A conversation about a virtual world and global extinction

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Photograph of an octopusI went for a haircut a week or so ago and my barber asked me about the books I had been reading recently.  He always has a book on the shelf next to him and sometimes I find him reading when I arrive and the shop is quiet.  So it is not unusual for us to talk about our current books.  I told him about ‘Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy’ by David Chalmers which led into a conversation about the possibility that we are in a simulation.  My posts on this topic [see ‘Are we in a simulation’ on September 28th 2022 and ‘Virtual digitalism’ on December 7th, 2022] have provoked a number of negative reactions.  People either think I have written nonsense or would rather not consider the prospect of us being part of a giant simulation.  Fortunately, my barber was happy to accept the possibility that we were part of a simulation which led to a discussion about whether our creator was the equivalent of a teenager playing on a computer in their bedroom or a scientist interested in the evolution of society; and, in either case, why they would have decided to give us hair on our heads that grows steadily throughout our life – perhaps as a personal indication of the passage of time or, simply to provide a living for barbers.  The development of human society and the use of probability to reason that a more advanced society might have created a virtual world in which we are living also led us to talk about the probability that a more advanced society finding us on Earth would annihilate us without pausing to learn about us in the same way that we are destroying all other forms of intelligent life on the planet.  For example, populations of vertebrates living in freshwater ecosystems have declined by 83% on average since 1970 [see World Wide Fund for Nature Living Planet Report 2022].  Maybe it would be preferable for someone to switch off the simulation rather than to suffer the type of invasion mounted by the Martians in the War of the Worlds by HG Wells.

Regular readers with good memories might recall a post entitled ‘Conversations about engineering over dinner and a haircut’ on February 16th, 2022 which featured the same barber who I visit more frequently than these two posts might imply.

The image shows Ollie the Octopus at the Ocean Lab, (Ceridwen CC BY-SA 2.0) for more on the intelligence of an octopus see ‘Intelligent aliens?‘ on January 16th, 2019.

When less is more from describing digital twins to protoplasm

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Word cluster diagramI spent several days last week reading drafts of PhD theses from two of my students.  I have three PhD students who are scheduled to finish their studies before Easter when they plan to start jobs that they have already been offered.  So, there is some urgency to their writing besides the usual desire to finish after three years or more of work on the same topic and the end of their funding.  Their relatively undiluted study of their topic can make it difficult for PhD students to see the big picture and write accessible descriptions of their research.  I have also encountered this challenge in describing our recent work on integrating digital twins to form an engineering metaverse.  There are dozens of published definitions of digital twins whereas the reverse holds for metaverses – no one really knows what they are.  Mary Midgley wrote, in her book ‘Beast and Man’, that descriptions should not be an account of everything about an entity or event but just enough to bring to our minds the appropriate conceptual scheme or construct that will tell us everything we need to know.  Our challenge as communicators is identifying the conceptual scheme that is needed, in other words selecting what matters and nothing else.  I like her example of an inappropriate description: “a section of protoplasm, measuring 1.76 meters vertically, emerged at 2:06 P.M. from hole in building at point x on plan and moved northward, its extremities landing alternately on concrete substratum, finally entering hole in further building, at point y on plan, at 2:09 P.M.”  If you need a conceptual scheme to understand this sentence, then try ‘a person walked across the road’.

Source: Mary Midgley, Beast and Man – the roots of human nature. Abingdon, Oxon. Routledge Classics, 2002.

Image: Cluster #1: simulation along product life cycle from Semeraro C, Lezoche M, Panetto H & Dassisti M, Digital twin paradigm: a systematic literature review, Computers in Industry, 130: 103469, 2021 who found thirty definitions of digital twins and created five such clusters of definitions.

Inducing chatbots to write nonsense

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titanium dental implant face profile technical pictureThe chatbot, ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, has been in the news recently and is the subject of much discussion in universities primarily because of its potential use by students to complete their coursework assignments but also the positive uses to which it might be applied. After last week’s invitations to edit two special issues in different journals on cosmetic dentistry and wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) [‘Wire arc additive manufacturing and cosmetic dentistry?‘ on February 8th, 2023], I did a little research in the scientific literature to find out if anyone had published research on using WAAM to make parts for cosmetic dentistry but found nothing.  I was not surprised – the level of precision achievable with WAAM is about 1 millimetre which would be insufficient for most applications in cosmetic dentistry.  Then, I signed up for a free trial with ChatGPT and conducted an experiment by asking it to write about wire arc additive manufacturing and cosmetic dentistry.  The chatbot produced 128 words about how WAAM is becoming increasing popular in cosmetic dentistry because of its accuracy and precision also because a wide range of materials can be used allowing a match to the colour and texture of teeth.  I repeated the experiment and the chatbot produced 142 different words, again stating that dental prostheses can be produced using WAAM with high precision and accuracy to match a patient’s existing teeth in colour so that restorations appear natural and undetectable.  In each case the six or seven sentences were well-written and included some facts that were used to construct a set of false statements, which superficially appeared reasonable; however, only a modicum of knowledge would be required to identify the fallacious rationale.  Some of my colleagues are already exploring incorporating the chatbot into students’ coursework by asking students to use it to generate a description of a technical topic and then asking them to critique its output in order to assess their understanding of the topic.  I expect chatbots will improve rapidly but for the moment it is relatively easy to induce them to write nonsense.

Bibliography

Li Y, Su C, Zhu J. Comprehensive review of wire arc additive manufacturing: Hardware system, physical process, monitoring, property characterization, application and future prospects. Results in Engineering,100330, 2021.

Image: www.authoritydental.org CC BY 2.0 downloaded from https://www.flickr.com/photos/dental-photos/50730990757

Wire arc additive manufacturing applied to cosmetic dentistry?

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photograph of a flower for decorative purposes onlyLast weekend I sat down at my laptop to write this week’s post with only a vague idea of a topic. When I opened my laptop I was surprised to see two emails from a supposedly reputable commercial publisher inviting me to be a guest editor for two special issues of two different journals.  For two decades, I served as editor-in-chief of two international journals consecutively with only a short overlap so I am well-qualified to act as a guest editor.  However, the invitations related to cosmetic dentistry and wire arc additive manufacturing.  I know almost nothing about these two subjects so why was I receiving invitations from the editors of two journals to be a guest editor.  In collaboration with colleagues, I have published some papers recently on another form of additive manufacturing [see ‘If you don’t succeed try and try again‘ on September 29th 2021].  My Google Scholar profile shows that my two most highly cited papers relate to work performed thirty years ago on osseointegrated dental implants [see ‘Turning the screw in dentistry‘ on September 30th, 2020]; although on closer examination it would also reveal that I have published nothing since then on this subject.  I suspect that a poorly programmed algorithm was fooled by my eclectic and long publication record into issuing poorly targeted invitations rather than the academic editors exercising poor judgment.  At least, I hope that is what happened since the alternative is that journal editors are no longer exercising academic judgment (though it is obvious this is also happening given the incoherent reviews of manuscripts that editors too frequently pass on to authors probably without reading them).  I will treat these invitations as spam; however, others may see them as opportunities to create or expand ‘peer-review’ rings and put more ‘Rotten eggs in the store‘ [see post on November 30th, 2022].  The peer-review and publication system for scientific papers is clearly broken and one part of the solution is to remove commercial interests from the process.