world without science and technology essay

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What Would Life Be Without Science And Technology

What would happen without Science? . Without science the world would not come up to this point. Because of science we have Technology, buildings, bridges, structures and transportation. However, the most important thing that we wouldn’t have if science didn’t exist is knowledge, it is the most important thing in our lives. We could not do simple things such as washing dishes and turning on a computer. We wouldn’t have invented cars, trucks, or other vehicles without science. Due to the contribution of science, human beings now a days live longer because of new inventions of medicine and treatment. Even doctors can transplant the vital organs such as heart, kidney, eyes etc. due the invention of science. So, science brought the modern civilization at this stage where we are today.

Video advice: What would be life without technology

how-would-be-life-without-technology.

What will happen if there is no technology?

Can society exist without science and technology.

Put simply, modern society wouldn't exist without it . It's no surprise that at least a cursory understanding of science and tech is needed in many roles that would not traditionally be associated with people working in labs and wearing white coats.

Why science and technology is important in our life?

Science and technology have facilitated human life and made us feel comfortable and enabled us to live in a modern way of life. With the help of things like microwaves, fans, smartphones, and cars, science and technology have made cooking, sleeping, and communicating and transportation easier and faster.

Can science progress without technology?

There can be science without technology , and there can be technology without science. ... Or, one particular species of technology might achieve such dominance that it halts the advance of science in order to preserve itself. That science has brought us technology does not mean that technology will always bring us science.

Can we survive without technology?

Yes, for most people, tech is not something we give a second thought to, but some people literally can't live without technology – and we aren't being dramatic. For some people, the existence of technology is the difference between silence and laughter, loneliness and interaction, and even life and death.

Video advice: A World Without Science

\”A World Without Science\” is an initiative of undergraduate students and professors of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. It is part of the \”Junior Bioscientist\” (JB) project, which is a science outreach project aimed at fostering science education in Brazilian public schools.

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What Would Life Be Without Modern Technology?

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Modern technology is constantly changing the way we live. It’s changed how we communicate, who we talk to, what jobs are available, and even where our food comes from.

It has even changed people’s patience. No one has to wait for anything thanks to Amazon. We simply purchase and wait for 24 hours or less for the item(s) to be delivered directly to our home.

But what if there were no technology? How would humans interact with one another? What if they wanted to learn about different cultures or languages? Technology has made negative, and positive, impacts on our everyday lives, and this is what life would be without modern technology.

Related: Biggest Cyber Attacks in History

Negative Impact: Life Before Modern Technology

Remember life before modern technology? It would be difficult to go back and live that life, especially with so many modern comforts helping us throughout the day. Thanks to those comforts, life would be difficult due to the intense change.

For example, life before modern technology meant no internet, so we couldn’t just Google whatever we wanted to know. We had to ask someone or find a paper map if we needed directions. Just think about what life is like when you have a power outage… It isn’t good. And everything becomes a challenge.

Positive Impact: Learn from Challenges

But with challenges comes learning. Instead of having every answer at our fingertips, more of us would learn, and maybe retain more information. How many of us have Googled the same question over and over because we can’t remember?

Having to actively search for an answer from someone or a book will not only help us learn more about it but even grow connections. It might be challenging, but challenges create learning experiences that we can grow from.

Negative Impact: Absence of Convenience And Safety

Another modern convenience is safety technology. Think about how much safer we are now that there are car airbags, seat belts, and anti-lock brakes? None of those were around before modern technology.

We didn’t have GPS either, which makes driving somewhere new a lot less stressful.

But modern technology isn’t just about making our lives easier. Our lives and workplaces are also altering as a result. We are more productive now that software programs help us get things done faster. Previously, people had to write all their correspondence by hand, but not anymore. The email is here.

Positive Impact: Practical Skills and Balanced Work

It’s hard to argue the fact that modern technology has really brought safety into our lives. Especially on the road. But what about other conveniences that technology has brought us that could hinder our practical and survival skills?

It’s become so easy to have everything done for us, that if we had to survive during a major outage that destroyed all the work, most of us wouldn’t be able to do that. It’s important to teach practical and survival skills, and having no modern technology would help us achieve that.

And let’s not forget work. Now that we have modern technology and we can work faster, we’re also working harder. What used to be a relatively balanced work-to-life balance has now been shifted into the majority of us working our lives away. Without the use of modern technology, less will be asked of us, and there may be a change in how we navigate our work life, with more time with family and outside than cooped up in an office.

Also Read: Biggest Stock Market Crashes in History

How Is Modern Technology Impacting Your Life?

Well, for starters, this is being read on a desktop or a phone. You’re probably using the internet to look up this information. And if you’re like most people, you can’t imagine going a day without your cell phone or laptop. The truth is, most of us can’t live without our gadgets.

Technology has made our lives easier. We can access information faster than ever before, and we can communicate with people all over the world in an instant. Plus, we now have new methods to amuse ourselves and keep connected. As an example, you may catch up on your favorite television episodes or movies on the internet or listen to music, all on demand.

Are We Too Reliant?

Most of us can’t live without gadgets, and that’s not a great sign. While technology has made our lives easier, we also should evaluate the fact that our lives revolve around technology of some kind. If we take a step away from it, we could explore ourselves, and grow our relationships with others.

We could work on decluttering thanks to the lack of influence we are constantly absorbing, and appreciate what we have rather than constantly crave what we want. Who else watches the videos of the people who have 20 Stanley cups? Without modern technology influencing those kinds of “trends”, it would make for a better world. Plus, we haven’t even talked about how much life without modern technology could benefit the environment.

Check Out: Most Expensive Drones: Professional Big Budget Technology

Our lives have never been easier thanks to technology. Gone are the days of having to go outside for entertainment or information; now, we have all those things at our fingertips via phone or computer.

However, with modern technology also comes a sense of dependency and addiction. Many people can’t go a day without their gadgets, and they spend more and more time on them every year.

With the current rate of invention, it can be hard to imagine life without modern technology. Technology has become a part of our lives that we love and rely on many digital tools to keep up with work or stay connected with friends and family. It isn’t easy to go back and live without these technologies because they have changed the way people communicate, learn, shop, access information, socialize, etc.

But it’s important to realize that modern technology is also a gift, and it’s important to take some time with nature and those around you without getting consumed by everything. While most of us might not need to learn practical or survival skills, it’s something all of us should work on so we know that we can live life without modern technology if something happens.

Nikole Stewart is a writer and editor with three years of experience writing keen articles on topics such as... More about Nikole Stewart

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Essay on Science and Technology for Students: 100, 200, 350 Words

• Updated on  
• Sep 20, 2023

Writing an essay on science and technology requires you to keep yourself updated with the recent developments in this field. Science is a field which has no limits. It is the most potent of all the fields and when combined with technology, then even the sky doesn’t remain a limit. Science is everywhere from the minute microscopic organisms to the gigantic celestial bodies. It’s the very essence of our existence. Let’s learn about Science and Technology in an essay format.

Also Read – Essay on Corruption

Essay on Science and Technology in 100 Words

Everything we do, every breath we take, every move we make, every interaction with any object, and even the thoughts we have, and the dreams we see, all involve science. Similarly, as the world is progressing, technology is getting intertwined with even the basic aspects of our lives. Be it education, sports, entertainment, talking to our loved ones, etc. Everything is inclusive of Technology nowadays. It is safe to say that Science and Technology go hand-in-hand. They are mutually inclusive of each other. Although from a broader perspective, Technology is a branch of Science, but still, each of these fields cannot be sustained without the other.

Essay on Science and Technology in 200 Words

Science and Technology are important aspects of life from the very beginning of the day to the end of it. We wake up in the morning because of the sound of our alarm clocks and go to bed at night after switching off our lights. Most importantly, it helps us save time is one of the results of advancements in science and technology. Each day new Technologies are being developed that are making human life easier and much more convenient.Advantages of Science and Technology

If we were to name the advantages of science and technology, then we would fall short of words because they are numerous. These range from the very little things to the very big ones.

Science and Technology are the fields that have enabled man to look beyond our own planet and hence, discover new planets and much more. And the most recent of the Project of India, The successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the south pole of the moon proves that the potential of Science and Technology cannot be fathomed via any means. The potential it holds is immense. 

In conclusion, we can confidently say that Science and Technology have led us to achieve an absolutely amazing life. However, it is extremely important to make use of the same in a judicious way so as to ensure its sustenance. 

Also Read – Essay on Noise Pollution

Essay on Science and Technology in 350 Words

Science and Technology include everything, from the smallest of the microbes to the most complex of the mechanisms. Our world cannot exist without Science and Technology. It is hard to imagine our lives without science and technology now. 

Impact of Science & Technology 

The impact of science and technology is so massive that it incorporates almost each and every field of science and even others. The cures to various diseases are being made due to the advancement in Science and Technology only. Also, technology has enhanced the production of crops and other agricultural practices also rely on Science and Technology for their own advancement. All of the luxuries that we have on a day-to-day basis in our lives are because of Science and Technology. Subsequently, the fields of Science and Technology have also assisted in the development of other fields as well such as, Mathematics , Astrophysics , Nuclear Energy , etc. Hence, we can say that we live in the era of Science and Technology. 

Safety Measures

Although the field of Science and Technology has provided the world with innumerable advancements and benefits that are carrying the world forward, there are a lot of aspects of the same that have a negative impact too. The negative impact of these is primarily on nature and wildlife and hence, indirectly and directly on humans as well.

The large factories that are associated with manufacturing or other developmental processes release large amounts of waste which may or may not be toxic in nature. This waste gets deposited in nature and water bodies and causes pollution. The animals marine or terrestrial living in their respective ecosystems may even ingest plastic or other toxic waste and that leads to their death. There are a lot of other negative aspects of the same.

Hence, it becomes our responsibility to use Science and Technology judiciously and prevent the degradation of nature and wildlife so as to sustain our planet, along with all its ecosystems, which will eventually ensure our existence in a healthy ecosystem leading to healthy and long life.

Science is something that is limitless. It is the most potent of all the fields and when combined with technology, then even the sky doesn’t remain a limit. Science is everywhere from the minute microscopic organisms to the most gigantic ones. It’s the very essence of our existence.

Science and Technology are important aspects of life. All of the luxuries that we have on a day-to-day basis in our lives are because of Science and Technology. Most importantly, it helps us save time is one of the results of advancements in science and technology. It is hard to imagine our lives without science and technology now. 

In any nation, science and technology holds a crucial part in its development in all aspect. The progress of the nation is dependent upon science and technology. It holds the to economic growth, changing the quality of life, and transformation of the society.

We hope this blog of ours on Essay on Science and Technology has helped you gain a deeper knowledge of the same. For more such informative and educational essays please visit our site:- Leverage Edu Essay Writing .

Deepansh Gautam

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Essay on Science and Technology for Students and Children

500+ words essay on science and technology.

Essay on Science and Technology: Science and technology are important parts of our day to day life. We get up in the morning from the ringing of our alarm clocks and go to bed at night after switching our lights off. All these luxuries that we are able to afford are a resultant of science and technology . Most importantly, how we can do all this in a short time are because of the advancement of science and technology only. It is hard to imagine our life now without science and technology. Indeed our existence itself depends on it now. Every day new technologies are coming up which are making human life easier and more comfortable. Thus, we live in an era of science and technology.

Essentially, Science and Technology have introduced us to the establishment of modern civilization . This development contributes greatly to almost every aspect of our daily life. Hence, people get the chance to enjoy these results, which make our lives more relaxed and pleasurable.

Benefits of Science and Technology

If we think about it, there are numerous benefits of science and technology. They range from the little things to the big ones. For instance, the morning paper which we read that delivers us reliable information is a result of scientific progress. In addition, the electrical devices without which life is hard to imagine like a refrigerator, AC, microwave and more are a result of technological advancement.

Furthermore, if we look at the transport scenario, we notice how science and technology play a major role here as well. We can quickly reach the other part of the earth within hours, all thanks to advancing technology.

In addition, science and technology have enabled man to look further than our planet. The discovery of new planets and the establishment of satellites in space is because of the very same science and technology. Similarly, science and technology have also made an impact on the medical and agricultural fields. The various cures being discovered for diseases have saved millions of lives through science. Moreover, technology has enhanced the production of different crops benefitting the farmers largely.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India and Science and Technology

Ever since British rule, India has been in talks all over the world. After gaining independence, it is science and technology which helped India advance through times. Now, it has become an essential source of creative and foundational scientific developments all over the world. In other words, all the incredible scientific and technological advancements of our country have enhanced the Indian economy.

Looking at the most recent achievement, India successfully launched Chandrayaan 2. This lunar exploration of India has earned critical acclaim from all over the world. Once again, this achievement was made possible due to science and technology.

In conclusion, we must admit that science and technology have led human civilization to achieve perfection in living. However, we must utilize everything in wise perspectives and to limited extents. Misuse of science and technology can produce harmful consequences. Therefore, we must monitor the use and be wise in our actions.

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Life Without Computers Essay

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Introduction

Communication, health care, human skills, list of references.

What do you think a life without a computer would look like? Technology is a fundamental aspect of our society and therefore it is hard to imagine existing without it. Read “A World without Computers” essay below to find out more. Since the development of the first computer, technology experienced an exponential growth that has led to the concept of globalization and the enhancement of the quality of life for people across the world. It is apparent that the computer technology fostered many positive changes in the society, and computers are an indispensable part of the modern society because they have enhanced the survival of humans.

One of the major contributions of the computer technology in the world has been the enhancement of the quality of communication. The computer technology alongside the discovery of the internet has eliminated the slow communication platforms that were used in the past (Boothroyd 2011). For instance, without the computer technology, people would have to communicate with their distance relatives through letters. It would be extremely slow to share information with relatives from different parts of the world, and it would be especially difficult to be updated on different global developments (Olsen 2012).

Computers facilitated instant messaging and access to information from the mass media companies across the world. Additionally, the growth of the social media platforms has made the world a global village where people from different parts of the world can share information easily. Living without the computer technology would be characterized by slow and limited access to information.

Living without the computer technology would also be characterized by a high mortality rate because the quality of the health care services would be very low compared to the status in the modern world. It is apparent that computers have facilitated the development of technologies that have enhanced preventive health care in the world, as well as the development of medications for various illnesses. Computers are used to analyze different specimens in laboratories to detect illnesses and their potential remedies (Hawkin 2012). Without computers, health care providers would only rely on the knowledge of symptoms to treat patients. This would result in many deaths because illnesses like cancer would not be easily detected without the use of the computer technology.

The computer technology has become an indispensable aspect of the modern world. Scientists have overly concentrated on the enhancement of the capabilities of the computers instead of investing in the enhancement of human skills (Baldry 2012).

It is apparent that computers have taken over different jobs and made human skills obsolete (Ford 2016). The world without computers would compel the authorities to invest in human skills and knowledge, and this would result in a society that is highly specialized in different doctrines. This implies that the rate of unemployment would be relatively low across the world because the corporate sector would require a high number of employees to handle the tasks that computers perform on a daily basis.

Life without computers would be difficult for humankind because the modern world has overly depended on the computer technology to enhance the quality of life. Communication would be relatively slow and limited, and the quality of health care services would be very low. However, the world without computers would compel the authorities to invest in educating the human assets in different doctrines to cover the gap that would be created by the lack of computers. It is vivid that computer technology has had a positive impact on the global society.

Baldry, C 2012, Computers, Jobs, and Skills: The Industrial Relations of Technological Change , Springer Science & Business Media, Berlin.

Boothroyd, J 2011, From Typewriters to Text Messages: How Communication Has Changed , Lerner Classroom, Minneapolis.

Ford, M 2016, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future , Basic Books, New York City.

Hawkin, D 2012, Twenty-first Century Confronts Its Gods, The: Globalization, Technology, and War, SUNY Press, New York.

Olsen, K 2012, How Information Technology Is Conquering the World: Workplace, Private Life, and Society , Scarecrow Press, Lanham.

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Short Essay on Life Without Technology [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF 

In today’s session, you will learn to write short essays on the topic of Life Without Technology. There will be three sets of essays covering different word limits. 

Short Essay on Life Without Technology in 100 Words 

Today, technology has become an important part of our daily lives. Mobile phones, tablets and computers have made connecting with people around the world an easy task. We can send and receive pictures, videos and documents over the internet. Technologically advanced machines like automatic washing machines, dishwashers, cleaning robots, smart televisions and various smart appliances have made life very comfortable for people.

However, these appliances have also made people lazy. People today have lost the connection with nature, with real people, with their friends and families. They hardly need to do their day-to-day work by themselves and have become physically unfit. Life without technology seems impossible today, but one must make sure to strike a balance between depending on technology and doing their work themselves. 

Short Essay on Life Without Technology in 200 Words 

There is no doubt that technology has made life easier for people. A hundred years ago, people wouldn’t have imagined that today, we will have so many gadgets to help us with our daily life. 

Today, mobile phones, tablets and computers have made connecting with people around the world an easy task. We can send and receive pictures, videos and documents over the internet. Technologically advanced machines like automatic washing machines, dishwashers, cleaning robots, smart televisions and various smart appliances have made life very comfortable for people. Even students are now dependent on online platforms to learn and understand their subjects better. If we want to travel, we do not use physical maps anymore but depend on GPS. 

However, these appliances and applications have also made people lazy. People today have lost the connection with nature, with real people, with their friends and families. They hardly need to do their day-to-day work by themselves and have become physically unfit. If someone loses their mobile phone, it feels as if they have lost an organ. Life without technology seems impossible today, but one must make sure to strike a balance between depending on technology and doing their work themselves. Only then, technology will prove to be a boon and not a bane for us. 

Short Essay on Life Without Technology in 400 Words

Today, technology has changed the way we conduct our lives and it is hard to imagine getting through the day without help from one or the other type of gadget. 

Today, mobile phones, tablets and computers have made connecting with people around the world an easy task. We can send and receive pictures, videos and documents over the internet. Technologically advanced machines like automatic washing machines, dishwashers, cleaning robots, smart televisions and various smart appliances have made life very comfortable for people.

Even students are now dependent on online platforms to learn and understand their subjects better. For their research and assignments, they need the help of the internet. If we want to travel, we do not use physical maps anymore but depend on GPS. One needs so many gadgets in the office like desktops, printers, xerox machines, fax machines, et cetera. Even in the kitchen, one needs mixer-grinders, food processors, microwave ovens and refrigerators. If we want to go somewhere and need to book train, bus or flight tickets for the same, we still use the internet. 

However, these gadgets, appliances and applications have also made people lazy. People today have lost the connection with nature, with real people, with their friends and families. They are always glued to their phone screens, happy in their virtual world and dislike going out. They hardly need to do their day-to-day work by themselves and have become physically unfit. If one wants some information, instead of thoroughly reading about it and understanding the topic completely, they can just search on the internet and get a short, concise answer.

All this has slowed down our brains and made us lose our creativity. Our lives have become entirely dependent on technology and gadgets. One cannot survive without mobile phones today. Be it an office employee or a school student, everyone needs a phone to stay connected with their family, friends, work and school. If someone loses their mobile phone, it feels as if they have lost an organ. 

A hundred years ago, people wouldn’t have imagined that today, we will have so many gadgets to help us with our daily life. Life without technology seems impossible today, but one must make sure to strike a balance between depending on technology and doing their work themselves. Only when things are well-balanced, technology will prove to be a boon and not a bane for us. Otherwise, it wouldn’t take long for us to lose ourselves in gadgets and the virtual world and destroy our health and peace of mind. 

In today’s session, I have written these sample essays with a very simplistic approach for a better understanding of all kinds of students. If you still have any doubts regarding this topic, kindly, keep me informed through some quick comments. I’ll try to answer all your queries to the best of my ability. To read more such essays on various other important topics, keep browsing our website. 

Thank you for being with us. Have a great day.

Essay on Relationship Between Science And Technology

Students are often asked to write an essay on Relationship Between Science And Technology in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Relationship Between Science And Technology

Introduction.

Science and technology are two closely related aspects of human life. They work together to improve our quality of life. Science, in simple terms, is the study of the natural world, while technology involves applying this knowledge to create useful things.

The Role of Science

Science is like a key that unlocks nature’s secrets. Scientists do experiments to understand how things work. They observe, ask questions, and find answers. This process helps us learn about the universe, from the smallest particles to the vastness of space.

The Role of Technology

Technology takes the knowledge we gain from science and uses it to create tools that solve problems or make tasks easier. For example, the understanding of electricity led to the invention of light bulbs and computers. Technology brings science into our daily lives.

The Interdependence

Science and technology depend on each other. Without science, we wouldn’t have the knowledge to build technologies. And without technology, scientists couldn’t perform complex experiments or gather accurate data. They work together, helping us progress.

250 Words Essay on Relationship Between Science And Technology

Understanding science and technology.

Science and technology are two words we often hear together. But what are they? Science is the study of the world around us. It helps us understand how things work. Technology, on the other hand, is the application of this knowledge to create tools that make our lives easier.

The Link Between Science and Technology

Science and technology are like best friends. They work together and help each other out. Without science, technology wouldn’t exist. And without technology, we wouldn’t be able to explore science as deeply as we do. For example, science helps us understand the laws of nature, and technology uses this knowledge to build things like cars, computers, and satellites.

How Science Fuels Technology

Science is like the fuel for technology. It provides the knowledge and theories that technology needs to grow. For instance, understanding electricity led to the invention of many gadgets like the television, mobile phones, and electric cars.

Technology’s Role in Advancing Science

Just as science fuels technology, technology also helps science advance. It provides tools that scientists use to explore the world. For example, microscopes allow us to see tiny things, telescopes let us look at distant stars, and computers help us store and analyze data.

In conclusion, science and technology are closely linked. They depend on each other to grow and advance. By understanding this relationship, we can appreciate how they work together to improve our lives.

500 Words Essay on Relationship Between Science And Technology

Science and technology are two words that we often hear together. But what do they mean, and how are they linked? Science is all about understanding the world around us. It’s about asking questions and finding answers. Technology, on the other hand, uses that knowledge to solve problems or create new things. Both are important and they often work together.

Science is like a tool that helps us understand how things work. It’s about exploring, asking questions, and finding answers. Scientists use experiments and observations to learn about the world. For example, a scientist might wonder why apples fall from trees. This question led Sir Isaac Newton to discover the law of gravity.

How They Work Together

At the same time, technology helps science too. New technologies can help scientists do their work better and faster. For example, telescopes help astronomers study stars and planets that are far away. Microscopes let biologists see tiny things like cells and bacteria.

Impact on Society

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Without Science the World Stops

S aturday, 15th of February 2014, ten minutes before 15 o’clock. A bunch of people romp about at Praça Luis de Camões, Lisboa. There is a group of people playing rhythmic music, music that normally accompanies Capoeira. The vibe of the music is like a heart beating on high adrenalin, activating the sympathetic nervous system  of all the people aware of what will happen within just a few minutes.

The clock strikes 15 o’clock. A female and a male Ph.D. student standing right next to the Camões statue, facing down to Chiado are unrolling a paper sign: “SEM a CIÊNCIA o MUNDO PÁRA”, without science the world stops. The capoeira musicians stop playing their rhythmical music, two girls holding balloons release them into the air, a couple jamming with their guitars stop, more than 50 people abruptly freeze in whatever movement or behavior they were just engaged in, and there are the dogs, which stop barking, rubbernecking to figure out what just happened.

On the 15th of February, 2014, at 15 o’clock, the vibrant atmosphere of Praça Luís de Camões just froze.

For three minutes people, scientists or non-scientist, working-colleagues, friends, or total strangers gathered to give science a face, to demonstrate that without science, the world would stop.

Following the latest abrupt reduction of the number of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) PhD and post-doc fellowships, the problems with the management of application lists, and especially the drastic changes in the government’s strategy to manage the scientific system in Portugal, a group of people from different institutes from Lisboa, Porto and Braga joined to organize a flash-mob. This event intended to demonstrate that those changes in regulation don’t affect only individual basic science researchers, but the whole Portuguese population, and actually the whole world.

Unfortunately, sometimes we fail to appreciate how many years of basic research have gone into keeping us relatively healthy throughout our daily lives, and into the different technologies that make our lives so much easier.

For example, we might take for granted that we can switch a button to turn light on and off at will, ignoring the fact that many years of basic research were spent to understand how we can produce and use electricity to be able to read a book before falling asleep at night without firing up the house. It took about 278 years from William Gilber’s early description of  electricity  and  magnetism  in 1600 until Thomas Edisons’s commercially available long-lasting  light bulb  was lit in 1878.

As a consequence of studying different phenomena of nature, by simply trying to understand how things work, knowledge is acquired while different techniques and technologies are established, which, when applied, end up being incorporated into our daily lives to improve everyone’s living standards on different levels.

To understand that we need, science is as simple as understanding that washing your hands with soap prevents you and others from getting sick. Maybe one is not aware, but it was only around 167 years ago, that Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician during the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy in 1847, discovered that washing hands with chlorinate lime solutions drastically reduced the number of puerperal fevers. Hard to believe, but Semmelweis´s theories were at first rejected by the medical community. Several years later, Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist, discovered the pathology of  puerperal fever and performed experiments to elucidate the relationship between germs and diseases, supporting with many other researchers the  germ theory of diseases  and the usage of soap. Pasteur is actually best known for inventing the technique of pasteurization, a process to reduce the number of pathogens in foods like milk and alcoholic beverages. Further, not content with that, Pasteur created vaccines for chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies. With this achievements profits, Pasteur founded the  Pasteur Institute in 1887, which sustains until today his commitment to basic science research and its practical application. Funding an Institute for basic research was not only a matter of giving back to the field where Pasteur succeeded from, but his greatest legacy to future generations.

Today, science is driven by public funding allowing everyone who is curious the possibility to learn, explore different scientific niches, improve and maintain the flow of human knowledge.

It is up to society as a whole, you and me, scientist or non-scientist, to realize the importance of funding basic research as a means of investing in our future.

Without science there is no human growth, no technological advances, no knowledge generation and the world stagnates. Science is knowledge and without an investment in science the world as we know it would not be possible.

Without science the world would stop.

Simone Lackner studied Molecular Biology at the  University of Vienna . As a PhD student at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program, she investigates the  neural basis of locomotor behaviors of larval zebrafish

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How AI could change computing, culture and the course of history

Expect changes in the way people access knowledge, relate to knowledge and think about themselves.

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A mong the more sombre gifts brought by the Enlightenment was the realisation that humans might one day become extinct. The astronomical revolution of the 17th century had shown that the solar system both operated according to the highest principles of reason and contained comets which might conceivably hit the Earth. The geological record, as interpreted by the Comte de Buffon, showed massive extinctions in which species vanished for ever. That set the scene for Charles Darwin to recognise such extinctions as the motor of evolution, and thus as both the force which had fashioned humans and, by implication, their possible destiny. The nascent science of thermodynamics added a cosmic dimension to the certainty of an ending; Sun, Earth and the whole shebang would eventually run down into a lifeless “heat death”.

The 20th century added the idea that extinction might not come about naturally, but through artifice. The spur for this was the discovery, and later exploitation, of the power locked up in atomic nuclei. Celebrated by some of its discoverers as a way of indefinitely deferring heat death, nuclear energy was soon developed into a far more proximate danger. And the tangible threat of imminent catastrophe which it posed rubbed off on other technologies.

None was more tainted than the computer. It may have been guilt by association: the computer played a vital role in the development of the nuclear arsenal. It may have been foreordained. The Enlightenment belief in rationality as humankind’s highest achievement and Darwin’s theory of evolution made the promise of superhuman rationality the possibility of evolutionary progress at humankind’s expense.

Artificial intelligence has come to loom large in the thought of the small but fascinating, and much written about, coterie of academics which has devoted itself to the consideration of existential risk over the past couple of decades. Indeed, it often appeared to be at the core of their concerns. A world which contained entities which think better and act quicker than humans and their institutions, and which had interests that were not aligned with those of humankind, would be a dangerous place.

It became common for people within and around the field to say that there was a “non-zero” chance of the development of superhuman AI s leading to human extinction. The remarkable boom in the capabilities of large language models ( LLM s), “foundational” models and related forms of “generative” AI has propelled these discussions of existential risk into the public imagination and the inboxes of ministers.

As the special Science section in this issue makes clear, the field’s progress is precipitate and its promise immense. That brings clear and present dangers which need addressing. But in the specific context of GPT-4 , the LLM du jour , and its generative ilk, talk of existential risks seems rather absurd. They produce prose, poetry and code; they generate images, sound and video; they make predictions based on patterns. It is easy to see that those capabilities bring with them a huge capacity for mischief. It is hard to imagine them underpinning “the power to control civilisation”, or to “replace us”, as hyperbolic critics warn.

But the lack of any “Minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic [drawing] their plans against us”, to quote H.G. Wells, does not mean that the scale of the changes that AI may bring with it can be ignored or should be minimised. There is much more to life than the avoidance of extinction. A technology need not be world-ending to be world-changing.

The transition into a world filled with computer programs capable of human levels of conversation and language comprehension and superhuman powers of data assimilation and pattern recognition has just begun. The coming of ubiquitous pseudocognition along these lines could be a turning point in history even if the current pace of AI progress slackens (which it might) or fundamental developments have been tapped out (which feels unlikely). It can be expected to have implications not just for how people earn their livings and organise their lives, but also for how they think about their humanity.

For a sense of what may be on the way, consider three possible analogues, or precursors: the browser, the printing press and practice of psychoanalysis. One changed computers and the economy, one changed how people gained access and related to knowledge, and one changed how people understood themselves.

The humble web browser, introduced in the early 1990s as a way to share files across networks, changed the ways in which computers are used, the way in which the computer industry works and the way information is organised. Combined with the ability to link computers into networks, the browser became a window through which first files and then applications could be accessed wherever they might be located. The interface through which a user interacted with an application was separated from the application itself.

The power of the browser was immediately obvious. Fights over how hard users could be pushed towards a particular browser became a matter of high commercial drama. Almost any business with a web address could get funding, no matter what absurdity it promised. When boom turned to bust at the turn of the century there was a predictable backlash. But the fundamental separation of interface and application continued. Amazon, Meta ( née Facebook) and Alphabet ( née Google) rose to giddy heights by making the browser a conduit for goods, information and human connections. Who made the browsers became incidental; their role as a platform became fundamental.

The months since the release of Open AI ’s Chat GPT , a conversational interface now powered by GPT-4 , have seen an entrepreneurial explosion that makes the dotcom boom look sedate. For users, apps based on LLM s and similar software can be ludicrously easy to use; type a prompt and see a result. For developers it is not that much harder. “You can just open your laptop and write a few lines of code that interact with the model,” explains Ben Tossell, a British entrepreneur who publishes a newsletter about AI services.

And the LLM s are increasingly capable of helping with that coding, too. Having been “trained” not just on reams of text, but lots of code, they contain the building blocks of many possible programs; that lets them act as “co-pilots” for coders. Programmers on GitHub, an open-source coding site, are now using a GPT-4 -based co-pilot to produce nearly half their code.

There is no reason why this ability should not eventually allow LLM s to put code together on the fly, explains Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer. The capacity to translate from one language to another includes, in principle and increasingly in practice, the ability to translate from language to code. A prompt written in English can in principle spur the production of a program that fulfils its requirements. Where browsers detached the user interface from the software application, LLM s are likely to dissolve both categories. This could mark a fundamental shift in both the way people use computers and the business models within which they do so.

Every day I write the book

Code-as-a-service sounds like a game-changing plus. A similarly creative approach to accounts of the world is a minus. While browsers mainly provided a window on content and code produced by humans, LLM s generate their content themselves. When doing so they “hallucinate” (or as some prefer “confabulate”) in various ways. Some hallucinations are simply nonsense. Some, such as the incorporation of fictitious misdeeds to biographical sketches of living people, are both plausible and harmful. The hallucinations can be generated by contradictions in training sets and by LLM s being designed to produce coherence rather than truth. They create things which look like things in their training sets; they have no sense of a world beyond the texts and images on which they are trained.

In many applications a tendency to spout plausible lies is a bug. For some it may prove a feature. Deep fakes and fabricated videos which traduce politicians are only the beginning. Expect the models to be used to set up malicious influence networks on demand, complete with fake websites, Twitter bots, Facebook pages, TikTok feeds and much more. The supply of disinformation, Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory has warned, “will soon be infinite”.

This threat to the very possibility of public debate may not be an existential one; but it is deeply troubling. It brings to mind the “Library of Babel”, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. The library contains all the books that have ever been written, but also all the books which were never written, books that are wrong, books that are nonsense. Everything that matters is there, but it cannot be found because of everything else; the librarians are driven to madness and despair.

This fantasy has an obvious technological substrate. It takes the printing press’s ability to recombine a fixed set of symbols in an unlimited number of ways to its ultimate limit. And that provides another way of thinking about LLM s.

Dreams never end

The degree to which the modern world is unimaginable without printing makes any guidance its history might provide for speculation about LLM s at best partial, at worst misleading. Johannes Gutenberg’s development of movable type has been awarded responsibility, at some time or other, for almost every facet of life that grew up in the centuries which followed. It changed relations between God and man, man and woman, past and present. It allowed the mass distribution of opinions, the systematisation of bureaucracy, the accumulation of knowledge. It brought into being the notion of intellectual property and the possibility of its piracy. But that very breadth makes comparison almost unavoidable. As Bradford DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley puts it, “It’s the one real thing we have in which the price of creating information falls by an order of magnitude.”

Printed books made it possible for scholars to roam larger fields of knowledge than had ever before been possible. In that there is an obvious analogy for LLM s, which trained on a given corpus of knowledge can derive all manner of things from it. But there was more to the acquisition of books than mere knowledge.

Just over a century after Gutenberg’s press began its clattering Michel de Montaigne, a French aristocrat, had been able to amass a personal library of some 1,500 books—something unimaginable for an individual of any earlier European generation. The library gave him more than knowledge. It gave him friends. “When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts,” he wrote, “nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”

And the idea of the book gave him a way of being himself no one had previously explored: to put himself between covers. “Reader,” he warned in the preface to his Essays , “I myself am the matter of my book.” The mass production of books allowed them to become peculiarly personal; it was possible to write a book about nothing more, or less, than yourself, and the person that your reading of other books had made you. Books produced authors.

As a way of presenting knowledge, LLM s promise to take both the practical and personal side of books further, in some cases abolishing them altogether. An obvious application of the technology is to turn bodies of knowledge into subject matter for chatbots. Rather than reading a corpus of text, you will question an entity trained on it and get responses based on what the text says. Why turn pages when you can interrogate a work as a whole?

Everyone and everything now seems to be pursuing such fine-tuned models as ways of providing access to knowledge. Bloomberg, a media company, is working on Bloomberg GPT , a model for financial information. There are early versions of a Quran GPT and a Bible GPT ; can a puffer-jacketed Pontiff GPT be far behind? Meanwhile several startups are offering services that turn all the documents on a user’s hard disk, or in their bit of the cloud, into a resource for conversational consultation. Many early adopters are already using chatbots as sounding boards. “It’s like a knowledgeable colleague you can always talk to,” explains Jack Clark of Anthropic, an LLM- making startup.

It is easy to imagine such intermediaries having what would seem like personalities—not just generic ones, such as “avuncular tutor”, but specific ones which grow with time. They might come to be like their users: an externalised version of their inner voice. Or they might be like any other person whose online output is sufficient for a model to train on (intellectual-property concerns permitting). Researchers at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning have built an early version of such an assistant for Laurie Anderson, a composer and musician. It is trained in part on her work, and in part on that of her late husband Lou Reed.

Without you

Ms Anderson says she does not consider using the system as a way of collaborating with her dead partner. Others might succumb more readily to such an illusion. If some chatbots do become, to some extent, their user’s inner voice, then that voice will persist after death, should others wish to converse with it. That some people will leave chatbots of themselves behind when they die seems all but certain.

Such applications and implications call to mind Sigmund Freud’s classic essay on the Unheimliche , or uncanny. Freud takes as his starting point the idea that uncanniness stems from “doubts [as to] whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate”. They are the sort of doubts that those thinking about LLM s are hard put to avoid.

Though AI researchers can explain the mechanics of their creations, they are persistently unable to say what actually happens within them. “There’s no ‘ultimate theoretical reason’ why anything like this should work,” Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist and the creator of Wolfram Alpha, a mathematical search engine, recently concluded in a remarkable (and lengthy) blog post trying to explain the models’ inner workings.

This raises two linked but mutually exclusive concerns: that AI ’s have some sort of internal working which scientists cannot yet perceive; or that it is possible to pass as human in the social world without any sort of inner understanding.

“These models are just representations of the distributions of words in texts that can be used to produce more words,” says Emily Bender, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is one of the authors of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” a critique of LLM triumphalism. The models, she argues, have no real understanding. With no experience of real life or human communication they offer nothing more than the ability to parrot things they have heard in training, an ability which huge amounts of number crunching makes frequently appropriate and sometimes surprising, but which is nothing like thought. It is a view which is often pronounced in those who have come into the field through linguistics, as Dr Bender has.

For some in the LLM -building trade things are not that simple. Their models are hard to dismiss as “mere babblers”, in the words of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the leader of a group at Alphabet which works on AI -powered products. He thinks the models have attributes which cannot really be distinguished from an ability to know what things actually mean. It can be seen, he suggests, in their ability reliably to choose the right meaning when translating phrases which are grammatically ambiguous, or to explain jokes.

If Dr Bender is right, then it can be argued that a broad range of behaviour that humans have come to think of as essentially human is not necessarily so. Uncanny “doubts [as to] whether an apparently animate being is really alive” are fully justified.

To accept that human-seeming LLM s are calculation, statistics and nothing more could influence how people think about themselves. Freud portrayed himself as continuing the trend begun by Copernicus—who removed humans from the centre of the universe—and Darwin—who removed them from a special and God-given status among the animals. Psychology’s contribution, as Freud saw it, lay in “endeavouring to prove to the ‘ego’ of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house”. LLM s could be argued to take the idea further still. At least one wing of Freud’s house becomes an unoccupied “smart home”; the lights go on and off automatically, the smart thermostat opens windows and lowers blinds, the roomba roombas around. No master needed at all.

Uncanny as that may all be, though, it would be wrong to think that many people will take this latest decentring to heart. As far as everyday life is concerned, humankind has proved pretty resilient to Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. People still believe in gods and souls and specialness with little obvious concern for countervailing science. They could well adapt quite easily to the pseudocognitive world, at least as far as philosophical qualms are concerned.

You do not have to buy Freud’s explanation of the unsettling effect of the uncanny in terms of the effort the mind expends on repressing childish animism to think that not worrying and going with the animistic flow will make a world populated with communicative pseudo-people a surprisingly comfortable one. People may simultaneously recognise that something is not alive and treat it as if it were. Some will take this too far, forming problematic attachments that Freud would have dubbed fetishistic. But only a few sensitive souls will find themselves left behind staring into an existential—but personal—abyss opened up by the possibility that their seeming thought is all for naught.

New gold dream

What if Mr Agüera y Arcas is right, though, and that which science deems lifeless is, in some cryptic, partial and emergent way, effectively animate? Then it will be time to do for AI some of what Freud thought he was doing for humans. Having realised that the conscious mind was not the whole show, Freud looked elsewhere for sources of desire that for good or ill drove behaviour. Very few people now subscribe to the specific Freudian explanations of human behaviour which followed. But the idea that there are reasons why people do things of which they are not conscious is part of the world’s mental furniture. The unconscious is probably not a great model for whatever it is that provides LLM s with an apparent sense of meaning or an approximation of agency. But the sense that there might be something below the AI surface which needs understanding may prove powerful.

Dr Bender and those who agree with her may take issue with such notions. But they might find that they lead to useful actions in the field of “ AI ethics”. Winkling out non-conscious biases acquired in the pre-verbal infancy of training; dealing with the contradictions behind hallucinations; regularising rogue desires: ideas from psychotherapy might be seen as helpful analogies for dealing with the pseudocognitive AI transition even by those who reject all notion of an AI mind. A concentration on the relationship between parents, or programmers, and their children could be welcome, too. What is it to bring up an AI well? What sort of upbringing should be forbidden? To what extent should the creators of AI s be held responsible for the harms done by their creation?

And human desires may need some inspection, too. Why are so many people eager for the sort of intimacy an LLM might provide? Why do many influential humans seem to think that, because evolution shows species can go extinct, theirs is quite likely to do so at its own hand, or that of its successor? And where is the determination to turn a superhuman rationality into something which does not merely stir up the economy, but changes history for the better? ■

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This article appeared in the Essay section of the print edition under the headline “THE AGE OF PSEUDOCOGNITION”

From the April 22nd 2023 edition

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A new 'AI scientist' can write science papers without any human input—here's why that's a problem

by Karin Verspoor, The Conversation

Scientific discovery is one of the most sophisticated human activities. First, scientists must understand the existing knowledge and identify a significant gap. Next, they must formulate a research question and design and conduct an experiment in pursuit of an answer. Then, they must analyze and interpret the results of the experiment, which may raise yet another research question.

Can a process this complex be automated? Last week, Sakana AI Labs announced the creation of an "AI scientist"—an artificial intelligence system they claim can make scientific discoveries in the area of machine learning in a fully automated way.

Using generative large language models (LLMs) like those behind ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, the system can brainstorm, select a promising idea, code new algorithms, plot results, and write a paper summarizing the experiment and its findings, complete with references. Sakana claims the AI tool can undertake the complete lifecycle of a scientific experiment at a cost of just US$15 per paper—less than the cost of a scientist's lunch.

These are some big claims. Do they stack up? And even if they do, would an army of AI scientists churning out research papers with inhuman speed really be good news for science ?

How a computer can 'do science'

A lot of science is done in the open, and almost all scientific knowledge has been written down somewhere (or we wouldn't have a way to "know" it). Millions of scientific papers are freely available online in repositories such as arXiv and PubMed .

LLMs trained with this data capture the language of science and its patterns. It is therefore perhaps not at all surprising that a generative LLM can produce something that looks like a good scientific paper—it has ingested many examples that it can copy.

What is less clear is whether an AI system can produce an interesting scientific paper. Crucially, good science requires novelty.

But is it interesting?

Scientists don't want to be told about things that are already known. Rather, they want to learn new things, especially new things that are significantly different from what is already known. This requires judgment about the scope and value of a contribution.

The Sakana system tries to address interestingness in two ways. First, it "scores" new paper ideas for similarity to existing research (indexed in the Semantic Scholar repository). Anything too similar is discarded.

Second, Sakana's system introduces a "peer review" step—using another LLM to judge the quality and novelty of the generated paper. Here again, there are plenty of examples of peer review online on sites such as openreview.net that can guide how to critique a paper. LLMs have ingested these, too.

AI may be a poor judge of AI output

Feedback is mixed on Sakana AI's output. Some have described it as producing " endless scientific slop ."

Even the system's own review of its outputs judges the papers weak at best. This is likely to improve as the technology evolves, but the question of whether automated scientific papers are valuable remains.

The ability of LLMs to judge the quality of research is also an open question. My own work (soon to be published in Research Synthesis Methods ) shows LLMs are not great at judging the risk of bias in medical research studies, though this too may improve over time.

Sakana's system automates discoveries in computational research, which is much easier than in other types of science that require physical experiments. Sakana's experiments are done with code, which is also structured text that LLMs can be trained to generate.

AI tools to support scientists, not replace them

AI researchers have been developing systems to support science for decades. Given the huge volumes of published research, even finding publications relevant to a specific scientific question can be challenging.

Specialized search tools make use of AI to help scientists find and synthesize existing work. These include the above-mentioned Semantic Scholar, but also newer systems such as Elicit , Research Rabbit , scite and Consensus .

Text mining tools such as PubTator dig deeper into papers to identify key points of focus, such as specific genetic mutations and diseases, and their established relationships. This is especially useful for curating and organizing scientific information.

Machine learning has also been used to support the synthesis and analysis of medical evidence, in tools such as Robot Reviewer . Summaries that compare and contrast claims in papers from Scholarcy help to perform literature reviews.

All these tools aim to help scientists do their jobs more effectively, not to replace them.

AI research may exacerbate existing problems

While Sakana AI states it doesn't see the role of human scientists diminishing, the company's vision of "a fully AI-driven scientific ecosystem" would have major implications for science.

One concern is that, if AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse . This means they may become increasingly ineffectual at innovating.

However, the implications for science go well beyond impacts on AI science systems themselves.

There are already bad actors in science, including "paper mills" churning out fake papers . This problem will only get worse when a scientific paper can be produced with US$15 and a vague initial prompt.

The need to check for errors in a mountain of automatically generated research could rapidly overwhelm the capacity of actual scientists. The peer review system is arguably already broken, and dumping more research of questionable quality into the system won't fix it.

Science is fundamentally based on trust. Scientists emphasize the integrity of the scientific process so we can be confident our understanding of the world (and now, the world's machines) is valid and improving.

A scientific ecosystem where AI systems are key players raises fundamental questions about the meaning and value of this process, and what level of trust we should have in AI scientists. Is this the kind of scientific ecosystem we want?

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