James' World 2

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Neuroscience has made progress in deciphering how our brains think and perceive our surroundings, but a central feature of cognition is still deeply mysterious: namely, that many of our perceptions and thoughts are accompanied by the subjective experience of having them. Consciousness, the name we give to that experience, can’t yet be explained — but science is at least beginning to understand it. In this episode, the consciousness researcher Anil Seth and host Steven Strogatz discuss why our perceptions can be described as a “controlled hallucination,” how consciousness played into the internet sensation known as “the dress,” and how people at home can help researchers catalog the full range of ways that we experience the world.

Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mystery of consciousness. The mystery being that when your brain cells fire in certain patterns, it actually feels like something. It might feel like jealousy or a toothache, or the memory of your mother’s face, or the scent of her favorite perfume. But other patterns of brain activity don’t really feel like anything at all. Right now, for instance, I’m probably forming some memories somewhere deep in my brain. But the process of that memory formation is imperceptible to me. I can’t feel it. It doesn’t give rise to any sort of internal subjective experience at all. In other words, I’m not conscious of it.

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Peter Greenwood for Quanta Magazine

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With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.

The softer side of materials science

Most of us don’t think much about pants these days, except to lament having to put them on in the morning. But trousers were actually a technological breakthrough. Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to let the wearer swing a leg across a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. At the same time, they needed some added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?

For the makers of the world’s oldest pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago, the answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber.

The world’s oldest-known pants were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man. He wore the woven wool pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, ankle-high boots, and a wool headband adorned with seashells and bronze discs. The pants’ basic design is strikingly similar to the pants most of us wear today, but closer inspection reveals the level of engineering that went into designing them.

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Photo by Wagner et al. 2022

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Flies are annoying, especially on warm weekends spent outdoors. They land on us and our food, they buzz in our ears, and some of them bite. Mosquitos are a kind of fly, and they transmit some of the world’s deadliest pathogens. But consider for a minute that you may not really know flies. Or rather, the flies you likely do know — the houseflies, the mosquitos, the gnats — are just a tiny, tiny fraction of an enormous group of insects that is, on the whole, quite wonderful. It also supports our very existence.

No, a fly didn’t write this. Flies do, however, have advocates among humans, and recently, one got to me.

Last fall, I met Emily Hartop, a scientist who studies flies, at a natural history museum in Berlin. A lifelong bug lover, Hartop told me the world is home to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fly species. And they fill pretty much every ecological role imaginable. Flies are superb pollinators, shrewd parasites, and exceptional janitors — they literally clean up our shit.

Flies are also anatomical marvels, Hartop said. In addition to a pair of wings, they have special balancing organs called halteres that function like gyroscopes, allowing flies to turn sharp corners, hover, and land upside down. “They’re called flies for a reason,” Hartop said. “They are amazing aerial acrobats.”

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As an Avianca flight approached Kennedy International Airport in New York, a serving cart collision began a legal saga, prompting the question: Is artificial intelligence so smart? Credit…Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

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As someone with more than 50 years of experience in both industry and academia who also happens to be a person with autism, managers in charge of DEI at major corporations often invite me to give lectures. These companies range from steel, pharmaceuticals, computers, and consumer products to cattle and livestock handling, transportation, and social media. I always get asked the same basic question from management: What do they need to do to make their workforce more inclusive?

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Illustration by Lalalimola

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Proverbs 18:21

Amplified Bible

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Not long ago, I was preparing to interview Tom Hanks at Symphony Space, a theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for an audience of seven hundred-plus people at The New Yorker Live. Hanks had just published a novel called “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” and he was hitting the road for a while. Symphony Space was the first stop on the tour. Someone from Knopf, his publisher, let me know that I would embarrass Hanks if, in my introduction, I went through the litany of movies he has starred in since the early eighties. In fact, if I had, that would have been the whole evening. The list is long and shimmery. Hanks is that rare thing, a real movie star who has sustained a four-decades-and-counting career. It’s not just that he has won two Oscars in a row (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”) or made box-office hits including “Splash,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and Steven Spielberg’s most enjoyable film, “Catch Me If You Can.” He’s also capable of taking on a predictable vehicle, such as the recent feature “A Man Called Otto,” and pumping some life into it while attracting a sizable audience.

What surprised me is the degree to which Hanks, particularly in front of a live crowd, in no way resembles Jimmy Stewart, the laconic Hollywood icon to whom he’s most often, and most lazily, compared. When we met beforehand, then onstage for an hour and a half, and, finally, over a long dinner at a local Greek restaurant, Hanks was about as laconic as Muhammad Ali. Or a hand grenade. He is funny, sarcastic, self-knowing, and a tireless raconteur, particularly about his day job. In our interview, he sometimes answered questions as he might in a more private setting than Symphony Space; far more often, he took some element of the question as a cue for a prolonged, well-polished anecdote, performed at the edge of his seat. Hanks’s novel is all over the place at times, undisciplined and overstuffed, but it contains extended passages and set pieces describing how movies are made that are entirely worth the ticket.

As an editor, I’ve always been frustrated by the degree to which the gatekeepers of the Entertainment Industrial Complex, as Hanks calls it, bar reporters from watching how a film gets made, limiting inquisitive journalists to a few distant glimpses of the process and then a concocted interchange on the official press junkets. And so I began our conversation at Symphony Space, which was recorded for The New Yorker Radio Hour and is published here in edited form, with my parochial complaint and a discussion of how Hanks sees things from inside.

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Photograph by Lloyd Bishop / NBC / Getty 

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Facebook, which was created in 2004, amassed 100 million users in just four and a half years. The speed and scale of its growth was unprecedented. Before anyone had a chance to understand the problems the social media network could cause, it had grown into an entrenched behemoth.

In 2015, the platform’s role in violating citizens’ privacy and its potential for political manipulation was exposed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Around the same time, in Myanmar, the social network amplified disinformation and calls for violence against the Rohingya, an ethnic minority in the country, which culminated in a genocide that began in 2016. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that Instagram, which had been acquired by Facebook in 2012, had conducted research showing that the app was toxic to the mental health of teenage girls.

Defenders of Facebook say that these impacts were unintended and unforeseeable. Critics claim that, instead of moving fast and breaking things, social media companies should have proactively avoided ethical catastrophe. But both sides agree that new technologies can give rise to ethical nightmares, and that should make business leaders — and society — very, very nervous.

We are at the beginning of another technological revolution, this time with generative AI — models that can produce text, images, and more. It took just two months for OpenAI’s ChatGPT to pass 100 million users. Within six months of its launch, Microsoft released ChatGPT-powered Bing; Google demoed its latest large language model (LLM), Bard; and Meta released LLaMA. ChatGPT-5 will likely be here before we know it. And unlike social media, which remains largely centralized, this technology is already in the hands of thousands of people. Researchers at Stanford recreated ChatGPT for about $600 and made their model, called Alpaca, open-source. By early April, more than 2,400 people had made their own versions of it.

While generative AI has our attention right now, other technologies coming down the pike promise to be just as disruptive. Quantum computing will make today’s data crunching look like kindergarteners counting on their fingers. Blockchain technologies are being developed well beyond the narrow application of cryptocurrency. Augmented and virtual reality, robotics, gene editing, and too many others to discuss in detail also have the potential to reshape the world for good or ill.

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Carolina Niño

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