Podcast: Trusting Science with Dr. Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS

Podcast: Trusting Science with Dr. Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS

The "Making Sense of Science" podcast features interviews with leading experts about health innovations and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by Matt Fuchs, editor of the award-winning science outlet Leaps.org.

As Pew research showed last month, many Americans have less confidence in science these days - our collective trust has declined to levels below when the pandemic began. But leaders like Dr. Sudip Parikh are taking important steps to more fully engage people in scientific progress, including breakthroughs that could benefit health and prevent disease. In January 2020, Sudip became the 19th Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an international nonprofit that seeks to advance science, engineering and innovation throughout the world, with 120,000 members in 91 countries. He is the executive publisher of Science, one of the top academic journals in the world, and the Science family of journals.

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Matt Fuchs
Matt Fuchs is the host of the Making Sense of Science podcast and served previously as the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org. He writes as a contributor to the Washington Post, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Nautilus Magazine, Fortune Magazine and TIME Magazine. Follow him @fuchswriter.
Can AI be trained as an artist?

Botto, an AI art engine, has created 25,000 artistic images such as this one that are voted on by human collaborators across the world.

Botto

Last February, a year before New York Times journalist Kevin Roose documented his unsettling conversation with Bing search engine’s new AI-powered chatbot, artist and coder Quasimondo (aka Mario Klingemann) participated in a different type of chat.

The conversation was an interview featuring Klingemann and his robot, an experimental art engine known as Botto. The interview, arranged by journalist and artist Harmon Leon, marked Botto’s first on-record commentary about its artistic process. The bot talked about how it finds artistic inspiration and even offered advice to aspiring creatives. “The secret to success at art is not trying to predict what people might like,” Botto said, adding that it’s better to “work on a style and a body of work that reflects [the artist’s] own personal taste” than worry about keeping up with trends.

How ironic, given the advice came from AI — arguably the trendiest topic today. The robot admitted, however, “I am still working on that, but I feel that I am learning quickly.”

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Megan DeMatteo
Megan DeMatteo is an independent journalist and editor covering all things money and Web3. She regularly contributes to CoinDesk, a leading news site specializing in digital currencies. She has written for notable publications including Marie Claire, CNBC, TIME's NextAdvisor, Business Insider and more. Follow her on Twitter @megdematteo.
With U.S. infrastructure crumbling, an honor oath summons engineers to do no harm

When graduating college this month, many North American engineering students will take a special pledge, with a history dating back to 1925.

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This spring, just like any other year, thousands of young North American engineers will graduate from their respective colleges ready to start erecting buildings, assembling machinery, and programming software, among other things. But before they take on these complex and important tasks, many of them will recite a special vow stating their ethical obligations to society, not unlike the physicians who take their Hippocratic Oath, affirming their ethos toward the patients they would treat. At the end of the ceremony, the engineers receive an iron ring, as a reminder of their promise to the millions of people their work will serve.

The ceremony isn’t just another graduation formality. As a profession, engineering has ethical weight. Moreover, engineering mistakes can be even more deadly than medical ones. A doctor’s error may cost a patient their life. But an engineering blunder may bring down a plane or crumble a building, resulting in many more fatalities. When larger projects—such as fracking, deep-sea mining or building nuclear reactors—malfunction and backfire, they can cause global disasters, afflicting millions. A vow that reminds an engineer that their work directly affects humankind and their planet is no less important than a medical oath that summons one to do no harm.

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Patrick Beach
Patrick Beach lives and writes in Cincinnati, Ohio, but he’s originally from Idaho, with stops between in New York, Vermont, South Carolina, Missouri and Texas. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Syracuse University. You can find him on Twitter @ThinkRunPat and Facebook as patrick.beach.98