Sara Imari Walker

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.

Even today, we can’t really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers.

Read the full article at: theconversation.com

Melanie Mitchell and David C. Krakauer

PNAS 120 (13) e2215907120

We survey a current, heated debate in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community on whether large pretrained language models can be said to understand language—and the physical and social situations language encodes—in any humanlike sense. We describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding and key questions for the broader sciences of intelligence that have arisen in light of these arguments. We contend that an extended science of intelligence can be developed that will provide insight into distinct modes of understanding, their strengths and limitations, and the challenge of integrating diverse forms of cognition.

Read the full article at: www.pnas.org

Dirk Helbing, Florian Abeillon

Since centuries, science has been a collective endeavor to create an increasingly better picture of the world, and scientific indicators have often served as a useful orientation. Recent developments, however, raise the question whether digital platforms create or amplify biases in science? Could this reduce our ability to observe, evaluate and communicate facts objectively?

Read the full article at: www.researchgate.net

Zhuangyuan Fan, Tianyu Su, Maoran Sun, Ariel Noyman, Fan Zhang, Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Esteban Moro
PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2023, pgad077,

Urban density, in the form of residents’ and visitors’ concentration, is long considered to foster diverse exchanges of interpersonal knowledge and skills, which are intrinsic to sustainable human settlements. However, with current urban studies primarily devoted to city- and district-level analyses, we cannot unveil the elemental connection between urban density and diversity. Here we use an anonymized and privacy-enhanced mobile dataset of 0.5 million opted-in users from three metropolitan areas in the United States to show that at the scale of urban streets, density is not the only path to diversity. We represent the diversity of each street with the experienced social mixing (ESM), which describes the chances of people meeting diverse income groups throughout their daily experience. We conduct multiple experiments and show that the concentration of visitors only explains 26% of street-level ESM. However, adjacent amenities, residential diversity, and income level account for 44% of the ESM. Moreover, using longitudinal business data, we show that streets with an increased number of food businesses have seen an increased ESM from 2016 to 2018. Lastly, although streets with more visitors are more likely to have crime, diverse streets tend to have fewer crimes. These findings suggest that cities can leverage many tools beyond density to curate a diverse and safe street experience for people.

Read the full article at: academic.oup.com

Carl T. Bergstrom & C. Brandon Ogbunu

A better term for this behavior comes from a concept that has nothing to do with medicine, engineering, or technology. When AI chatbots flood the world with false facts, confidently asserted, they’re not breaking down, glitching out, or hallucinating. No, they’re bullshitting.

Read the full article at: undark.org