Philippa Kaur

When a wealthy technology entrepreneur invents an AI-driven system capable of predicting how human fear affects the world’s financial markets, nothing turns out quite as he planned

Humans

9 February 2022

By Linda Marric
Alex Hoffman (Josh Hartnett) creates an AI-based system to monetise fear in The Fear IndexSky
The Fear Index
David Caffrey
Sky Atlantic/NOW TVAdvertisement

IN RECENT years, big corporations have made it their business to keep a close eye on developments in artificial intelligence. From predicting trends in markets to planning risk-mitigation strategies, companies are constantly on the lookout for new ways to capitalise on AI to stay ahead of the game.
The Fear Index, a four-part psychological thriller based on Robert Harris’s 2011 bestselling novel of the same name, explores the ethical and moral issues wrapped up in applying AI to business, and asks some pertinent questions about the morality of using scientific advances for the sole purpose of making money.
Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, The Black Dahlia) stars as Alex Hoffman, a wealthy technology entrepreneur who invents an AI-driven system capable of predicting how human fear affects behaviour and how that, in turn, affects fluctuations of the world’s financial markets. This knowledge promises not only power, but also considerable returns for Alex’s multibillionaire clients.
Directed by David Caffrey (Peaky Blinders, The Alienist), the series also stars Line of Duty alum Arsher Ali as Alex’s best friend and business partner Hugo, alongside Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie) as Alex’s wife Gabby.
The action covers an intense 24-hour period in which Alex, a former scientist at the CERN particle physics laboratory, prepares to launch his morally questionable money-spinner. “Humans act in very predictable ways when they are frightened,” he assures his wealthy investors.
Yet, having promised billions in profit to his already rich clients, Alex’s plans are thrown into chaos when he is attacked by an unknown assailant at the home he shares with Gabby the night before the launch, leaving him disoriented and confused.
The next day, acting increasingly erratically and struggling to keep on top of things, Alex and Hugo don’t quite get the launch day they had in mind. It doesn’t help that an unexpected tragedy prompts some of their employees to start to question the morality of the whole endeavour.
Meanwhile, Alex becomes convinced that mysterious forces are conspiring to frame him for a series of acts he has no memory of having carried out. Questioned by the police and deserted by his wife, Alex finds himself in free fall, no longer sure what is real and what is happening only in the darkest corners of his imagination.
The Fear Index takes us not only into the mind of a man in a mental health crisis, but also provides a glimpse into a world where billions are made and spent in seconds, and where whole economies can be derailed by the timely use of a mathematical equation.
Caffrey adds a faint air of sci-fi and mystery to the proceedings, and ultimately delivers a gripping and robust thriller in which nothing is quite what it seems. A series of red herrings are peppered throughout the story to keep viewers on their toes. These add a note of suspense to the narrative but, to my mind, the series works best when viewed as a psychological drama about a man struggling to cope with psychosis as his life falls apart.
Although clearly made with fans of Line of Duty – the BBC’s long-running cop show – in mind, The Fear Index sadly lacks its punchiness and accessibility. With a screenplay filled with overly melodramatic exchanges and jarring technical jargon, the series often feels confusing and needlessly meandering. Still, Hartnett delivers a phenomenal turn and is the best thing about this flawed, yet highly watchable, mystery.

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From Amazon warriors to pugilistic matriarchs, stories of female fighters abound. Where do they come from and what can they tell us about gender equality, past, present and future, asks Laura Spinney

Humans

| Columnist

9 February 2022

By Laura Spinney
Adam Eastland Art + Architecture/Alamy Source: www.alamy.com
THERE can be few myths as ingrained in our consciousness as that of the Amazons, an ancient caste of warrior women whose marksmanship struck fear into the hearts of their enemies, who chose sexual partners freely and who sacrificed their male offspring to preserve the matriarchy.
I have been musing on this while watching tensions rise on the Russia-Ukraine border. At the beginning of that conflict, in 2014, a Ukrainian biathlete and sports minister called Olena Pidhrushna was falsely accused on Russian TV of shooting Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine. Historian Amandine Regamey recognised this image of a gun-toting … More

In Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, Mickey gets a shot at immortality by uploading his consciousness, but at what cost, asks Sally Adee

Humans

9 February 2022

By Sally Adee
Died at work? Just load your mind into a new body and finish the jobShutterstock / Photobank.kiev.ua

Mickey7
Edward Ashton
St Martin’s Press (out in the US on 15 February and in the UK on 17 February)Advertisement

IT WASN’T that long ago that sci-fi creators were more starry-eyed and optimistic about the prospects of tech companies keeping our best interests at heart. In 2016, Black Mirror, the TV series whose dark speculations defined the late 2010s, released an unusually upbeat vision of digital immortality in which a dying woman uploads her mind to a global megacorp’s server farm and lives her best life online in perpetuity.
The idea of uploaded consciousness has long been an object of fascination in science fiction. Neal Stephenson spent several hundred pages of his 2019 triumph Fall; or, Dodge in Hell on a gonzo hallucinatory riff recounting his protagonist’s transition into life in silico. Yet, Stephenson’s artistically muscular depiction failed to answer a central question: is it a goal that’s worth pursuing, even in theory? Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 is the first novel I have come across that properly explores the philosophy behind that question.
In the book, titular Mickey escapes a grim life on his home planet by signing on to a mission to terraform a new one. He has no skills to offer, so he applies to be the ship’s “Expendable”, a disposable employee who specialises in dangerous tasks that often prove deadly. The only perk of the job is that no matter how often he is killed, he is uploaded into a new body to carry on his work. “The way they sell you on becoming an Expendable is that they don’t call it becoming an Expendable,” Mickey muses. “They call it becoming an Immortal.”
The ideal version of immortality is as a seamless continuation of the self. But will Mickey2 – or Mickey7, the incarnation we meet in the story – be the original Mickey or just an accurate copy? The hiring manager for the terraforming mission is deliberately ambiguous on this point. As the plot unfolds, Ashton artfully illustrates how this conceptual fuzziness benefits the corporations that make digital immortality their business.
When Mickey’s eighth instance is mistakenly decanted while Mickey7 is still alive, he wakes up to the fact that he has had the wool pulled over his eyes. It is the best illustration of the problem of digital immortality I have read: simple, fast and fun, laying out complicated concepts in an accessible way. Yet beneath the breezy tone lies a vision with harrowing implications.
“It is easy to envision the business case for digital immortality that is anything but customer-centric”
Black Mirror’s megacorp was seemingly able to monetise giving its customers a pleasant digital ever after, but it is easy to envision the business case for digital immortality that is anything but customer-centric. For the full bleak take on this, I refer you to Lena, a short story by Sam Hughes under the nom de plume “qntm”, which was published online in 2021 and is already on its way to being upload canon. After a neuroscience grad student agrees to have his consciousness copied by his university research lab, the initial techno-optimism fades into dystopian despair in ways that feel laceratingly plausible.
Given the prevailing direction of our society, the Black Mirror episode looks almost quaint in its optimism. But whether a life in the digitised beyond feels like heaven for the minds that inhabit it or like a corporate-branded version of hell, Mickey7 makes a good case that any human who decides to upload themselves will be just as dead as anyone else who has ever lived and died.

Lena
qntm
A well-meaning neuroscience grad student donates his digital consciousness to science, a decision he may find he “lives” to regret.

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
Neal Stephenson
William Morrow Speculative science fiction looking into the near future of the US. Like a more emotionally healthy, post-cyberpunk Succession.

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Peter Richardson/English Heritage
Visit
The World of Stonehenge is revealed at London’s British Museum in an exhibition exploring the science of why the monument was built and the surprisingly cosmopolitan society that created it. From 17 February.

Read
A Human History of Emotion is told by psychologist Richard Firth-Godbehere, who explores the central and often underappreciated role that emotions have played in human societies throughout history and how they shaped today’s world.
Diyah Pera/Netflix
Watch
Space Force returns to Netflix for a second season of the out-of-this-world workplace comedy. Steve Carell is the hapless General Naird, while John Malkovich … More

Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as those sung in English even though there are significant cultural differences in musical tone and scales

Humans

3 February 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A woman playing a koto, a traditional Japanese musical instrumentShutterstock/PixHound
Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as English language ones even though they are sung in different tones and scales.
Patrick Savage at Keio University in Japan and his colleagues analysed the musical notation of more than 10,000 folk songs, including the well-known Child Ballads from the pre-20th century. Around 4125 of the songs were sung in English and 5957 were Japanese.
The team defined a folk song quite loosely. “There are a lot of definitions, but we essentially said a folk song is an old song that has been orally transmitted between generations,” says Savage.Advertisement
There are a few differences between Japanese and English folk songs. For example, Japanese folk songs use a five-note musical scale, whereas English ones typically use a seven-note scale. They are also quite different tonally.
The researchers, however, were looking specifically at how the two musical genres evolved and whether there were any similarities. They first converted the musical notations into letter sequences that could be read by an algorithm that usually tracks evolutionary changes in nature. “This algorithm can identify highly related pairs of melody,” says Savage.

The nature of the subject matter influenced the analysis. “It is difficult to tell which version of a song or which style of melody came first,” says Savage. This means that when the researchers compared two similar songs, they couldn’t say for sure whether a difference in the number of notes between the two was due to an insertion or a deletion – so they treated all of these sorts of changes as the same.
They could, however, distinguish insertion/deletions from note substitutions, where the number of notes in a melody is the same in two songs, but a given note has a different value in each song.
The researchers found that these note substitutions were less likely than note insertions or deletions in both Japanese and English folk songs. “We think this is because note insertions or deletions don’t really affect the melody too much,” he says. “Substitutions, like singing everything in a lower note, obviously messes up the melody a lot more.”
What’s more, the effect was stronger in Japanese songs. “Ornamentation is a bigger deal in Japanese folk songs,” says Savage, referring to when small, rapid changes are made to non-essential notes in a melody.
The team also found that musical notes that played a bigger role in a song’s melody were less likely to change as the ballad evolved. “The way the music is being transmitted – whether they are Japanese or English – is very analogous,” says Savage.
“The patterns of change documented in this study will come as no great surprise to musicologists,” says Marisa Hoeschele at the Acoustics Research Institute in Austria. “But it is interesting that these same constraints apply cross-culturally.”
“Studying how folk music evolved can lead to insights into how cultural evolution occurs more generally,” adds Hoeschele.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039
Join us for a mind-blowing festival of ideas and experiences. New Scientist Live is going hybrid, with a live in-person event in Manchester, UK, that you can also enjoy from the comfort of your own home, from 12 to 14 March 2022. Find out more.

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By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Anna Omiotek-TottIN MY garden, bulbs such as snowdrops are coming up. Every year, I wonder if spring is arriving earlier due to climate change.
One study from 2006 found that many signs of spring, such as plant species unfurling their leaves, had been hastened by 7.5 days across Europe in the previous 30 years (Global Change Biology, doi.org/b7vmgk). And research published this week has found that UK plants are flowering nearly a month earlier than they did before the mid-1980s, probably due to warmer temperatures from January to April.
You might think that warmer weather would be welcomed by gardeners, … More

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

2 February 2022

Read
Strange Bedfellows accompany many of us through our lives, yet most of us know next to nothing about common sexually transmitted infections. Ina Park aims to change all that in this upbeat look at the science of STIs.
National Museums Scotland
Visit
Audubon’s Birds of America is a chance to see this rare, hand-coloured natural history book and to learn more about its controversial creator, John James Audubon. It is on show at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from 12 February.Advertisement
Shutterstock/Triff Source: Shutterstock
Watch
Death by Shakespeare sees chemist Kathryn Harkup reveal the science behind some of the grisly methods used by the Bard to kill characters in his plays. Online talk by the Royal Institution on 10 February at 7pm GMT.

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From how food is grown to how we generate power, Vaclav Smil’s new book outlines the basic technologies that keep society going and commands us to know them better

Humans

2 February 2022

By Simon Ings

IN SUCH a complex world, no one can be expected to understand everything. But for energy expert Vaclav Smil, there are limits. In his view, it is inexcusable that most of us don’t know the first thing about the basic workings of modern life and the technologies that keep us all alive. It’s not all rocket science, he says. “Appreciating how wheat is grown or steel is made… are not the same as asking… somebody to comprehend femtochemistry.”
Smil deplores the way that Western culture disproportionately rewards work that is removed from the material realities of life on Earth. Most of all, he is concerned that the general public is abandoning its grip on reality. How the World Really Works is Smil’s attempt to redress the balance, showing the fundamentals of how food is grown, how the built environment is made and maintained, and how all of this is powered.
Smil believes it is worth understanding what might seem like outdated technologies given that the building blocks of our lives won’t change significantly over the next 20 to 30 years. Most of our electricity is still gener­ated by steam turbines, invented by Charles Parsons in 1884, or by gas turbines, first commercially deployed in the late 1930s, he writes. And many of the trappings of the industrial world still hinge on the production of ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, all of which currently require fossil fuels for their production. Even the newest technologies – AI, electric cars, 5G and space tourism – get most of their energy from fossil fuel-based turbines, says Smil.
Alternative methods are on their way, of course, but they will take decades to fully establish. Coal displaced wood relatively easily in the early 20th century, but it will probably take longer to bring in renewables because global energy demand is now an order of magnitude higher.
Given the irrefutable evidence of climate change, does this mean that Western civilisation, so hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels, is doomed?
Perhaps, but Smil would prefer that we concentrate on practical solutions, rather than wasting our energies on complex socio-economic forecasts. In his view, such forecasts will get less accurate over time because “more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors”.
How the World Really Works neither laments the possibly imminent end of the world, nor bloviates about the potentially transformative powers of the AI Singularity. Indeed, it gives no quarter to such dramatic thinking, be it apocalyptic or techno-utopian.
Instead, in an era where specialisation is seen as the pinnacle of knowledge, Smil is an unapologetic generalist. “Drilling the deepest possible hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me,” he writes. “I have always preferred to scan as far and as wide as my limited capabilities have allowed me to do.”
He chooses to explain the workings of the world as it is today, from energy to food, materials, the biosphere, globalisation and the perception of risk. He covers sizeable ground that other commentators ignore. It is a grumpy, pugnacious account that, I would argue, is intellectually indispensable in the run up to this year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. In short, How the World Really Works fully delivers on the promise of its title. It is hard to formulate any higher praise.

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