootropic Neural News — George Church > Our ability to prioritize and process the news is in an autocatalytic, positive feedback loop in which we extend our brain both biologically and electronically. Surgery could extend our brain capacity from 1.2 kg to 50 kg (routine head loads of the Sherpas of Nepal). The rate of growth of neural systems could be as fast as the doubling time of human cells (about one day) with differentiation from generic stem cells to complex neural nets recently engineered to occur in four days. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Harvard University; Director, Personal Genome Project; Co-author (with Ed Regis), Regenesis - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Nootropic Neural News](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26567) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-193 — Linking The Levels Of Human Variation — Elizabeth Wrigley-Field > Or consider the rise of antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria. The epidemiologist Diane Lauderdale and her colleagues are analyzing a particular cause of this deadly epidemic in Chicago: prison. Their work triangulates knowledge at the micro scale of how the bacterium passes from one person’s skin to another’s with knowledge at the macro scale that determines whose skin touches whose: how people move in and out of crowded jails, where they live when they leave, what sports they play. The result is increasingly realistic models of interaction between microbes and humans—not only as individuals or as populations, but both at the same time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Faculty Member, Minnesota Population Center - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Linking The Levels Of Human Variation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26566) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-194 — Our Changing Conceptions Of What It Means To Be Human — Howard Gardner > When I take a look at John Brockman’s original list of "hot topics" from a quarter of a century ago, I discern a pattern, or throughline. We live at a time of great, perhaps unprecedented, advances in digital technology (hardware/software) and biological (genetic/brain) research and applications. It’s easy to see these changes as wholly or largely positive, though—as a card-carrying member of the pessimists’ society—I can easily point to problematic aspects as well. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Our Changing Conceptions Of What It Means To Be Human](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26564) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-195 — The Abdication Of Space-Time — Donald D. Hoffman > The standard assumption in perceptual psychology is that evolution favors veridical perceptions, those that accurately describe those aspects of the environment that are crucial to the fitness of an organism. It is not standard to assume that the very space-time format of our perceptions is itself non-veridical, primitive and illusory. How will this field have to change if space and time are themselves illusions? And how will our notions of physical causality have to change? Will these changes affect how we approach the classic mind-body problem, the question of how our conscious experiences are related to our physical bodies and, in particular, to the activity of our brains? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Abdication Of Space-Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26563) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-196 — Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger Of Good Things To Come — Roger Schank > Let’s move on to something more serious. My stomach hurts. I tell this to my wife and she suggests a medicine in the cabinet that she remembers I have used before and reminds me that it helped. Now, suppose that this was not my wife but a computer? Is it an ad? Does it matter? Can we do this. Yes. AI technology could easily employ models of people and there needs. (But, today, we are busy with key words.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger Of Good Things To Come](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26562) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-197 — The Disillusionment Hypothesis And The Decline and Disaffection For Poor White Americans — Richard Nisbett > Over the past 15 years or so, the mortality rate for poorly educated middle-aged whites living in the South and West in the U.S. increased significantly. Mortality did not increase for middle-aged blacks, Hispanics or any other ethnic group, nor for whites in other regions of the country, nor for poorly educated whites in other rich countries. The death rates that are most elevated are those for suicide, cirrhosis of the liver, heroin overdose and other causes suggesting self-destructive behavior. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Disillusionment Hypothesis And The Decline and Disaffection For Poor White Americans](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26561) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-198 — The Most Important X...Y...Z... — Jared Diamond > For instance, marital therapists have identified about 19 independent factors essential to a happy marriage: compatibility about sex, money, religion, politics, in-laws, child-rearing, styles of arguing, and 12 other factors. If a couple agrees about 18 of those factors but can’t resolve a disagreement just about sex (or just about money, or just religion, or…etc.), they are in deep trouble. Hence, if you hear a newly-married couple ask you in all seriousness, “What is the single most important requirement for a happy marriage?” you can bet that that marriage will end in divorce. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles; Author, Upheaval - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Most Important X...Y...Z...](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26559) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2016-199 — Identifying The Principles, Perhaps The Laws, Of Intelligence — Pamela McCorduck > The pursuit is inspired by the general agreement in the sciences of mind that intelligence arises not from the medium that embodies it—whether biological or electronic—but the way interactions among elements in the system are arranged. Intelligence begins when a system identifies a goal, learns (from a teacher, a training set, or an experience) and then moves on autonomously, adapting to a complex, changing environment. Another way of looking at this is that intelligent entities are networks, often hierarchies of intelligent systems, humans certainly among the most complex, but congeries of humans even more so. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Machines Who Think, The Universal Machine, Bounded Rationality, This Could Be Important; Co-author (with Edward Feigenbaum), The Fifth Generation - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Identifying The Principles, Perhaps The Laws, Of Intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26557) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted