ASM207 Crime, Cloning, and the Memory of Water

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crime cloning and the memory of water all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike picard and boy this week we have got quite a show the last one of 2019 so what do you say let's get it started and here we are on the final show of 2019 for ask science mike i'm so glad you're here with me in this holiday season if you've got some time off of school or work i hope you're enjoying it if you work in the retail sector or food service or health care or some other sector where you're feeling left out because so many of your friends and family have time to rest and uh you're still on the clock i just want you to know i'm thinking of you and i understand that that would be difficult and frustrating uh in january now very soon from this episode coming out i'll be in buffalo new york uh at trinity church for their fresh voices series that's january 11th and then january 20th through 27th i'll be at the first presbyterian church in fort smith arkansas for a week with mike mccarg you can get information on both of those by going to ask sciencemike.com and clicking on the events tab as always we need your questions you can send those in on asksciencemike.com and i do want to say thank you to everyone who started leaving reviews on apple podcasts that will help us find new listeners for the program which i actually would like to talk with you about for just a moment not new listeners uh but this this episode and this show and um some of my insecurity you know ask science mike has such um a wonderful audience all of you listeners you're kind thoughtful people and you come from really different perspectives so anytime i answer a question on the show i know that i am in some way alienating or excluding a big chunk of the audience so this is a program that both like conservative evangelicals and atheists listen to this is a show that um political progresses and political conservatives listen to this is a show that um people who love and hate jordan peterson listen to and i'm not sure how we make it work but i think it's because what i love to do is simply honor the vulnerability that comes with curiosity so when someone asks me a question you'll notice what i'm in a rush to do is affirm and validate that person's life and experience and feelings and i feel good and confident when i do that um that feels very meaningful to me this week we have a lot of questions that are very heady important substantive questions many of which have ambiguous answers at best when i have to share information with you i prefer to relay to you the information of experts and try to leave my opinion out of it because i don't have a lot of confidence in my opinion and it's also less alienating if we talk about something with political implications if i share with you what experts say and why and they give you some links and you go read for yourself that's different than me sharing my opinion where if we disagree uh that can create this like emotional tension that you feel because i'm this trusted voice on the podcast every week but if you're politically and theologically conservative you know that i am not either of those things um and that's not to say i don't think that there's value in disagreement or even conflict there is i'm just saying it's not my wheelhouse i i prefer to help people experience a sense of safety you know my entire philosophy as a public communicator and activist and educator is to have a bottom-up approach to dealing with the problems that people face and basically i understand that at the root of our brains literally the root of our brains near the brain stem are neurological structures brain structures whose job is to make sure that we are safe and if we don't feel safe we can't have any kind of a discussion we have to feel safe first so i try to de-escalate and make sure people feel safe and then i make sure they feel accepted because as we move up in the brain into you know stuff like the cingulate cortex and then the limbic system of the brain uh they are there are structures that deal with belonging and acceptance so start with safety then move to acceptance and then we can move to problem solving we can move to ideas um and those first two are what i'm best at it's odd i'm called science mike because i'm actually better at de-escalating and make people feel safe and making people feel like they belong than i am at digging into complex and nuanced uh political philosophical issues um and this week we have a lot of questions that are just going to force me to give you my opinion and i just had to say right up front that that makes me uncomfortable and it brings insecurity and as i say that i don't want the people who picked these questions to feel a sense of shame you should not i'm so glad you asked challenging questions this week i don't want the patrons who voted on these questions to feel a sense of shame or that you've hurt me you have not i'm so excited that these are the questions you wanted to hear about i just wanted to take a moment here on this show the last one of the year which i know uh download numbers will be down a bit compared to a usual episode over the holiday season i just had to say like i feel uncomfortable these questions because i care about you and i know we come from so many different perspectives i understand some of the psychology and sociological implications between things like the anti-vaxx movement and homeopathic medicine so even though i would disagree with some of the conclusions those groups make i understand the emotional motivations that arrive at those positions but my frustration with uh science literacy in the world means sometimes i i respond less graciously on those topics than other topics and so of course we have a question about homeopathy this week we're going to talk about the crime rate and crime this week and that means we have to talk about policing and race and i know a lot of my white listeners i get very upset when we talk about the system of whiteness and white supremacy and we talk about police brutality against black and brown people that that is upsetting i think it's vital to discuss but when i look at some of the consensus on experts around crime and policing i found some things that i think would also be upsetting to black and brown listeners so i'm reticent to even share it um because i know you're listening and i i care about you and i care about racial justice uh and then we're gonna talk about um cloning and that one's gonna be pretty easy that's a nice wheelhouse science question for me that shouldn't uh should not upset anybody and then our last question this week is about automation and the way the economy is changing and i think that'll be less emotionally charged but uh well as you'll see um i don't i either don't have a definitive answer to every question this week or i have a definitive answer that i am concerned will upset people listening so i just wanted to start by naming that i'm trying to get better about naming my feelings sharing my feelings opening openly so that you would also feel comfortable to do the same with me as you ask your questions as you leave your comments uh so without further ado and disclaimer and preamble uh let's go ahead and get to some questions [Music] hi science mike i have a question for you um that's actually coming out of seeing a disney movie um it's a little embarrassing to admit that but i took my daughter to go see frozen 2 in the movie theater and one of the ideas in the movie that i thought was very compelling was the idea that water remembers or water has memory and so i decided to do a little research on my own so when i went home and started poking around in google i got flooded with websites that said yes this is absolutely true and other sites i said absolutely not it's pseudoscience so i'd love to hear your opinion on whether there's any actual scientific evidence that water has memory thanks for your show i love everything you're doing and um thanks for listening to my question when we talk about scientific evidence that's a more complicated thing than you might think science doesn't give like thumbs up thumbs down or this is true this is false science attempts to use careful methods to ascribe a probability to something we speak in terms of statistical confidence of a given hypothesis being true or not and that means science is complicated even to scientists a lot of people are trained in operating and devising scientific experiments aren't statistically literate uh and so they might do good science but then they would might do you know really flawed statistical analysis on the results that's a common problem in the sciences so um you know when you ask is there any scientific evidence that water has memory yes there is scientific evidence that water has memory but that evidence is very low quality so there have been studies on water memory um and those findings have not resonated with the scientific community because of methodological flaws and what is viewed by chemists especially as an improbable implausible theory of a mechanism of action for water memory when we talk about water memory well first of all frozen two is a great movie and i loved the water has memory uh thing there as a storytelling element i won't say anymore um because i don't wanna spoil it for anyone hasn't seen it but as someone who loves story and study story the moment they said it i knew how the film would play out and i thought it was an excellent excellent um beat to introduce in the story uh but when we talk about water having memory there's like two theories on how that happens first of all uh this comes you might remember this from the no sews episode recently where the idea in homeopathic medicine medicine is like cures like which is not a scientific idea and the idea that when we dilute things dramatically the way we get the essence of something in water is that there's a memory there's a there's a trace of not the actual substance but the water itself was transformed by encountering the substance and therefore this water might be useful in treating disease and illness of course studies don't back that up at all but when we look at a couple of mechanisms of action one is the idea of clumping that you would have these gas bubbles inside of water that were created by encountering a given substance and that they are unique almost a fingerprint of that substance and of course we know that water almost always does have gas bubbles in it and chemists can degas a water and that works consistently but these are very unstable arrangements they are have not been shown to be unique uh based on a particular substance being in water um and the pure water gets the more likely it is to to pull in gases from the surrounding environment or dust or even plastics water doesn't like to be pure so it impurifies itself pretty readily but then that doesn't necessarily radically alter or alter all the behavior of that water depending on what those impurities are the other idea is hydrogen bonds change and get modified by encountering substances water is a highly dynamic substance especially in its liquid form and um most chemists would say that that's a pretty absurd notion that hydrogen bonds are constantly breaking and reforming in water and even if there was some special statistically significant arrangement of hydrogen bonds in water as the result of contacting something those bonds would immediately be reformed on contacting something like a human mouth or especially a human's stomach those are very hostile environments for water um so i mean uh i don't mean to laugh there's not there's just not a lot of notion that supports the idea that water has memory in a homeopathic sense there's also an early episode of science mike quite some time ago there was a scientist who you know uh claimed that like singing to water uh had an effect on that water and and we we went through it and kind of debunked that as well um here's why i'm really interested in this question you you googled the answer and i've one of the critiques i've gotten from people about my show is that i just google things for people and this also comes into public policy and advocacy work where when you learn about something new be that homeopathic medicine or white supremacy or something else yes we all turn to google and then google this machine mind uh just gives us a bunch of articles that have been selected by algorithm and there's a whole industry of people who tune their articles to be favorable to google search algorithms and if you click through on most topics the first couple of pages on google you're going to be more confused than before you googled something exactly what happened with you you looked up does water have memory and there were a bunch of articles that said yes and a bunch of articles that said no and they both had lots of rationale and explanation to support their position and this is such a complicated thing in our society isn't it because if you're me and you talk about science all the time let's say i wasn't a science educator but i was a scientist and sometimes i shared scientific findings on twitter and then people would tweet me when they realized i did that and asked me to rule on different questions they had to point them in the right direction that that would be exhausting wouldn't it now i do that as my job but sometimes it is exhausting for me because people ask me the same questions over and over and over and i'm like why can't they just look it up well we've created an environment where media literacy is is very difficult there's never been more media available and it's very hard to discern what media is trustworthy and what isn't and uh we've got a widely and deeping polarization and global culture and global society especially in the west if you look at the outcome of the most recent election in the uk or you look at the impeachment process in the united states you would see that these kind of identity mythic narratives are shaping the way we consume media and we tend to want to read media that meets our lower brain needs of safety and belonging i think that's what's happening but when people have a genuine curiosity and they realize they might be falling into some mythology i absolutely believe homeopathy and the anti-vaxx movement is a coping mythology when people try to examine that and they ask google they get a lot of media they can't discern between so i do take great pride and joy in studying media literacy learning to be media literate myself and then using media literacy skills to help my listeners first hear where i went with my research and then get a glimpse into how i did that research to increase their own media literacy but i would just like to say to all of us that these same patterns are in play when we talk about racism for example it's a common arc i've seen for white men like myself to start studying white supremacy and to be appalled at what they see and to realize oh my gosh we have a giant system that i'm a part of that oppresses people of color oh no and then they began to or they begin to share these thoughts publicly and in some way have an unsophisticated or rudimentary or even problematic analysis and then someone corrects them maybe even harshly and that hurts their feelings and so they begin to ask questions but because the people impacted by these systems are if they're active online they're constantly bombarded by people asking questions that could be found on google they get tired they rebuff the people and then ultimately because these decision-making processes we have in our lives are driven by our emotional brains and not our thinking brains that sense of rejection makes them look for safety and belonging and then i think that's how you get um what does they call classic liberal white men who say well you know i think the conservatives they're all bonkers and they're crazy but the left has just gone too far and they're reclaiming language and so now here i am with the good rational people who stand for free speech above all this was a big thing i thought about a lot during my faith transition as well i realized that christians and atheists were largely using fancy intellectual language to hide the emotional motivations for their belief systems don't hear me wrong i am not criticizing the fact that our feelings play a core role in what we believe i think that's good and important and necessary i think the problem is that we too often deny that those factors are in play and pretend that we're all having rational discussions and that brings us back to the memory of water these google results are overwhelming because media literacy requires some difficult work to not only understand how to critique media but to have an awareness of your philosophical positions and your epistemological positions when i weigh in the way that i just did i prioritized some sources as better than others because i thought their way of using knowledge was better i leaned in with the consensus of the scientific community and excluded some of the natural medicine and what i would call pseudoscience communities and in doing so there's a grief for me because those people can then interpret my leaning on what i see as a better way of finding factual information as a rejection of their feelings and the ways that they feel safe and feel belonging and that's the that's why this question of water memory is so important it's so evocative of the precise point we find our global culture in today with an internet that can tell us everything but gives us no capacity to weigh what is more or less factually accurate and those forces are simultaneously empowering people in wonderful ways i love the way that um someone who's who's queer and in the closet can find queer communities online and share wow that's great i love the way that uh people of color can collect and organize and find celerity solidarity online wow that's wonderful and i lament the way that these algorithmic-driven information presentation systems encourage us to go into our own philosophical epistemological comfort bubbles where we are no longer able to agree on a common consensus for what reality is at all which is to say no i do not believe that water has memory but i understand the motivations of those people who say that it does [Music] i'm so careful in choosing sponsors for ask science mike because i want um i want to keep doing the show and i want you to feel like like i've earned your trust and i love that betterhelp is one of the sponsors of this program because i think mental health is so important if you don't know better help they are an online mental health counseling service they are wonderful and um i use this service myself in my pursuit of mental health and stability uh what they do is they let you use a website or an app on your computer or your mobile device to talk to licensed therapists over 3 000 in all 50 states by the way over chat or text or phone or video and it's super convenient and super affordable and super easy i've told you before that sometimes it's hard for me to drive to the therapist office in los angeles traffic and also finding a therapist is an overwhelming process and better help is very simple you go in you fill out a secure convenient questionnaire and they will match you with a therapist you like and if you don't like the therapist you're matched with you can request another one at any time and they will find you a new therapist there's so many specializations available in anxiety family conflicts uh anger depression sleep issues trauma relationships grief grief self-esteem lgbtq matters all of these things have specialists assigned to them and i know that for issues i'm working through right now i was amazed at how betterhelp was able to zero in on a professional who was uniquely able to help me in that situation so if you'd like to join me in pursuing better health just go to betterhelp.com sciencemic where you get a 10 discount off your first month and don't forget that the service is affordable and available on a sliding scale for people with low or restricted incomes to learn more and to get started today just go to betterhelp.com sciencemike [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hi science mike i've been hearing a lot in the news about lawmakers increasing sentences for various crimes it is my understanding that punishment has never been shown to be a deterrent for committing crimes why then don't we look to solutions that might actually reduce crime what has been shown to reduce crime have other countries done this effectively i'm wondering specifically if reducing poverty will also reduce crime full disclosure my husband is a police officer so these conversations can get interesting in our house winky face thanks so much carrie uh carrie um i just wanna let you know that uh my dad's a police officer was a police officer before he retired and so these are conversations that i'm well acquainted with having uh so many of the adults in my life as a child were police officers and members of the law enforcement community um before i answer the question i'd like to kind of look at some of the subtext of your first paragraph where you said i've been hearing in the news about increasing sentences but you understand that punishment hasn't really been shown to be a deterrent for committing crimes there's an interesting sociological phenomena that we find different approaches to policy between conservative people and progressive people that appear to be related to brain function here's what i mean on the surface it actually makes sense that increasing the penalty or the punishment for a given crime would act as a deterrent to do a crime that seems logical it seems like a trustworthy idea and what we find is in the political and policy motivations of conservatives is they tend to be very compelled by something that makes sense progressives on the other hand don't care if it makes sense they care if it works uh so if something really unexpected we is found like um giving people free ice cream sandwiches lowered addiction rates progressives might not even want to study to say why if we have a study that it does they'd say great let let's start putting ice cream sandwiches in the budget do you see what i mean there's fundamentally different policy motivations but we have to remember that police policy and policing policy isn't decided by some academic board somewhere these things happen through elections and through uh advocacy uh it's as being public policy it is very complex so just because you're right increasing the punishment for most crimes doesn't actually affect the crime rate at all it doesn't actually change public policy because public opinion and polling in elections play a big role right so that's a big deal i don't want to gloss over that as we get into the question and then i just want to say gosh i am so afraid to answer this question here's why you talk about conflicting information uh when we talk about water memory there's not like a scientific debate about whether water has memory but when we talk about what lowers crime there actually is significant differences among experts who've done serious research on what strategies best mitigate crime and we also then um if we only look at lowering crime that's we're fragmenting society crime doesn't exist in a vacuum so there are ways that we could probably demonstrate in research that would lower crime but they would do so at the cost of great human misery and suffering so we can't just say how do we lower the crime rate we had to say how do we reduce crimes in ways that maximize human flourishing right i think that's an important context and that means for me to answer this question i have to have read all these things which i have and then offer you my opinion and boy do i hate doing that so i just want to say right now that what we're see what you're about to hear is like my interpretation of expert findings with an understanding that i'm disregarding things that might look like they work but do so by basically oppressing violently uh marginalized groups of people poor people people of color native people not okay with that um and so you also might understand that sometimes you can have what is i would consider quick fix strategy that can make a short term impact on the crime rate but does so in a way that actually sews the seeds for great inequality and difficulty in the future and potentially a higher crime rate so what do we know works in america and around the world well first kind of fascinating the crime rate is already plummeting across the united states and much of the world right now and has been doing so for some time that's not a new development experts are very torn on why it's happening but we know that it is happening we absolutely have crime rates rising in some locations but overall crime rates are going down and even in locations where the crime rate is going up it's lower than it was in say the 1980s or early 90s fascinating we also want to say that climate change could reverse that that the impact on basic material security and safety from the changing climate and food security and housing security that could certainly reverse this trend and do so definitively so as i look through the research with those things aside that the crime rate's already lowering and that climate change could cause it to rise again and maybe be higher than it has been in some sometime or perhaps in recorded history what do we see that consistently lowers crime and in fact may already be lowering crime rates in communities number one is improving access to education people who spend more time in the education system are less likely to commit crime and there's we can't talk about crime without talking about racism the justice system is a significant maybe even primary force in um maintaining systems of white supremacy but what's fascinating about the education metric is this is true across all racial groups white people who have lower education rates or been through less education are more likely to be arrested to be prosecuted and to be incarcerated now some of this isn't fair because crime doesn't simply come out of poverty white collar crime is real there are crimes of greed that happen in wealthy communities and uh those people are less likely to be prosecuted and less likely to be convicted and less likely to be incarcerated because they can afford legal counsel so it's not just a matter of education their crime still happens among people who are wealthy and educated but they're more likely to get away with it i guess under some argument that like they didn't mug somebody they just uh they just wiped out the retirement of a half million people uh oh gosh boy my opinion really came through there actually i'm not even sorry white-collar crime and the greed uh associated with that is very very frustrating to me but in general improving access to education makes people less likely to commit crime which means like in a strange way to some political ideologies investing in education is a good investment because it will lower costs otherwise in other places fascinating improving access to economic opportunity lowers the crime rate as unemployment goes down crime goes down working people have less time to make especially you've got to consider uh a high propensity for crime group is uh young people teenagers bored teens get up to mischief and this could be as simple as them having they're they're too busy working and too tired when they're not to um engage in crime based activities so economic opportunity across racial groups a cost ages across education levels lowers the crime rate and the data and access to basic necessities food shelter clothing lowers the crime rate so those three things education economic opportunity what i would call social safety all lower the crime rate much more effectively than increasing penalties or increasing incarceration rates in fact america has this incredibly high incarceration rate globally unique and research is telling us that that does not play a significant role in reducing crime it's just very expensive and traumatic for our society high incarceration rates and high penalties aren't helping and neither do stop and frisk or broken windows policies where stop and frisk basically means stop anyone who looks suspicious this almost overwhelmingly ends up being people of color and poor people who are stopped and frisked by the police and then they go to prison for you know having less marijuana on them than a 14 year old or a 15 year old in an affluent neighborhood and broken windows is basically um drowning people in the minutia of ordinance and regulation so literally uh i see your windows broken city ordinance 701-3 says windows have to be prepared uh and that gives us reason to search your premises or we're going to write you a ticket for this meaning the theory being uh well if if you know we're coming after you for the small stuff you know we're watching and we're gonna get you for the big stuff and uh it's it's been really broadly demonstrated in the research that neither of those things stop and frisk or broken windows policing works but there is one type of policing that is shown to be very effective and that's what is called hot spot policing when you look at crime rates they tend to be very low everywhere if you look city by city or region by region but if you start working street by street the crime rate can go from you know say the violent crime risk is is five or ten per hundred thousand well you get in a hot spot a difficult street and it can be 300 or 3 000 in a hundred thousand your risk of violent crime or injury and violent crime uh and that's dangerous and so uh what has been shown is to have police focus with an intentional pragmatic strategy in those hot spots that addresses the specific crimes in question and it's different every time there is no like universal solution because hot spots are all unique they all represent some type of systemic disenfranchisement of a group of people um and they can be unforeseen consequences of public policy so for example if you look at gentrification a neighborhood starts getting gentrified and then a housing project gets torn down but it's okay we built another one four blocks away but now before we had a couple of gangs who had set up established boundaries now you just move one gang in one area to the center of another gang's territory and now you have an extended period of conflict in search of a new equilibrium and the crime rate explodes in a way that maybe the developers and policy people who made those decisions did not foresee it also means we should be careful about forcefully relocating people maybe not do it at all for that matter but that's my point but if you took the policy learnings from that and applied it to a different hotspot where there's a different situation it won't work so hotspot policing is about police forces getting in touch with and learning and connecting with the community and partnering with that community to address the crime that is victimizing all the residents it seems to be most effective when police work in conjunction with citizenry and don't move in as like a conquering force into an area and it means it takes a lot of effort and time to test and devise and work on strategies that work for one specific neighborhood but that is one way that policing does seem to lower crime finally booze make booze harder to get alcohol consumption is highly correlated and and causal in fact with some forms of violent crime and so you want to make booze harder to get make it served in fewer locations put more taxing on it make it more expensive but don't don't do this via prohibition because then you just get a thriving of a black market you get an underground market handling distribution in ways that are even less savory than the prior legal one so some studies have shown that just fewer liquor licenses and a higher tax on alcohol can also impact the climate the climate the crime rate that's a lot isn't it that is a lot so lowering crime improve access to education economic opportunity and the necessities of life focus on hot spots with pragmatic localized solutions and make alcohol harder to get but not via prohibition um i hope that's helpful and uh that nobody had an aneurysm as i went through my opinion on lowering the crime rate hi science mike i had a dream last night and you were in it uh you were a member of a team who backed by some wealthy investors were in the process of building a theme park on an island to showcase some clones of real-life dinosaurs in the dream you are giving a tour of the park to myself and some others showing us areas where the dinosaurs would be kept you were explaining that even though some of the park had already been built your team hadn't actually cloned any dinosaurs yet the scientists were still trying unsuccessfully to blend frog dna with that of a rhino and when i woke up i realized that my dream was largely a rip off of michael crichton but it got me thinking could the science of jurassic park be used to help recover endangered species like the rhino or even those recently extinct if we were to preserve their dna that's my question for you anyway i want to take a moment to say thank you though for your work in this podcast and the liturgists i work at a large evangelical church in the northwest and i tend to lean more right of center of my views and i'm often challenged by what you have to say i've even considered unsubscribing on several occasions but i continue to listen to every episode because i recognize the heart of christ in you in your care for the broken and marginalized you bring the voices and stories of people to the foreground when all the debate often threatens to crowd them out and reduce them to issues i don't always agree with everything that's said on these podcasts but they've become an invaluable voice in my life hearing your heart helps mine to become more compassionate and i feel myself growing closer to jesus through it so thank you well first i would just like to thank you for your kind words and encouragement that means so much to me and then on the cloning thing you know this is something i hear uh often this is this is something people bring up quite frequently in casual conversation with me um it won't surprise you that when i'm at social engagements people tend to ask me science questions uh including people who haven't known me before that moment um but i don't know fascinating uh cycle of my life but yeah this comes up a lot so if if mass species die off as a problem would it one strategy be to preserve as much dna of that species as possible and then supplement wild populations with cloned animals or if animals go extinct bring them back using cloning and this makes great sense on the surface and as we start to dig down we run into a few issues here they are number one animals are better at making animals than we are it takes a lot of embryos to make one viable animal uh using cloning cloning isn't like a home run process it's actually a very small number of cloned embryos are viable and that means it is an expensive difficult process to clone even one animal and then sometimes those animals can have long-term health or quality of life issues that we don't predict so it's a lot cheaper to just have animals reproduce themselves through mating and reproduction than it is to clone them but even if that were not the case the other problem is animals are going extinct for a reason or reasons typically habitat loss hunting dangerous interactions with humanity or human livestock right or climate change causing a destruction to their habitat or food chain which means if you have an animal or a species that's under incredible pressure from those factors adding cloned animals they will die of the same habitat loss the same hunting the same climate change driven issues unless you address the factors that cause the animal population to decline or go extinct in the first place your carefully cloned animals will also die and then you'll have re-extinction which would be tragic so it means we we shouldn't even consider cloning and cloning can play an important role as numbers of a given species decline to the point where there's not genetic variability enough to sustain a population at that point using archives clone dna could be just the boost a species needs to survive and be viable but before that happens we've got to work on the macro issues that are causing the species decline in the first place and we know how to do this by the way when humanity pays attention and works hard we have brought animals back from the very brink of extinction and seeing their numbers grow and thrive the bald eagle being a classic example but buffalo being another gray wolves in the west we can do it when we do it people get mad uh people get mad they can't develop something on their own land because of some bird's nest and that this is this is the difficulty of naturalism and protecting species is uh people don't want their individual life inconvenienced anyway just so that a species can survive meaning just so that we can have a functioning ecosystem that we all live in uh but cloning is one small minor tool in a much larger more difficult and more important tool set of species preservation that means we have to preserve habitats we have to create regulation that limits humans ability to drive out kill prey upon hunt consume endangered and threatened [Music] animals and that's hard but without that our our our theoretical jurassic park of extincted animals extinct extinct animals d extinct animals unextinct brought back from extinction animals would be just that a zoo where the only examples of that species in the world were in that zoo and we just kept cloning from our stock to keep some tiny symbol of what the natural world once was that sounds very sad to me and that's why i'm so active and support the work of naturalists in protecting species before they go and before cloning is necessary to save them [Music] hi science mike my name is terry i used to be a phd student in electrical engineering with a focus on machine learning i'm really concerned about what automation is doing to our economy and how people are losing their jobs and are being replaced with algorithms and i wonder what your thoughts are on this and what some of the economics research um says about it i know automation can lead to some really good things like better safety maybe more efficiency and i think that's a great reason to do it but i'm curious about what people are thinking about in terms of how are we going to automate things while still um keeping a humanist mindset and helping people keep jobs and be employed without necessarily having to go to college that's expensive and also just how are we not going to create more divides between people using technology um i'm really thankful for all that you do you've helped me a lot and yeah let me know your thoughts thanks if i've learned anything in my life it's that predicting the future is hard uh you know when i was a very young person i loved computers and digital technology um now i was programming computers when i was in grade school early grade school taking them apart learning all about them and i could look at the progression of computer technology every year and and see a possible future i could imagine computers small enough that we could carry around in our pockets that was very exciting to me and i could imagine that uh the kind of modems that we used to let computers talk to each other back then it was these crazy sounds uh for computers to talk to each other on the phone but um you know you begin to imagine that uh well gosh we've got cell phones now i bet computers could talk to each other wirelessly so i imagine at some point there would be a computer in your pocket that could make phone calls and could call other computers and you could even like have a chat session text chat with someone else with a a pocket computer um and that would sound really prescient if i had written all that down back then people i'd i'd be an amazing prognosticator but that doesn't mean i ever imagined we would have like machine learning powered apps with a global ip network called the internet i just would have never imagined at the same time i imagine by now computers would be conversant in speech and probably sentient um i was sure that by the time i was 40 the world's first androids would be walking around and i mean i i don't mean on a technicality we do have humanoid robots that can walk now i meant like sentient machines who were a part of human society i would have thought we had that by now so if you look at what i thought about the future in the past i tended to either be too cautious and conservative in where i thought things would go or wildly overestimate the progress of technology and i think that is a really consistent pattern for humanity since the industrial revolution and especially in the information age even experts are overwhelmed by the complexity of these systems if there's anything i know from a career of developing software before i was an author and a podcaster my main work was building digital systems and overseeing and participating in software projects it is so hard to estimate how long and how much money it will take to make even one software product in an existing category and when you take something new that hasn't been done before like a car that can drive itself you tend to be either wildly over optimistic or too pessimistic in your estimates and i think that's where we are right now i don't think self-driving cars are as close as i would have said two or three years ago because as we're entering the edge cases at the end of a significant technological development we're finding that there are many more factors to consider than we ever imagined before and i think so it is with widespread automation we do know that automation has already taken jobs and funny enough taking jobs in our economy is sometimes described as increases in efficiency because of the way that's my dog flapping her ears i'm sorry if that's if that's distracting to anyone this is my third attempt recording this answer and i've decided we're just going to have to deal with the flapping ear she does not care that i'm recording and why should she she is having a wonderful day it's sunny in los angeles and she can see the birds uh so uh when we look at you know trends we're optimistic we're pessimistic and we see that uh jobs have been lost and we call that increased efficiency if you look at the way our economy is structured there's actually great incentive in the structures of how we build companies uh to get rid of jobs companies have a mandate to drive profits as high as they can to quote return shareholder value unquote and that means doing the most work with the fewest number of people is the best for your books is the best for your stock price and so we see automation used in ways that are predatory towards people that is not inevitable so one i think maybe our our obsession with efficiency makes sense on a company by company level but has a negative effect on the overall economy and quality of life that's why corporate profits are soaring and wages are stagnant or at least that's a reason and that might be good for the companies themselves but it's not good for society overall and if things aren't good for society overall eventually they also won't be good for the companies we have a very myopic and short-term focus in our economy right now and automation plays one piece one part of that larger movement i know i see that's ruby she's she's one of my best friends is your ears itching huh okay uh so will automation kill the economy by destroying jobs maybe um but let's look at one because this is so big and so complex let's look at one type of job to see this might play out one of the most common jobs in america is driving driving trucks or driving vehicles that transport people whether that's mass transit or things like taxis and uber and lyft it's one of the biggest jobs in america one of the most commonly held jobs and when you look at truck drivers very few truck drivers just drive trucks i'll say that again very few truck drivers just drive trucks if you're driving a moving truck you have it there's not that much value in just moving someone's possessions if you do not unload them from the truck and bring them into a residence that's where the value of a moving truck happens if you're driving a bread truck well the people who drive bread trucks don't just drive the trucks they put the bread on pallets and they bring it into the store and they arrange the shelves so often when you're pulling uh bread off of a shelf it wasn't a store employee who put it there it was a truck driver that worked for the bread company and so we may be near maybe i don't know by the way we may be near an age when semi trucks or delivery trucks could be self-driving but it doesn't handle the rest of their job so if you automated a bread truck you would still need either the grocery store or the bread company to have someone does that important work of putting the bread on the shelves in a way that's attractive to customers see what i mean um so it could be every job lost by uh automated trucks is offset by increased retail staff to handle the distribution of the products coming off of those trucks as well as the people who build and maintain the trucks themselves maybe maybe whereas it's less clear with like taxis and uber and lyft you probably could just get in an unattended vehicle and get to your destination and now yes we're talking about a clear job loss so in the absence of a definitive answer which i do not believe there is one i don't think anyone can definitively answer how deep and how fast jobs will be lost due to automation it means we should be aware of the possibility the degree to which is already happened and i think it would be helpful if we took a mole a more holistic look at our economy and we're too obsessed with individual companies quarterly results and stock prices in this country and i think we should look at other macro economic indicators as signs of success it's not just the unemployment rate but the right employment rate uh it's the wage growth not just employment you know i saw a graphic this week that i haven't yet verified or vetted that showed how over the last three decades um payroll taxes have risen to offset the loss in corporate taxes corporate taxes have gone way way down so even as wages have been stagnant one of the reasons is individuals are paying more and more taxes companies paying less and less and that's because companies are doing what they would do should do in the ways that they're structured and incentivize and i'm saying perhaps the problem is the structure of the incentives themselves and not automation uh that if we change the incentives of the way structure companies are structured and the economy is structured then people be less likely to deploy automation in ways that is predatory across the larger workforce and larger economy maybe i don't know i'd be really interested to hear what people think about this one so uh send me a tweet i'd love to hear your thoughts on automation and job loss [Music] it's been a while since the old four question uh traditional last science mic format has gone over an hour but these were tough questions this week thanks for sticking it out if you made it all the way to the end i'd like to thank greg nordine for editing and sound design caitlyn hermstad for being the producer of a science mike and drew golucky for pre-production jed botiford for writing recording performing the ass science mic theme song my patrons on patreon for making the show possible victory palmisano for production support uh brent cradle for management services and you the listener thanks for being here and i can't wait to talk with you next [Applause] [Music]