Letters archive

It seems possible that all animals with brains need to sleep and dream or, like us, they would presumably lose touch with reality. Perhaps the same is true of artificial intelligence? Researchers might like to build in periods of enforced inactivity or who knows what AI might do ( 16/23 December 2023, p 44 ).

Why chase the theoretical date of a global temperature rise of 1.5°C when carbon dioxide levels can be measured in real time anywhere? Adopting temperature rise as a measure of the climate emergency is akin to using rates of skin cancer as a measure of the extent of the ozone hole. CO 2 is the …

The collapse of national income for states reliant on coal, oil and gas production and export could lead to frightening scenarios ( 9 December 2023, p 11 ). The problem of climate refugees fleeing countries or areas such as Pacific islands due to devastating climate change impacts are very likely to be compounded by many …

I sincerely hope that Peter Turchin is right in his predictions of the growing resilience of modern-day societies, but I fear that few of the civilisations of the past 5000 years on which he has based his conclusions would have had communication networks that could spread panic in minutes, along with just-in-time supply chains that …

If we are trying to find alien life, why go to all the trouble of searching for biosignatures on remote exoplanets? Several novelists have pointed out that, if aliens are as enthusiastic tourists as we are, they will leap at the chance of visiting Earth, where, by pure coincidence, the sun and moon are about …

Graham Lawton's article on the true cost of goods when emissions are factored in led me to wonder about the true cost of a copy of New Scientist . The only applicable research I could find was done in Sweden by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology's Centre for Sustainable Communications in 2007. It compared …

Has Josh Bongard considered the consequences of embodied AI if he does manage to develop artificially intelligent robots that can feel and think with true, human-like understanding? The present level of AI already raises many serious problems – social, economic and psychological. The primary safeguard is that you can turn it off if things are …

Having read the call to develop embodied AI, I couldn't help but wonder if there were only some way that two ordinary people – a man and woman for instance – could get together in the privacy of their own homes and undertake some kind of experiment that resulted in a fully functioning intelligence, body …

The earliest supernovae were glimpsed in the galaxy GS-z12 ( 2 December 2023, p 13 ).

Although the COP28 summit recognised that the planet is warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases, which inevitably leads to rising sea levels, there was no recognition that the melting of snow and ice greatly reduces the reflection of solar energy back into space, known as Earth's albedo. This allows more of the sun's heat …