In this article, we will review reader responses to the September 2023 issue of Scientific American. We will cover various topics including artificial intelligence, black holes, vaccine improvement, imagination, creativity, and the mysterious beauty of the universe, among other interesting subjects. We will showcase readers’ responses and the editors’ answers to these messages.
Intelligent Exploration
In the article “The Mystery of Artificial Intelligence,” George Maeser points out the “explorations” that can examine the methods of artificial intelligence in producing its results. Does this not effectively resolve the “black box” problem that AI experts frequently refer to? How does the hypothetical black box differ from the internal operations of the AI that these explorations reveal?
Elise Corbin Toronto
Maeser responds: explorations do not solve the black box problem on their own – they are merely one research tool. They can reveal how sets of artificial neural cells are encoded in a high-level information network, such as parts of speech or chess positions. Researchers first decide on the information they wish to explore and then design an exploration to discover and translate it into a form readable by humans. The exploration can analyze whether the network is merely repeating training data or recognizing patterns within it. However, explorations only reveal the presence of information, not how the network uses it to arrive at a particular conclusion. Researchers still need to track how information flows through the system.
Dying Black Holes
In the article “The Disappearance,” Adam Mann discusses the evaporation of black holes, among other things. I wondered what happens when the mass of an evaporating black hole shrinks to the point where its gravity is not strong enough to prevent the escape of electromagnetic radiation. Does the rest of the black hole become visible? What does it look like? What is the remaining material?
Glenn P. Davis Hamilton, Ontario
The editors respond: current theories suggest that at the minimum mass of an evaporating black hole, the black hole will emit an electromagnetic jet of gamma rays as its “final act” before disappearing from existence. The evaporation occurs so slowly that all known black holes need much longer than the age of the universe to reach this point. Thus, astronomers have used the non-detection of distinctive gamma-ray bursts to estimate the limits of abundance for low-mass primordial black holes that may have formed after the Big Bang.
Vaccine Improvement
As a physician and vaccine scientist, I am excited that scientists have mastered the ability to distinguish the F protein shapes of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) that protect and enhance disease, as explained in “The Long Shot” by Tara Hill. This progress has made it possible to build safe and protective RSV vaccines that avoid vaccine-associated enhancement disease (VAED), some of which have recently been licensed. VAED consists of two somewhat different immune diseases: antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which I discovered in the late 1970s, and vaccine-associated hypersensitivity (VAH). Essential ADE contributes to dengue fever infections because dengue viruses form immune complexes with immunoglobulin G antibodies. These complexes cause productive cellular infection in macrophages that lead to the release of high concentrations of the toxic NS1, a viral protein that damages the endothelial cell layer and causes dengue shock syndrome. Several vaccine formulations have resulted in advanced tissue dissemination of VAH, sometimes with lethal immune responses, such as formalin-treated measles vaccine and previous RSV vaccines given to children, as well as killed SARS and MERS vaccines given to monkeys.
Scott P. Halstead Westwood, Massachusetts
Imagination and Creativity
Thank you for Robert Martin’s article “Dementia Can Free Creativity.” My mother-in-law, as her Alzheimer’s disease progresses, has been able to recite large amounts of meaningful poetry from memory. She had no previous inclination towards writing at all. I could never understand poetic creativity, let alone in a person who needs help performing basic life tasks. It is nice to know she wasn’t the only one. I wonder if some hallucinogenic drugs could work in the same way.
Edwin Hawkins via email
The Mysterious Beauty
In “Wonders of the Sky,” Peter Toothill makes an almost side-by-side comparison of images of the dust surrounding a binary star system. One of the depictions is a complex computer simulation, while the other is a photograph of bright craters in vibrant colors taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. They seem to be perfectly identical and equal in beauty. My appreciation for theoretical physicists and their ability to replicate the real world increases.
Joseph S. Nardillo Medford, New Jersey
I Don’t Think AI
In “Protecting AI is Everyone’s Responsibility” [Science Agenda], the editors state: “Essentially, AI is a computational process looking for patterns or similarities in vast quantities of data fed to it.” I find it hard to accept this definition of artificial intelligence as accurate because I believe that intelligence is the opposite of mechanical data computation: it is the creation of new ideas from limited, incomplete, and often contradictory data, or even without any pre-existing data. I think we should tone down the current hype surrounding AI by emphasizing this fundamental essence of intelligence.
Regulation should cover all systems or products that produce “human-like output.” It should require these systems or products to include unremovable source labels in their outputs to prevent exploitation and fraud. Perhaps the content obfuscation method described in “Out of Sight” by Dina Ginkina [Progress] could be used to create such digital watermarks. Additionally, the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) offers an open standard for including content credentials in various files. Already, camera manufacturers are bringing products to market that include the ability to embed content credentials in original images.
Robert Braun Hard, Austria
Built to Last
Naomi Oreskes’ article “Social Security and Science” [The Observer, May 2023] carries a mix of information, history, and wise commentary on a single printed page more than I thought possible. Being in my eighties, I especially enjoyed her praise for older productive things that only need minor adjustments from time to time to remain useful.
James Lucy Alt Emporda, Catalonia
Correction
In “The Grass Went,” by Jesse Greenspan [Progress], it incorrectly stated that no mammals were observed at the study site. As shown in the related chart, bats were seen. During one night of research, no wingless small animals were found.
In “A Gamble in the Stratospheric Layer,” by Douglas Fox [October 2023], the chart depicting the intersection area of tropical winds and trade winds did not accurately represent the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation cells known as Ferrel Cells. The corrected chart can be seen at the following link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-engineer-the-sky
This article titled “Messages” was published in Scientific American, Volume 330, Issue 1 (January 2024), Page 8.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/readers-respond-to-the-september-2023-issue/
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