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To say NASA has been undergoing some massive administrative changes lately is a huge understatement. One of the more concerning ones, according to a new paper at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Ari Koeppel and Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, is the trend towards the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” - which they argue doesn’t work very well when it comes to producing valuable science.

The recent rapid advance in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) applications I think qualifies as a disruptive technology. The term “disruptive technology” was popularized in 1997 by Clayton M. Christensen. To summarize, a disruptive technology is “an innovation that fundamentally alters the way industries operate, businesses function, or consumers behave, often rendering existing technologies, products, or services obsolete.” AI is potentially so powerful, and changing so quickly, that it is challenging to optimally regulate it. We are caught in a classic dilemma – we do not want to hamper our own competitiveness in a critical new technology, but we also don’t want to unwittingly create new vulnerabilities or unintended negative consequences. For now we seem to be erring on the side of not hampering competitiveness, which basically places us at the tender mercies of tech bros.

Which is partly why I found the conflict between Anthropic and the Department of Defense (still the legal name) so fascinating. In short, Anthropic’s powerful AI application, Claude, has at least two significant internal “red lines” or guardrails – it cannot be used for massive domestic surveillance, and it cannot be used for final military targeting, without a human in the loop. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has not backed down on this – he says that the first restriction on domestic surveillance is simply a matter of ethics. The second restriction, however, is mainly a matter of quality control – their system is still vulnerable to hallucinations and is not reliable enough to count on for final targeting decisions. Hegseth has criticized his concerns as “woke” and a critical vulnerability for the US military. More charitably, he say essentially that the US military is using the application lawfully, and should not be restricted in any lawful use of the software. Others have also stated that in an emergency they have to know the software will do whatever they ask it.

This conflict has many deep implications, and is beyond what I intend for this blog post. What I want to focus on is the fact that an AI application is creating this ethical dilemma, and forcing us to ask – who should control such awesome power, the CEO of a tech company or the Federal government? It seems that we are facing or about to face many similar questions provoked by the disruptive nature of recent AI applications.

Anthropic, in fact, is at the center of another similar discussion, involving the security of the internet. They have a new application, Mythos, which is an AI coding app. Mythos is potentially disruptive in two ways. The first is more mundane, and certainly not unique to mythos – it allows for non-coders to do what is called “vibe coding”, giving an AI coder a natural language description of the application you want, and the AI coder making it. Why this is disruptive is because it takes coding out of the limited hands of a relatively few highly trained and skilled individuals and puts it in the hands of everybody. This can lead to the proliferation of code that has not gone through any rigorous safety testing for vulnerabilities.

But the feature of Mythos that has many experts (including those from Anthropic itself) very concerned is that the program turns out to be excellent at identifying security vulnerabilities in code. I mean – really good. It has found vulnerabilities that have been sitting there unnoticed for years, and can reliably exploit them. When Anthropic realized how good their software was at essentially cracking software security, they had an “Oh, shit” moment. We are at an “inflection point”. Anthropic estimates they are 12-18 months ahead of the competition, so very soon similarly powerful software will proliferate. If we do not lock down critical software infrastructure by then, the internet can be screwed. Much of the internet and many applications run on core software that is open source, maintained by volunteers with shoestring budgets. Mythos has already cracked open some of these core bits of code.

Turning the internet, and essentially the software infrastructure that increasingly runs our world, into a cybersecurity nightmare is, I would imagine, not good for business. So Anthropic has given a preview version of Mythos to a consortium of 40 software companies, including their competitors, to basically give them a head start in finding and fixing any vulnerabilities in their software (which they are calling Project Glasswing). They are also dedicating some money to fund the project, especially for open source software. This all sounds great, and maybe this will fix the problem. Hopefully we will eventually see this as a Y2K situation, the disaster that never happened because we prevented it.

What this affair highlights is how the disruptive nature of AI is creating the potential for significant problems, if we do not stay ahead of it with rational regulation and quality control. It seems that Anthropic is trying to be an ethical and responsible corporate citizen, and that it recognizes the power of its products. Thank goodness for that – imagine if the same tech were in the hands of a less scrupulous or responsible company? It’s pretty easy to imagine. This is happening at a time when the Federal government not only has no apparent interest in regulating AI, they are trying to prevent the states from doing so either. And they are throwing a temper tantrum when they cannot use their new toys without restrictions.

Going forward we should not rely on the noblesse oblige of tech CEOs. We need to make sure that security and ethical restrictions are baked into any new applications. I am all for vibe coding, for example, but such apps need to have rigorous quality control, so we don’t fill the world with the coding equivalent of AI slop, creating a vulnerabilities tsunami. Perhaps this consortium of tech companies will evolve into something bigger – an organization dedicated to safely and securely developing this technology. This means, of course, we need to get buy in from China, which means we need international standards to regulate this tech. I think of it like nuclear weapons. AI is a very different kind of threat, but it is also a powerful technology that would benefit from international agreements so that we don’t accidentally destroy our civilization.

The post AI May Disrupt The Internet first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Today’s photos are of lizards, come from Ephraim Heller, and were taken in Trinidad and Tobago. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Many people have said to me “the hummingbirds are nice, but what about the lizards of Trinidad and Tobago?” Perhaps not literally true, but grant me poetic license. Preparing this post gave me an opportunity to learn about lizards. Trinidad and Tobago is home to about 49 species of lizards in 11 families in 4 clades.

Clade #1: T&T is home to four iguanian families (Iguania): Dactyloidae (anoles), Iguanidae (iguanas), Polychrotidae (polychrotids), and Tropiduridae (treerunners). Iguania are characterized by visual communication (dewlaps, crests, color change), fleshy non-forked tongues, and sit-and-wait predatory behavior, along with various osteological arrangements.

Here’s a Caribbean treerunner (Plica caribeana):

The green Iguana (Iguana iguana) possesses a parietal eye, a small, pale scale on the top of the head that is a photosensory organ, connected to the pineal gland via its own nerve pathway. It cannot form images, but it detects changes in light intensity and shadow, giving the animal an early warning system against aerial predators approaching from above. It also contributes to circadian rhythm regulation and thermoregulation, which is particularly important for a reptile that ferments its food. Green iguanas eat leaves, relying on a hindgut microbial fermentation system to break down plant fiber.

Green iguanas have a social structure. Dominant males hold territories that contain smaller males, females, and juveniles, with larger males claiming better display perches and more access to females. During mating season males shift toward red or orange hues, becoming more conspicuous; a defeated male that loses his territory returns to a dull brown within hours and holds this color until he reclaims his position.

This one is angry with me:

Trinidad has only one native anole, the leaf anole (Anolis planiceps). Other species are introductions that arrived from other Caribbean islands, likely through human commerce. When a leaf anole detects a threat it can run bipedally, a behavior seen in a number of small lizards and interpreted as a burst-speed adaptation.

Here’s an unidentified anole. Perhaps a reader can identify it:

Clade #2: T&T is home to three gecko families (Gekkota): Gekkonidae (true geckos), Phyllodactylidae (leaf-toed geckos), and Sphaerodactylidae (sphaerodactyl geckos).

Gekkota are distinguished primarily by their feet and eyes. Most geckos have adhesive toe pads with microscopic hair-like structures (setae) that generate van der Waals forces, allowing them to cling to smooth surfaces. The eye is typically large with a vertical or elliptical pupil, and the eyelid is fused into a fixed transparent scale (the “spectacle”) rather than a moveable lid.

I photographed the northern turnip-tailed gecko (Thecadactylus rapicauda). The name comes from the tail, a fat-storage organ. It is also detachable: autotomy (self-amputation) serves as a predator-distraction mechanism. The regenerated tail is typically wider at the tip than at the base, allegedly looking like a turnip. One cool but useless fact: this gecko is able to lick the transparent scale covering each eye.

For completeness, here’s a bit of information about the two lizard clades that I did not photograph.

Clade #3: there are two species of Amphisbaenia in the family amphisbaenidae. These are legless worm lizards. Adapted for living underground, the key distinguishing features are: annular (ring-like) body scales arranged in complete rings around the body, which no true lizard possesses; a highly consolidated, rigid skull adapted for head-first burrowing, with the two sides of the skull fused to form a battering ram; vestigial or absent eyes covered by scales; no external ear openings; and reduced or absent limbs in most families. They move using a unique accordion-like rectilinear locomotion rather than lateral undulation. Sadly, I have no photos of worm lizards as they live underground.

Clade #4: finally, there are three scincoid families (Scincoidea): Scincidae (skinks), Teiidae (teiids), and Gymnophthalmidae (microteiids). Scincoidea is defined primarily by molecular phylogenetics, not by a single morphological characteristic. Bony plates underlaying the scales are present in skinks, giving them their characteristic armored, smooth texture.

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The post An Open Letter to Professor Katy Milkman: Don’t Censor John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Emily Oster. Amplify Their Voices. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

In 1934, a Soviet physicist named Pavel Cherenkov shone gamma rays into a bottle of water and noticed a faint blue glow. So had others before him. They all shrugged and moved on. Cherenkov didn't. What he found — by refusing to dismiss something he didn't understand — turned into one of the most useful phenomena in modern physics.

It's obvious that Earth is a planet. It's obvious that the Sun is a star. But for substellar objects like brown dwarfs, it's not so clear. Researchers are using the JWST to find a stronger dividing line between star and planet that depends on how they formed.

A pair of dwarf galaxies in the giant Virgo Cluster show what can happen when these stellar cities interact. Scientists at the University of Michigan focused the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) onto the galaxies NGC 4486B and UCD736 and found each of them sporting "overmassive" black holes at or near their hearts. Those supermassive black holes comprise a large fraction of each galaxy's mass.

On the relationship between the pointless cosmos and purposeful living organisms.

I am a firm believer in miracles—a confession that will be immediately off-putting to readers of Skeptic. Below I will offer a definition of miracles and attempt to justify belief in them, but for the moment I will focus on a fundamental distinction between two modes of causality. I call these because-of causal mode and so-that causal mode. We can think of these as two ways of explaining an event.

Because-of causal mode example: a man walks into a bank and we ask for an explanation. One explanation tells us about the neurons firing in the motor cortex of the brain that excited a cascade of additional neuron firings, and then muscle flexing. And, of course, there was the mass of the body, the friction of shoes against the sidewalk, the heft and leverage of the doorway, and so on. This mechanical explanation makes the event intelligible; it tells us how the event took place. It took place because of all these enabling factors.

So-that causal mode example: There’s another way of making the event intelligible, and that is to explain the purpose of the man’s actions—he went into the bank so-that he could deposit some money. This is a teleological explanation.

The scientific because of explanation is concerned with immediate past events—facts about what things happened and theories about how they happened. Meanwhile, teleological explanations focus on future outcomes involving values. A teleological explanation tells us that an agent is acting for the sake of bringing about an intended state of affairs—causality guided by purpose. All living systems act with purpose; they seek beneficial outcomes; their behaviors are goal-directed, functional. They are about something.

Here we have two modes of causal explanation—both claiming to render events intelligible, but in different ways. There has been a long tradition of attempts to conciliate these two modes of causality, a tradition that I will now grossly oversimplify. Some people say that the so-that mode of causality is a mere illusion, or at best, a convenient pretense. They believe there is only one kind of causality, and that all genuine explanations can be reduced to the logic of because-of causality.

Others believe that teleological explanations are real, insisting that the universe has some sort of inherent or endowed purpose—it has a point, it is about something, for something. The entire universe behaves in the ways it does so-that an ultimate purpose in creation might be achieved. In one approach because-of causality is ultimately real and so-thatcausality is a fantasy. In the other approach so-that causality is ultimately real and the because-of causality of science is merely an instrument for working out an ultimate cosmic purpose.

The cosmic bus isn’t going anywhere that matters. It has no driver and no destination.

Here’s the big question prompted by our encounter with contemporary science: is the grand epic of cosmic evolution in some way driven or guided so-that some destiny might be achieved, or is the cosmos, despite its awesome splendors, ultimately void of genuine meaning or purpose? As Steven Weinberg famously said, “the more we know about the universe the more it appears to be pointless.” There are difficulties with each of these views. If you claim there is genuine meaning somehow inherent in the cosmos, then you must tell us what it is and why we should accept it. But if the claim is that teleological dynamics are not genuinely real, then you are left with the problem of convincing us that meanings (e.g., values, expectations, the force of will) fail to have genuinely real consequences.

I wish to offer a third option, one that avoids both problems. This view says that all the elements of so-that causality (goal-directed behavior) are genuinely real phenomena, but they are recent and unintended emergents of because-of dynamics.

We might frame this emergence view in terms of two different perspectives on the nature of matter: the grunge theory and the glitz theory of matter. The grunge theory says that matter isn’t much—it’s just some sort of vague or chaotic and uninteresting stuff that becomes interesting only when the laws of nature or the will of God whip it into shape. So the grunge theory appears to assign matter to one domain, while relegating both natural law and divine purpose to another. 

I want to reject the dualism of this view in favor of what I’m calling the glitz theory of matter, which holds that there are no independently real laws of nature. What we have are simply the properties of matter. A law of nature is just something we formulate as we observe regularities in the properties of matter. If we take this view then we can see that matter is not boring grunge, but wonderfully interesting and creative stuff. What makes it interesting: when certain properties of matter interact with other properties of matter, we find increasing probabilities that novel and unanticipated properties of matter will emerge spontaneously.

Here’s a simple illustration: Oxygen and hydrogen atoms have distinctive properties, and when they interact they can produce water molecules, which present new properties not found in either oxygen or hydrogen. And then the interaction of water properties with other properties of matter will increase the probability of even more novel properties. And, as proposed above, the emergence of new properties of matter may result in the formulation of completely new laws of nature. All of this follows the straight-forward logic of because-of causality. As interactions continue the probability of getting large molecules will increase, and when you have interactions between large molecules, then the probability of emergent living systems will increase dramatically. And as living creatures arrive on the scene, so too does the visionary logic of so-that causality. In a fundamental sense, the story of creation is a story about shifting probabilities and how these result in the various entities, events, properties and relations that make up the natural world.

I want to suggest that the goal-directed causal dynamics of teleology amounts to an emergent property of living systems. Before the appearance of living systems causality was limited to because-of dynamics, but with life comes purpose and value. Now agency enters the picture and things begin to matter. Living systems behave in certain ways so-that they will survive and reproduce. Molecules don’t do this. Molecules are created and constrained entirely by the care-less dynamics of because-of causality. But when molecules get really complex and interactive then it becomes more and more probable that they will gang up and behave according to a completely new mode of causality. This does not mean that because-ofcausality becomes overruled or deactivated. It means only that the because-of dynamics have called into play additional sets of anticipatory, goal-directed algorithms. 

A meaningless universe has inadvertently, accidentally and aimlessly created the conditions for meaningfulness.

Purposeful behavior and meaningfulness are real phenomena, not illusory; but they are also recent (~4 billion years ago) and localized (on Earth, at least). This suggests that the cosmos itself is essentially absurd—it has no meaning; it is not guided or coaxed by any agent or purpose. It is not about anything. However, without question, there are pockets of genuine meaning and purpose within the cosmos, as we are here to attest. The cosmic bus isn’t going anywhere that matters. It has no driver and no destination. But there are living beings on the bus, and they hustle here and there with all kinds of determination. My life, your life, all our lives, can be rich and full of meaning without having to claim they have cosmic significance. Life can be worth living even if we are not the point of some cosmic drama. The thing that impresses me most about the cosmic drama is that a meaningless universe has inadvertently, accidentally and aimlessly created the conditions for meaningfulness. This mysterious and wonderfully ironic accident—dare I say, “miracle”?—takes my breath away. 

By “miracle” I do not mean an impossible event occurring at the behest of an all-powerful supernatural agent. I mean only this: any event, the occurrence of which is considered to be so radically improbable as to be virtually impossible. (I am excluding logically impossible events from discussion because they have a probability of zero—even gods cannot square circles). A miracle is an event having a probability value so close to zero that you cannot imagine any conditions under which it might occur. Given these terms, it might be said with good reason that many miracles have occurred in our universe—it’s just that they never occur before their time.

A thought experiment might help to clarify this. Suppose we place ourselves backward in time to some point immediately after the primordial Big Bang, when the universe was nothing but a raging inferno (no quarks, no atoms, just pure radiation) and consider the prospect of a supernova. Nothing that might have been known of the natural world at the time could possibly predict or explain the formation of stars, not to mention their fusion and expulsion of atoms. The very idea of such events would be considered so improbable as to be preposterous, impossible, and contrary to nature.

 Life can be worth living even if we are not the point of some cosmic drama.

Or, let us go back a mere four billion years. Again, at that point we would be completely incredulous if faced with the notion that billions of tiny objects would soon be exploring about on our young planet and behaving in complex patterns that defy all that could possibly be known at the time about the natural order of things. And yet, lo and behold, living beings emerged, not because of some magic wand, and not because of necessity, but rather because a countless series of unpredictable probability-enhancing events brought forth the enabling conditions. 

We have the meaning-bearing lives we do because they were made incrementally less improbable by the epic events of cosmic evolution, whereby matter was distilled out of radiant energy, segregated into galaxies, collapsed into stars, fused into atoms, swirled into planets, spliced into molecules, captured into cells, mutated into species, compromised into ecosystems, provoked into thought, and cajoled into cultures. Surely, there is nothing intellectually shameful about embracing the staggering beauty and the humbling fortuity of these events as … miraculous.

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