Philippa Kaur

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    AI can help historians restore ancient texts from damaged inscriptions

    An AI tool developed by DeepMind can help historians restore ancient Greek texts with 72 per cent accuracy, and date inscriptions to within 30 years of their true age

    Humans

    9 March 2022

    By Carissa Wong
    The Celsus Library in the ancient city of Ephesus, TurkeyMazur Travel/Shutterstock
    An artificial intelligence algorithm developed as part of a collaboration between historians and UK-based AI firm DeepMind can help restore ancient Greek texts with 72 per cent accuracy.
    The AI can also predict where in the ancient Mediterranean world the texts were originally written with more than 70 per cent accuracy and date them to within a few decades of their agreed-upon date of creation. All of this marks an improvement upon an earlier version of the AI that could only restore ancient texts.
    “Inscriptions provide evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilisations,” says Thea Sommerschield at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy. “But most surviving inscriptions have been damaged over the centuries, so their texts are now fragmentary or illegible. They may also have been moved or trafficked far from their original location.”Advertisement
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    When recovering ancient texts, historians are usually interested in achieving three major goals: restoring the text, and working out exactly when and where it was written. To do this, they look for distinctive features and patterns in the style of writing and compare them to those of ancient texts that have already been found and dated.
    “However, it’s really difficult for a human to harness all existing relevant data, and to discover underlying patterns every time,” says Sommerschield.
    Sommerschield and her colleagues worked with researchers at DeepMind to get the machine-learning AI – called Ithaca after a Greek island that is famous for being the home of the legendary figure Odysseus – to carry out all three tasks.
    To train Ithaca, the team used around 60,000 ancient Greek texts from across the Mediterranean that are already well-studied and known to have been written between 700 BC and AD 500. The team masked some of the characters in the texts and then compared Ithaca’s predictions for this “missing” text with the actual inscriptions.
    Next, the team used a data set of nearly 8000 inscriptions – again, already well-studied and understood – to test Ithaca’s performance alone, or in combination with two ancient historians. On its own, Ithaca could restore texts with 62 per cent accuracy, while ancient historians alone restored text with around 25 per cent accuracy.
    However, the most accurate reconstructions involved Ithaca and historians working together. When historians took Ithaca’s top 20 most likely reconstructions for a given text and used them to inform their own work, they could restore the text with an accuracy even greater than Ithaca alone.
    “When historians used Ithaca, their performance on the text restoration task actually tripled, to 72 per cent,” says Sommerschield.

    Ithaca could also predict where in the Mediterranean a text was written 71 per cent of the time and it could date the texts to within 30 years of their true date of creation, as previously established by historians.
    “It is clear that the authors’ work is important and groundbreaking. The ‘ancient historian and Ithaca’ method produces startlingly significant improvements in outcomes over traditional human-only methods,” says Tom Elliott at New York University. However, further testing with more historians is needed and people will need training and technical support to use the tool, he adds.
    The team says the feedback from historians so far has been positive.
    “We hope that the way we’ve designed it, it’s going to be easy for an ancient historian to use, because they will just type in the text [to an online interface] and then they will get all these visualisations that they can use,” says Yannis Assael at DeepMind in the UK, and an author of the study.
    Ithaca’s design should also make it easily applicable to any ancient language and any written medium, says Sommerschield.
    Journal reference: Nature, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04448-z

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    Chernobyl staff denied access to radiation monitoring lab

    Scientific monitoring of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is being affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine

    Humans

    8 March 2022

    By Matthew Sparkes
    Damage to infrastructure at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology neutron sourceState Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine
    Scientists monitoring radiation levels at Chernobyl are unable to access their laboratories and instruments because Russian troops control the plant, warns a worker who escaped the facility when it was captured by Russian forces on 24 February. Other staff still running the working power plants on the site are reportedly being held in poor conditions without the chance to take breaks away from the facility to rest.
    “We continue scientific monitoring as much as possible,” says the nuclear expert from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “This is very far from [the] usual volume [of testing] because [my colleagues] have no access to our labs and instruments in Chernobyl, but we do our best in monitoring important values, sometimes by indirect data.”
    The scientist tells New Scientist that all of his team were able to escape the facility and leave the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on the first day of the invasion. Despite this, some of those staff are now caught in areas of intense fighting.Advertisement
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    He says his team advises staff at the working part of the nuclear power plant and adds that they remain in contact. But it has now been almost two weeks since Russia seized the plant and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) director general Rafael Mariano Grossi says that the 210 staff on site have still not been able to leave for rest, something he stressed is important for them to carry out their jobs safely.
    The anonymous scientist says that workers at the plant are “heroes” for continuing to ensure nuclear and radiation safety under those conditions.
    The IAEA has now listed a series of incidents at nuclear power plants that it says present a risk to safety, although there are no signs or evidence of radiation leaks.
    “We cannot go on like this, there has to be clear understandings, clear commitments not to go anywhere near a nuclear facility when it comes to military operations,” said Grossi at a press conference yesterday.
    On the first day of the invasion there were radiation spikes at the Chernobyl plant which the State Inspectorate for Nuclear Regulation of Ukraine put down to Russian military vehicles stirring up radioactive dust.
    On 26 February, an electrical transformer at a radioactive waste disposal facility near Kharkiv was damaged, and the following day missiles hit the site of a similar facility in Kyiv. No radiation leaks were detected after these attacks.
    On 4 March a fire was started by missiles targeted at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The blaze was later put out, but reports suggest that firefighters initially came under fire from Russian forces.
    A neutron generator at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology used for scientific research has also been destroyed by shelling, says Grossi, and there are also concerns about a lack of communication from staff at an oncology centre in Mariupol that has radioactive materials.

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    A new image captures enormous gas rings encircling an aging red star

    Huge rings of gas surround a large red star named V Hydrae, new images show, signaling its eventual transformation into a much smaller and bluer star.

    “It’s definitely going through its metamorphosis,” says Raghvendra Sahai, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Such ringlike structures have never been seen in any object like this before.”

    Observations of the three concentric rings, all ejected from the star during the last 800 years, could help astronomers understand how giant stars lose mass toward the end of their lives and seed the cosmos with planet- and life-building elements.

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    Born roughly twice as massive as the sun and lying about 1,300 light-years from Earth, V Hydrae is what’s known as an asymptotic giant branch star. It once fused hydrogen in its core, as the sun does. But now it is a cool, brilliant, puffed-up star that alternately burns hydrogen and helium in shells around a carbon-oxygen core. Such stars cast lots of material into space.

    “The processes by which this happens are not well-understood,” says Sahai, who has studied V Hydrae since the 1980s.

    His team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of radio telescopes in Chile, also known as ALMA, to detect the three rings of gas. Beyond them lie three additional rings, which are fainter and seen only partially, Sahai and colleagues report in a paper submitted February 18 at arXiv.org.

    The outermost complete ring now sits about 260 billion kilometers from the star, or 1,740 times as far as Earth is from the sun — more than 40 times Pluto’s distance from Earth. By measuring the speed at which the three complete rings are moving outward and their current distances from the star, the astronomers calculate that it cast them off about 270, 485 and 780 years ago.

    It’s thought that another star orbits the main one every few hundred years on an elliptical orbit. When the companion dives in, it can trigger the giant star to cast more material into space, the team says.

    The new image is striking and unusual, and it illustrates how a companion star enhances a giant star’s loss of mass, says Joel Kastner, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York who was not part of the study. “Mass loss is very important because it’s how the elements of life get distributed from stars into the universe.”

    Stars like V Hydrae forged most of the nitrogen in Earth’s air as well as much of our planet’s carbon, the basis for all terrestrial life (SN: 2/12/21; SN: 11/18/21). V Hydrae has so many carbon compounds in its atmosphere that it’s classified as a carbon star. It’s also one of the reddest stars known because those compounds as well as dust particles absorb its blue and violet light.

    Sahai expects the star’s ejection of material to continue, but, he says, “it’s anybody’s guess as to how many more rings will be produced.”

    When the star loses all of its atmosphere, probably many thousands of years from now, it will expose its hot core, whose ultraviolet light will set the cast-off material aglow, creating a beautiful bubble of gas known as a planetary nebula.

    When the nebula dissipates, all that will remain of the magnificent red star will be a tiny blue one — a white dwarf — a little larger than Earth, plus innumerable life-giving elements floating through the Milky Way. More

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    Geese may have been the first birds to be domesticated 7000 years ago

    Goose bones from Stone Age China suggest the birds were being domesticated there 7000 years ago, which could mean they were domesticated before chickens

    Humans

    7 March 2022

    By Michael Marshall
    Chinese geese (Anser cygnoides f. domestica)blickwinkel/AGAMI/M. Guyt/Alamy
    Geese may have been domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in what is now China, according to a study of preserved goose bones. That may make them the first bird to be domesticated, before chickens – although the timing of chicken domestication is uncertain.
    The finding extends the history of goose domestication and potentially the history of domestic poultry as a whole, says Masaki Eda at Hokkaido University Museum in Sapporo, Japan.
    Eda is part of a team that has excavated an archaeological site in east China called Tianluoshan, which was a Stone Age village between about 7000 and 5500 years ago. Its inhabitants “were basically hunter-gatherers”, says Eda, but they also grew rice in paddy fields.Advertisement
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    The researchers have identified 232 goose bones at Tianluoshan and say there are multiple lines of evidence that some of the geese were at least partially domesticated.
    Four of the bones belonged to immature geese that were less than 16 weeks old, with the youngest probably less than eight weeks old. This implies they must have hatched at Tianluoshan, says Eda, because they were too young to have flown in from elsewhere. However, no wild geese breed in the area today and it is unlikely they did so 7000 years ago, he says.
    Some of the adult geese also seem to have been locally bred, based on the chemical make-up of their bones, which reflects the water they drank. These locally bred birds were all roughly the same size, indicating captive breeding. Finally, the researchers carbon-dated the bones and found that the locally bred geese lived about 7000 years ago.
    Taken together, the findings suggest the geese were at an early stage of domestication, says Eda.

    “It’s a major study in our understanding of poultry domestication,” says Ophélie Lebrasseur at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. “They’ve been very thorough.”
    “The main thing that stood out for me is the fact they actually did radiocarbon dating on the bird bones,” says Julia Best at Cardiff University in the UK. This makes the dating much more reliable than if they had simply dated the surrounding sediment.
    If geese were domesticated 7000 years ago, that would make them the first bird to be domesticated, says Eda. The other candidate is chickens, but there has been a dispute over when and where this first happened.
    Chickens were probably domesticated from wild birds called red junglefowl, which live in southern Asia. However, genetics has complicated the story, revealing that domestic chickens subsequently interbred with other birds like the grey junglefowl.
    A study published in 2014 reported that chickens were domesticated in northern China as early as 10,000 years ago, based on DNA from bones. However, it isn’t clear that red junglefowl ever lived that far north, says Lebrasseur. Furthermore, the bones weren’t directly dated and “a lot of the things they claimed were chickens were pheasants”, says Best. Firm evidence of domestic chickens only appears from around 5000 years ago, she says.
    This implies geese were domesticated before chickens, says Lebrasseur. “With the evidence we currently have, I think it is true,” she says. But she adds that bird domestications are understudied compared with those of mammals like dogs and cows, so the story could well change as more evidence emerges.
    It is very difficult to say why the geese were domesticated, says Eda. Meat, eggs, feathers and bone tools are all possibilities, and they may have been used in ritual ceremonies. “One of the things we see with chickens is they’re often held in high esteem when they’re first domesticated,” says Best.
    Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2117064119

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Astronomers may not have found a sign of the universe’s first stars after all

    A new study casts a haze over a hint of the universe’s first glimmers of starlight.

    In 2018, researchers claimed that a subtle signature in radio waves from early in the universe’s history had revealed the era when the first stars switched on, known as the cosmic dawn. But the first experiment to test that study’s conclusions found no sign of those early stars, scientists report February 28 in Nature Astronomy.

    Just after the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was a hot stew of matter. Stars probably didn’t flicker on until at least 100 million years later — a poorly understood era of the cosmos. Finding signs of the first beams of starlight would flesh out the cosmic origin story. So the 2018 claim of pinpointing those earliest gleams, from the EDGES experiment in the Australian outback, caused an astronomical hubbub (SN: 2/28/18).

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    “It definitely completely excited our whole community with this fascinating result,” says radio astronomer Saurabh Singh of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India.

    The researchers reported detecting a dip across particular wavelengths of radio waves, a sign of light from the first stars interacting with surrounding hydrogen gas. But the result quickly raised skepticism, because the dip was deeper than expected. To know whether the hint of the first starlight was real, scientists would need to make more measurements.

    Singh and colleagues did just that with the Shaped Antenna Measurement of the Background Radio Spectrum 3, or SARAS 3. Similar to EDGES, the experiment uses an antenna to pick up radio waves. But SARAS 3 has a different design from EDGES, with a differently shaped antenna. And SARAS 3 is designed to float atop a lake. “That gives us a very distinctive advantage,” Singh says.

    On Earth, radio waves come from a variety of sources, which must be carefully accounted for to reveal the subtler signal from the cosmic dawn. Misunderstanding those other sources of radio waves could lead to an unaccounted-for experimental error that might give incorrect results.

    In particular, experiments on land must contend with radio waves emitted from the ground, which are difficult to estimate due to the complex, layered nature of soil. When the antenna is atop a lake, it’s easier to estimate what kinds of radio waves come from the uniform water below. Data taken from two lakes in India revealed no sign of the dip.

    The new study “highlights just how difficult this measurement is,” says physicist H. Cynthia Chiang of McGill University in Montreal. It’s uncomfortable that the two studies disagree, she says, but notes that the disagreement “isn’t quite enough to make any definitive conclusions at this point.”

    And some of the same types of experimental issues that may affect EDGES could also affect SARAS 3, says experimental cosmologist Judd Bowman of Arizona State University in Tempe, a member of the EDGES team. “We still have more work ahead to reach the final outcome.”

    An improved version of EDGES will be deployed later this year, and the SARAS 3 team has additional deployments planned. Other experiments are also working on similar measurements. Those tests may finally illuminate the universe’s transition from darkness to light. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    How Russia’s war in Ukraine hinders space research and exploration

    Space exploration may seem like a faraway endeavor from Earth’s surface, but events on the ground ripple into space. The Russian war on Ukraine is no exception.

    From a rocket launch system to a rover set to explore Mars, a wide range of space missions is facing postponements or cancelations due to escalating tensions on the ground in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine on February 24. The European Union, United States and others have imposed sanctions on Russia; Russia, as a result, is continually changing and canceling its space-related plans. The shifts are having an impact on everything from international collaborations to missions that rely on Russian rockets to get to space.

    Here’s a closer look at some of those projects.

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    ExoMars rover

    The ExoMars mission is a partnership between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos. This is a two-part mission to Mars consisting of an orbiter and a rover. The orbiter has been at the Red Planet since late 2016, but the Rosalind Franklin rover was supposed to launch this September (SN: 10/18/16).

    “The sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely,” the European Space Agency, or ESA, said in a February 28 statement in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Due to Earth’s and Mars’ orbital geometry, the most direct trajectory for a spacecraft from our planet to Mars repeats every two years, and that launch window remains open for less than two weeks. The ExoMars rover, which will look for signs of past life, was originally to launch in 2020, but due to the pandemic and technical issues, it slipped to 2022 (SN: 3/12/20). Now it’s at risk of slipping again to 2024.

    The eROSITA telescope

    Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma is a space-based X-ray observatory, run jointly by Germany and Russia, that has been mapping the large-scale structure of the universe for the last two and a half years (SN: 7/8/20). The probe’s main telescope, eROSITA, has discovered hundreds of celestial objects, including a bizarre stellar explosion known as a “cow” (SN: 1/21/22). On February 26, the Germans placed eROSITA into safe mode as an action to “freeze co-operation with Russia,” according to a statement from SRG leadership at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany.  

    “This is a standard, reversible, operation mode of the telescope, in which we do not take data, but keep the vital subsystems on,” says Andrea Merloni, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, also in Garching, and eROSITA’s project scientist. He declined to comment on any other aspect of the mission or collaboration with Russia.

    The Russian News Agency TASS reported March 1 that Roscosmos intends to estimate the financial loss of that safe-mode action and other European space-related sanctions, and the Russian space agency will then bill “the European side” of the projects.

    ESA, meanwhile, is “assessing the consequences on each of our ongoing programmes conducted in cooperation with the Russian state space agency,” the agency said in its February 28 statement.

    Navigation satellites

    In response to international sanctions against Russia, the head of Roscosmos announced February 26 that the agency was suspending cooperation with the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, and withdrawing its dozens of employees from the site. Several space missions were set to launch from this location via a Russian Soyuz rocket in the next year, including a pair of European navigation satellites in early April.

    These satellites would have joined with the already-launched two dozen that make up the Galileo navigational system, the European answer to the United States’ GPS system. Two additional Galileo satellites are also in orbit, but they were placed incorrectly and instead focus on science and search and rescue (SN: 12/10/18).

    OneWeb internet network

    The U.K. company OneWeb, which is building a space-based internet network with hundreds of low-Earth satellites, is also facing a launch postponement.

    A Soyuz rocket was scheduled to send up a few dozen OneWeb satellites March 4, one of a series of launches aimed at completing the network in 2022. But in the early hours of March 2, the head of Roscosmos tweeted the space agency wouldn’t launch the satellites without a guarantee from the company that they wouldn’t be used for military purposes. He also demanded the U.K. government sell its share of the mission, which it has refused to do.

    Venera-D mission to Venus

    The Russian-Ukraine war has also affected U.S. space activities, but to a lesser extent than its impact on its European counterparts. NASA has relationships with several commercial partners, so the agency relies less on Roscosmos. But NASA is still feeling some effects.

    For instance, in retaliation to U.S. sanctions, the head of Roscosmos tweeted on February 26 that NASA’s participation in the Russian-led Venera-D mission to Venus would be “inappropriate.” This mission will include an orbiter, lander and surface station, and it will focus on understanding Venus’s former and present habitability.

    However, Venera-D won’t launch until late this decade, and NASA has been involved only in some planning groups. The U.S. space agency already has two of its own Venus missions in the works (SN: 6/02/21).

    International Space Station

    While many areas of cooperation in space with Russia are fraying, the International Space Station collaboration so far remains unchanged. “NASA continues working with all our international partners, including the State Space Corporation Roscosmos, for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station,” NASA public affairs officer Joshua Finch, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, said in an e-mailed statement.

    Currently, there are two Russian cosmonauts, four NASA astronauts and one ESA astronaut aboard the station. Later this month, a Russian Soyuz capsule is set to return the two cosmonauts and one of the NASA astronauts to Earth, landing in Kazakhstan as scheduled, Finch said.

    However, during a March 1 NASA Advisory Council meeting, Wayne Hale, a former NASA associate administrator, recommended the U.S. space agency consider contingencies in case Russia no longer collaborates on the space station. At the same meeting the following day, former U.S. representative Jane Harman recommended that NASA think about what cooperation with Russia will look like going forward. More

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    Don't Miss: New Scientist Live, the greatest science show on Earth

    Katie Yu
    Watch
    Upload, a sci-fi comedy that satirises the idea of a digital afterlife, returns for a second season. Created by Greg Daniels (Parks and Recreation, Space Force), the series will be available on Amazon Prime Video from 11 March.

    Visit
    New Scientist Live will be at Manchester Central and online from 12 March. With talks from over 40 speakers across four stages, there are also live, hands-on demonstrations and exhibitions. 14 March is dedicated to schools and home learners.

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    An Infinity of Worlds may exist in the universe. In this eye-opening account of cosmic inflation, physicist Will Kinney points out that if this were true, it would raise difficult questions about what the cosmos actually is. More

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    How to Stay Smart in a Smart World review: Why humans still trump AI

    Despite AI’s impressive feats at driving cars and playing games, a new book by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that our brains have plenty to offer that AI will never match

    Humans

    2 March 2022

    By Chen Ly

    IN THE 1950s, Herbert Simon – a political scientist and one of the founders of AI – declared that, once a computer could beat the best chess player in the world, machines would have reached the pinnacle of human intelligence. Just a few decades later, in 1997, the chess-playing computer Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov.
    It was an impressive feat, but according to Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, human minds don’t need to worry just yet. In How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, he unpacks humanity’s complicated relationship with artificial intelligence and digital technology. In an age where self-driving cars have been let loose on the roads, smart homes can anticipate and cater for our every need and websites seem to know our preferences better than we do, people tend to “assume the near-omniscience of artificial intelligence”, says Gigerenzer. But, he argues, AIs aren’t as clever as you might think.
    A 2015 study, for example, showed that even the smartest object-recognition system is easily fooled, confidently classifying meaningless patterns as objects with more than 99 per cent confidence. And at the 2017 UEFA Champions League final in Cardiff, UK, a face-recognition system matched the faces of 2470 football fans at the stadium and the city’s railway station to those of known criminals. This would have been useful but for 92 per cent of the matches turning out to be false alarms, despite the system being designed to be both more efficient and more reliable than humans.
    There are good reasons why even the smartest systems fail, says Gigerenzer. Unlike chess, which has rules that are rigid and unchanging, the world of humans is squishy and inconsistent. In the face of real-world uncertainty, algorithms fall apart.
    Here, we get to the crux of Gigerenzer’s main argument: technology, at least as we know it today, could never replace humans because there is no algorithm for common sense. Knowing, but not truly understanding, leaves AI in the dark about what is really important.
    Obviously, technology can be, and often is, useful. The voice and face-recognition software on smartphones are largely convenient and the fact that YouTube seems to know what I want to watch saves the hassle of working it out for myself. Yet even if smart technology is mostly helpful, and is showing few signs of replacing us, Gigerenzer argues that we should still be aware of the dangers it can pose to our society.
    “Knowing, but not truly understanding, leaves artificial intelligence in the dark about what is really important”
    Digital technology has created an economy that trades on the exchange of personal data, which can be used against our best interests. Companies and political parties can purchase targeted adverts that subtly influence our online shopping choices and, even more nefariously, how we vote. “One might call this turn to an ad-based business model the ‘original sin’ of the internet,” writes Gigerenzer.
    So, what can be done? Gigerenzer says that more transparency from tech firms and advertisers is vital. But technology users also need to change our relationship with it. Rather than treating technology with unflinching awe or suspicion, we must cultivate a healthy dose of scepticism, he says. In an age where we seem to accept the rise of social media addiction, regular privacy breaches and the spread of misinformation as unavoidable downsides of internet use – even when they cause significant harm to society – it is perhaps time we took stock and reconsidered.
    Using personal anecdotes, cutting-edge research and cautionary real-world tales, Gigerenzer deftly explains the limits and dangers of technology and AI. Occasionally, he uses extreme examples for the sake of making a point, and in places he blurs the lines between digital technology, smart technology, algorithms and AI, which muddies the waters. Nevertheless, the overall message of Gigerenzer’s book still stands: in a world that increasingly relies on technology to make it function, human discernment is vital “to make the digital world a world we want to live in”.

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