A Physicist Goes in Search of Our Origins

Home , Guido Tonelli, Robert Brout

Books & arts researchers and practitioners, the book charts rooted. Why? Because using data to inform we need to address the source of the bias. a slow, steady, complex progress, with many automated decisions often ignores the con- This will be done not through technological lows and some incredible highs. texts, emotions and relationships that are core fixes, but by education and social change. At We meet people such as Rich Caruana, now to human choices. the same time, research is needed to address senior principal researcher at Microsoft in Data are not raw materials. They are always the field’s perverse dependence on correla- Redmond, Washington, who was asked as a about the past, and they reflect the beliefs, tions in data. Current AI identifies patterns, graduate student to glance at something that practices and biases of those who create and not meaning. led to his life’s work — optimizing data cluster- collect them. Yet current application of auto- Meticulously researched and superbly writing and compression to make models that are mated decision-making is informed more by ten, these books ultimately hold up a mirror. both intelligible and accurate. And we walk efficiency and economic benefits than by its They show that the responsible — ethical, legal along the beach with Marc Bellemare, who pio- effects on people. and beneficial — development and use of AI is neered reinforcement learning while working Worse, most approaches to AI empower not about technology. It is about us: how we with games for the Atari console and is now at those who have the data and the computa- want our world to be; how we prioritize human Google Research in Montreal, Canada. tional capability to process and manage them. rights and ethical principles; who comprises Christian shows researchers’ growing real- Increasingly, these are big tech corporations — this ‘we’. This discussion can wait no longer. ization that AI developments are affected private entities outside democratic processes But the key question is: how can all have a by societal values — and, more importantly, and participatory control. Governments and voice? affect them. They come with a cost and can individuals are the users, not the leaders. The have profound impacts on communities. At consequences of this shift are enormous and Virginia Dignum is a professor in the its core, The Alignment Problem asks how we have the potential to alter society. department of computing science at can ensure that AI systems capture our norms So, what now? Besides efforts to debias the Umeå University in Sweden. and values, understand what we mean and do data and explain decisions algorithms make, e-mail: [email protected] what we want. We all have different concep- tions of and requirements for what such systems should do. As mathematician Norbert Wiener put it in 1960: “We had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is A physicist goes in the purpose which we really desire.” Crawford’s collection exposes the dark side of AI success. It traverses the globe exploring search of our origins the relationships between places and their impact on AI infrastructure. From Nevada and Indonesia, where the lithium and tin CERN experimentalist offers sweeping history of the central to semiconductors are mined at great human and environmental cost, we travel to Universe, in science and culture. By Andrea Taroni an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey. Here, labourers bend their bodies to the will of robots and production lines, instead of the hysicist Guido Tonelli has spent as a nuts-and-bolts experimentalist. automation adapting to human tempo. In an decades constructing intricate Tonelli argues that the search for the origins uneasy reminder of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 instruments to probe the myster- of the cosmos arises from humans’ need to be film Modern Times, we witness the hardship ies of matter. As part of one of the rooted. His biblical title nods to the idea that of “fauxtomation” — supposedly automated two main experiments at the Large current scientific understanding is part of a systems that rely heavily on human labour, PHadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, much wider cultural history. And the picture such as that of workers paid below minimum he vaulted to international attention in front of creation built up by twenty-first-century wage in data-labelling farms. of a packed auditorium in July 2012,when the science is as astonishing and mysterious as Crawford concludes with the arresting group announced the discovery of the Higgs any ancient myth. reminder that AI is not objective, neutral or boson — the long-sought elementary particle His starting point is Hesiod’s Theogony, universal. Instead, it is deeply embedded in that imparts mass to all others. a poem from around 700 bc on the birth of the culture and economic reality of those who Now, Tonelli has turned his gaze from the make it — mostly, the white, wealthy men of very small to the very large — the history of the California’s Silicon Valley. Universe. His ambition encompasses scientific “Stories allow us to make Both books are strong in their exposition insights, art, philosophy and religion. sense of the void from which of the challenges and dangers of current use Genesis is not just a book about the cosmos all things began.” and development of AI, and what sets it apart as measured by giant telescopes and particle from ‘classic’ computing. Reading them side by accelerators. It is also a story of humanity’s side highlights three core issues: over-reliance interpretations of the beginning and evolution the Greek gods. In the beginning, there was on data-driven, stochastic predictions; auto- of creation. chaos. Tonelli uses ‘chaos’ in its original sense mated decisions; and concentration of power. Many other physicists, from Stephen — a chasm or void so enormous that it could Hawking to Janna Levin, have explored this swallow and contain everything — rather Data dominance space in popular writing. Most cater to an than with its more modern connotation of As AI researcher Joy Buolamwini comments Anglophone audience. Tonelli’s contribu- disorder. Just as silence can be understood in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias, algo- tion — a bestseller in his native Italy — has a as a superposition of opposite-phase sound rithmic decision-making is undoing decades different flavour. It combines the humanistic waves that cancel one another out, the void of progress towards equal rights, reifying the approach that underpins much Italian educa- can host unlimited quantities of matter and very prejudices it reveals to be still deeply tion with scientific facts gleaned from a career antimatter, yet have a net energy of zero. The

VALENTIN FLAURAUD/AFP/GETTY VALENTIN Part of the Large Hadron Collider, where author Guido Tonelli worked on the Higgs boson, foundational to the structure of the Universe.

Universe was born 13.8 billion years ago from leaps between scientific detail and cultural small and the very large. Considering that so a random quantum fluctuation in this void. references are demanding to follow. much of his story pertains to the transfor- A sweeping description ensues. First came The book’s most vivid passages are its mation of matter across phases, it is striking the unfathomably quick inflation through more scientific ones. The description of the that he makes no explicit connection with which the Universe ballooned in size. Next Higgs boson, and its foundational impor- branches of physics developed to under- came cooling, in which hierarchies of forces, tance in the development of the structure of stand these phenomena, such as the theory symmetries, particles, black holes, stars and the Universe and our understanding of it, is of phase transitions that explains the struc- galaxies emerged. Each chapter represents a clearly home turf for Tonelli. He makes deep tural rearrangement when water becomes ‘day’ in Tonelli’s genesis, capturing an impor- and lucid connections with concepts such as ice. This omission exposes a cultural gap in tant phase as the Universe acquired structure. spontaneous symmetry breaking, the process physics. But some pioneering physicists, Here lie phenomena such as baryogenesis (the through which a physical system enters its such as Robert Brout, Murray Gell-Mann mysterious process that led to the asymmetry lowest-energy state by seemingly disregard- and Ken Wilson, have managed to connect between matter and antimatter); the primor- ing all the other possible states with the same high-energy particle physics with its ‘low-en- dial soup of quarks and gluons from which the symmetry. And the chapters examining the ergy’ condensed-matter cousin. Tonelli misses building blocks of atoms were born; and the formation and structure of stars and galaxies a trick here. uncoupling of matter from radiation. are spellbinding – it would be a joy to listen to Ultimately, however, his goal is to bridge a these while gazing at a starry sky. much wider gap — the one between science Matter and mythology Yet Tonelli leaves a gap between the very and the humanities. For Tonelli, everything Tonelli references all manner of mythology in the evolution of the Universe, culture and and literary sources. He is also scrupulous in Genesis: The Story of the human condition follows from the need explaining how scientists arrived at their con- How Everything Began to understand our origins. Stories allow us to clusions. The chapter on the Big Bang describes Guido Tonelli (transl. make sense of the void from which all things Erica Segre & Simon the work of researchers including Albert began. It is fitting that his own story is com- Carnell) Einstein, Georges Lemaître and Henrietta Swan Profile (2021) plex, mysterious and, at times, even messy — a Leavitt, and refers to the Hindu deity Shiva, the bit like the Universe itself. Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, or Śūnyatā, and Jorge Luis Borges’s 1945 short story ‘The Andrea Taroni is chief editor of Nature Physics. Aleph’. Although fascinating, the conceptual He is based in London.