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What a pair! The renowned biologist and the hoax-exposer/mathematician, teamed up to attack the medical profession’s new and woke tendency to deny the existence of biological sex as a reality. (Yes, all animals have exactly two sexes, which are not made up by society.) This eloquent op-ed is in the Boston Globe, and you can click below to read it for free, or find it archived here (h/t Mark, Barry).

It’s the “sex assigned at birth” meme, which any fool knows was made up to pretend that biological sex doesn’t really exist in nature, but is merely a “social construct”. This is the same risible meme taken apart by Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven in a recent NYT op-ed. As Alan and Richard note below, the distortion of reality was made for ideological reasons—by gender activists who want to see biological sex as a spectrum, and that is based on the the insupportable view that if you distort biology, transgender or transsexual people will not be “erased”. But, as I’ve said ad infinitum, you don’t need to distort biology to justify treating such people with civility and respect, and to confer on them the same moral value as everyone else has.

The excerpt from the above speaks for itself, but has a lot of useful links to show how well the termites have dined.

The American Medical Association says that the word “sex” — as in male or female — is problematic and outdated; we should all now use the “more precise” phrase “sex assigned at birth.” The American Psychological Association concurs: Terms like “birth sex” and “natal sex” are “disparaging” and misleadingly “imply that sex is an immutable characteristic.” The American Academy of Pediatrics is on board too: “sex,” it declares, is “an assignment that is made at birth.” And now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge us to say “assigned male/female at birth” or “designated male/female at birth” instead of “biologically male/female” or “genetically male/female.”

After discussing the biological definition of sex, which, as you know well by now involves differences in developmental systems that produce gametes of different size and mobility, Sokal and Dawkins give a sharp rap on the knuckles of the medical establishment. I’ve put the last two paragraphs in bold; the penultimate one shows the trend and motivation, while the last one shows the damage.

Much is speciously made of the fact that a very few humans are born with chromosomal patterns other than XX and XY. The most common, Klinefelter syndrome with XXY chromosomes, occurs in about 0.1 percent of live births; these individuals are anatomically male, though often infertile. Some extremely rare conditions, such as de la Chapelle syndrome (0.003 percent) and Swyer syndrome (0.0005 percent), arguably fall outside the standard male/female classification. Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.

So where does this leave the medical associations’ claims about “sex assigned at birth”?

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that. But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis. Of course, any observation can be erroneous, and in rare cases the sex reported on the birth certificate is inaccurate and needs to be subsequently corrected. But the fallibility of observation does not change the fact that what is being observed — a person’s sex — is an objective biological reality, just like their blood group or fingerprint pattern, not something that is “assigned.” The medical associations’ pronouncements are social constructionism gone amok.

. . .For decades, feminists have protested against the neglect of sex as a variable in medical diagnosis and treatment, and the tacit assumption that women’s bodies react similarly to men’s bodies. Two years ago, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet finally acknowledged this criticism, but the editors apparently could not bring themselves to use the word “women.” Instead the journal’s cover proclaimed: “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.” But now even this double-edged concession may be lost, as the denial of biological sex threatens to undermine the training of future doctors.

The medical establishment’s newfound reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality most likely stems from a laudable desire to defend the human rights of transgender people. But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided. Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned.”

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It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just. If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world.

And when an organization that proclaims itself scientific distorts the scientific facts in the service of a social cause, it undermines not only its own credibility but that of science generally. How can the public be expected to trust the medical establishment’s declarations on other controversial issues, such as vaccines — issues on which the medical consensus is indeed correct — when it has so visibly and blatantly misstated the facts about something so simple as sex?

 

Read also Byrne and Hooven; click below (or read it archived here):

Finally, the infamous Lancet cover:

You’ve likely heard of the Breakthrough Starshot (BTS) initiative. BTS aims to send tiny gram-scale, light sail picospacecraft to our neighbour, Proxima Centauri B. In BTS’s scheme, lasers would propel a whole fleet of tiny probes to the potentially water-rich exoplanet.

Now, another company, Space Initiatives Inc., is tackling the idea. NASA has funded them so they can study the idea. What can we expect to learn from the effort?

Proxima b may be a close neighbour in planetary terms. But it’s in a completely different solar system, about four light-years away. That means any probes sent there must travel at relativistic speeds if we want them to arrive in a reasonable amount of time.

That’s why Space Initiatives Inc. proposes such tiny spacecraft. With their small masses, direct lasers can propel them to their destination. That means they must send a swarm of hundreds or even one thousand probes to get valuable scientific results.

This is much different than the architecture that missions usually conform to. Most missions are a single spacecraft, perhaps with a smaller attached probe like the Huygens probe attached to the Cassini spacecraft. How does using a swarm change the mission? What results can we expect?

“We anticipate our innovations would have a profound effect on space exploration.”

Thomas Eubanks, Space Inititatives Inc.

A new presentation at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas examined the idea. It’s titled “SCIENTIFIC RETURN FROM IN SITU EXPLORATION OF THE PROXIMA B EXOPLANET.” The lead author is T. Marshall Eubanks from Space Initiatives Inc., a start-up developing 50-gram femtosatellites that weigh less than 100 grams (3.5 oz.)

Tiny probes like these can only do flybys. They’re too tiny and low-mass for anything else. When designing a mission like this, the first consideration is whether the probes will operate as a dispersed or coherent swarm. In a dispersed swarm, the probes reach their destination sequentially. In a coherent swarm, the probes are together when they do their flyby. Both architectures have their merits.

In either case, these tiny solar sail probes will be very thin. But thanks to technological advances, they can still gather high-resolution images by working together.

The image below shows 247 probes forming an array as they fly by Proxima b. Together, they have the light-collecting area of a three-meter telescope. This arrangement should enable sub-arc-second resolutions at optical wavelengths. Spectroscopy should be equally as fine.

“While both erosion by the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and image smearing will degrade imaging, we anticipate these systems will enable sub-arcsecond resolution imaging and spectroscopy of the target planet,” the authors write.

This image from the presentation shows how the probe swarm would arrive at Proxima b. (Note that the planned swarm dispersion is much smaller than is indicated here.) Image Credit: Eubanks et al. 2024.

These tiny spacecraft could do some course correction, but not much. So, getting the navigation right is critical. Unfortunately, our data on Proxima b’s orbit is not as well-understood as the planets in our own Solar System. It all comes down to ephemeris.

Ephemeris tables show the trajectory of planets and other objects in space. But in Proxima b’s case, the ephemeris error is potentially quite large.

Added to that is the distance. If the probes can travel at 20% of light speed, reaching the planet will take over 21 years. The authors calculate that if they can restrict Proxima b’s ephemeris error to 100,000 km and send 1,000 probes, at least one will come within 1,000 km of the planet. “Meeting this ephemeris error goal will require improved astrometry of the Proxima system,” the authors write.

The probes would perform science observations on their way to Proxima b. As they travel, the swarm would have dozens or even hundreds of opportunities to use microlensing to study stellar objects. A stellar mass microlensing event requiring one month on Earth would only take one hour.

“It is now possible to predict lensing events for nearby stars; BTS probe observations of dozens or hundreds of predicted microlensing events by nearby stars will offer both a means of observing these systems and a novel means of interstellar navigation,” the authors explain.

The swarm would be only the third mission to leave our Solar System. The Voyage spacecraft left the heliosphere, but only inadvertently. So, the swarm could observe the interstellar medium (ISM) during its 20+ year journey. One of the questions we have about the local ISM concerns clouds. We only have poor data on the nature of these clouds, and scientists aren’t certain if our Solar System is in the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC.)

“In situ observation of the properties of these clouds will be a primary scientific goal for mission science during the long interstellar voyage,” the researchers write.

There are clouds in the ISM near our Solar System. But we don’t know much about them, including if our Solar System is in the LIC or if it’s leaving it. Image Credit: Interstellar Probe/JHUAPL

Opportunistic science during the voyage is great, but arrival at Proxima b is the meat of the mission. One day before the probes arrive, they would still be 35 AU away. At that point, the mission could begin imaging. Proxima b would still only be several pixels across, but it’s enough to see any visible moons.

“At this point, it would be worth turning some probes to face forward and begin imaging the Proxima system to search for undiscovered planets, moons and asteroids in the system, and to begin a Proxima b approach video,” the researchers explain.

Upon arrival at Proxima Centauri b, a one-meter aperture telescope 6,000 km away from the planet could attain a six-meter resolution on the surface. That’s an idealistic number, as not all of the planet’s surface could be imaged at that resolution. PCb is also tidally locked to its star, meaning one side is in darkness. Because of that, the mission should be designed to gather low-light and infrared images of the night side. “Night-side illumination imagery might also be the most conclusive technosignature from an initial Proxima mission,” the authors write.

As probes pass through Proxima b’s shadow, they could use the light from the star to perform spectroscopy. Probes passing behind Proxima b could use the Earth laser system for spectrometry, and if the probes are in a coherent swarm, they could use the lasers from pairs of probes on either side of the planet.

“Transmission spectroscopy, which for Proxima b cannot be done from Earth,” the researchers explain, “will likely provide the best means of determining the existence of a biology or even a technological society on Proxima b through the search for the spectral lines of biomarkers and technomarkers.”

As humanity’s first mission to Proxima Centauri b, the swarm would face some hurdles and uncertainties. But in a coherent swarm architecture, the mission could also be almost too successful. “A BTS mission, especially with a coherent swarm, may collect more data than can be returned to Earth,” the authors write. If the data returned has to be selected autonomously by the swarm itself, that could be more demanding than deciding what data to collect in the first place.

Scientists have many questions about Proxima Centauri b. Should the swarm ever be launched, any amount of data it returns will be valuable. Even though it’ll take over four years for the data to be sent back to Earth.

An artist’s conception of a violent flare erupting from the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. Such flares can obliterate the atmospheres of nearby planets. Credit: NRAO/S. Dagnello.

Scientists don’t know how hot the planet is. They’re not certain if it even has liquid water. It looks like the planet is just over one Earth mass and has a slightly higher radius. But those measurements are uncertain. Scientists are also uncertain about its composition. The star it orbits is a flare star, which means the planet could be subjected to extremely powerful bursts of radiation. That’s a lot of uncertainty.

But it’s the nearest exoplanet, the only one we could feasibly reach in a realistic amount of time. That alone makes it a desirable target.

There’s no final plan for a mission like this. It’s largely conceptual. But the technology to do it is coming along. NASA has funded a mission study, so it definitely has merit.

“Fortunately, we don’t have to wait until mid-century to make practical progress – we can explore and test swarming techniques now in a simulated environment, which is what we propose to do in this work,” said report lead author Thomas Eubanks from Space Initiatives Inc. “We anticipate our innovations would have a profound effect on space exploration, complementing existing techniques and enabling entirely new types of missions, for example, picospacecraft swarms covering all of cislunar space or instrumenting an entire planetary magnetosphere.”

Eubanks also points out how a swarm of probes could investigate interstellar objects that pass through our inner Solar System, like Oumuamua.

But the main mission would be the one to Proxima Centauri b. According to Eubanks, that would happen sometime in the third quarter of this century.

The post What a Swarm of Probes Can Teach Us About Proxima Centauri B appeared first on Universe Today.

The expansion rate of the universe, measured by the Hubble constant, has been one of the most controversial numbers in cosmology for years, and we seem at last to be close to nailing it down

If your life feels aimless and joyless, you may be languishing, says psychologist Corey Keyes — who reveals how it differs from depression and what you can do to flourish instead

Microplastic particles can be found in the most remote ocean regions on earth. In Antarctica, pollution levels are even higher than previously assumed.

A study that could help revolutionize wireless communication introduces a novel method to curve terahertz signals around an obstacle.

A study that could help revolutionize wireless communication introduces a novel method to curve terahertz signals around an obstacle.

Scientists are using computer simulations and laboratory experiments to see if depleted oil and natural gas reservoirs can be used for storing carbon-free hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen is an important clean fuel: It can be made by splitting water using solar or wind power, it can be used to generate electricity and power heavy industry, and it could be used to power fuel-cell-based vehicles. Additionally, hydrogen could be stored for months and used when energy needs outpace the supply delivered by renewable energy sources.

With climate change and rising urbanization, the likelihood and severity of urban flooding are increasing. But not all city blocks are created equal. Researchers investigated how urban layout and building structures contribute to pedestrian safety during flooding. Based on their simulated results, the team recommends modifying building corners and protective block layouts to reduce pedestrian risk.

A team has taken the first atomic-resolution images and demonstrated electrical control of a chiral interface state -- an exotic quantum phenomenon that could help researchers advance quantum computing and energy-efficient electronics.

A team has taken the first atomic-resolution images and demonstrated electrical control of a chiral interface state -- an exotic quantum phenomenon that could help researchers advance quantum computing and energy-efficient electronics.

An improved charging protocol might help lithium-ion batteries to last much longer. Charging with a high-frequency pulsed current reduces aging effects, an international team demonstrated.

We have enough genetic material to bring back the northern white rhino, but doing so won’t be easy

Here’s a rare example of animal behavior being fossilized. In this case it’s in termites, whose modern representatives engage, as pairs, in a behavior called “tandem running”. This occurs after a group of reproductive termites  who have left their natal nest fly away, a behavior certainly evolved as a way of staring new colonies.  Unlike other social insects like bees, a termite colony contains both reproductive males and females, both of which have wings, eyes, and the capacity to mate and start new colonies (other workers lack wings and eyes). At mating time, a swarm of reproductive individuals fly away at random (they’re not good fliers), and then alight on the ground or, in the case at hand, on a tree trunk.  After dropping their wings, they form mating pairs, each of which can start a new colony. To find that colony, a male and a female engage in “tandem running,” with (in the species below) the female running around with the male close behind, his head contacting her abdomen. Apparently some species can have either a male or a female as the leader in the tandem run. I can’t find out whether mating occurs before the tandem run or after the pair burrow into the ground to found their new colony.

When the female finds a site she likes, the pair digs in (most termites nest underground), and, after mating, the female becomes the “queen”, and the male the “king”.  They remain monogamous, with the male continuing to fertilize the female throughout the life of the colony. This implies that all the termites in a colony are brothers and sisters. Since “kings” and “queens” can live for decades (25-50 years, according to one site, the colony can last a long time sending out reproductives to found new colonies.

At any rate, below you can see two examples of tandem running in reproductive alates (winged termites that have lost their wings). This is the behavior that appears to have been “fossilized”.

The YouTube notes:

When male and female termite alates (flying termites) pair up, they break off their wings and the male starts following the female around until she finds a suitable spot to start a new nest. This activity is called termite tandem running.

And so to the new paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, which you can read by clicking on the title below or reading the pdf here.

The authors had a piece of 38-million-year-old Baltic amber, which is fossilized plant resin. (Baltic amber containing animal or plant inclusions like this can sell for a lot of money.) When resin or sap falls to the ground, it can, over long periods, be converted to amber by pressure and temperature of the sediments above. Eventually it becomes quite hard and can be mined.

In one pice of amber, the authors found two termites that looked as if they might have been tandem running when they got stuck in the sap and then preserved. Here’s a photo of their specimen, which is of the extinct species Electrotermis affinis.  The caption to the partial figure below is “E. affinis pair in Baltic amber. (A and B) The dorsal and ventral sides of the tandem, respectively, with (B) an arrow pointing to the 15-articles antenna of the tandem leader.”  The scale bars represent 0.5 mm.

This certainly looks like a tandem pair, but the problem is that they are not straight head-to-abdomen, but twisted a bit, so they are more side to side.  Because it’s hard to get a good look at specimens in amber, and you can’t cut the amber open (that destroys the specimen), the authors used  X-ray microtomography (a 3-D reconstruction using X rays) to show that the male is the one on the right in (A) and left in the ventral view (B); he’s smaller and the sexes can be told apart by the shape of the seventh “sternite”, or abdominal plate. They also saw that the female’s mouthparts were in contact with the tip of the male’s abdomen, which is what happens in tandem running.  So we have a male and female in the right contact position, buttressing the idea that this is a tandem pair.

The authors then hypothesized that this was indeed a pair that was doing tandem running (probably on a tree) when they got stuck in sap, and the side-by-side position resulted from the pair trying to get unstuck.  They failed, and eventually became part of a piece of amber.

To test this “position change” hypothesis, they put tandem-running termites of a living species, Coptotermes formosanus, in a sticky trap, a flat piece of cardboard covered with a sticky substance (I used them in the lab to catch cockroaches). This mimics a pair getting stuck in resin, and, as in resin, the pair could move around a bit after they got stuck.  Would the tandem runners move more side by side?

Indeed they did. The stickiness led to the tandem pair shifting their positions as they tried to free themselves. In fact, they assumed a more side by side position once stuck. (I have to say that I find this experiment disturbing, as it involves killing insects for the sake of science. However, I killed cockroaches to keep my lab free of organisms other than fruit flies.)

Here’s what they found in 17 termites that didn’t escape the trap:

The spatial orientation of the leader and the follower after entrapment was significantly different than in natural tandem runs. The distance between the body centroids of the leader and the follower was smaller in trapped pairs than in natural tandems (Fig. 2 D–G and SI Appendix, Fig. S2, Exact Wilcoxon rank sum test, W = 599, P < 0.001). This is because partners of trapped pairs were often positioned side-by-side, differing from the linear positioning of natural tandems (Fig. 2 D–G). The shorter inter-individual distance could result from the two individuals entering the sticky surface together and becoming stuck near each other without the ability to move away, rather than their active behavioral interactions to maintain proximity.

And a picture of a living tandem pair (female in front) that wound up stuck more side by side, like the fossilized ones above:

(From paper): The relative position of females and males forming mating pairs. (A–C) Mating pairs of the termite C. formosanus in (A) a natural tandem run and (B and C) on a sticky surface. Females are marked in red and males in blue. The convoluted lines indicate the trajectories of a female and a male during 30 min after the pair entered the sticky trap.

They also concluded, from a complicated logistic regression, that the probability was 74% that the following individual was a female.

Finally, here’s a reconstruction in the paper of the original event that led to the fossil. Note that the “fossilized behavior” term is a bit incorrect, as what gets fossilized is not their normal behavior, but what seems to be the behavior of a tandemly running pair that’s gotten stuck.  But given that there are individuals of both sexes in this pair, and that the antennae contact the abdomen, combined with what’s seen in the “resin mimicking” experiment, it’s seems likely that the authors are correct.

(from paper) Artistic reconstruction of E. affinis tandem pairs running freely on a tree bark and one tandem trapped by tree-resin.

What about other examples of fossilized behavior? I want to put in a paragraph about this from the paper, just for your delectation:

Some fossils preserve the “frozen” behavior of animals in actions at the moment of death (9, 10). However, our results demonstrate that animals on the sticky trap are not instantaneously immobilized and change their postures on the surface. These experiments imply that the spatial orientation of animals preserved in sticky matrices, such as in tree resin prior to fossilization into amber, is influenced by the process of entrapment. Therefore, the interpretation of fossilized behavior can be dramatically refined or even corrected by observing the behavior of living organisms under entrapment conditions. Some behaviors fossilized in amber may remain unaltered by the entrapment process. For example, the preservation of mating moths in copula (14) or hell ants grasping prey items (12) suggests that the inter-individual interactions of these behaviors are strong enough not to be disturbed by the movement on the sticky surface. However, entrapment in amber likely affects many other behaviors. For example, insects dispersing through phoresy [attachment to other insects as a way of moving around] can be preserved detached from the host insect, perhaps because the host struggled on the sticky surface before complete encasement (37). The consequence of different behavioral responses can be studied using extant relatives. Furthermore, animals have evolved behavioral responses to sticky objects. For example, recent studies have revealed that ants are not passively affected by sticky objects but actively modify them. Red imported fire ants cover sticky surfaces with soil particles to access food resources (38), and granivorous desert ants remove sticky spider webs from nestmates to rescue them (39). Scavenging insects can be attracted by large animals trapped on a sticky surface (11, 35), and the spatial distribution of these insects may have reflected their foraging behavior. Thus, future studies on behavioral responses to sticky objects by animals will increase our understanding of fossil records in amber, as well as shed light on the behavioral capacity of extant insects.

I found it really interesting that ants can get around the danger of sticky substrates by covering them with soil, and can even remove spider web stuck to other ants. Ants have brains about the size of a grain of sand, but this behavior is somehow coded in there (or else they learn to do this, which seems less likely).

********

Reference: K. Mizumoto et al, 2024.  Extinct and extant termites reveal the fidelity of behavior fossilization in amber.  Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2308922121

 

Random-seeming hand gestures seem to help people control prosthetic hands better than ones that mimic their ordinary muscle movements

We’re almost at the bottom of the tank again, so please send in your good photos. Thanks.

Today we have some fall photos from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous. But he/she added this:

 I’ve attached some pics of fall foliage, from right here at my home in NY’s Hudson Valley.

A new way of interpreting the elusive mathematics of quantum mechanics could fundamentally change our understanding of reality

Researchers have used quantum light to create a magnetic field with a strength that is measured in imaginary numbers

It's time once again for Skeptoid to correct another round of errors in previous shows.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss421_Eve_Herold_2024_04_09.mp3 Download MP3

If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible. This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them. Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, healthcare, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image.

Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future.

Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition. She has written extensively about issues at the crossroads of science and society, including stem cell research and regenerative medicine, aging and longevity, medical implants, transhumanism, robotics and AI and bioethical issues in leading-edge medicine. Previous books include Stem Cell Wars and Beyond Human, and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Vice, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, among others. She’s a frequent contributor to the online science magazine, Leaps, and is the recipient of the 2019 Arlene Eisenberg Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Shermer and Herold discuss:

• What happened to our flying cars and jetpacks from The Jetsons?
• What is a robot, anyway? And what are social robots?
• Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler, and the female doll
• Robot nannies, friends, therapists, caregivers, and lovers
• Sex robots
• The uncanny valley: roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970
• Robots in science fiction
• Psychological states: anthropomorphism, effectance (the need to interact effectively with one’s environment), theory of mind (onto robots), social connectedness
• “Personal, social, emotional, home robots”
• Emotions, animism, mind
• Emotional intelligence
• Turing Test
• Artificial intelligence and natural intelligence
• What is AI and AGI?
• The alignment problem
• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• Robopocalypse
• Robo soldiers
• What is “mind”, “thinking”, and “consciousness”, and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes?
• Westworld: Robot sentience?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• The self and other minds
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?
• Does Watson know that it beat the great Ken Jennings in Jeopardy!?
• Self-driving cars
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it.

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