Nerd Night SF #100: Double-Slit, AI, and Sword Canes!

“Through Two Doors at Once” by Anil Ananthaswamy

The famed double-slit experiment has continually challenged our ideas about the nature of reality itself. How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle, or indeed reality, exist before we look at it, or does looking create reality? This headscratcher of an experiment has a fascinating 200 year-old history, filled with the mysteries and paradoxes of quantum mechanics, and it continues to confound and challenge our intuitions about the nature of reality.

Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist and author.

“Black Box: How AI Will Amplify the Best and Worst of Humanity” by Jacob Ward

For most of us, our own mind is a black box: an all-powerful and utterly mysterious device that runs our lives for us. And not only do we humans just barely understand how it works, science is now revealing that it makes most of our decisions for us using rules and shortcuts of which you and I aren’t even aware. Meanwhile, every area of human activity, from criminal justice to corporate hiring to military strategy, is turning to “black box” artificial intelligence systems for cost savings, efficiency, and moral clarity. Jacob Ward reveals the relationship between the unconscious habits of our minds, and the way that AI is poised to amplify them, alter them, maybe even reprogram them. What will society look like if we allow our unconscious habits to be shaped by AI and machine learning? Or is it possible to institute guidelines for the development of AI and ML that will help protect us from our own worst instincts?

Jacob Ward has appeared at Nerd Nite SF twice before in our 8 years, but he’s probably a little more famous as a journalist, TV correspondent, and the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science.

“The History and Outlaw Status of Sword Canes” by Erin Simon

Delve into the early history of the dapper gent’s most lethal accessory! Marvel that so many people still try to sneak them on planes! Laugh at the California law that calls them out by name (the wrong one)! By looking at ngrams, silly pictures, and even sillier laws, we’ll learn about sword canes, how a ballistic knife is different from a lipstick case knife, and what California law has to say about boobytraps. The pen may be mightier, but the sword cane is way more fun.

Erin Simon is the product counsel for Google Books.