From AI trust gaps to cosmic data floods to California’s most elusive predator
Kishore Hari
May 18
Greetings science fans!
Some weeks, the news and the calendar seem to be in quiet conversation with each other. This is one of those weeks.
The question of what AI actually does to human life is getting harder to avoid. After a year of headlines claiming AI would replace millions of jobs, companies are quietly discovering something more nuanced: AI isn’t eliminating human work so much as redistributing human judgment, away from routine tasks and into the narrow zones where ambiguity is high, mistakes are costly, and trust actually matters. The gap between what AI can do and what we’re actually willing to let it do unsupervised turns out to be wide and deeply human. That question of trust is one that journalist Joanna Stern explored firsthand by spending a full year handing over her daily life to AI systems. She’s at the Computer History Museum on Tuesday and at the Commonwealth Club on Wednesday to talk about what she found.
In astronomy, the data deluge is already here. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory issued its first scientific alerts in February, launching a system expected to eventually produce up to seven million alerts per night, chronicling new asteroids, exploding stars, and other changes in the sky. In its first year of survey operations, Rubin is expected to capture images of more objects than all other optical telescopes throughout history combined. No human team can process that. The field has already crossed a threshold at which deep learning is the only way to process the sheer volume of data being collected. Stanford’s Michelle Park will talk about what that actually looks like for galaxy science, Thursday evening in Los Altos.
And on the ground here in California: the California Fish and Game Commission granted permanent protections in February to Southern California and Central Coast mountain lions under the state Endangered Species Act, a milestone years in the making. Researchers in the Santa Cruz Mountains have documented pumas with kinked tails, a visible marker linked to inbreeding, a sign of just how isolated these populations have become. Saturday evening at Martin Griffin Preserve, the Living with Lions project brings the research to life through a documentary about P-36, a young mountain lion navigating the fragmented wildlands of Northern California. A good reminder that conservation policy has a face and four paws.
My picks for the week:
- My Year With AI: Joanna Stern Hands Over Her Life – 5/19, 7 PM, Computer History Museum
- Teaching Machines to Learn the Universe: Galaxy Science in the Rubin Era – 5/21, 7 PM, Los Altos Public Library
- A Night of mountain lions – Movie night at Martin Griffin Preserve – 5/23, 6 PM, Martin Griffin Preserve
Have a great week in science!
-Kishore
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