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Science Friday

Infant Formula, AI Weirdness, Venus Fly Traps. Nov. 8, 2019, Part 2

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Life Sciences, Natural Sciences, Wnyc, Friday, Science

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2019

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Would you feel comfortable consuming a product that listed “whey protein concentrate” and “corn maltodextrin” on its list of ingredients? What about feeding it to your baby? Most of the ingredients found in baby formula are actually just carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and are perfectly safe—and necessary—for infant health. But this inscrutable list of ingredients is one reason why many parents are opting to buy European formula for their little ones. Word is spreading around parenting blogs and websites—and among parents themselves—that European formulas, with their simpler ingredients lists, are “cleaner” and therefore healthier for babies. But is there any truth to this claim? Baby formula expert and clinical researcher Bridget Young, PhD and professor of pediatrics Anthony Porto, MD, MPH, join Ira to discuss what the data says about the differences between infant formulas, as well as what those ingredients actually mean for your baby’s health. And, AI may be short for “artificial intelligence,” but in many ways, our automated programs can be surprisingly dumb. For example, you can think you’re training a neural net to recognize sheep, but actually it’s just learning what a green grassy hill looks like. Or teaching it the difference between healthy skin and cancer—but actually just teaching it that tumors always have a ruler next to them. And if you ask a robot to navigate a space without touching the walls, sometimes it just stays still in one place.  AI researcher Janelle Shane, author of a new book about the quirky, but also serious errors that riddle AI—which, at the end of the day, can only do what we tell them to.  Plus, learn about the surprising facts and common misconceptions about the Venus flytrap. In our latest Macroscope video, researchers Elsa Youngsteadt and Laura Hamon are rushing to understand more about the Venus flytraps found in North Carolina before it’s too late. Science Friday video producer Luke Groskin joins Ira to talk about what we know and don’t know about this famous carnivorous plant.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Artificial intelligence. AI. It's a fact of life, right?

0:08.4

Facial recognition algorithms that recognize who's in your photos, email filters that keep your inbox,

0:15.1

relatively spam-free. And even your airplanes autopilot, they're all powered by forms of AI.

0:22.3

But AI is not omnipotent.

0:25.2

In fact, artificial intelligence has severe shortcomings.

0:28.7

It can only really do exactly what we tell it to,

0:32.3

even if what we're telling it to do is to learn and evolve.

0:36.7

And this has consequences for everything, from how

0:39.3

well AI can identify tumors to whether self-driving cars decide to stop in time to avoid hitting

0:46.8

a pedestrian. Dr. Janelle Shane is an artificial intelligence researcher, blogger,

0:52.1

an author of the new book. You look like a thing and I love you.

0:56.1

How artificial intelligence works and why it's making the world a

0:59.5

weirder place.

1:01.0

She spends her time teaching neural nets to write recipes, tell knock-knock jokes,

1:06.5

and even flirt.

1:08.0

Yes, these are all harder than they sound.

1:12.0

And she's here to talk about how AI works and why things go wrong and how AI is making our world weirder. Welcome, Dr. Shane.

1:18.6

Hey, great to be on the show. Thank you. You know, I read a lot of books and I come across a lot of

1:24.6

titles, but your title, you look like a thing and I love you.

1:29.0

How did that come about?

1:31.1

Well, this was one of these experiments where I was trying to get one of these artificial intelligence algorithms to imitate pickup lines.

1:42.2

You know, these kind of cheesy one-liners that nobody uses in real life,

...

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