In my last posting, I introduced some issues at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and morality. While I’ve long been interested in this nexus, the most immediate impetus for the posting was meeting Peter Singer, author of the excellent book “Wired for War” about the rise of unmanned warfare, while simultaneously working for the TV show “Caprica” and a U.S. military research agency that funds some of the work in my laboratory on bio-inspired robotics. “Caprica,” for those who don’t know it, is a show about a time when humans invent sentient robotic warriors. “Caprica” is a prequel to “Battlestar Galatica,” and as we know from that show, these warriors rise up against humans and nearly drive them to extinction.

Here, I’d like to push the idea that as interesting as the technical challenges in making sentient robots like those on “Caprica” are, equally interesting are the moral challenges of making such machines. But “interesting” is too dispassionate—I believe that we need to begin the conversation on these moral challenges. Roboticist Ron Arkin has been making this point for some time, and has written a book on how we may integrate ethical decision-making into autonomous robots.

Given that we are hardly at the threshold of building sentient robots, it may seem overly dramatic to characterize this as an urgent concern, but new developments in the way we wage war should make you think otherwise. (Read more…)

Two parts of my life recently collided. Two ironies, really. First, after growing up off the grid, without TV (or school, for that matter, but that’s another story), with parents who had only disdain for TV and popular culture, I find myself working for a new cable TV show.  The show, called “Caprica,” is about a time when humans develop advanced robots for warfare. These robots, the “Cylons,” eventually develop a mind of their own, begin to resent their enslavement to humans, rise up, and nearly extinguish their makers. This part of the story will be familiar to fans of the TV series “Battlestar Galactica,” which Caprica is a prequel to. I work as a technical script consultant for the show. This means I read pre-production scripts with an eye to making the robotics, artificial intelligence, and other such sci-tech in the show more realistic.

Some publicity about my involvement with Caprica led directly to the second irony. Last week, Northwestern University hosted Peter Singer, author of “Wired for War”, a recent bestseller about the perils of robotic warfare.  I was invited to meet with him for dinner after his talk.  The only problem was that it was on the same day that I had a meeting at the headquarters of a military research agency in Washington DC, which is funding some of the research in my laboratory in the area of biologically-inspired robotics.  I was able to shift to an earlier flight so I could catch the last part of Singer’s evening talk and join him for dinner.

Robotic warfare, as we all know from media reports about drones, is of rapidly growing importance. (Read more…)

How should we help our children deal with horrible events they witness or are told about from history? It’s a hard problem. Often the solution is simply to avoid the issue until an age is reached at which a young person can handle it. Then there are various approximations of the truth, made into a form that can be in some way understood by minds that are still under construction.

Here I want to tell you about another approach that could be called “therapy through play.” The idea seems to be inspired by approaches where a phobic person is slowly exposed to the situation eliciting fear, and through repetition the phobia is slowly diminished.

I’ll give two examples of this approach in action. In 2003 FEMA published a coloring book for kids about the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Entitled “A scary thing happened,” the book contains drawings of the towers in various states of destruction that kids are meant to color in. Here’s the cover of that book:

I can only imagine a parent intoning to their traumatized child: “That’s great Johnny, but don’t you want to color in the people jumping off the buildings?” (Read more…)

My last posting, asking whether the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine should be shuttered, has generated some interesting comments. The most interesting was provided by reader Alexandria Kung, who suggested that any movement to banish NCCAM constitutes medical ethnocentrism (see the fifth comment here). Her idea is that westernized medicine is not the only way to heal people, and that we need something like NCCAM to investigate healing approaches from other cultures and traditions. We have more common ground than might be expected.

In my response, I would like to be clear that I strongly believe a proposition that I’ve learned is viewed skeptically by many in the complementary medicine community: science is not just another religion.

That is, the results of science cannot be viewed with the same relativism that would be appropriate when considering, say, different moral attitudes about wasting water in desert versus temperate cultures. Science is a method of inquiry for obtaining understanding about natural phenomena. (Read more…)

The NCCAM was set up under the NIH in 1992 through the effort of Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), with an initial outlay of $2 million of federal funding. Since then it has grown to a budget of $122 million.

Its mission is to investigate alternative medical practices such as acupuncture, homeopathy, and natureopathy.  Another part of the NIH also studies these types of treatments, for a total annual outlay of $300 million. Thanks to the efforts of the Science Based Medicine blog, Steven Salzberg’s blog on pseudoscience, and an article and blog posting in the Washington Post, this expenditure is now receiving some scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the scientific record for the alternative approaches that NCCAM has investigated have not been encouraging. (Read more…)

In the past two postings I’ve talked about my experience working with the Science Entertainment Exchange, which aims to improve the quality of science in movies and other forms of entertainment by connecting movie and TV people with scientists who have expertise in something related to their story lines. In my last posting, I addressed some creative ways in which scientists and engineers can be helpful in this endeavor. In this posting, I will address how the entertainment industry can further the agenda of scientists and engineers.

Ten years ago, while I was doing my PhD in neuroscience at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, the ABC TV news show “Primetime Live” decided to do an exposé on wasteful government funding of science. Their strategy was to ask the main funding agencies for a list of the titles of currently funded projects and pick the ones that sounded the most “out there.” Since my lab was studying prey capture in weakly-electric fish, the project I was working on got picked. Luckily, the executive producer was well informed about science and after trips to several of the labs, where he found that the selected projects had excellent justifications, they switched the tone of the show. It became about how seemingly strange and obscure basic science projects have led to revolutions in our understanding of everything from genetics to brain plasticity. (Read more…)

At the end of my last posting, I promised to tell a bit about my meeting with the makers of TRON 2 at a studio in LA. We met in a beautiful high-tech conference room with loads of food, a videographer recording the proceedings, and what looked to be part of some giant gear system excised from a sunken ship quietly decorating a corner. This lent an air of steampunk to the feel of the room.

The TRON 2 people solicited comments from us on the draft script that we had all read (while under careful watch from a production assistant) and then asked us for help with some specific problems they were having. It was an energetic and intense exchange, the kind where jumping in has to occur at the expense of interrupting someone. This was all done in contracted confidence for obvious reasons, so not much can be said about the specifics of what we discussed.

Participating in the exchange brought many questions to my mind about what ways entertainment industry folks and scientists can help one another.  There are two ways that seem interesting, one I call Truth is Stranger than Fiction and one I call You Gotta Know the Laws to Break ‘Em. (Read more…)

Welcome to my corner – or loose confederacy of evanescent electrons – of the Science in Society Blog. My primary charges are issues in brain science and engineering, my main areas of research. I’m an assistant professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. Because two departments means only two Christmas parties, clearly not enough, I’m also adjunct in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology.

My background is quite varied, with degrees in philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience, and on-the-job training in artificial intelligence and mechanical engineering. A highly abbreviated history is that I started out with the aim of making an artificially intelligent system with human-like capabilities, and I’ve settled for the more practical goal of making an artificially intelligent fish. This work is driven by more general questions about the ways in which the body is clever, and how that fits with more readily recognized forms of cleverness that are identified with the nervous system. The body evolved in close coordination with the nervous system over the past 635 million years, so it should be no surprise that there’s a lot going on in that interaction. The main approaches I use for working on these problems are biological investigations, computer simulations, and robotics.

I’m excited by this opportunity to blog about issues at the intersection of science and society, as I’ve long been interested in bringing research to the broader community. In the past I’ve done this through an interactive art installation project in LA and through working on projects between Northwestern University and the Shedd Aquarium.

Most recently, I was involved with the Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). SEE is a new program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, with the goal of connecting entertainment industry folks (thus far, mostly movie types) with scientists. (Read more…)