The importance of being nerd
Growing up surrounded by scientists, I became comfortable amid those nerdy looks and fleeting glances. That bunch of creatures floating around with books and great ideas in mind became my natural habitat. I always thought that those humans drawing symbols on a blackboard were mostly innocuous, utterly driven by their passion for science and completely covered in chalk. However, the image of a harmless, nerdy genius the TV shows are now trying to sell us, is in reality one of the biggest scams of modern time. From the Manhattan project to the development of vaccine, scientists had proven to be the most dangerous predators on earth. They operate at a level of knowledge where only a few other selected people can operate and their lack of preparation on basic human rights and ethical issues makes them a threat.
It happens to hear scientists spelling out very problematic ideas with a tone of complete disregard for the social norms. Once I remember a post doc coming up with new ideas on electoral systems: ‘We don’t need to have universal suffrage,’ he said, ‘it is enough to sample a fraction of the whole population. It will be efficient and cheap.’ Even a student taking their first statistics class will realize the subtlety of this sentence. This is true if the selection is done completely random, without introducing any bias. It is incredibly difficult to identify biases when sub-sampling. The intrinsic difficulty is that we do not know if there is a bias until we know the exact results. Only at that point, we can verify if the selection was accurate.
Nowadays, it is becoming more common to see wrong poll projections during national elections. Even the most reliable polling agencies are not able to do a satisfactory job sometimes. It is becoming clearer that when reaching out for electoral polls using standard tools such as landline or cell phones or social networks, entire group of people with similar social-economic background, stay completely under the radar. Science is a powerful tool and when scientists are sloppy it can become a powerful tool in the hand of the wrong people. I can easily imagine a situation in which the sentence on subsampling electors can, out of context, be used by politicians to reduce the electoral pool, becoming a threat for one of the basic human rights: the vote.
It is even scarier if we think about artificial intelligence. In the area of ‘big data’ and ultra-fast internet, AI has already distorted the way we perceive reality. Scientists are already making questionable choices for the development and use of their trained neural nets. They are selling their ideas to make a profit on the expenses of a large fraction of individuals. Isn’t this the right time to realize that inventors and speculators, conquerors and explorers are two sides of the same coin?
I always thought that as humans, we are living in the best possible time of all. Is that true tho? Imagine if someone would have told Colombo about the tremendous consequences of his journey, would Colombo have done something differently? I hope so but I am not sure that we want to know the real answer. I wouldn’t recommend to just ‘wait and see’. It is time to act: we have to build a new generation of scientists critically trained on ethical issues.
