Representante da médium que teria o poder de desviar chuvas e controlar o tempo tem encontro virtual com equipe técnica de Bento Albuquerque
Por Cleo Guimarães. Atualizado em 15 out 2021, 17h30; Publicado em 15 out 2021, 13h24
Bento Albuquerque, ministro de Minas e Energia: sua equipe ouviu dicas e conselhos do representante da médium que incorpora o Cacique Cobra Coral Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil
Vale tudo para enfrentar a pior seca dos últimos 91 anos, inclusive recorrer à paranormalidade. Porta-voz de Adelaide Scritori – a médium que, ao incorporar o Cacique Cobra Coral, teria o poder de desviar chuvas e controlar o tempo -, Osmar Santos participou nesta quinta (14) de uma reunião com três integrantes da equipe técnica do ministro de Minas e Energia, Bento Albuquerque. O assunto foi um só: a crise hídrica no país.
reprodução/Reprodução
Osmar diz que em agosto a Fundação enviou um alerta ao governo federal, no qual alertava para os riscos de um apagão, caso a estiagem permanecesse por mais de um mês. O encontro virtual aconteceu nesta quinta (14) e, segundo Guilherme Godoi, um dos técnicos do Ministério na reunião, não houve avanço. “Simplesmente ouvimos o que ele tinha a dizer. Nosso trabalho é técnico”. Já Osmar garante que a médium vai trazer “muita chuva” para Minas Gerais a partir do mês que vem.
A falta de chuvas, como se sabe, reduziu a níveis críticos os reservatórios das usinas hidroelétricas. Por isso, foram acionadas as termoelétricas, que usam combustíveis fósseis, mais caros. O custo é repassado aos consumidores residenciais, comerciais e industriais, o que pressiona a inflação ao produtor e ao consumidor.
É tamanha a certeza expressa, ontem, pelo presidente Bolsonaro de que chuvas recentes em algumas regiões do país afastaram o risco de um apagão de eletricidade que, na última quinta-feira, a convite do ministro Bento Albuquerque, de Minas e Energia, desembarcou às pressas em Brasília o cidadão Osmar Santos.
Osmar é o porta-voz de Adelaide Scritori, a médium paulista que diz incorporar o espírito da entidade Cacique Cobra Coral, detentora do poder de desviar chuvas e controlar o tempo. Osmar contou à VEJA que ouviu o apelo da equipe técnica do ministro: “Faça chover”. E que ele respondeu que o Cacique fará chover.
O encontro deveu-se ao fato de que a médium, em agosto último, alertou o governo federal sobre os riscos de um apagão no país a partir deste sábado, 16 de outubro. “Seria a data limite”, segundo Osmar. “Alguma coisa tinha que ser feita com urgência”. Então se fez a reunião urgente, embora em cima da hora.
Agora está tudo nas mãos de Deus. Ou melhor: do Cacique Cobra Coral.
Ministério de Minas e Energia confirma reunião com equipe de Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral
17.out.2021 às 17h02; Atualizado: 17.out.2021 às 19h35
O Ministério de Minas e Energia reuniu-se recentemente com representantes da Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral para tratar da questão da crise hídrica que secou reservatórios de hidrelétricas do país neste ano. A reunião foi divulgada pela revista Veja na sexta-feira (15).
A pasta confirmou a reunião com representantes da entidade esotérica, a quem é atribuída poderes de intervenção no clima, em comunicado divulgado à imprensa neste domingo (17), que responde reportagens publicadas sobre o encontro.
Segundo o comunicado, que não cita quando a reunião foi realizada, o encontro não foi pedido pelo ministério, mas ocorreu em atendimento a “princípios da transparência e do diálogo franco”.
O ministério, que diz receber centenas de pedidos de audiência, afirmou que apenas aceitou o encontro com representantes da entidade e reproduziu email recebido no início de setembro em que representante da entidade chamado Osmar Santos pediu uma reunião com o ministro Bento Albuquerque.
O assunto da reunião seria “tratar da tragédia econômica x energética… e os meios para recuperar tais precipitações irregulares no lugar certo ainda na estação inverno que se finda e primavera”, segundo a mensagem reproduzida pelo comunicado do ministério, que ressalta que Albuquerque não participou da reunião.
“Durante a audiência, o senhor Osmar (diretor de relações governamentais do instituto) relatou aos técnicos do MME que o instituto faz serviços de previsões dos mais variados tipos”, afirmou a pasta. “Como servidores públicos, os servidores do MME apenas e tão somente ouviram as informações do senhor Osmar”, acrescentou o ministério.
Na semana passada, o Operador Nacional do Sistema Elétrico (ONS) afirmou que a projeção para o nível das represas de hidrelétricas do país é que eles cheguem até o fim do mês com 16,7% da sua capacidade na região Sudeste/Centro-Oeste, contra projeção de 15,2% feita na semana anterior.
O ONS afirmou ainda que vê ainda um cenário “bastante preocupante” para 2022 e recomendou que o país permaneça mobilizado para enfrentar a próxima estação seca.
por El País Brasil – Publicado 14/10/2021 às 17:13 – Atualizado 14/10/2021 às 18:46
Por Byung-Chul Han, em entrevista a Sergio C. Fanjul, no El País
Com certa vertigem, o mundo material, feito de átomos e moléculas, de coisas que podemos tocar e cheirar, está se dissolvendo em um mundo de informação, de não-coisas, como observa o filósofo alemão de origem coreana Byung-Chul Han. Não-coisas que, ainda assim, continuamos desejando, comprando e vendendo, que continuam nos influenciando. O mundo digital cada vez se hibridiza de modo mais notório com o que ainda consideramos mundo real, ao ponto de confundirem-se entre si, fazendo a existência cada vez mais intangível e fugaz. O último livro do pensador, Não-coisas. Quebras no mundo de hoje, se une a uma série de pequenos ensaios em que o pensador sucesso de vendas (o chamaram de rockstar da filosofia) disseca minuciosamente as ansiedades que o capitalismo neoliberal nos produz.
Unindo citações frequentes aos grandes filósofos e elementos da cultura popular, os textos de Han transitam do que chamou de “a sociedade do cansaço”, em que vivemos esgotados e deprimidos pelas inapeláveis exigências da existência, à análise das novas formas de entretenimento que nos oferecem. Da psicopolítica, que faz com que as pessoas aceitem se render mansamente à sedução do sistema, ao desaparecimento do erotismo que Han credita ao narcisismo e exibicionismo atual, que proliferam, por exemplo, nas redes sociais: a obsessão por si mesmo faz com que os outros desapareçam e o mundo seja um reflexo de nossa pessoa. O pensador reivindica a recuperação do contato íntimo com a cotidianidade – de fato, é sabido que ele gosta de cultivar lentamente um jardim, trabalhos manuais, o silêncio. E se rebela contra “o desaparecimento dos rituais” que faz com que a comunidade desapareça e que nos transformemos em indivíduos perdidos em sociedades doentes e cruéis.
Byung-Chul Han aceitou esta entrevista como EL PAÍS, mas somente mediante um questionário por e-mail que foi respondido em alemão pelo filósofo e posteriormente traduzido e editado.
PERGUNTA. Como é possível que em um mundo obcecado pela hiperprodução eo hiperconsumo, ao mesmo tempo os objetos vão se dissolvendo e vamos rumo a um mundo de não-coisas?
RESPOSTA. Há, sem dúvida, uma hiperinflação de objetos que conduz a sua proliferação explosiva. Mas se trata de objetos descartáveis com os quais não estabelecemos laços afetivos. Hoje estamos obcecados não com as coisas, e sim com informações e dados, ou seja, não-coisas. Hoje somos todos infômanos. Chegou a se falar de datasexuais [pessoas que compilam e compartilham obsessivamente informação sobre sua vida pessoal].
P. Nesse mundo que o senhor descreve, de hiperconsumo e perda de laços, por que é importante ter “coisas queridas” e estabelecer rituais?
R. As coisas são os apoios que dão tranquilidade na vida. Hoje em dia estão em conjunto obscurecidas pelas informações. O smartphone não é uma coisa. Eu o caracterizo como o infômata que produz e processa informações. As informações são todo o contrário aos apoios que dão tranquilidade à vida. Vivem do estímulo da surpresa. Elas nos submergem em um turbilhão de atualidade. Também os rituais, como arquiteturas temporais, dão estabilidade à vida. A pandemia destruiu essas estruturas temporais. Pense no teletrabalho. Quando o tempo perde sua estrutura, a depressão começa a nos afetar.
P. Em seu livro se estabelece que, pela digitalização, nos transformaremos em homo ludens, focados mais no lazer do que no trabalho. Mas, com a precarização e a destruição do emprego, todos poderemos ter acesso a essa condição?
R. Falei de um desemprego digital que não é determinado pela conjuntura. A digitalização levará a um desemprego maciço. Esse desemprego representará um problema muito sério no futuro. O futuro humano consistirá na renda básica e nos jogos de computador? Um panorama desalentador. Com panem et circenses (pão e circo) Juvenal se refere à sociedade romana em que a ação política não é possível. As pessoas se mantêm contentes com alimentos gratuitos e jogos espetaculares. A dominação total é aquela em que as pessoas só se dedicam a jogar. A recente e hiperbólica série coreana da Netflix, Round 6, em que todo mundo só se dedica ao jogo, aponta nessa direção.
P. Em que sentido?
R. Essas pessoas estão totalmente endividadas e se entregam a esse jogo mortal que promete ganhos enormes. Round 6 representa um aspecto central do capitalismo em um formato extremo. Walter Benjamin já disse que o capitalismo representa o primeiro caso de um culto que não é expiatório, e sim nos endivida. No começo da digitalização se sonhava que ela substituiria o trabalho pelo jogo. Na verdade, o capitalismo digital explora impiedosamente a pulsão humana pelo jogo. Pense nas redes sociais, que incorporam elementos lúdicos para provocar o vício nos usuários.
P. De fato, o smatphone nos prometia certa liberdade… Não se transformou em uma longa corrente que nos aprisiona onde quer que estejamos?
R. O smartphone é hoje um lugar de trabalho digital e um confessionário digital. Todo dispositivo, toda técnica de dominação gera artigos cultuados que são utilizados à subjugação. É assim que a dominação se consolida. O smartphone é o artigo de culto da dominação digital. Como aparelho de subjugação age como um rosário e suas contas; é assim que mantemos o celular constantemente nas mãos. O like é o amém digital. Continuamos nos confessando. Por decisão própria, nos desnudamos. Mas não pedimos perdão, e sim que prestem atenção em nós.
P. Há quem tema que a internet das coisas possa significar algo assim como a rebelião dos objetos contra o ser humano.
R. Não exatamente. A smarthome [casa inteligente] com coisas interconectadas representa uma prisão digital. A smartbed [cama inteligente] com sensores prolonga a vigilância também durante as horas de sono. A vigilância vai se impondo de maneira crescente e sub-reptícia na vida cotidiana como se fosse o conveniente. As coisas informatizadas, ou seja, os infômatas, se revelam como informadores eficientes que nos controlam e dirigem constantemente.
P.O senhor descreveu como o trabalho vai ganhando caráter de jogo, as redes sociais, paradoxalmente, nos fazem sentir mais livres, o capitalismo nos seduz. O sistema conseguiu se meter dentro de nós para nos dominar de uma maneira até prazerosa para nós mesmos?
R. Somente um regime repressivo provoca a resistência. Pelo contrário, o regime neoliberal, que não oprime a liberdade, e sim a explora, não enfrenta nenhuma resistência. Não é repressor, e sim sedutor. A dominação se torna completa no momento em que se apresenta como a liberdade.
P. Por que, apesar da precariedade e da desigualdade crescentes, dos riscos existenciais etc., o mundo cotidiano nos países ocidentais parece tão bonito, hiperplanejado, e otimista? Por que não parece um filme distópico e cyberpunk?
R. O romance 1984 de George Orwell se transformou há pouco tempo em um sucesso de vendas mundial. As pessoas têm a sensação de que algo não anda bem com nossa zona de conforto digital. Mas nossa sociedade se parece mais a Admirável Mundo Novo de Aldous Huxley. Em 1984 as pessoas são controladas pela ameaça de machucá-las. Em Admirável Mundo Novo são controladas pela administração de prazer. O Estado distribui uma droga chamada “soma” para que todo mundo se sinta feliz. Esse é nosso futuro.
P. O senhor sugere que a Inteligência Artificial e o big data não são formas de conhecimento tão espantosas como nos fazem crer, e sim mais “rudimentares”. Por que?
R. O big data dispõe somente de uma forma muito primitiva de conhecimento, a saber, a correlação: acontece A, então ocorre B. Não há nenhuma compreensão. A Inteligência Artificial não pensa. A Inteligência Artificial não sente medo.
P.Blaise Pascal disse que a grande tragédia do ser humano é que não pode ficar quieto sem fazer nada. Vivemos em um culto à produtividade, até mesmo nesse tempo que chamamos “livre”. O senhor o chamou, com grande sucesso, de a sociedade do cansaço. Nós deveríamos nos fixar na recuperação do próprio tempo como um objetivo político?
R. A existência humana hoje está totalmente absorvida pela atividade. Com isso se faz completamente explorável. A inatividade volta a aparecer no sistema capitalista de dominação com incorporação de algo externo. É chamado tempo de ócio. Como serve para se recuperar do trabalho, permanece vinculado ao mesmo. Como derivada do trabalho constitui um elemento funcional dentro da produção. Precisamos de uma política da inatividade. Isso poderia servir para liberar o tempo das obrigações da produção e tornar possível um tempo de ócio verdadeiro.
P.Como se combina uma sociedade que tenta nos homogeneizar e eliminar as diferenças, com a crescente vontade das pessoas em ser diferentes dos outros, de certo modo, únicas?
R. Todo mundo hoje quer ser autêntico, ou seja, diferente dos outros. Dessa forma, estamos nos comparando o tempo todo com os outros. É justamente essa comparação que nos faz todos iguais. Ou seja: a obrigação de ser autênticos leva ao inferno dos iguais.
P. Precisamos de mais silêncio? Ficar mais dispostos a escutar o outro?
R. Precisamos que a informação se cale. Caso contrário, explorará nosso cérebro. Hoje entendemos o mundo através das informações. Assim a vivência presencial se perde. Nós nos desconectamos do mundo de modo crescente. Vamos perdendo o mundo. O mundo é mais do que a informação. A tela é uma representação pobre do mundo. Giramos em círculo ao redor de nós mesmos. O smartphone contribui decisivamente a essa percepção pobre de mundo. Um sintoma fundamental da depressão é a ausência de mundo.
P.A depressão é um dos mais alarmantes problemas de saúde contemporâneos. Como essa ausência do mundo opera?
R. Na depressão perdemos a relação com o mundo, com o outro. E nos afundamos em um ego difuso. Penso que a digitalização, e com ela o smartphone, nos transformam em depressivos. Há histórias de dentistas que contam que seus pacientes se aferram aos seus telefones quando o tratamento é doloroso. Por que o fazem? Graças ao celular sou consciente de mim mesmo. O celular me ajuda a ter a certeza de que vivo, de que existo. Dessa forma nos aferramos ao celular em situações críticas, como o tratamento dental. Eu lembro que quando era criança apertava a mão de minha mãe no dentista. Hoje a mãe não dá a mão à criança, e sim o celular para que se agarre a ele. A sustentação não vem dos outros, e sim de si mesmo. Isso nos adoece. Temos que recuperar o outro.
P.Segundo o filósofo Fredric Jameson é mais fácil imaginar o fim do mundo do que o fim do capitalismo. O senhor imaginou algum modo de pós-capitalismo agora que o sistema parece em decadência?
R. O capitalismo corresponde realmente às estruturas instintivas do homem. Mas o homem não é só um ser instintivo. Temos que domar, civilizar e humanizar o capitalismo. Isso também é possível. A economia social de mercado é uma demonstração. Mas nossa economia está entrando em uma nova época, a época da sustentabilidade.
P.O senhor se doutorou com uma tese sobre Heidegger, que explorou as formas mais abstratas de pensamento e cujos textos são muito obscuros até o profano. O senhor, entretanto, consegue aplicar esse pensamento abstrato a assuntos que qualquer um pode experimentar. A filosofia deve se ocupar mais do mundo em que a maior parte da população vive?
R. Michel Foucault define a filosofia como uma espécie de jornalismo radical, e se considera a si mesmo jornalista. Os filósofos deveriam se ocupar sem rodeios do hoje, da atualidade. Nisso sigo Foucault. Eu tento interpretar o hoje em pensamentos. Esses pensamentos são justamente o que nos fazem livres.
Placing our faith in forecasting and science could save lives and money
Oliver Uberti
October 14, 2021
2021 is shaping up to be a historically busy hurricane season. And while damage and destruction have been serious, there has been one saving grace — that the National Weather Service has been mostly correct in its predictions.
Thanks to remote sensing, Gulf Coast residents knew to prepare for the “life-threatening inundation,” “urban flooding” and “potentially catastrophic wind damage” that the Weather Service predicted for Hurricane Ida. Meteorologists nailed Ida’s strength, surge and location of landfall while anticipating that a warm eddy would make her intensify too quickly to evacuate New Orleans safely. Then, as her remnants swirled northeast, reports warned of tornadoes and torrential rain. Millions took heed, and lives were saved. While many people died, their deaths resulted from failures of infrastructure and policy, not forecasting.
The long history of weather forecasting and weather mapping shows that having access to good data can help us make better choices in our own lives. Trust in meteorology has made our communities, commutes and commerce safer — and the same is possible for climate science.
Two hundred years ago, the few who studied weather deemed any atmospheric phenomenon a “meteor.” The term, referencing Aristotle’s “Meteorologica,” essentially meant “strange thing in the sky.” There were wet things (hail), windy things (tornadoes), luminous things (auroras) and fiery things (comets). In fact, the naturalist Elias Loomis, who was among the first to spot Halley’s comet upon its return in 1835, thought storms behaved as cyclically as comets. So to understand “the laws of storms,” Loomis and the era’s other leading weatherheads began gathering observations. Master the elements, they reasoned, and you could safely sail the seas, settle the American West, plant crops with confidence and ward off disease.
In 1856, Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian Institution’s first director, hung a map of the United States in the lobby of its Washington headquarters. Every morning, he would affix small colored discs to show the nation’s weather: white for places with clear skies, blue for snow, black for rain and brown for cloud cover. An arrow on each disc allowed him to note wind direction, too. For the first time, visitors could see weather across the expanding country.
Although simple by today’s standards, the map belied the effort and expense needed to select the correct colors each day. Henry persuaded telegraph companies to transmit weather reports every morning at 10. Then he equipped each station with thermometers, barometers, weathervanes and rain gauges — no small task by horse and rail, as instruments often broke in transit.
For longer-term studies of the North American climate, Henry enlisted academics, farmers and volunteers from Maine to the Caribbean. Eager to contribute, “Smithsonian observers” took readings three times a day and posted them to Washington each month. At its peak in 1860, the Smithsonian Meteorological Project had more than 500 observers. Then the Civil War broke out.
Henry’s ranks thinned by 40 percent as men traded barometers for bayonets. Severed telegraph lines and the priority of war messages crippled his network. Then in January 1865, a fire in Henry’s office landed the fatal blow to the project. All of his efforts turned to salvaging what survived. With a vacuum of leadership in Washington, citizen scientists picked up the slack.
Although the Chicago Tribune lampooned Lapham, wondering “what practical value” a warning service would provide “if it takes 10 years to calculate the progress of a storm,” Rep. Halbert E. Paine (Wis.), who had studied storms under Loomis, rushed a bill into Congress before the winter recess. In early 1870, a joint resolution establishing a storm-warning service under the U.S. Army Signal Office passed without debate. President Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law the following week.
Despite the mandate for an early-warning system, an aversion to predictions remained. Fiscal hawks could not justify an investment in erroneous forecasts, religious zealots could not stomach the hubris, and politicians wary of a skeptical public could not bear the fallout. In 1893, Agriculture Secretary J. Sterling Morton cut the salary of one of the country’s top weather scientists, Cleveland Abbe, by 25 percent, making an example out of him.
While Moore didn’t face consequences for his dereliction of duty, the Weather Bureau’s hurricane-forecasting methods gradually improved as the network expanded and technologies like radio emerged. The advent of aviation increased insight into the upper atmosphere; military research led to civilian weather radar, first deployed at Washington National Airport in 1947. By the 1950s, computers were ushering in the future of numerical forecasting. Meanwhile, public skepticism thawed as more people and businesses saw it in their best interests to trust experts.
In September 1961, a local news team decided to broadcast live from the Weather Bureau office in Galveston, Tex., as Hurricane Carla angled across the Gulf of Mexico. Leading the coverage was a young reporter named Dan Rather. “There is the eye of the hurricane right there,” he told his audience as the radar sweep brought the invisible into view. At the time, no one had seen a radar weather map televised before.
Rather realized that for viewers to comprehend the storm’s size, location and imminent danger, people needed a sense of scale. So he had a meteorologist draw the Texas coast on a transparent sheet of plastic, which Rather laid over the radarscope. Years later, he recalled that when he said “one inch equals 50 miles,” you could hear people in the studio gasp. The sight of the approaching buzz saw persuaded 350,000 Texans to evacuate their homes in what was then the largest weather-related evacuation in U.S. history. Ultimately, Carla inflicted twice as much damage as the Galveston hurricane 60 years earlier. But with the aid of Rather’s impromptu visualization, fewer than 50 lives were lost.
In other words, weather forecasting wasn’t only about good science, but about good communication and visuals.
Data visualization helped the public better understand the weather shaping their lives, and this enabled them to take action. It also gives us the power to see deadly storms not as freak occurrences, but as part of something else: a pattern.
Two hundred years ago, a 10-day forecast would have seemed preposterous. Now we can predict if we’ll need an umbrella tomorrow or a snowplow next week. Imagine if we planned careers, bought homes, built infrastructure and passed policy based on 50-year forecasts as routinely as we plan our weeks by five-day ones.
Unlike our predecessors of the 19th or even 20th centuries, we have access to ample climate data and data visualization that give us the knowledge to take bold actions. What we do with that knowledge is a matter of political will. It may be too late to stop the coming storm, but we still have time to board our windows.
Kim Cobb and Michael E. Mann, opinion contributors
10/12/21 11:30 AM EDT
The fate of the Biden administration’s agenda on climate remains uncertain, captive to today’s toxic atmosphere in Washington, DC. But the headlines of 2021 leave little in the way of ambiguity — the era of dangerous climate change is already upon us, in the form of wildfires, hurricanes, droughts and flooding that have upended lives across America. A recent UN report on climate is clear these impacts will worsen in the coming two decades if we fail to halt the continued accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
To avert disaster, we must chart a different climate course, beginning this year, to achieve steep emissions reductions this decade. Meeting this moment demands an all hands-on-deck approach. And no stone should be left unturned in our quest for meaningful options for decarbonizing our economy.
But while it is tempting to pin our hopes on future technology that might reduce the scope of future climate damages, we must pursue such strategies based on sound science, with a keen eye for potential false leads and dead ends. And we must not allow ourselves to be distracted from the task at hand — reducing fossil fuel emissions — by technofixes that at best, may not pan out, and at worst, may open the door to potentially disastrous unintended consequences.
So-called “geoengineering,” the intentional manipulation of our planetary environment in a dubious effort to offset the warming from carbon pollution, is the poster child for such potentially dangerous gambits. As the threat of climate change becomes more apparent, an increasingly desperate public — and the policymakers that represent them — seem to be willing to entertain geoengineering schemes. And some prominent individuals, such as former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, have been willing to use them to advocate for this risky path forward.
The New York Times recently injected momentum into the push for geoengineering strategies with a recent op-ed by Harvard scientist and geoengineering advocate David Keith. Keith argues that even in a world where emissions cuts are quick enough and large enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, we would face centuries of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperatures combined with rising sea levels.
The solution proposed by geoengineering proponents? A combination of slow but steady CO2 removal factories (including Keith’s own for-profit company) and a quick-acting temperature fix — likened to a “band-aid” — delivered by a fleet of airplanes dumping vast quantities of chemicals into the upper atmosphere.
This latter scheme is sometimes called “solar geoengineering” or “solar radiation management,” but that’s really a euphemism for efforts to inject potentially harmful chemicals into the stratosphere with potentially disastrous side effects, including more widespread drought, reduced agricultural productivity, and unpredictable shifts in regional climate patterns. Solar geoengineering does nothing to slow the pace of ocean acidification, which will increase with emissions.
On top of that is the risk of “termination shock” (a scenario in which we suffer the cumulative warming from decades of increasing emissions in a matter of several years, should we abruptly end solar geoengineering efforts). Herein lies the moral hazard of this scheme: It could well be used to justify delays in reducing carbon emissions, addicting human civilization writ large to these dangerous regular chemical injections into the atmosphere.
While this is the time to apply bold, creative thinking to accelerate progress toward climate stability, this is not the time to play fast and loose with the planet, in service of any agenda, be it political or scientific in nature. As the recent UN climate report makes clear, any emissions trajectory consistent with peak warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century will pave the way for substantial drawdown of atmospheric CO2 thereafter. Such drawdown prevents further increases in surface temperatures once net emissions decline to zero, followed by global-scale cooling shortly after emissions go negative.
Natural carbon sinks — over land as well as the ocean — play a critical role in this scenario. They have sequestered half of our historic CO2 emissions, and are projected to continue to do so in coming decades. Their buffering capacity may be reduced with further warming, however, which is yet another reason to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century. But if we are to achieve negative emissions this century — manifest as steady reductions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations — it will be because we reduce emissions below the level of uptake by natural carbon sinks. So, carbon removal technology trumpeted as a scalable solution to our emissions challenge is unlikely to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
As to the issue of climate reversibility, it’s naïve to think that we could reverse nearly two centuries of cumulative emissions and associated warming in a matter of decades. Nonetheless, the latest science tells us that surface warming responds immediately to reductions in carbon emissions. Land responds the fastest, so we can expect a rapid halt to the worsening of heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods once we reach net-zero emissions. Climate impacts tied to the ocean, such as marine heat waves and hurricanes, would respond somewhat more slowly. And the polar ice sheets may continue to lose mass and contribute to sea-level rise for centuries, but coastal communities can more easily adapt to sea-level rise if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
While it’s appealing to think that a climate “band-aid” could protect us from the worst climate impacts, solar geoengineering is more like risky elective surgery than a preventative medicine. This supposed “climate fix” might very well be worse than the disease, drying the continents and reducing crop yields, and having potentially other unforeseen negative consequences. The notion that such an intervention might somehow aid the plight of the global poor seems misguided at best.
When considering how to advance climate justice in the world, it is critical to ask, “Who wins — and who loses?” in a geoengineered future. If the winners are petrostates and large corporations who, if history is any guide, will likely be granted preferred access to the planetary thermostat, and the losers are the global poor — who already suffer disproportionately from dirty fossil fuels and climate impacts — then we might simply be adding insult to injury.
To be clear, the world should continue to invest in research and development of science and technology that might hasten societal decarbonization and climate stabilization, and eventually the return to a cooler climate. But those technologies must be measured, in both efficacy and safety, against the least risky and most surefire path to a net-zero world: the path from a fossil fuel-driven to a clean energy-driven society.
Kim Cobb is the director of the Global Change Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. She was a lead author on the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. Follow her on Twitter: @coralsncaves
Michael E. Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He is author of the recently released book, “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back our Planet.” Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelEMann
A new paper explores how the opinions of an electorate may be reflected in a mathematical model ‘inspired by models of simple magnetic systems’
Date: October 8, 2021
Source: University at Buffalo
Summary: A study leverages concepts from physics to model how campaign strategies influence the opinions of an electorate in a two-party system.
A study in the journal Physica A leverages concepts from physics to model how campaign strategies influence the opinions of an electorate in a two-party system.
Researchers created a numerical model that describes how external influences, modeled as a random field, shift the views of potential voters as they interact with each other in different political environments.
The model accounts for the behavior of conformists (people whose views align with the views of the majority in a social network); contrarians (people whose views oppose the views of the majority); and inflexibles (people who will not change their opinions).
“The interplay between these behaviors allows us to create electorates with diverse behaviors interacting in environments with different levels of dominance by political parties,” says first author Mukesh Tiwari, PhD, associate professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology.
“We are able to model the behavior and conflicts of democracies, and capture different types of behavior that we see in elections,” says senior author Surajit Sen, PhD, professor of physics in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.
Sen and Tiwari conducted the study with Xiguang Yang, a former UB physics student. Jacob Neiheisel, PhD, associate professor of political science at UB, provided feedback to the team, but was not an author of the research. The study was published online in Physica A in July and will appear in the journal’s Nov. 15 volume.
The model described in the paper has broad similarities to the random field Ising model, and “is inspired by models of simple magnetic systems,” Sen says.
The team used this model to explore a variety of scenarios involving different types of political environments and electorates.
Among key findings, as the authors write in the abstract: “In an electorate with only conformist agents, short-duration high-impact campaigns are highly effective. … In electorates with both conformist and contrarian agents and varying level(s) of dominance due to local factors, short-term campaigns are effective only in the case of fragile dominance of a single party. Strong local dominance is relatively difficult to influence and long-term campaigns with strategies aimed to impact local level politics are seen to be more effective.”
“I think it’s exciting that physicists are thinking about social dynamics. I love the big tent,” Neiheisel says, noting that one advantage of modeling is that it could enable researchers to explore how opinions might change over many election cycles — the type of longitudinal data that’s very difficult to collect.
Mathematical modeling has some limitations: “The real world is messy, and I think we should embrace that to the extent that we can, and models don’t capture all of this messiness,” Neiheisel says.
But Neiheisel was excited when the physicists approached him to talk about the new paper. He says the model provides “an interesting window” into processes associated with opinion dynamics and campaign effects, accurately capturing a number of effects in a “neat way.”
“The complex dynamics of strongly interacting, nonlinear and disordered systems have been a topic of interest for a long time,” Tiwari says. “There is a lot of merit in studying social systems through mathematical and computational models. These models provide insight into short- and long-term behavior. However, such endeavors can only be successful when social scientists and physicists come together to collaborate.”
Journal Reference:
Mukesh Tiwari, Xiguang Yang, Surajit Sen. Modeling the nonlinear effects of opinion kinematics in elections: A simple Ising model with random field based study. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2021; 582: 126287 DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2021.126287
As Democrats trim the legislation, they should focus on keeping it
Oct 12th 2021
TAKE A ROAD TRIP to Indianapolis, home to a certain two-and-a-half-mile race track, and you will find yourself in good company. A survey carried out before the pandemic found that about 85% of local commuters drive to work, alone. Standing on a bridge over 38th Street, which runs by the state fairground, you cannot escape the roar of six lanes of petrol-fired traffic below—and, reports a local, this is quiet compared with the noise on pre-virus days. Getting Americans to kick their addiction to fossil fuels will require many of these drivers to find another way of getting to work, and to move on from the flaming hydrocarbons celebrated at the city’s famous oval.
Joe Biden hopes to use what looks like a narrow window of Democratic control of Congress to encourage this transition. The last time lawmakers came close to writing climate legislation on anything like this scale was in 2009, when the Waxman-Markey bill, which would have established a trading system for greenhouse-gas emissions, was passed by the House. Since then, a Democratic White House has tried to nudge America to reduce emissions, by issuing new regulations, and a Republican White House has tried to undo them. That record illustrates what a delicate operation this is. Yet despite having a much weaker grip on Congress than Barack Obama had in the first year of his presidency, Mr Biden and his legislative allies have put forward a sweeping set of proposals for decarbonising America’s economy. These would promote everything from clean energy on the grid and electric vehicles on the road, to union jobs making green technologies and climate justice for left-behind communities.
Were this wish list passed in its entirety, which is unlikely, it would give a boost to Mr Biden’s pledge to reduce America’s emissions by roughly half from their 2005 level by 2030. A chart released by the office of Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s majority leader, suggests that implementing all of these provisions could reduce America’s emissions by 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, thus achieving almost all of Mr Biden’s goal of cutting them by roughly half in that period (see chart 1). Passing a law, even a less expansive one, would allow Mr Biden to travel to the UN climate summit in Glasgow in November representing a country that is making progress towards internationally agreed goals, rather than asking for the patience of poorer, less technologically sophisticated countries while America sorts itself out.
Some of the Democratic proposals are in a $1trn infrastructure bill with bipartisan support. But most are found in a $3.5trn budget bill that, on account of Senate rules, can only pass through a partisan parliamentary manoeuvre known as reconciliation. This requires the assent of all 50 Democratic senators. The likeliest outcome is a compromise between Democratic progressives and moderates that yokes together the agreed infrastructure bill with a much slimmer version of the $3.5trn proposal. Yet it is possible that neither bill will become law.
This raises two questions. First, how good on climate can a salami-sliced version of Mr Biden’s agenda, the result of a negotiation between 270 Democratic members of Congress each angling for their constituents’ interests, really be? Second, how bad would it be for America’s decarbonisation efforts were both bills to fail?
Happily even reconciliation-lite could bring meaningful progress if key bits of the current proposals survive the negotiations. Paul Bledsoe of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank, is confident a deal “likely a bit under $2trn” will happen this month. The Rhodium Group, an analysis firm, reckons that just six proposals would cut America’s emissions by nearly 1bn tonnes in 2030 compared with no new policies (see chart 2), about a sixth of America’s total net emissions per year. That is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions from all cars and pickup trucks on American roads, or the emissions of Florida and Texas combined. The six include proposals related to “natural carbon removal” (which involves spending on forests and soil), fossil fuels (making it more expensive to emit methane) and transport (a generous credit for buyers of electric vehicles).
The big prize, though, is the power sector. Two proposals for decarbonising the grid account for the lion’s share of likely emissions reductions: a new Clean Electricity Performance Programme (CEPP) and more mundane reforms to the tax credits received by clean energy. The CEPP has been touted by Mr Biden’s cabinet officials and leading progressives as a linchpin of the climate effort. It is loosely based on the mandatory clean electricity standards imposed by over two dozen states which have successfully boosted adoption of low-carbon energy.
The CEPP is flawed in a couple of ways, though. Because it has to be primarily a fiscal measure in order to squeeze through the reconciliation process it does not involve mandatory regulation, unlike those successful state energy standards. Rather, it uses (biggish) subsidies and (rather punier) penalty fees to try to nudge utilities to build more clean energy. It is politically vulnerable because it is seen as unfriendly to natural gas and coal (unless they have expensive add-on kit to capture and store related emissions). That has incurred the hostility of Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who represents coal-rich West Virginia, without whose approval the bill will fail. Some influential utility companies with coal assets, including Ohio-based American Electric Power, do not like it either.
Despite the attention paid to it, CEPP is actually less potent as a greenhouse-gas slayer than those boring tax credits, which are less controversial because they do not overtly penalise coal or gas. Two energy veterans, one at a top renewables lobbying outfit and the other at a fossil-heavy utility, agree that the tax credits would sharply boost investment in low-carbon technologies. That is because they improve the current set-up by replacing stop-go uncertainty with a predictable long-term tax regime, and make tax breaks “refundable” rather than needing to be offset against tax liabilities, meaning even utilities that do not have such tax liabilities can enjoy them as freely as cash in the bank.
Thus the obsession over the CEPP is overshadowing the real star proposal. The tax credits have “a huge impact potentially”, reckons Rhodium, accounting for over one-quarter of the greenhouse-gas emissions reductions in the legislation, at a cost of roughly $150bn over ten years. A former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) puts it bluntly: “Take the wind and solar tax credits at ten years if you had to choose—and let everything else go.”
What if Democrats fail, the negotiations fall apart and Mr Biden is left empty handed? That would be embarrassing. And it would perhaps make it difficult to pursue ambitious federal climate policies through Congress for years, just as the failure of Waxman-Markey in 2009 haunted lawmakers. However it would not mean America can do nothing at all about climate change. First of all, as Mr Biden’s officials have already made clear, they stand ready to use regulations to push ahead on decarbonisation efforts, just as the Obama administration did. Last month the EPA issued rules cracking-down on emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, an especially powerful greenhouse gas. The administration also has plans for loan guarantees for energy innovations and for speeding-up approvals for offshore wind farms. Yet this is tinkering compared with the federal law being discussed, especially as new regulations will likely encounter legal challenges.
Even if the federal government fails again, states and cities have climate policies too. Drawing on analysis funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Leon Clarke of the University of Maryland calculates that decentralised policies emulating the current best efforts of states like California could achieve roughly one-quarter of Mr Biden’s objective. But this is a bad deal: such efforts would fall a long way short of the federal proposal in terms of emissions reduction, and what reductions they achieve would be more expensive than if done at the federal level. Still, it is not nothing. Last month, Illinois passed the country’s boldest climate-change law. Democratic states such as New York and California have green policies, but Republican states such as Texas and Indiana have big wind industries too.
While Mr Clarke says Congress has to act if America is to achieve Mr Biden’s targets, he believes that progress will continue even if Congress falters, because there is now a deeper sense of ownership of climate policy among local and state governments. “The Trump years really changed the way that subnationals in the US view climate action,” he says. “They can’t rely on the federal government.”
Change is happening in surprising places. Take that flyover in Indianapolis. The city’s officials have made it into a bike path that will be connected to 55 miles of commuter-friendly trails traversing the city. $100m has been allocated for building a bus-rapid transit system, which is a cheap and efficient substitute for underground rail, with more such rapid bus lines on the cards. Bloated 38th Street will undergo a “lane diet” with car and lorry traffic yielding two lanes to the buses. Come back in a few years and the view from the bridge will be quieter.
Two new studies have finally put an end to the theory that the Americas were populated by ancient peoples who walked across the Bering Strait.
Two new studies have now, finally, put an end to the long-held theory that the Americas were populated by ancient peoples who walked across the Bering Strait land-bridge from Asia approximately 15,000 years ago. Because much of Canada was then under a sheet of ice, it had long been hypothesised that an “ice-free corridor” might have allowed small groups through from Beringia, some of which was ice-free. One study published in the journal Nature, entitled “Postglacial Viability and Colonization in North America’s Ice-Free Corridor” found that the corridor was incapable of sustaining human life until about 12,600 years ago, or well after the continent had already been settled.
An international team of researchers “obtained radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and metagenomic DNA from lake sediment cores” from nine former lake beds in British Columbia, where the Laurentide and Cordellian ice sheets split apart. Using a technique called “shotgun sequencing,” the team had to sequence every bit of DNA in a clump of organic matter in order to distinguish between the jumbled strands of DNA. They then matched the results to a database of known genomes to differentiate the organisms. Using this data they reconstructed how and when different flora and fauna emerged from the once ice-covered landscape. According to Mikkel Pedersen, a Ph.D. student at the Center for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen, in the deepest layers, from 13,000 years ago, “the land was completely naked and barren.”
“What nobody has looked at is when the corridor became biologically viable,” noted study co-author, Professor Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the Centre for GeoGenetics and also the Department of Zoology, the University of Cambridge. “The bottom line is that even though the physical corridor was open by 13,000 years ago, it was several hundred years before it was possible to use it.” In Willerslev’s view, “that means that the first people entering what is now the U.S., Central and South America must have taken a different route.”
A second study, “Bison Phylogeography Constrains Dispersal and Viability of the Ice Free Corridor in Western Canada,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined ancient mitochondrial DNA from bison fossils to “determine the chronology for when the corridor was open and viable for biotic dispersals” and found that the corridor was potentially a viable route for bison to travel through about 13,000 years ago, or slightly earlier than the Nature study.
Geologists had long known that the towering icecaps were a formidable barrier to migration from Asia to the Americas between 26,000 to 10,000 years ago. Thus the discovery in 1932 of the Clovis spear points, believed at that time to be about 10,000 years old, presented a problem, given the overwhelming presumption of the day that the ancient Indians had walked over from Asia about that time. In 1933, the Canadian geologist William Alfred Johnston proposed that when the glaciers began melting, they broke into two massive sheets long before completely disappearing, and between these two ice sheets people might have been able to walk through, an idea dubbed the “ice-free corridor” by Swedish-American geologist Ernst Antevs two years later.
Archaeologists then seized on the idea of a passageway to uphold the tenuous notion that Indians had arrived to the continent relatively recently, until such belief became a matter of faith. Given the recent discoveries that place Indians in the Americas at least 14,000 years ago, both studies now finally lay to rest the ice-free corridor theory. As Willerslev points out, “The school book story that most of us are used to doesn’t seem to be supported.” The new school book story is that the Indians migrated in boats down along the Pacific coast around 15,000 years ago. How long that theory will hold up remains to be seen.
Crows and their relatives among them ravens, magpies and jays are renowned for their intelligence and for their ability to flourish in human-dominated landscapes. That ability may have to do with cross-species social skills. In the Seattle area, where rapid suburban growth has attracted a thriving crow population, researchers have found that the birds can recognize individual human faces.
John M. Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, has studied crows and ravens for more than 20 years and has long wondered if the birds could identify individual researchers. Previously trapped birds seemed more wary of particular scientists, and often were harder to catch. “I thought, ‘Well, it’s an annoyance, but it’s not really hampering our work,’ ” Dr. Marzluff said. “But then I thought we should test it directly.”
To test the birds’ recognition of faces separately from that of clothing, gait and other individual human characteristics, Dr. Marzluff and two students wore rubber masks. He designated a caveman mask as “dangerous” and, in a deliberate gesture of civic generosity, a Dick Cheney mask as “neutral.” Researchers in the dangerous mask then trapped and banded seven crows on the university’s campus in Seattle.
In the months that followed, the researchers and volunteers donned the masks on campus, this time walking prescribed routes and not bothering crows.
The crows had not forgotten. They scolded people in the dangerous mask significantly more than they did before they were trapped, even when the mask was disguised with a hat or worn upside down. The neutral mask provoked little reaction. The effect has not only persisted, but also multiplied over the past two years. Wearing the dangerous mask on one recent walk through campus, Dr. Marzluff said, he was scolded by 47 of the 53 crows he encountered, many more than had experienced or witnessed the initial trapping. The researchers hypothesize that crows learn to recognize threatening humans from both parents and others in their flock.
After their experiments on campus, Dr. Marzluff and his students tested the effect with more realistic masks. Using a half-dozen students as models, they enlisted a professional mask maker, then wore the new masks while trapping crows at several sites in and around Seattle. The researchers then gave a mix of neutral and dangerous masks to volunteer observers who, unaware of the masks’ histories, wore them at the trapping sites and recorded the crows’ responses.
The reaction to one of the dangerous masks was “quite spectacular,” said one volunteer, Bill Pochmerski, a retired telephone company manager who lives near Snohomish, Wash. “The birds were really raucous, screaming persistently,” he said, “and it was clear they weren’t upset about something in general. They were upset with me.”
Again, crows were significantly more likely to scold observers who wore a dangerous mask, and when confronted simultaneously by observers in dangerous and neutral masks, the birds almost unerringly chose to persecute the dangerous face. In downtown Seattle, where most passersby ignore crows, angry birds nearly touched their human foes. In rural areas, where crows are more likely to be viewed as noisy “flying rats” and shot, the birds expressed their displeasure from a distance.
Though Dr. Marzluff’s is the first formal study of human face recognition in wild birds, his preliminary findings confirm the suspicions of many other researchers who have observed similar abilities in crows, ravens, gulls and other species. The pioneering animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz was so convinced of the perceptive capacities of crows and their relatives that he wore a devil costume when handling jackdaws. Stacia Backensto, a master’s student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies ravens in the oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope, has assembled an elaborate costume including a fake beard and a potbelly made of pillows because she believes her face and body are familiar to previously captured birds.
Kevin J. McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology who has trapped and banded crows in upstate New York for 20 years, said he was regularly followed by birds who have benefited from his handouts of peanuts and harassed by others he has trapped in the past.
Why crows and similar species are so closely attuned to humans is a matter of debate. Bernd Heinrich, a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont known for his books on raven behavior, suggested that crows’ apparent ability to distinguish among human faces is a “byproduct of their acuity,” an outgrowth of their unusually keen ability to recognize one another, even after many months of separation.
Dr. McGowan and Dr. Marzluff believe that this ability gives crows and their brethren an evolutionary edge. “If you can learn who to avoid and who to seek out, that’s a lot easier than continually getting hurt,” Dr. Marzluff said. “I think it allows these animals to survive with us and take advantage of us in a much safer, more effective way.”
It’s no surprise that corvids — the “crow family” of birds that also includes ravens, jays, magpies, and nutcrackers — are smart. They use tools, recognize faces, leave gifts for people they like, and there’s even a video on Facebook showing a crow nudging a stubborn little hedgehog out of traffic. Corvids will also drop rocks into water to push floating food their way.
What is perhaps surprising is what the authors of a new study published last week in the journal Science have found: Crows are capable of thinking about their own thoughts as they work out problems. This is a level of self-awareness previously believed to signify the kind of higher intelligence that only humans and possibly a few other mammals possess. A crow knows what a crow knows, and if this brings the word sentience to your mind, you may be right.
It’s long been assumed that higher intellectual functioning is strictly the product of a layered cerebral cortex. But bird brains are different. The authors of the study found crows’ unlayered but neuron-dense pallium may play a similar role for the avians. Supporting this possibility, another study published last week in Science finds that the neuroanatomy of pigeons and barn owls may also support higher intelligence.
“It has been a good week for bird brains!” crow expert John Marzluff of the University of Washington tells Stat. (He was not involved in either study.)
Corvids are known to be as mentally capable as monkeys and great apes. However, bird neurons are so much smaller that their palliums actually contain more of them than would be found in an equivalent-sized primate cortex. This may constitute a clue regarding their expansive mental capabilities.
In any event, there appears to be a general correspondence between the number of neurons an animal has in its pallium and its intelligence, says Suzana Herculano-Houzel in her commentary on both new studies for Science. Humans, she says, sit “satisfyingly” atop this comparative chart, having even more neurons there than elephants, despite our much smaller body size. It’s estimated that crow brains have about 1.5 billion neurons.
Ozzie and Glenn not pictured. Credit: narubono/Unsplash
The kind of higher intelligence crows exhibited in the new research is similar to the way we solve problems. We catalog relevant knowledge and then explore different combinations of what we know to arrive at an action or solution.
The researchers, led by neurobiologist Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen in Germany, trained two carrion crows (Corvus corone), Ozzie and Glenn.
The crows were trained to watch for a flash — which didn’t always appear — and then peck at a red or blue target to register whether or not a flash of light was seen. Ozzie and Glenn were also taught to understand a changing “rule key” that specified whether red or blue signified the presence of a flash with the other color signifying that no flash occurred.
In each round of a test, after a flash did or didn’t appear, the crows were presented a rule key describing the current meaning of the red and blue targets, after which they pecked their response.
This sequence prevented the crows from simply rehearsing their response on auto-pilot, so to speak. In each test, they had to take the entire process from the top, seeing a flash or no flash, and then figuring out which target to peck.
As all this occurred, the researchers monitored their neuronal activity. When Ozzie or Glenn saw a flash, sensory neurons fired and then stopped as the bird worked out which target to peck. When there was no flash, no firing of the sensory neurons was observed before the crow paused to figure out the correct target.
Nieder’s interpretation of this sequence is that Ozzie or Glenn had to see or not see a flash, deliberately note that there had or hadn’t been a flash — exhibiting self-awareness of what had just been experienced — and then, in a few moments, connect that recollection to their knowledge of the current rule key before pecking the correct target.
During those few moments after the sensory neuron activity had died down, Nieder reported activity among a large population of neurons as the crows put the pieces together preparing to report what they’d seen. Among the busy areas in the crows’ brains during this phase of the sequence was, not surprisingly, the pallium.
Overall, the study may eliminate the layered cerebral cortex as a requirement for higher intelligence. As we learn more about the intelligence of crows, we can at least say with some certainty that it would be wise to avoid angering one.
Climate change academics from some of the regions worst hit by warming are struggling to be published, according to a new analysis.
The study looked at 100 of the most highly cited climate research papers over the past five years.
Less than 1% of the authors were based in Africa, while only 12 of the papers had a female lead researcher.
The lack of diverse voices means key perspectives are being ignored, says the study’s author.
Researchers from the Carbon Brief website examined the backgrounds of around 1,300 authors involved in the 100 most cited climate change research papers from 2016-2020.
They found that some 90% of these scientists were affiliated with academic institutions from North America, Europe or Australia.
Issues of concern to African climate researchers were in danger of being ignored
The African continent, home to around 16% of the world’s population had less than 1% of the authors according to the analysis.
There were also huge differences within regions – of the 10 authors from Africa, eight of them were from South Africa.
When it comes to lead authors, not one of the top 100 papers was led by a scientist from Africa or South America. Of the seven papers led by Asian authors, five were from China.
“If the vast majority of research around climate change is coming from a group of people with a very similar background, for example, male scientists from the global north, then the body of knowledge that we’re going to have around climate change is going to be skewed towards their interests, knowledge and scientific training,” said Ayesha Tandon from Carbon Brief, who carried out the analysis and says that “systemic bias” is at play here.
“One study noted that a lot of our understanding of climate change is biased towards cooler climates, because it’s mainly carried out by scientists who live in the global north in cold climates,” she added.
There are a number of other factors at play that limit the opportunities for researchers from the global south. These include a lack of funding for expensive computers to run the computer models, or simulations, that are the bedrock of much climate research.
Other issues include a different academic culture where teaching is prioritised over research, as well as language barriers and a lack of access to expensive libraries and databases.
Most of the leading papers on climate change were published by institutions in the global north
Even where researchers from better-off countries seek to collaborate with colleagues in the developing world, the efforts don’t always work out well.
One researcher originally from Tanzania but now working in Mexico explained what can happen.
“The northern scientist often brings his or her own grad students from the north, and they tend to view their local partners as facilitators – logistic, cultural, language, admin – rather than science collaborators,” Dr Tuyeni Mwampamba from the Institute of Ecosystems and Sustainability Research in Mexico told Carbon Brief.
Researchers from the north are often seen as wanting to extract resources and data from developing nations without making any contribution to local research, a practice sometimes known as “helicopter science”.
For women involved in research in the global south there are added challenges in getting your name on a scientific paper
A scientist at work in Cote D’Ivoire
“Women tend to have a much higher dropout rate than men as they progress through academia,” said Ayesha Tandon.
“But then women also have to contend with stereotypes and sexism, and even just cultural norms in their country or from the upbringing that might prevent them from spending as much time on their science or from pursuing it in the way that men do.”
The analysis suggests that the lack of voices from women and from the global south is hampering the global understanding of climate change.
Solving the problem is not going to be easy, according to the author.
“This is a systemic problem and it will progress and keep getting worse, because people in positions of power will continue to have those privileges,” said Ayesha Tandon.
“It’s a problem that will not just go away on its own unless people really work at it.”
Após ser aprovado na Câmara dos Deputados, no último dia 29 de setembro, o projeto de lei que regulamenta o uso da inteligêcia artificial (IA) no Brasil (PL 21/20) passará agora pela análise do Senado. Enquanto isso não acontece, o PL que estabelece o Marco Civil da IA, ainda é alvo de discussões.
A proposta, de autoria do deputado federal Eduardo Bismarck (PDT-CE), foi aprovado na Câmara na forma de um substitutivo apresentado pela deputada federal Luisa Canziani (PTB-PR). O texto define como sistemas de inteligência artificial as representações tecnológicas oriundas do campo da informática e da ciência da computação. Caberá privativamente à União legislar e editar normas sobre a matéria.
Em entrevista ao Portal Rota Jurídica, o neurocientista Álvaro Machado Dias salientou, por exemplo, que as intenções contidas no referido do PL apontam um caminho positivo. Contudo, as definições genéricas dão a sensação de que, enquanto o projeto tramita no Senado, vai ser importante aprofundar o contato com a área.
O neurocientista, que é professor livre-docente da UNIFESP, sócio da WeMind Escritório de Inovação, do Instituto Locomotiva de Pesquisas e do Rhizom Blockchain, salienta por outro lado que, em termos sociais, o Marco Civil da Inteligência Artificial promete aumentar a consciência sobre os riscos trazidos pelos algoritmos enviesados, bem como estimular a autorregulação.
Isso, segundo diz, deve aumentar a “justiça líquida” destes dispositivos que tanto influenciam a vida em sociedade. Ressalta que, em termos econômicos, a interoperabilidade (o equivalente a todas as tomadas teremos o mesmo número de pinos) vai fortalecer um pouco o mercado.
“Porém, verdade seja dita, estes impactos não serão tão grandes, já que o PL não fala em colocar a IA como tema estratégico para o País, nem aponta para maior apoio ao progresso científico na área”, acrescenta.
Riscos
Para o neurocientista, os riscos são os de sempre: engessamento da inovação; endereçamento das responsabilidades aos alvos errados; externalidades abertas por estratégias que questionarão as bases epistemológicas do conceito com certa razão (o famoso: dada a definição X, isto aqui não é inteligência artificial).
Porém, o especialista diz que é importante ter em mente que é absolutamente fundamental regular esta indústria, cujo ponto mais alto é a singularidade. “Isto é, a criação de dispositivos capazes de fazer tudo aquilo que fazemos, do ponto de vista interativo e produtivo, só que com mais velocidade e precisão. Trata-se de um debate muito complexo. E, como sempre, na prática, a teoria é outra”, completou.
Objetivos
Álvaro Machado Dias explica que o objetivo principal do PL é definir obrigações para a União, estados e municípios, especialmente regras de governança, responsabilidades civis e parâmetros de impacto social, relacionadas à aplicação e comercialização de plataformas de inteligência artificial. Existe também uma parte mais técnica, que foca a interoperabilidade, isto é, a capacidade dos sistemas trocarem informações.
Observa, ainda, que a principal premissa do projeto é a de que estas tecnologias devem ter sua implementação determinada por princípios como a ausência da intenção de fazer o mal, a qual seria escorada na transparência e responsabilização dos chamados agentes da inteligência artificial.
Frances Haugen’s testimony at the Senate hearing today raised serious questions about how Facebook’s algorithms work—and echoes many findings from our previous investigation.
October 5, 2021
Karen Hao
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee October 5. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On Sunday night, the primary source for the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files, an investigative series based on internal Facebook documents, revealed her identity in an episode of 60 Minutes.
Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company, says she came forward after she saw Facebook’s leadership repeatedly prioritize profit over safety.
Before quitting in May of this year, she combed through Facebook Workplace, the company’s internal employee social media network, and gathered a wide swath of internal reports and research in an attempt to conclusively demonstrate that Facebook had willfully chosen not to fix the problems on its platform.
Today she testified in front of the Senate on the impact of Facebook on society. She reiterated many of the findings from the internal research and implored Congress to act.
“I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy,” she said in her opening statement to lawmakers. “These problems are solvable. A safer, free-speech respecting, more enjoyable social media is possible. But there is one thing that I hope everyone takes away from these disclosures, it is that Facebook can change, but is clearly not going to do so on its own.”
During her testimony, Haugen particularly blamed Facebook’s algorithm and platform design decisions for many of its issues. This is a notable shift from the existing focus of policymakers on Facebook’s content policy and censorship—what does and doesn’t belong on Facebook. Many experts believe that this narrow view leads to a whack-a-mole strategy that misses the bigger picture.
“I’m a strong advocate for non-content-based solutions, because those solutions will protect the most vulnerable people in the world,” Haugen said, pointing to Facebook’s uneven ability to enforce its content policy in languages other than English.
Haugen’s testimony echoes many of the findings from an MIT Technology Review investigation published earlier this year, which drew upon dozens of interviews with Facebook executives, current and former employees, industry peers, and external experts. We pulled together the most relevant parts of our investigation and other reporting to give more context to Haugen’s testimony.
How does Facebook’s algorithm work?
Colloquially, we use the term “Facebook’s algorithm” as though there’s only one. In fact, Facebook decides how to target ads and rank content based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of algorithms. Some of those algorithms tease out a user’s preferences and boost that kind of content up the user’s news feed. Others are for detecting specific types of bad content, like nudity, spam, or clickbait headlines, and deleting or pushing them down the feed.
All of these algorithms are known as machine-learning algorithms. As I wrote earlier this year:
Unlike traditional algorithms, which are hard-coded by engineers, machine-learning algorithms “train” on input data to learn the correlations within it. The trained algorithm, known as a machine-learning model, can then automate future decisions. An algorithm trained on ad click data, for example, might learn that women click on ads for yoga leggings more often than men. The resultant model will then serve more of those ads to women.
And because of Facebook’s enormous amounts of user data, it can
develop models that learned to infer the existence not only of broad categories like “women” and “men,” but of very fine-grained categories like “women between 25 and 34 who liked Facebook pages related to yoga,” and [target] ads to them. The finer-grained the targeting, the better the chance of a click, which would give advertisers more bang for their buck.
The same principles apply for ranking content in news feed:
Just as algorithms [can] be trained to predict who would click what ad, they [can] also be trained to predict who would like or share what post, and then give those posts more prominence. If the model determined that a person really liked dogs, for instance, friends’ posts about dogs would appear higher up on that user’s news feed.
Before Facebook began using machine-learning algorithms, teams used design tactics to increase engagement. They’d experiment with things like the color of a button or the frequency of notifications to keep users coming back to the platform. But machine-learning algorithms create a much more powerful feedback loop. Not only can they personalize what each user sees, they will also continue to evolve with a user’s shifting preferences, perpetually showing each person what will keep them most engaged.
Who runs Facebook’s algorithm?
Within Facebook, there’s no one team in charge of this content-ranking system in its entirety. Engineers develop and add their own machine-learning models into the mix, based on their team’s objectives. For example, teams focused on removing or demoting bad content, known as the integrity teams, will only train models for detecting different types of bad content.
This was a decision Facebook made early on as part of its “move fast and break things” culture. It developed an internal tool known as FBLearner Flow that made it easy for engineers without machine learning experience to develop whatever models they needed at their disposal. By one data point, it was already in use by more than a quarter of Facebook’s engineering team in 2016.
Many of the current and former Facebook employees I’ve spoken to say that this is part of why Facebook can’t seem to get a handle on what it serves up to users in the news feed. Different teams can have competing objectives, and the system has grown so complex and unwieldy that no one can keep track anymore of all of its different components.
As a result, the company’s main process for quality control is through experimentation and measurement. As I wrote:
Teams train up a new machine-learning model on FBLearner, whether to change the ranking order of posts or to better catch content that violates Facebook’s community standards (its rules on what is and isn’t allowed on the platform). Then they test the new model on a small subset of Facebook’s users to measure how it changes engagement metrics, such as the number of likes, comments, and shares, says Krishna Gade, who served as the engineering manager for news feed from 2016 to 2018.
If a model reduces engagement too much, it’s discarded. Otherwise, it’s deployed and continually monitored. On Twitter, Gade explained that his engineers would get notifications every few days when metrics such as likes or comments were down. Then they’d decipher what had caused the problem and whether any models needed retraining.
How has Facebook’s content ranking led to the spread of misinformation and hate speech?
During her testimony, Haugen repeatedly came back to the idea that Facebook’s algorithm incites misinformation, hate speech, and even ethnic violence.
“Facebook … knows—they have admitted in public—that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems in most of the languages in the world,” she told the Senate today. “It is pulling families apart. And in places like Ethiopia it is literally fanning ethnic violence.”
Here’s what I’ve written about this previously:
The machine-learning models that maximize engagement also favor controversy, misinformation, and extremism: put simply, people just like outrageous stuff.
Sometimes this inflames existing political tensions. The most devastating example to date is the case of Myanmar, where viral fake news and hate speech about the Rohingya Muslim minority escalated the country’s religious conflict into a full-blown genocide. Facebook admitted in 2018, after years of downplaying its role, that it had not done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.”
As Haugen mentioned, Facebook has also known this for a while. Previous reporting has found that it’s been studying the phenomenon since at least 2016.
In an internal presentation from that year, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, a company researcher, Monica Lee, found that Facebook was not only hosting a large number of extremist groups but also promoting them to its users: “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools,” the presentation said, predominantly thanks to the models behind the “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features.
In 2017, Chris Cox, Facebook’s longtime chief product officer, formed a new task force to understand whether maximizing user engagement on Facebook was contributing to political polarization. It found that there was indeed a correlation, and that reducing polarization would mean taking a hit on engagement. In a mid-2018 document reviewed by the Journal, the task force proposed several potential fixes, such as tweaking the recommendation algorithms to suggest a more diverse range of groups for people to join. But it acknowledged that some of the ideas were “antigrowth.” Most of the proposals didn’t move forward, and the task force disbanded.
In my own conversations, Facebook employees also corroborated these findings.
A former Facebook AI researcher who joined in 2018 says he and his team conducted “study after study” confirming the same basic idea: models that maximize engagement increase polarization. They could easily track how strongly users agreed or disagreed on different issues, what content they liked to engage with, and how their stances changed as a result. Regardless of the issue, the models learned to feed users increasingly extreme viewpoints. “Over time they measurably become more polarized,” he says.
In her testimony, Haugen also repeatedly emphasized how these phenomena are far worse in regions that don’t speak English because of Facebook’s uneven coverage of different languages.
“In the case of Ethiopia there are 100 million people and six languages. Facebook only supports two of those languages for integrity systems,” she said. “This strategy of focusing on language-specific, content-specific systems for AI to save us is doomed to fail.”
She continued: “So investing in non-content-based ways to slow the platform down not only protects our freedom of speech, it protects people’s lives.”
I explore this more in a different article from earlier this year on the limitations of large language models, or LLMs:
Despite LLMs having these linguistic deficiencies, Facebook relies heavily on them to automate its content moderation globally. When the war in Tigray[, Ethiopia] first broke out in November, [AI ethics researcher Timnit] Gebru saw the platform flounder to get a handle on the flurry of misinformation. This is emblematic of a persistent pattern that researchers have observed in content moderation. Communities that speak languages not prioritized by Silicon Valley suffer the most hostile digital environments.
Gebru noted that this isn’t where the harm ends, either. When fake news, hate speech, and even death threats aren’t moderated out, they are then scraped as training data to build the next generation of LLMs. And those models, parroting back what they’re trained on, end up regurgitating these toxic linguistic patterns on the internet.
How does Facebook’s content ranking relate to teen mental health?
One of the more shocking revelations from the Journal’s Facebook Files was Instagram’s internal research, which found that its platform is worsening mental health among teenage girls. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” researchers wrote in a slide presentation from March 2020.
Haugen connects this phenomenon to engagement-based ranking systems as well, which she told the Senate today “is causing teenagers to be exposed to more anorexia content.”
“If Instagram is such a positive force, have we seen a golden age of teenage mental health in the last 10 years? No, we have seen escalating rates of suicide and depression amongst teenagers,” she continued. “There’s a broad swath of research that supports the idea that the usage of social media amplifies the risk of these mental health harms.”
In my own reporting, I heard from a former AI researcher who also saw this effect extend to Facebook.
The researcher’s team…found that users with a tendency to post or engage with melancholy content—a possible sign of depression—could easily spiral into consuming increasingly negative material that risked further worsening their mental health.
But as with Haugen, the researcher found that leadership wasn’t interested in making fundamental algorithmic changes.
The team proposed tweaking the content-ranking models for these users to stop maximizing engagement alone, so they would be shown less of the depressing stuff. “The question for leadership was: Should we be optimizing for engagement if you find that somebody is in a vulnerable state of mind?” he remembers.
But anything that reduced engagement, even for reasons such as not exacerbating someone’s depression, led to a lot of hemming and hawing among leadership. With their performance reviews and salaries tied to the successful completion of projects, employees quickly learned to drop those that received pushback and continue working on those dictated from the top down….
That former employee, meanwhile, no longer lets his daughter use Facebook.
How do we fix this?
Haugen is against breaking up Facebook or repealing Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, which protects tech platforms from taking responsibility for the content it distributes.
Instead, she recommends carving out a more targeted exemption in Section 230 for algorithmic ranking, which she argues would “get rid of the engagement-based ranking.” She also advocates for a return to Facebook’s chronological news feed.
Ellery Roberts Biddle, a projects director at Ranking Digital Rights, a nonprofit that studies social media ranking systems and their impact on human rights, says a Section 230 carve-out would need to be vetted carefully: “I think it would have a narrow implication. I don’t think it would quite achieve what we might hope for.”
In order for such a carve-out to be actionable, she says, policymakers and the public would need to have a much greater level of transparency into how Facebook’s ad-targeting and content-ranking systems even work. “I understand Haugen’s intention—it makes sense,” she says. “But it’s tough. We haven’t actually answered the question of transparency around algorithms yet. There’s a lot more to do.”
Nonetheless, Haugen’s revelations and testimony have brought renewed attention to what many experts and Facebook employees have been saying for years: that unless Facebook changes the fundamental design of its algorithms, it will not make a meaningful dent in the platform’s issues.
Her intervention also raises the prospect that if Facebook cannot put its own house in order, policymakers may force the issue.
“Congress can change the rules that Facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing,” Haugen told the Senate. “I came forward at great personal risk because I believe we still have time to act, but we must act now.”
Unidade da Universidade Federal de São Paulo. (Foto: Divulgação)
Universitária buscou atendimento psiquiátrico na Unifesp, instituição de ensino que oferece o serviço médico gratuitamente aos alunos
Thayná Alexandrino conta que há tempos percebe alguns sintomas associados à depressão e ansiedade
Segundo a jovem de 24 anos, a médica que a atendeu a julgou pela aparência física; universidade não se pronunciou
Texto: Letícia Fialho Edição: Nadine Nascimento
A estudante de geografia da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp), Thayná Alexandrino (24), buscou ajuda psiquiátrica na unidade de atendimento gratuito oferecida pela instituição aos alunos, há cerca de um mês. A jovem relata ter sido julgada pela sua aparência física no atendimento, quando ouviu da profissional que a atendeu: “você não tem cara de paciente psiquiátrica. Mulheres como você precisam ser fortes”.
“Ingressei na universidade e tive a oportunidade de cuidar da minha saúde através dos serviços gratuitos oferecidos por eles. Contudo, ao chegar lá, me deparei com algo totalmente diferente do que esperava. Fui mal tratada pela psiquiatra, que me julgou do começo ao fim”, relata Thayná.
A estudante conta que há tempos percebe alguns sintomas associados à depressão e ansiedade e que, por conta dos estigmas relacionados a doenças mentais, demorou a procurar ajuda. Durante a pandemia, ela perdeu pessoas próximas e se sentiu fragilizada para lidar com o luto.
“Mesmo contando para ela sobre o luto pelo qual estou passando, sobre meu histórico familiar e pré-disposições, escutei a pior justificativa ‘você está muito bem vestida para ter algum problema de ordem mental’ e também que ‘não pode se dar ao luxo de ser fraca’”, relata a vítima que desistiu do atendimento quando a profissional disse: “Mulheres como você sabem lidar muito bem com a dor”.
A estudante conta que sentiu-se impotente e negligenciada no atendimento prestado pela unidade de atendimento da universidade. Segundo ela, a profissional que a atendeu era uma mulher branca, na faixa etária dos 40 anos, com bagagem profissional e acadêmica.
“Parece que a única alternativa sugerida por profissionais brancos é que nós, mulheres negras, precisamos ser fortes o tempo todo. Pessoalmente, na visão dela, eu não poderia sofrer. Lembro que na minha infância uma professora disse que a vida seria dura pra quem fosse fraco. E agora ouvi quase a mesma coisa, vindo de uma profissional de saúde mental”, reflete Thayná.
Insegurança da aluna
Em busca de atendimento adequado, a estudante recorreu a um psicólogo, seguindo orientação médica, em outra unidade de atendimento. E novamente teve uma abordagem pouco acolhedora.
“Quando relatei sobre o episódio em que fui vítima de racismo. Fui surpreendida com a colocação de mais um profissional branco. Ele disse que eu não era negra e, sim, ‘mulata’, em vista de outros pacientes negros que ele atende. Até quando um cara branco pode julgar a negritude de outras pessoas?”, conta.
A estudante diz que, até o momento, não recorreu a nenhum outro profissional por conta dos valores altos e por sentir-se insegura. “Eu adoro a área da saúde e ser atendida por profissionais que não tiveram a sensibilidade de olhar para a minha dor, me toca bastante. Outra coisa é a falta de representatividade. O fato de não ter pessoas negras inseridas nesses espaços, perpetua o racismo estrutural”, reitera a Thayná.
A Alma Preta Jornalismo entrou em contato com a Unifesp para solicitar um posicionamento sobre o caso, mas até o momento não teve retorno. Caso a instituição se posicione, o texto será atualizado.
Americano Joshua Walker defende que decisões judiciais nunca sejam automatizadas
Identificar as melhores práticas e quais fatores influenciaram decisões judiciais são alguns dos exemplos de como o uso da inteligência artificial pode beneficiar o sistema de Justiça e, consequentemente, a população, afirma o advogado americano Joshua Walker.
Um dos fundadores do CodeX, centro de informática legal da Universidade de Stanford (EUA) —onde também lecionou— e fundador da Lex Machina, empresa pioneira no segmento jurídico tecnológico, Walker iniciou a carreira no mundo dos dados há mais de 20 anos, trabalhando com processos do genocídio de 1994 em Ruanda, que matou ao menos 800 mil pessoas em cem dias.
Autor do livro “On Legal AI: Um Rápido Tratado sobre a Inteligência Artificial no Direito” (Revista dos Tribunais, 2021), no qual fala sobre como softwares de análise podem ser usados na busca de soluções no direito, Walker palestrou sobre o tema na edição da Fenalaw —evento sobre uso da tecnologia por advogados.
Em entrevista à Folha por email, ele defende que os advogados não só aprendam a usar recursos de inteligência artificial, como também assumam o protagonismo nos processos de desenvolvimento de tecnologias voltadas ao direito.
“Nós [advogados] precisamos começar a nos tornar cocriadores porque, enquanto os engenheiros de software se lembram dos dados, nós nos lembramos da estória e das histórias”, afirma.
Ao longo de sua carreira, quais tabus foram superados e quais continuam quando o assunto é inteligência artificial? Como confrontar essas ideias? Tabus existem em abundância. Há mais e novos todos os dias. Você tem que se perguntar duas coisas: o que meus clientes precisam? E como posso ser —um ou o— melhor no que faço para ajudar meus clientes? Isso é tudo que você precisa se preocupar para “inovar”.
A tradição jurídica exige que nos adaptemos, e nos adaptemos rapidamente, porque temos: a) o dever de lealdade de ajudar nossos clientes com os melhores meios disponíveis; b) o dever de melhorar a prática e a administração da lei e do próprio sistema.
A inteligência artificial legal e outras técnicas básicas de outros campos podem impulsionar de forma massiva ambas as áreas. Para isso, o dever de competência profissional nos exige conhecimentos operacionais e sobre as plataformas, que são muito úteis para serem ignorados. Isso não significa que você deve adotar tudo. Seja cético.
Estamos aprendendo a classificar desafios humanos complexos em estruturas processuais que otimizam os resultados para todos os cidadãos, de qualquer origem. Estamos aprendendo qual impacto as diferentes regras locais se correlacionam com diferentes classes de resultados de casos. Estamos apenas começando.
FolhaJus
Seleção das principais notícias da semana sobre o cenário jurídico e conteúdos exclusivos com entrevistas e infográficos.
O sr. começou a trabalhar com análise de dados por causa do genocídio de Ruanda. O que aquela experiência lhe ensinou sobre as possibilidades e limites do trabalho com bancos de dados? O que me ensinou é que a arquitetura da informação é mais importante do que o número de doutores, consultores ou milhões de dólares do orçamento de TI (tecnologia da informação) que você tem à sua disposição.
Você tem que combinar a infraestrutura de TI, o design de dados, com o objetivo da equipe e da empresa. A empresa humana, seu cliente (e para nós eram os mortos) está em primeiro lugar. Todo o resto é uma variável dependente.
Talento, orçamento etc. são muito importantes. Mas você não precisa necessariamente de dinheiro para obter resultados sérios.
Como avalia o termo inteligência artificial? Como superar a estranheza que ele gera? É basicamente um meme de marketing que foi usado para inspirar financiadores a investir em projetos de ciência da computação, começando há muitas décadas. Uma boa descrição comercial de inteligência artificial —mais prática e menos jargão— é: software que faz análise. Tecnicamente falando, inteligência artificial é: dados mais matemática.
Se seus dados são terríveis, a IA resultante também o será. Se são tendenciosos, ou contêm comunicação abusiva, o resultado também será assim.
Esse é um dos motivos de tantas empresas de tecnologia jurídica e operações jurídicas dominadas pela engenharia fracassarem de forma tão espetacular. Você precisa de advogados altamente qualificados, técnicos, matemáticos e advogados céticos para desenvolver a melhor tecnologia/matemática.
Definir IA de forma mais simples também implica, precisamente, que cada inteligência artificial é única, como uma criança. Ela sempre está se desenvolvendo, mudando etc. Esta é a maneira de pensar sobre isso. E, como acontece com as crianças, você pode ensinar, mas nenhum pai pode controlar operacionalmente um filho, além de um certo limite.
Como o uso de dados pode ampliar o acesso à Justiça e torná-lo mais ágil? Nunca entendi muito bem o que significa o termo “acesso à Justiça”. Talvez seja porque a maioria das pessoas, de todas as origens socioeconômicas e étnicas, compartilha a experiência comum de não ter esse acesso.
Posso fazer analogias com outras áreas, porém. Um pedaço de software tem um custo marginal de aproximadamente zero. Cada vez que um de nós usa uma ferramenta de busca, ela não nos custa o investimento que foi necessário para fazer esse software e sofisticá-lo. Há grandes custos fixos, mas baixo custo por usuário.
Essa é a razão pela qual o software é um ótimo negócio. Se bem governado, podemos torná-lo um modus operandi ainda melhor para um país moderno. Isso supondo que possamos evitar todos os pesadelos que podem acontecer!
Podemos criar software de inteligência artificial legal que ajuda todas as pessoas em um país inteiro. Esse software pode ser perfeitamente personalizado e tornar-se fiel a cada indivíduo. Pode custar quase zero por cada operação incremental.
Eu criei um pacote de metodologias chamado Citizen’s AI Lab (laboratório de IA dos cidadãos) que será levado a muitos países ao redor do mundo, incluindo o Brasil, se as pessoas quiserem colocá-lo para funcionar. Vai fazer exatamente isso. Novamente, esses sistemas não apenas podem ser usados para cada operação (uso) de cada indivíduo, mas também para cada país.
FolhaJus Dia
Seleção diária das principais notícias sobre o cenário jurídico em diferentes áreas
Em quais situações não é recomendado que a Justiça use IA? Nunca para a própria tomada de decisão. Neste momento, em qualquer caso, e/ou em minha opinião, não é possível e nem desejável automatizar a tomada de decisões judiciais.
Por outro lado, juízes podem sempre se beneficiar com a inteligência artificial. Quais são as melhores práticas? Quantos casos um determinado juiz tem em sua pauta? Ou em todo o tribunal? Como isso se compara a outros tribunais e como os resultados poderiam ser diferentes por causa dos casos ou do cenário econômico, político ou outros fatores?
Há protocolos que ajudam as partes a obter uma resolução antecipada de disputas? Esses resultados são justos?, uma questão humana possibilitada por uma base ou plataforma empírica auxiliada por IA. Ou os resultados são apenas impulsionados pelo acesso relativo aos fundos de litígio pelos litigantes?
Como estruturamos as coisas para que tenhamos menos disputas estúpidas nos tribunais? Quais advogados apresentam os comportamentos de arquivamento mais malignos e abusivos em todos os tribunais? Como a lei deve ser regulamentada?
Essas são perguntas que não podemos nem começar a fazer sem IA —leia-se: matemática— para nos ajudar a analisar grandes quantidades de dados.
Quais são os limites éticos para o uso de bancos de dados? Como evitar abusos? Uma boa revisão legal é essencial para todo projeto de inteligência artificial e dados que tenha um impacto material na humanidade. Mas para fazer isso em escala, nós, os advogados, também precisamos de mecanismos legais de revisão de IA.
Apoio muito o trabalho atual da inteligência artificial ética. Infelizmente, nos Estados Unidos, e talvez em outros lugares, a “IA ética” é uma espécie de “falsa questão” para impedir os advogados de se intrometerem em projetos de engenharia lucrativos e divertidos. Isso tem sido um desastre político, operacional e comercial em muitos casos.
Nós [advogados] precisamos começar a nos tornar cocriadores porque, enquanto os engenheiros de software se lembram dos dados, nós nos lembramos da estória e das histórias. Nós somos os leitores. Nossas IAs estão imbuídas de um tipo diferente de sentido, evoluíram de um tipo diferente de educação. Cientistas da computação e advogados/estudiosos do direito estão intimamente alinhados, mas nosso trabalho precisa ser o de guardiões da memória social.
Pesquisa Datafolha com advogados brasileiros mostrou que apenas 29% dos 303 entrevistados usavam recursos de IA no dia a dia. Como é nos EUA? O que é necessário para avançar mais? O que observei no “microclima” da tecnologia legal de São Paulo foi que o “tabu” contra o uso de tecnologia legal foi praticamente eliminado. Claro, isso é um microclima e pode não ser representativo ou ser contrarrepresentativo. Mas as pessoas podem estar usando IA todos os dias na prática, sem estar cientes disso. Os motores de busca são um exemplo muito simples. Temos que saber o que é algo antes de saber o quanto realmente o usamos.
Nos EUA: suspeito que o uso ainda esteja no primeiro “trimestre” do jogo em aplicações de IA para a lei. Litígio e contrato são casos de uso razoavelmente estabelecidos. Na verdade, eu não acho que você pode ser um advogado de propriedade intelectual de nível nacional sem o impulsionamento de alguma forma de dados empíricos.
Ainda são raros cursos de análise de dados para estudantes de direito no Brasil. Diante dessa lacuna, o que os profissionais devem fazer para se adaptar a essa nova realidade? Qual é o risco para quem não fizer nada? Eu começaria ensinando processo cívil com dados. Essa é a regra, é assim que as pessoas aplicam a regra (o que arquivam), e o que acontece quando o fazem (consequências). Isso seria revolucionário. Alunos, professores e doutores podem desenvolver todos os tipos de estudos e utilidades sociais.
Existem inúmeros outros exemplos. Os acadêmicos precisam conduzir isso em parceria com juízes, reguladores, a imprensa e a Ordem dos Advogados.
Na verdade, meu melhor conselho para os novos alunos é: assuma que todos os dados são falsos até prova em contrário. E quanto mais sofisticada a forma, mais volumosa a definição, mais para se aprofundar.
RAIO X
Joshua Walker
Autor do livro “On Legal AI – Um Rápido Tratado sobre a Inteligência Artificial no Direito” (Revista dos Tribunais, 2021) e diretor da empresa Aon IPS. Graduado em Havard e doutor pela Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de Chicago, foi cofundador do CodeX, centro de informática legal da Universidade de Stanford, e fundador da Lex Machina, empresa pioneira do segmento jurídico tecnológico. Também lecionou nas universidades de Stanford e Berkeley
Pesquisadores Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann e Giorgio Parisi vão dividir prêmio de 10 milhões de coroas suecas
O prêmio Nobel em Física deste ano foi dedicado ao estudo de sistemas complexos, dentre eles os que permitem a compreensão das mudanças climáticas que afetam nosso planeta. A escolha coloca um carimbo definitivo de consenso sobre a ciência do clima.
Os pesquisadores Syukuro Manabe, dos Estados Unidos, e Klaus Hasselmann, da Alemanha, foram premiados especificamente por modelarem o clima terrestre e fazerem predições sobre o aquecimento global. A outra metade do prêmio foi para Giorgio Parisi, da Itália, que revelou padrões ocultos em materiais complexos desordenados, das escalas atômica à planetária, em uma contribuição essencial à teoria de sistemas complexos, com relevância também para o estudo do clima.
“Muitas pessoas pensam que a física lida com fenômenos simples, como a órbita perfeitamente elíptica da Terra ao redor do Sol ou átomos em estruturas cristalinas”, disse Thors Hans Hansson, membro do comitê de escolha do Nobel, na coletiva que apresentou a escolha.
”Mas a física é muito mais que isso. Uma das tarefas básicas da física é usar teorias básicas da matéria para explicar fenômenos e processos complexos, como o comportamento de materiais e qual é o desenvolvimento no clima da Terra. Isso exige intuição profunda por quais estruturas e quais progressões são essenciais, e também engenhosidade matemática para desenvolver os modelos e as teorias que as descrevem, coisas em que os laureados deste ano são poderosos.”
“Eu acho que é urgente que tomemos decisões muito fortes e nos movamos em um passo forte, porque estamos numa situação em que podemos ter uma retroalimentação positiva e isso pode acelerar o aumento de temperatura”, disse Giorgio Parisi, um dos vencedores, na coletiva de apresentação do evento. “É claro que para as gerações futuras nós temos de agir agora de uma forma muito rápida.”
COMO É ESCOLHIDO O GANHADOR DO NOBEL
A tradicional premiação do Nobel teve início com a morte do químico sueco Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), inventor da dinamite. Em 1895, em seu último testamento, Nobel registrou que sua fortuna deveria ser destinada para a construção de um prêmio —o que foi recebido por sua família com contestação. O primeiro prêmio só foi dado em 1901.
O processo de escolha do vencedor do prêmio da área de física começa no ano anterior à premiação. Em setembro, o Comitê do Nobel de Física envia convites (cerca de 3.000) para a indicação de nomes que merecem a homenagem. As respostas são enviadas até o dia 31 de janeiro.
Podem indicar nomes os membros da Academia Real Sueca de Ciências; membros do Comitê do Nobel de Física; ganhadores do Nobel de Física; professores física em universidades e institutos de tecnologia da Suécia, Dinamarca, Finlândia, Islândia e Noruega, e do Instituto Karolinska, em Estocolmo; professores em cargos semelhantes em pelo menos outras seis (mas normalmente em centenas de) universidades escolhidas pela Academia de Ciências, com o objetivo de assegurar a distribuição adequada pelos continentes e áreas de conhecimento; e outros cientistas que a Academia entenda adequados para receber os convites.
Autoindicações não são aceitas.
Começa então um processo de análise das centenas de nomes apontados, com consulta a especialistas e o desenvolvimento de relatórios, a fim de afunilar a seleção. Finalmente, em outubro, a Academia, por votação majoritária, decide quem receberá o reconhecimento.
Peebles ajudou a entender como o Universo evoluiu após o Big Bang, e Mayor e Queloz descobriram um exoplaneta (planeta fora do Sistema Solar) que orbitava uma estrela do tipo solar.
Pesquisas com laser foram premiadas em 2018, com láureas para Arthur Ashkin, Donna Strickland e Gérard Mourou.
Indo um pouco mais longe, o prêmio já esteve nas mãos de Max Planck (1918), por ter lançado as bases da física quântica e de Albert Einstein (1921), pela descoberta do efeito fotoelétrico. Niels Bohr (1922), por suas contribuições para o entendimento da estrutura atômica, e Paul Dirac e Erwin Schrödinger (1933), pelo desenvolvimento de novas versões da teoria quântica, também foram premiados.
“A COP 26 está sendo convocada a oferecer, urgentemente, respostas eficazes para a crise ecológica sem precedentes e para a crise de valores em que vivemos”, disse o pontífice. “Isso permitirá dar uma esperança concreta às futuras gerações. Vamos acompanhar com nosso compromisso e nossa proximidade espiritual.
O argentino transmitiu a mensagem em encontro no Vaticano batizado de “Fé e Ciência: Rumo à COP 26”. Estavam presentes líderes cristãos, como Justin Welby, arcebispo de Canterbury e líder espiritual dos anglicanos, e o patriarca ortodoxo Bartolomeu; mas também representantes muçulmanos, judeus, hindus, sikhs, budistas e taoistas, entre outros.
A reunião terminou com a assinatura de um apelo aos participantes da 26ª Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre Mudança Climática (COP 26), que acontecerá em Glasgow, na Escócia, de 31 de outubro a 12 de novembro. O texto foi entregue ao chanceler italiano, Luigi Di Maio, e ao presidente da COP, Alok Sharma.
A menos de um mês do evento sobre o clima, o documento é mais um movimento de pressão para que os líderes mundiais ajam de forma rápida e contundente ante um aquecimento global chamado de “catastrófico” pelos religiosos.
Lá fora
Na newsletter de Mundo, semanalmente, as análises sobre os principais fatos do globo, explicados de forma leve e interessante.
Essas “sementes de conflito”, destacou o papa, “causam as graves feridas que provocamos ao meio ambiente, como as mudanças climáticas, a desertificação, a poluição, a perda da biodiversidade”.
Welby, por sua vez, criticou que “nos últimos 100 anos tenhamos declarado guerra à Criação”.
“Nossos abusos, nossa guerra contra o clima, afetam os mais pobres”, disse. Ele defendeu o que chamou de “arquitetura financeira global que se arrependa de seus pecados” para promover mudanças como impostos que estimulem atividades mais sustentáveis e a economia verde.
Outros líderes destacaram a importância de uma ação conjunta entre os países —e Francisco afirmou que diferenças culturais devem ser vistas como uma força, não uma fraqueza, nesse contexto. “Se um país naufragar, todos naufragamos”, disse Rajwant Singh, líder sikh americano.
Há um mês, o papa Francisco, Welby e o chefe da Igreja Ortodoxa, Bartolomeu, lançaram um “apelo urgente”. Nele, pediram “a todo mundo, independentemente de suas crenças, ou visão de mundo, que se esforce para ouvir o grito da Terra”.
Durante a pandemia do novo coronavírus, vimos nascer uma série de inovações ligadas à Inteligência Artificial (IA). Um exemplo foi o projeto “IACOV-BR: Inteligência Artificial para Covid-19 no Brasil”, do Laboratório de Big Data e Análise Preditiva em Saúde da Faculdade de Saúde Pública da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), que desenvolve algoritmos de machine learning (aprendizagem de máquina) para antecipar o diagnóstico e o prognóstico da doença e é conduzido com hospitais parceiros em diversas regiões do Brasil para auxiliar médicos e gestores.
Já uma pesquisa da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp), em parceria com a Rede D’Or e o Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA), apontou, em fase piloto, ser possível identificar de forma rápida a gravidade dos casos de infecção por SARS-CoV-2 atendidos em pronto socorro lançando mão da IA para realizar a análise de diversos marcadores clínicos e de exames de sangue dos pacientes.
Esses são apenas dois – e nacionais – de uma infinidade de cases que mostram como o desenvolvimento e aprimoramento da IA pode ser benéfico para a sociedade. Temos que ressaltar, contudo, que a tecnologia é a famosa faca de dois gumes. De um lado, faz a humanidade avançar, otimiza processos, promove disrupções. De outro, cria divergências, paradoxos e traz problemas e dilemas que antes pareciam inimagináveis.
Em 2020, por exemplo, o departamento de polícia de Detroit, no Centro-Oeste dos Estados Unidos, foi processado por prender um homem negro identificado erroneamente por um software de reconhecimento facial como autor de um furto.
Ainda, um estudo publicado na revista Science em outubro de 2019 apontou que um software usado em atendimentos hospitalares nos EUA privilegiava pacientes brancos em detrimento de negros na fila de programas especiais voltados ao tratamento de doenças crônicas, como problemas renais e diabetes. A tecnologia, segundo os pesquisadores, tinha sido desenvolvida pela subsidiária de uma companhia de seguros e era utilizada no atendimento de, aproximadamente, 70 milhões de pacientes.
Mais recentemente, já em 2021, a startup russa Xsolla demitiu cerca de 150 funcionários com base em análise de big data. Dados dos colaboradores foram avaliados em ferramentas como o Jira – software que permite o monitoramento de tarefas e acompanhamento de projetos –, Gmail e o wiki corporativo Confluence, além de conversas e documentos, para classificá-los como “interessados” e “produtivos” no ambiente de trabalho remoto. Os que ficaram aquém do esperado foram desligados. Controverso, no mínimo, vez que houve a substituição de uma avaliação de resultados pelo simples monitoramento dos funcionários.
Novamente, esses são apenas alguns exemplos em um mar de diversos outros envolvendo polêmicas similares, cuja realidade demonstra que os gestores não estão preparados para lidar. O estudo “O estado da IA responsável: 2021”, produzido pela FICO em parceria com a empresa de inteligência de mercado Corinium, apontou que 65% das organizações não conseguem explicar como as decisões ou previsões dos seus modelos de IA são feitas. A pesquisa foi elaborada com base em conversas com 100 líderes de grandes empresas globais, inclusive brasileiros. Ainda, 73% dos entrevistados afirmaram estar enfrentando dificuldades para conseguir suporte executivo voltado a priorizar a ética e as práticas responsáveis de IA.
Softwares e aplicativos de Inteligência Artificial, que envolvem técnicas como big data e machine learning, não são perfeitos porque, justamente, foram programados por seres humanos. Há uma diferença, que pode até parecer sutil à primeira vista, entre ser inteligente e ser sábio, o que as máquinas, ao menos por enquanto, ainda não são. Em um mundo algorítmico, a IA responsável, pautada pela ética, deve ser o modelo de governança. Ao que tudo indica, entretanto, como demonstrou o estudo da FICO, é que tanto executivos como programadores não sabem como se guiar nesse sentido.
É aqui que entra a importância dos marcos regulatórios, que jogam luz sobre um tema, procuram prevenir conflitos e, caso estes ocorram, demonstram como os problemas devem ser solucionados.
Assim como ocorreu em relação à proteção de dados pessoais, a União Europeia busca ser protagonista e se tornar modelo global na regulação da IA. Por lá, o debate ainda é incipiente, mas já envolve pontos como a criação de uma autoridade para promover as normas de IA em cada país da União Europeia (EU). A regulação também mira o IA que potencialmente coloque em risco a segurança e os direitos fundamentais dos cidadãos, além da necessidade de uma maior transparência no uso de automações, como chatbots.
No Brasil, o Marco Legal da Inteligência Artificial (Projeto de Lei 21/2020) já está em tramitação no Congresso Nacional, para o qual o regime de urgência, que dispensa algumas formalidades regimentais, foi aprovado na Câmara dos Deputados. Além de toda a problemática envolvendo a falta de uma discussão aprofundada sobre o tema no Legislativo, o substitutivo do projeto se mostrou uma verdadeira bomba quanto à responsabilidade, trazendo que:
“(…) normas sobre responsabilidade dos agentes que atuam na cadeia de desenvolvimento e operação de sistemas de inteligência artificial devem, salvo disposição em contrário, se pautar na responsabilidade subjetiva, levar em consideração a efetiva participação desses agentes, os danos específicos que se deseja evitar ou remediar, e como esses agentes podem demonstrar adequação às normas aplicáveis por meio de esforços razoáveis compatíveis com padrões internacionais e melhores práticas de mercado”.
Enquanto a responsabilidade objetiva depende apenas de comprovação de nexo causal, a responsabilidade subjetiva pressupõe dolo ou culpa na conduta. Significa que agentes que atuam na cadeia de desenvolvimento e operação de sistemas de IA somente responderão por eventuais danos causados por esses sistemas se for comprovado que eles desejaram o resultado danoso ou que foram negligentes, imprudentes ou imperitos. Ademais, quem são tais agentes? Não há quaisquer definições sobre quem seriam esses operadores.
Na pressa de regular, corre-se o risco de termos, assim como diversas outras leis de nosso país, uma legislação “para inglês ver”, que mais atrapalha do que ajuda; que em vez de fazer justiça, é, na verdade, injusta. Por enquanto, no Brasil, não se tem registros de casos como os trazidos no início do texto, mas, invariavelmente, haverá. É apenas questão de tempo. E quando isso ocorrer, o risco que correremos é o de termos em mãos uma legislação incompatível com os preceitos constitucionais, que não protegem o cidadão, mas o tornam ainda mais vulnerável.
*André Aléxis de Almeida é advogado, especialista em Direito Constitucional, mestre em Direito Empresarial e mentor jurídico de empresas
In 1978, David Premack and Guy Woodruff published a paper that would go on to become famous in the world of academic psychology. Its title posed a simple question: does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?
In coining the term ‘theory of mind’, Premack and Woodruff were referring to the ability to keep track of what someone else thinks, feels or knows, even if this is not immediately obvious from their behaviour. We use theory of mind when checking whether our colleagues have noticed us zoning out on a Zoom call – did they just see that? A defining feature of theory of mind is that it entails second-order representations, which might or might not be true. I might think that someone else thinks that I was not paying attention but, actually, they might not be thinking that at all. And the success or failure of theory of mind often turns on an ability to appropriately represent another person’s outlook on a situation. For instance, I can text my wife and say: ‘I’m on my way,’ and she will know that by this I mean that I’m on my way to collect our son from nursery, not on my way home, to the zoo, or to Mars. Sometimes this can be difficult to do, as captured by a New Yorker cartoon caption of a couple at loggerheads: ‘Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel.’
Premack and Woodruff’s article sparked a deluge of innovative research into the origins of theory of mind. We now know that a fluency in reading minds is not something humans are born with, nor is it something guaranteed to emerge in development. In one classic experiment, children were told stories such as the following:
Maxi has put his chocolate in the cupboard. While Maxi is away, his mother moves the chocolate from the cupboard to the drawer. When Maxi comes back, where will he look for the chocolate?
Until the age of four, children often fail this test, saying that Maxi will look for the chocolate where it actually is (the drawer), rather than where he thinks it is (in the cupboard). They are using their knowledge of the reality to answer the question, rather than what they know about where Maxi had put the chocolate before he left. Autistic children also tend to give the wrong answer, suggesting problems with tracking the mental states of others. This test is known as a ‘false belief’ test – passing it requires one to realise that Maxi has a different (and false) belief about the world.
Many researchers now believe that the answer to Premack and Woodruff’s question is, in part, ‘no’ – suggesting that fully fledged theory of mind might be unique to humans. If chimpanzees are given an ape equivalent of the Maxi test, they don’t use the fact that another chimpanzee has a false belief about the location of the food to sneak in and grab it. Chimpanzees can track knowledge states – for instance, being aware of what others see or do not see, and knowing that, when someone is blindfolded, they won’t be able to catch them stealing food. There is also evidence that they track the difference between true and false beliefs in the pattern of their eye movements, similar to findings in human infants. Dogs also have similarly sophisticated perspective-taking abilities, preferring to choose toys that are in their owner’s line of sight when asked to fetch. But so far, at least, only adult humans have been found to act on an understanding that other minds can hold different beliefs about the world to their own.
Research on theory of mind has rapidly become a cornerstone of modern psychology. But there is an underappreciated aspect of Premack and Woodruff’s paper that is only now causing ripples in the pond of psychological science. Theory of mind as it was originally defined identified a capacity to impute mental states not only to others but also to ourselves. The implication is that thinking about others is just one manifestation of a rich – and perhaps much broader – capacity to build what philosophers call metarepresentations, or representations of representations. When I wonder whether you know that it’s raining, and that our plans need to change, I am metarepresenting the state of your knowledge about the weather.
Intriguingly, metarepresentations are – at least in theory – symmetric with respect to self and other: I can think about your mind, and I can think about my own mind too. The field of metacognition research, which is what my lab at University College London works on, is interested in the latter – people’s judgments about their own cognitive processes. The beguiling question, then – and one we don’t yet have an answer to – is whether these two types of ‘meta’ are related. A potential symmetry between self-knowledge and other-knowledge – and the idea that humans, in some sense, have learned to turn theory of mind on themselves – remains largely an elegant hypothesis. But an answer to this question has profound consequences. If self-awareness is ‘just’ theory of mind directed at ourselves, perhaps it is less special than we like to believe. And if we learn about ourselves in the same way as we learn about others, perhaps we can also learn to know ourselves better.
A common view is that self-knowledge is special, and immune to error, because it is gained through introspection – literally, ‘looking within’. While we might be mistaken about things we perceive in the outside world (such as thinking a bird is a plane), it seems odd to say that we are wrong about our own minds. If I think that I’m feeling sad or anxious, then there is a sense in which I am feeling sad or anxious. We have untrammelled access to our own minds, so the argument goes, and this immediacy of introspection means that we are rarely wrong about ourselves.
This is known as the ‘privileged access’ view of self-knowledge, and has been dominant in philosophy in various guises for much of the 20th century. René Descartes relied on self-reflection in this way to reach his conclusion ‘I think, therefore I am,’ noting along the way that: ‘I know clearly that there is nothing that can be perceived by me more easily or more clearly than my own mind.’
An alternative view suggests that we infer what we think or believe from a variety of cues – just as we infer what others think or feel from observing their behaviour. This suggests that self-knowledge is not as immediate as it seems. For instance, I might infer that I am anxious about an upcoming presentation because my heart is racing and my breathing is heavier. But I might be wrong about this – perhaps I am just feeling excited. This kind of psychological reframing is often used by sports coaches to help athletes maintain composure under pressure.
The philosopher most often associated with the inferential view is Gilbert Ryle, who proposed in The Concept of Mind (1949) that we gain self-knowledge by applying the tools we use to understand other minds to ourselves: ‘The sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same.’ Ryle’s idea is neatly summarised by another New Yorker cartoon in which a husband says to his wife: ‘How should I know what I’m thinking? I’m not a mind reader.’
Many philosophers since Ryle have considered the strong inferential view as somewhat crazy, and written it off before it could even get going. The philosopher Quassim Cassam, author of Self-knowledge for Humans (2014), describes the situation:
Philosophers who defend inferentialism – Ryle is usually mentioned in this context – are then berated for defending a patently absurd view. The assumption that intentional self-knowledge is normally immediate … is rarely defended; it’s just seen as obviously correct.
But if we take a longer view of history, the idea that we have some sort of special, direct access to our minds is the exception, rather than the rule. For the ancient Greeks, self-knowledge was not all-encompassing, but a work in progress, and something to be striven toward, as captured by the exhortation to ‘know thyself’ carved on the Temple of Delphi. The implication is that most of us don’t know ourselves very well. This view persisted into medieval religious traditions: the Italian priest and philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas suggested that, while God knows himself by default, we need to put in time and effort to know our own minds. And a similar notion of striving toward self-awareness is found in Eastern traditions, with the founder of Chinese Taoism, Lao Tzu, endorsing a similar goal: ‘To know that one does not know is best; not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease.’
Self-awareness is something that can be cultivated
Other aspects of the mind – most famously, perception – also appear to operate on the principles of an (often unconscious) inference. The idea is that the brain isn’t directly in touch with the outside world (it’s locked up in a dark skull, after all) – and instead has to ‘infer’ what is really out there by constructing and updating an internal model of the environment, based on noisy sensory data. For instance, you might know that your friend owns a Labrador, and so you expect to see a dog when you walk into her house, but don’t know exactly where in your visual field the dog will appear. This higher-level expectation – the spatially invariant concept of ‘dog’ – provides the relevant context for lower levels of the visual system to easily interpret dog-shaped blurs that rush toward you as you open the door.
Adelson’s checkerboard. Courtesy Wikipedia
Elegant evidence for this perception-as-inference view comes from a range of striking visual illusions. In one called Adelson’s checkerboard, two patches with the same objective luminance are perceived as lighter and darker because the brain assumes that, to reflect the same amount of light, the one in shadow must have started out brighter. Another powerful illusion is the ‘light from above’ effect – we have an automatic tendency to assume that natural light falls from above, whereas uplighting – such as when light from a fire illuminates the side of a cliff – is less common. This can lead the brain to interpret the same image as either bumps or dips in a surface, depending on whether the shadows are consistent with light falling from above. Other classic experiments show that information from one sensory modality, such as sight, can act as a constraint on how we perceive another, such as sound – an illusion used to great effect in ventriloquism. The real skill of ventriloquists is being able to talk without moving the mouth. Once this is achieved, the brains of the audience do the rest, pulling the sound to its next most likely source, the puppet.
These striking illusions are simply clever ways of exposing the workings of a system finely tuned for perceptual inference. And a powerful idea is that self-knowledge relies on similar principles – whereas perceiving the outside world relies on building a model of what is out there, we are also continuously building and updating a similar model of ourselves – our skills, abilities and characteristics. And just as we can sometimes be mistaken about what we perceive, sometimes the model of ourselves can also be wrong.
Let’s see how this might work in practice. If I need to remember something complicated, such as a shopping list, I might judge I will fail unless I write it down somewhere. This is a metacognitive judgment about how good my memory is. And this model can be updated – as I grow older, I might think to myself that my recall is not as good as it used to be (perhaps after experiencing myself forgetting things at the supermarket), and so I lean more heavily on list-writing. In extreme cases, this self-model can become completely decoupled from reality: in functional memory disorders, patients believe their memory is poor (and might worry they have dementia) when it is actually perfectly fine when assessed with objective tests.
We now know from laboratory research that metacognition, just like perception, is also subject to powerful illusions and distortions – lending credence to the inferential view. A standard measure here is whether people’s confidence tracks their performance on simple tests of perception, memory and decision-making. Even in otherwise healthy people, judgments of confidence are subject to systematic illusions – we might feel more confident about our decisions when we act more quickly, even if faster decisions are not associated with greater accuracy. In our research, we have also found surprisingly large and consistent differences between individuals on these measures – one person might have limited insight into how well they are doing from one moment to the next, while another might have good awareness of whether are likely to be right or wrong.
This metacognitive prowess is independent of general cognitive ability, and correlated with differences in the structure and function of the prefrontal and parietal cortex. In turn, people with disease or damage to these brain regions can suffer from what neurologists refer to as anosognosia – literally, the absence of knowing. For instance, in Alzheimer’s disease, patients can suffer a cruel double hit – the disease attacks not only brain regions supporting memory, but also those involved in metacognition, leaving people unable to understand what they have lost.
This all suggests – more in line with Socrates than Descartes – that self-awareness is something that can be cultivated, that it is not a given, and that it can fail in myriad interesting ways. And it also provides newfound impetus to seek to understand the computations that might support self-awareness. This is where Premack and Woodruff’s more expansive notion of theory of mind might be long overdue another look.
Saying that self-awareness depends on similar machinery to theory of mind is all well and good, but it begs the question – what is this machinery? What do we mean by a ‘model’ of a mind, exactly?
Some intriguing insights come from an unlikely quarter – spatial navigation. In classic studies, the psychologist Edward Tolman realised that the rats running in mazes were building a ‘map’ of the maze, rather than just learning which turns to make when. If the shortest route from a starting point towards the cheese is suddenly blocked, then rats readily take the next quickest route – without having to try all the remaining alternatives. This suggests that they have not just rote-learned the quickest path through the maze, but instead know something about its overall layout.
A few decades later, the neuroscientist John O’Keefe found that cells in the rodent hippocampus encoded this internal knowledge about physical space. Cells that fired in different locations became known as ‘place’ cells. Each place cell would have a preference for a specific position in the maze but, when combined together, could provide an internal ‘map’ or model of the maze as a whole. And then, in the early 2000s, the neuroscientists May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser and their colleagues in Norway found an additional type of cell – ‘grid’ cells, which fire in multiple locations, in a way that tiles the environment with a hexagonal grid. The idea is that grid cells support a metric, or coordinate system, for space – their firing patterns tell the animal how far it has moved in different directions, a bit like an in-built GPS system.
There is now tantalising evidence that similar types of brain cell also encode abstract conceptual spaces. For instance, if I am thinking about buying a new car, then I might think about how environmentally friendly the car is, and how much it costs. These two properties map out a two-dimensional ‘space’ on which I can place different cars – for instance, a cheap diesel car will occupy one part of the space, and an expensive electric car another part of the space. The idea is that, when I am comparing these different options, my brain is relying on the same kind of systems that I use to navigate through physical space. In one experiment by Timothy Behrens and his team at the University of Oxford, people were asked to imagine morphing images of birds that could have different neck and leg lengths – forming a two-dimensional bird space. A grid-like signature was found in the fMRI data when people were thinking about the birds, even though they never saw them presented in 2D.
Clear overlap between brain activations involved in metacognition and mindreading was observed
So far, these lines of work – on abstract conceptual models of the world, and on how we think about other minds – have remained relatively disconnected, but they are coming together in fascinating ways. For instance, grid-like codes are also found for conceptual maps of the social world – whether other individuals are more or less competent or popular – suggesting that our thoughts about others seem to be derived from an internal model similar to those used to navigate physical space. And one of the brain regions involved in maintaining these models of other minds – the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) – is also implicated in metacognition about our own beliefs and decisions. For instance, research in my group has discovered that medial prefrontal regions not only track confidence in individual decisions, but also ‘global’ metacognitive estimates of our abilities over longer timescales – exactly the kind of self-estimates that were distorted in the patients with functional memory problems.
Recently, the psychologist Anthony G Vaccaro and I surveyed the accumulating literature on theory of mind and metacognition, and created a brain map that aggregated the patterns of activations reported across multiple papers. Clear overlap between brain activations involved in metacognition and mindreading was observed in the medial PFC. This is what we would expect if there was a common system building models not only about other people, but also of ourselves – and perhaps about ourselves in relation to other people. Tantalisingly, this very same region has been shown to carry grid-like signatures of abstract, conceptual spaces.
At the same time, computational models are being built that can mimic features of both theory of mind and metacognition. These models suggest that a key part of the solution is the learning of second-order parameters – those that encode information about how our minds are working, for instance whether our percepts or memories tend to be more or less accurate. Sometimes, this system can become confused. In work led by the neuroscientist Marco Wittmann at the University of Oxford, people were asked to play a game involving tracking the colour or duration of simple stimuli. They were then given feedback about both their own performance and that of other people. Strikingly, people tended to ‘merge’ their feedback with those of others – if others were performing better, they tended to think they themselves were performing a bit better too, and vice-versa. This intertwining of our models of self-performance and other-performance was associated with differences in activity in the dorsomedial PFC. Disrupting activity in this area using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) led to more self-other mergence – suggesting that one function of this brain region is not only to create models of ourselves and others, but also to keep these models apart.
Another implication of a symmetry between metacognition and mindreading is that both abilities should emerge around the same time in childhood. By the time that children become adept at solving false-belief tasks – around the age of four – they are also more likely to engage in self-doubt, and recognise when they themselves were wrong about something. In one study, children were first presented with ‘trick’ objects: a rock that turned out to be a sponge, or a box of Smarties that actually contained not sweets but pencils. When asked what they first thought the object was, three-year-olds said that they knew all along that the rock was a sponge and that the Smarties box was full of pencils. But by the age of five, most children recognised that their first impression of the object was false – they could recognise they had been in error.
Indeed, when Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie and Uta Frith outlined their influential theory of autism in the 1980s, they proposed that theory of mind was only ‘one of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational capacity’. The implication is that there should also be noticeable differences in metacognition that are linked to changes in theory of mind. In line with this idea, several recentstudies have shown that autistic individuals also show differences in metacognition. And in a recent study of more than 450 people, Elisa van der Plas, a PhD student in my group, has shown that theory of mind ability (measured by people’s ability to track the feelings of characters in simple animations) and metacognition (measured by the degree to which their confidence tracks their task performance) are significantly correlated with each other. People who were better at theory of mind also formed their confidence differently – they were more sensitive to subtle cues, such as their response times, that indicated whether they had made a good or bad decision.
Recognising a symmetry between self-awareness and theory of mind might even help us understand why human self-awareness emerged in the first place. The need to coordinate and collaborate with others in large social groups is likely to have prized the abilities for metacognition and mindreading. The neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel has proposed that primates have unusually efficient ways of cramming neurons into a given brain volume – meaning there is simply more processing power devoted to so-called higher-order functions – those that, like theory of mind, go above and beyond the maintenance of homeostasis, perception and action. This idea fits with what we know about the areas of the brain involved in theory of mind, which tend to be the most distant in terms of their connections to primary sensory and motor areas.
A symmetry between self-awareness and other-awareness also offers a subversive take on what it means for other agents such as animals and robots to be self-aware. In the film Her (2013), Joaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore falls in love with his virtual assistant, Samantha, who is so human-like that he is convinced she is conscious. If the inferential view of self-awareness is correct, there is a sense in which Theodore’s belief that Samantha is aware is sufficient to make her aware, in his eyes at least. This is not quite true, of course, because the ultimate test is if she is able to also recursively model Theodore’s mind, and create a similar model of herself. But being convincing enough to share an intimate connection with another conscious agent (as Theodore does with Samantha), replete with mindreading and reciprocal modelling, might be possible only if both agents have similar recursive capabilities firmly in place. In other words, attributing awareness to ourselves and to others might be what makes them, and us, conscious.
A simple route for improving self-awareness is to take a third-person perspective on ourselves
Finally, a symmetry between self-awareness and other-awareness also suggests novel routes towards boosting our own self-awareness. In a clever experiment conducted by the psychologists and metacognition experts Rakefet Ackerman and Asher Koriat in Israel, students were asked to judge both how well they had learned a topic, and how well other students had learned the same material, by watching a video of them studying. When judging themselves, they fell into a trap – they believed that spending less time studying was a signal of being confident in knowing the material. But when judging others, this relationship was reversed: they (correctly) judged that spending longer on a topic would lead to better learning. These results suggest that a simple route for improving self-awareness is to take a third-person perspective on ourselves. In a similar way, literary novels (and soap operas) encourage us to think about the minds of others, and in turn might shed light on our own lives.
There is still much to learn about the relationship between theory of mind and metacognition. Most current research on metacognition focuses on the ability to think about our experiences and mental states – such as being confident in what we see or hear. But this aspect of metacognition might be distinct from how we come to know our own, or others’, character and preferences – aspects that are often the focus of research on theory of mind. New and creative experiments will be needed to cross this divide. But it seems safe to say that Descartes’s classical notion of introspection is increasingly at odds with what we know of how the brain works. Instead, our knowledge of ourselves is (meta)knowledge like any other – hard-won, and always subject to revision. Realising this is perhaps particularly useful in an online world deluged with information and opinion, when it’s often hard to gain a check and balance on what we think and believe. In such situations, the benefits of accurate metacognition are myriad – helping us recognise our faults and collaborate effectively with others. As the poet Robert Burns tells us:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us…
(Oh, would some Power give us the gift To see ourselves as others see us! It would from many a blunder free us… )
If modernity is the Anthropocene and if secularization is a defining feature of modernity’s birth, then it is natural to ask: did secularization engender climate change?
Why is secularization never connected to climate change? And why is climate change not connected to secularization? If modernity is the Anthropocene and if secularization is a defining feature of modernity’s birth, then it is natural to ask: did secularization engender climate change?
I aim to open a new space in the study of both secularism and the Anthropocene, of religion and climate change. Further, I aim to create a philosophical bridge between influential currents in anthropology and the humanities. I build this bridge through the critique of Orientalism and the anthropology of secularism and Islam, respectively founded by Edward Said and Talal Asad, on one hand, and the literature on the Anthropocene influenced by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, on the other.
I argue that secularization should be re-conceptualized not only as an imperial and racial but also as an ecological set of processes.
My perspective stems from a philosophical engagement with both the project and the concept of secularization. It therefore presupposes a critical understanding of what has been called ‘the secular’ as a name given to the result of the destruction of nature: the transformation of the earth itself by industrial and colonial powers. I propose an alternative definition of secularization, secularism, and secularity. As I argue fully in my first book, Des empires sous la terre, the Anthropocene is an outcome of secularization understood as a set of processes engendered by the imperial relations of power between Europe and the rest of the world.
Thinking Through the Secularocene
What is secularization? Neither a supposed decline of religion nor a simple continuation of Christianity by other means, secularization should be seen as a transformation of the earth itself by virtue of its connection with fossil empires and capitalism.
This perspective differs from scholars who have been engaged in criticizing the idea of secularization as a mythology of progress and privatization – a mythology to which 9/11 proved false. I argue that the concept of secularization should be redefined instead of being dissolved. It is only if one presupposes that secularization is reducible to the privatization of religion that the existence of political religion can be construed as testifying against the reality of secularization. When one opposes the permanence of religion or of Christianity to the reality of secularization, one is in fact reactivating the secularization thesis in its primitive, Hegelian version (developed by Marcel Gauchet) – that modernity is the secular realization of Christianity on earth – and, therefore, of all religions in the world.
In other words, before it can be seen as a process, secularization should be approached as an order which articulates philosophy and politics, discourse and practices throughout the 19th century in Western Europe. Secularization is the order which claims that the other-worldliness of religion and the divine must be abolished by virtue of its realization in this world. The first instance of this demand is Hegel’s absolute knowledge and his interpretation of the French Revolution as the realization of heaven on earth. The so-called ‘end of history’ is indeed the accomplishment of a secularizing process by which the divine becomes the institution of freedom through the modern state.
The first way in which secularization manifests its reality is discursive. As a discourse, it asserts that the modern West must be and therefore is Christianity itself, Christianity as the secular. Before it can become an analytical concept, the concept of secularization formulates a demand: Christianity and religions realize heaven and all forms of transcendence in this world.
Is the reality of secularization solely discursive? No. The reality of the secular is the earth itself as it is transformed by industrial capitalism. This redefinition of the secular and of secularization allows us to think alternatively about this ‘global’ event called climate change. I argue that the Anthropocene should be seen as an effect of secularization, and that one might use the word Secularocene to describe this dimension of ‘colonial modernity.’
How did secularization lead to climate change, one might ask? By authorizing the extraction of coal through expropriating lands that belonged to the Church, and dismissing the reality of demons in the underground as superstitious, secularization allowed fossil industrialism to transform the planet. For this reason, secularization should be seen as a crucial aspect of what Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital: an extra-economic process of expropriation structured by state violence deploying itself through racial, gender, class, and religious hierarchies.
The critique of secularism is more than the critique of a political doctrine demanding the privatization of religion. It is the critique of how the earth itself has been transformed. As such, philosophical secularism refers to an ontology that posits this world as the sole reality. It defines immanence, or earth, as the reality which must be opposed to transcendence, or “heaven”. The critique of heaven is not the condition of all critique, as Marx famously puts it. It is part of how capitalism operates. Hence, the critique of heaven has transformed the earth itself through the secularization of both empire and capital.
While genealogy authorizes us to think about the categories of religion and secularity critically, it should be integrated within a larger perspective if we are to rethink secularization by constructing an alternative narrative of its deployment beyond the tropes of religion’s decline. A post-genealogical philosophy of history is a theory, not of progress, but of how the earth has been transformed through imperial and capitalist processes of globalization. The very existence of climate change invites us to think past Foucault’s legacies in postcolonial thought. Beyond genealogy, the hypothesis of the Anthropocene – or of the Secularocene for that matter – might require that we integrate genealogical inquiries into a radically new form of philosophical history. After the genealogy of religion and the secular, a philosophy of global history might help us understand imperial secularization as the birth of the Anthropocene.
Mohamad Amer Meziane holds a PhD from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University. He is affiliated to the Institute of Religion Culture and Public Life, the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Religion.
As a new Oxford paper shows, the incredibly rapid fall in the cost of renewables offers hope–but only if movements can push banks and politicians hard enough
This is one of the first solar panels and batteries ever installed, in the state of Georgia in 1955. At the time it was the most expensive power on earth; now it’s the cheapest, and still falling fast.
So far in the global warming era, we’ve caught precious few breaks. Certainly not from physics: the temperature has increased at the alarming pace that scientists predicted thirty years ago, and the effects of that warming have increased even faster than expected. (“Faster Than Expected” is probably the right title for a history of climate change so far; if you’re a connoisseur of disaster, there is already a blog by that name). The Arctic is melting decades ahead of schedule, and the sea rising on an accelerated schedule, and the forest fires of the science fiction future are burning this autumn. And we haven’t caught any breaks from our politics either: it’s moved with the lumbering defensiveness one would expect from a system ruled by inertia and vested interest. And so it is easy, and completely plausible, to despair: we are on the bleeding edge of existential destruction.
But one trend is, finally, breaking in the right direction, and perhaps decisively. The price of renewable energy is now falling nearly as fast as heat and rainfall records, and in the process perhaps offering us one possible way out. The public debate hasn’t caught up to the new reality—Bill Gates, in his recent bestseller on energy and climate, laments the “green premium” that must be paid for clean energy. But he (and virtually every other mainstream energy observer) is already wrong—and they’re all about to be spectacularly wrong, if the latest evidence turns out to be right.
Last Wednesday, a team at Oxford University released a fascinating paper that I haven’t seen covered anywhere. Stirringly titled “Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition,” it makes the following argument: “compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars–even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy.” Short and muscular, the paper begins by pointing out that at the moment most energy technologies, from gas to solar, have converged on a price point of about $100 per megawatt hour. In the case of coal, gas, and oil, however, “after adjusting for inflation, prices now are very similar to what they were 140 years ago, and there is no obvious long-range trend.” Sun, wind, and batteries, however, have dropped exponentially at roughly ten percent a year for three decades. Solar power didn’t exist until the late 1950s; since that time it has dropped in price about three orders of magnitude.
They note that all the forecasts over those years about how fast prices would drop were uniformly wrong, invariably underestimating by almost comic margins the drop in costs for renewable energy. This is a massive problem: “failing to appreciate cost improvement trajectories of renewables relative to fossil fuels not only leads to under-investment in critical emission reduction technologies, it also locks in higher cost energy infrastructure for decades to come.” That is, if economists don’t figure out that solar is going to get steadily cheaper, you’re going to waste big bucks building gas plants designed to last for decades. And indeed we have (and of course the cost of them is not the biggest problem; that would be the destruction of the planet.)
Happily, the Oxford team demonstrates that there’s a much easier and more effective way to estimate future costs than the complicated calculations used in the past: basically, if you just figure out the historic rates of fall in the costs of renewable energy, you can project them forward into the future because the learning curve seems to keep on going. In their model, validated by thousands of runs using past data, by far the cheapest path for the future is a very fast transition to renewable energy: if you replace almost all fossil fuel use over the next twenty years, you save tens of trillions of dollars. (They also model the costs of using lots of nuclear power: it’s low in carbon but high in price).
To repeat: the cost of fossil fuels is not falling; any technological learning curve for oil and gas is offset by the fact that we’ve already found the easy stuff, and now you must dig deeper. But the more solar and windpower you build, the more the price falls—because the price is only the cost of setting up the equipment, which we get better at all the time. The actual energy arrives every morning when the sun rises. This doesn’t mean it’s a miracle: you have to mine lithium and cobalt, you have to site windmills, and you have to try and do those things with as little damage as possible. But if it’s not a miracle, it’s something like a deus ex machina—and the point is that these machines are cheap.
If we made policy with this fact in mind—if we pushed, as the new $3.5 trillion Senate bill does, for dramatic increases in renewable usage in short order, then we would not only be saving the planet, we’d be saving tons of money. That money would end up in our pockets—but it would be removed from the wallets of people who own oil wells and coal mines, which is precisely why the fossil fuel industry is working so hard to gum up the works, trying to slow down everything from electric cars to induction cooktops and using all their economic and political muscle to prolong the transition. Their economically outmoded system of energy generation can only be saved by political corruption, which sadly is the fossil fuel industry’s remaining specialty. So far the learning curve of their influence-peddling has been steep enough to keep carbon levels climbing.
That’s why we need to pay attention to the only other piece of good news, the only other virtuous thing that’s happened faster than expected. And that’s been the growth of movements to take on the fossil fuel industry and push for change. If those keep growing—if enough of us divest and boycott and vote and march and go to jail—we may be able to push our politicians and our banks hard enough that they actually let us benefit from the remarkable fall in the price of renewable energy. Activists and engineers are often very different kinds of people—but their mostly unconscious alliance offers the only hope of even beginning to catch up with the runaway pace of global warming.
So if you’re a solar engineer working to drop the price of power ten percent a year, don’t you dare leave the lab—the rest of us will chip in to get you pizza and caffeine so you can keep on working. But if you’re not a solar engineer, then see you in the streets (perhaps at October’s ‘People vs Fossil Fuels’ demonstrations in DC). Because you’re the other half of this equation.
Researchers have unveiled a ground-breaking system that allows electronic devices to run without batteries for “an infinite lifetime”.
Computer engineers from Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology developed the BFree energy-harvesting technology in order to enable battery-free devices capable of running perpetually with only intermittent energy input.
The engineers hope the innovative BFree system will help cut the vast amounts of dead batteries that end up as e-waste in landfills around the world.
It will also allow amateur hobbyists and those within the Maker Movement to create their own battery-free electronic devices.
“Right now, it’s virtually impossible for hobbyists to develop devices with battery-free hardware, so we wanted to democratise our battery-free platform,” said Josiah Hester, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University, who led the research .
“Makers all over the internet are asking how to extend their device’s battery life. They are asking the wrong question. We want them to forget about the battery and instead think about more sustainable ways to generate energy.”
In order to run perpetually with only intermittent energy – for example the sun going behind a cloud and no longer powering the device’s solar panel – the BFree system simply pauses the calculations it is running without losing memory or needing to run through a long list of operations before restarting when power returns.
The technology is part of a new trend known as ubiquitous computing, which aims to make computing available at any time and in any place through smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).
The research represents a significant advancement in this field by circumventing the need for a battery, and the associated charging and replacing that comes with them.
“Many people predict that we’re going to have a trillion devices in this IoT,” Dr Hester said.
“That means a trillion dead batteries or 100 million people replacing a dead battery every few minutes. That presents a terrible ecological cost to the environment.
“What we’re doing, instead, is truly giving power to the people. We want everyone to be able to effortlessly program devices in a more sustainable way.”
The research will be presented at the UbiComp 2021 conference on 22 September.
From top left: Mariana Mazzucato, Carlota Perez, Kate Raworth, Stephanie Kelton, Esther Duflo. 20-first
Few economists become household names. Last century, it was John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman. Today, Thomas Piketty has become the economists’ poster-boy. Yet listen to the buzz, and it is five female economists who deserve our attention. They are revolutionising their field by questioning the meaning of everything from ‘value’ and ‘debt’ to ‘growth’ and ‘GDP.’ Esther Duflo, Stephanie Kelton, Mariana Mazzucato, Carlota Perez and Kate Raworth are united in one thing: their amazement at the way economics has been defined and debated to date. Their incredulity is palpable.
It reminds me of many women I’ve seen emerge into power over the past decade. Like Rebecca Henderson, a Management and Strategy professor at Harvard Business School and author of the new Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. “It’s odd to finally make it to the inner circle,” she says, “and discover just how strangely the world is being run.” When women finally make it to the pinnacle of many professions, they often discover a world more wart-covered frog than handsome prince. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, when they get a glimpse behind the curtain, they discover the machinery of power can be more bluster than substance. As newcomers to the game, they can often see this more clearly than the long-term players. Henderson cites Tom Toro’s cartoon as her mantra. A group in rags sit around a fire with the ruins of civilisation in the background. “Yes, the planet got destroyed” says a man in a disheveled suit, “but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
You get the same sense when you listen to the female economists throwing themselves into the still very male dominated economics field. A kind of collective ‘you’re kidding me, right? These five female economists are letting the secret out – and inviting people to flip the priorities. A growing number are listening – even the Pope (see below).
All question concepts long considered sacrosanct. Here are four messages they share:
Get Over It – Challenge the Orthodoxy
Described as “one of the most forward-thinking economists of our times,” Mariana Mazzucato is foremost among the flame throwers. A professor at University College London and the Founder/Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, she asks fundamental questions about how ‘value’ has been defined, who decides what that means, and who gets to measure it. Her TED talk, provocatively titled “What is economic value? And who creates it?” lays down the gauntlet. If some people are value creators,” she asks, what does that make everyone else? “The couch potatoes? The value extractors? The value destroyers?” She wants to make economics explicitly serve the people, rather than explain their servitude.
Stephanie Kelton takes on our approach to debt and spoofs the simplistic metaphors, like comparing national income and expenditure to ‘family budgets’ in an attempt to prove how dangerous debt is. In her upcoming book, The Deficit Myth (June 2020), she argues they are not at all similar; what household can print additional money, or set interest rates? Debt should be rebranded as a strategic investment in the future. Deficits can be used in ways good or bad but are themselves a neutral and powerful policy tool. “They can fund unjust wars that destabilize the world and cost millions their lives,” she writes, “or they can be used to sustain life and build a more just economy that works for the many and not just the few.” Like all the economists profiled here, she’s pointing at the mind and the meaning behind the money.
Get Green Growth – Reshaping Growth Beyond GDP
Kate Raworth, a Senior Research Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, is the author of Doughnut Economics. She challenges our obsession with growth, and its outdated measures. The concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was created in the 1930s and is being applied in the 21st century to an economy ten times larger. GDP’s limited scope (eg. ignoring the value of unpaid labour like housework and parenting or making no distinction between revenues from weapons or water) has kept us “financially, politically and socially addicted to growth” without integrating its costs on people and planet. She is pushing for new visual maps and metaphors to represent sustainable growth that doesn’t compromise future generations. What this means is moving away from the linear, upward moving line of ‘progress’ ingrained in us all, to a “regenerative and distributive” model designed to engage everyone and shaped like … a doughnut (food and babies figure prominently in these women’s metaphors).
Carlota Perez doesn’t want to stop or slow growth, she wants to dematerialize it. “Green won’t spread by guilt and fear, we need aspiration and desire,” she says. Her push is towards a redefinition of the ‘good life’ and the need for “smart green growth” to be fuelled by a desire for new, attractive and aspirational lifestyles. Lives will be built on a circular economy that multiplies services and intangibles which offer limitless (and less environmentally harmful) growth. She points to every technological revolution creating new lifestyles. She says we can see it emerging, as it has in the past, among the educated, the wealthy and the young: more services rather than more things, active and creative work, a focus on health and care, a move to solar power, intense use of the internet, a preference for customisation over conformity, renting vs owning, and recycling over waste. As these new lifestyles become widespread, they offer immense opportunities for innovation and new jobs to service them.
Get Good Government – The Strategic Role of the State
All these economists want the state to play a major role. Women understand viscerally how reliant the underdogs of any system are on the inclusivity of the rules of the game. “It shapes the context to create a positive sum game” for both the public and business, says Perez. You need an active state to “tilt the playing field toward social good.” Perez outlines five technological revolutions, starting with the industrial one. She suggests we’re halfway through the fifth, the age of Tech & Information. Studying the repetitive arcs of each revolution enables us to see the opportunity of the extraordinary moment we are in. It’s the moment to shape the future for centuries to come. But she balances economic sustainability with the need for social sustainability, warning that one without the other is asking for trouble.
Mariana Mazzucato challenges governments to be more ambitious. They gain confidence and public trust by remembering and communicating what they are there to do. In her mind that is ensuring the public good. This takes vision and strategy, two ingredients she says are too often sorely lacking. Especially post-COVID, purpose needs to be the driver determining the ‘directionality’ of focus, investments and public/ private partnerships. Governments should be using their power – both of investment and procurement – to orient efforts towards the big challenges on our horizon, not just the immediate short-term recovery. They should be putting conditions on the massive financial bail outs they are currently handing out. She points to the contrast in imagination and impact between airline bailouts in Austria and the UK. The Austrian airlines are getting government aid on the condition they meet agreed emissions targets. The UK is supporting airlines without any conditionality, a huge missed opportunity to move towards larger, broader goals of building a better and greener economy out of the crisis.
Get Real – Beyond the Formulae and Into the Field
All of these economists also argue for getting out of the theories and into the field. They reject the idea of nerdy theoretical calculations done within the confines of a university tower and challenge economists to experiment and test their formulae in the real world.
Esther Duflo, Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT, is the major proponent of bringing what is accepted practice in medicine to the field of economics: field trials with randomised control groups. She rails against the billions poured into aid without any actual understanding or measurement of the returns. She gently accuses us of being no better with our 21st century approaches to problems like immunisation, education or malaria than any medieval doctor, throwing money and solutions at things with no idea of their impact. She and her husband, Abhijit Banerjee, have pioneered randomised control trials across hundreds of locations in different countries of the world, winning a Nobel Prize for Economics in 2019 for the insights.
They test, for example, how to get people to use bed nets against malaria. Nets are a highly effective preventive measure but getting people to acquire and use them has been a hard nut to crack. Duflo set up experiments to answer the conundrums: If people have to pay for nets, will they value them more? If they are free, will they use them? If they get them free once, will this discourage future purchases? As it turns out, based on these comparisons, take-up is best if nets are initially given, “people don’t get used to handouts, they get used to nets,” and will buy them – and use them – once they understand their effectiveness. Hence, she concludes, we can target policy and money towards impact.
Mazzucato is also hands-on with a number of governments around the world, including Denmark, the UK, Austria, South Africa and even the Vatican, where she has just signed up for weekly calls contributing to a post-Covid policy. ‘I believe [her vision] can help to think about the future,’ Pope Francis said after reading her book, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. No one can accuse her of being stuck in an ivory tower. Like Duflo, she is elbow-deep in creating new answers to seemingly intractable problems.
She warns that we don’t want to go back to normal after Covid-19. Normal was what got us here. Instead, she invites governments to use the crisis to embed ‘directionality’ towards more equitable public good into their recovery strategies and investments. Her approach is to define ambitious ‘missions’ which can focus minds and bring together broad coalitions of stakeholders to create solutions to support them. The original NASA mission to the moon is an obvious precursor model. Why, anyone listening to her comes away thinking, did we forget purpose in our public spending? And why, when so much commercial innovation and profit has grown out of government basic research spending, don’t a greater share of the fruits of success return to promote the greater good?
Economics has long remained a stubbornly male domain and men continue to dominate mainstream thinking. Yet, over time, ideas once considered without value become increasingly visible. The move from outlandish to acceptable to policy is often accelerated by crisis. Emerging from this crisis, five smart economists are offering an innovative range of new ideas about a greener, healthier and more inclusive way forward. Oh, and they happen to be women.
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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