Sonia Contera: "People will react against the abuses of technology and end science"

Conversing with Sonia Contera is like entering Wikipedia looking for information on viruses and beginning to click on links guided by curiosity until ending up, an hour later, reading about Foucault.

The French philosopher, the origin of life on Earth, the ingenuity of Elon Musk, the properties of symmetry, the training of drones used in Ukraine, Japanese war innovation and the future of chips are mixed in his speech and always with reason and foundation.

Contera, a 52-year-old from Madrid, has an encyclopedic knowledge because she “amuses” him, but also because of the discipline in which she works: nanotechnology.

In the nano world, far from the stereotypes of tiny robots navigating the bloodstream, they live at the forefront of numerous fields.

Specialists like Contera, a professor at the University of Oxford, look out over the precipice of physics (her original training), biology, artificial intelligence, medicine... And that is why she wrote the book

(

, Princeton University Press), to explain what is in that world.

At that scale – a hair is 80,000 nanometers wide – they have very different laws, but also the response to diseases (as in the vaccines that knocked down covid) and to quantum computing.

And Contera, who passed through Madrid to discuss disinformation and science under the umbrella of the European Parliament, is concerned about what may happen in the future with such complex technologies.

That is why he calls for science to enter the social conversation, so that citizens can also understand and make decisions, beyond Silicon Valley offices: "It is dangerous when scientists do not reflect on science."

Contera, who grew up in Fuerteventura, speaks languages ​​as distant as Russian, Chinese, Czech, Japanese, Danish and German, those of those countries in which he has worked.

For this reason, the reading of his science is global and very aware of the global balance of power, which will be determined by those who emerge victorious from that geostrategic race that is held in the nanometric universe.

“It is the revolution of materials, of medicine, of chips, of biocomputers.

There is a lot of geopolitics and the problem for Europe is that we have no strategy”, he laments.

Ask.

In nanotechnology, from what he tells in his book, the vanguard of many disciplines now converge.

Response.

That is where we are in the 21st century.

Science is so competitive that we didn't realize that things are coming together.

Medicine, for example, is a very powerful force for convergence, because of course, our body is created by the universe, not by the Department of Biochemistry.

So no matter how hard we tried in the first half of the 20th century to reduce everything to molecules and genes, biology doesn't work that way and that's why most treatments for complex diseases have failed.

And now we are beginning to look for solutions such as immunotherapies, which are much more complex.

To solve the problems of the 21st century we have no choice but to converge.

For example, another problem that is starting to emerge now, the chips.

We need them,

because the computations that artificial intelligence uses need millions and millions and millions of operations.

It needs so many that we can't do the computations anymore, because to train an artificial intelligence you need 2 million dollars just in the electricity bill.

Our processes, which are all very reductionist, are coming to an end.

And we have to start looking for other strategies that are the ones used by the universe to create intelligence or to create living matter.

People have to start reacting, you have to control it;

Amazon and Google cannot be the owners of our lives

P.

In the world of the nanometric scale they are governed by other laws.

R.

It is energy and structure.

That is the point of why life arises at the nanoscale.

One of the great discoveries of physics in the 20th century is realizing that the universe behaves differently at each scale and for reasons that we do not understand;

it's the way it works.

Life arose on Earth 4 billion years ago, which is a third of the age of the universe, and all this time has been devoted to evolution.

It's a long time.

The only truth of physics really is that entropy, that systems become disordered when they have energy.

But we are the opposite.

Life is order.

And how is this created?

Can only do nanoscale,

because when you are so small that a water molecule can move you and that movement can cause you to catch another molecule and bend it and create a chemical reaction.

At the nanoscale, mechanics, electricity, chemistry, it's all coupled together.

That has many technological possibilities, but it is also very interesting to reflect on ourselves, how we work.

P.

You talk about almost philosophical questions, although nanotechnology sounds like little robots that go for blood.

What will it really do?

R.

No, not robots, that's not going to work like that.

That will not exist.

Nanotechnology is the evolution of RNA nanoparticle vaccines, such as those for covid, which are going to make a great qualitative leap for cancer treatment, and the revolution in immunotherapies.

Biosensors, for example, because we have realized during the pandemic how important it is to have bacteria or virus detectors and detect them quickly and detect them well.

Nanotechnology is key there because we have to detect the structures of biology, which are at the nanoscale: proteins, DNA, molecules.

Tissue repair: it is also a nanotechnological process, due to the proteins we need to regenerate materials.

And another change is that we are going to start seeing analog computers and forget about digital computers a bit:

the architectures of the computers of the future and autonomous vehicles.

The computing that is required in an autonomous vehicle has to be somewhat analog and perhaps biological or inspired by biology and will need the ability of nanotechnology to create it.

The first so-called neuromorphic computers that use chips as a kind of neuron simulator are already being made quite advanced.

And that is going to suggest many social and security problems.

As we see now in the war in Ukraine, where they use a lot of drones: what do we do when the drones start talking to each other.

This scares me a lot, it makes me panic [laughs].

They're dumb now, but imagine when they start getting smarter: Amazon with smart drones.

That's why we have to talk about this

because people have to start reacting, you have to control it;

Amazon and Google cannot be the owners of our lives.

Many biologists or sociologists or economists want the machine to solve everything for you, but it can't.

intuition is needed

Q.

In the book you explain that by ignoring the laws of the nanometric world, the approach to biology has often been like trying to calculate the position of the stars without knowing the laws of gravity.

R.

One of the problems we have had is the separation of the disciplines.

It does not happen in Spain, but many biologists have almost no education in physics or mathematics and that is going to endanger their professions.

One of the things that physics does is use intuition, which is a kind of analog intelligence.

Creating intuitions about reality is what allowed us to understand gravity or understand quantum mechanics.

Explanations that after a lot of thinking and feeling a problem occurred to you and then you could check with experiments.

In the world of data, many people are trying not to have that intuition, not to think, that artificial intelligence is simply going to give us the keys to how to solve problems.

Many biologists or sociologists or economists want to skip the intuition step of the model and let the machine solve everything for you.

And there are two problems.

First, the machine can't handle so much data, it's impossible.

And that deep down, reality is always much more interesting and with much more meaning and depth than we want.

We always try to reduce everything to processes that we can control, but in the end there is something wonderful in the universe that forces us again to suffer against the problem and create that intuition.

Can we create intuition in a machine?

We have a long way to go.

The point is that we want to solve everything with data, but we can't.

I suppose that for the better, because in the end we always crash against the complexity of reality.

You have to be more humble.

Reality overwhelms you.

Sonia Contera, an expert in nanotechnology at the University of Oxford.

JOHN BARBOSA

Q.

You cite the example of Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence that has been able to predict the shape of proteins, a historical milestone in biomedicine.

R.

But it is not artificial intelligence that dominates this program.

When DeepMind arrived, everything was already done, the only thing they did was improve the algorithm with their optimization capacity.

The program has been developed for 20 or 30 years by many people and the most interesting thing is that they realized that in order to understand the shape of the protein you had to take into account its evolutionary history.

Not only knowing the structure, the components, you can bend it.

And that's a new way of doing math.

The idea that you have to take evolutionary history into account.

That opens up the capacity for total manufacturing, because we're starting to be able to create synthetic proteins.

And when you create proteins, you are already able to create any shape with atomic precision at the nanoscopic scale: to make new materials,

even to make quantum computers, which is what I'm thinking.

And we will also learn the limits of protein structure, of evolution, things that have not evolved because of physical constraints.

It's going to open up a lot of questions about what's possible.

In physics, instead of dealing with the form of the universe, we start to deal with life, the form from which it arises, because life is a computation, it is an information process.

All of this is very new and all of this is converging with the new computer sciences, it is transforming a lot how we see reality.

And how we understand ourselves.

It's going to open up a lot of questions about what's possible.

In physics, instead of dealing with the form of the universe, we start to deal with life, the form from which it arises, because life is a computation, it is an information process.

All of this is very new and all of this is converging with the new computer sciences, it is transforming a lot how we see reality.

And how we understand ourselves.

It's going to open up a lot of questions about what's possible.

In physics, instead of dealing with the form of the universe, we start to deal with life, the form from which it arises, because life is a computation, it is an information process.

All of this is very new and all of this is converging with the new computer sciences, it is transforming a lot how we see reality.

And how we understand ourselves.

Q.

Has any of this news surprised you?

R.

Being a physicist you believe anything.

Once you swallow quantum mechanics there is no longer any surprise [laughs].

The idea that one can design proteins on the computer and have a bacterium manufacture them for you to create, for example, a covid vaccine.

There is already one, which has already approved clinical trials.

And they begin to create materials that evolve in the laboratory.

That seems freaky to me.

P.

But you also write that this ability to transform life can have consequences for human identity.

R.

So far what we have done is use nature as something inexhaustible.

We already know that it is not, we have reached the moment of destruction.

And I think we are beginning to apply this way of thinking to ourselves.

And we'll do it wrong.

We will do as badly as we have done with the rest of the planet, because human life is 4,000 million years of evolution and we understand very little.

We may be able to modify a protein, but we don't understand what the complex relationships are between all this, even if it is possible to understand it.

Until now we have used technology without responsibility, and we reach the decisive moment: are we able to use technology in a mature and responsible way and be more humble or do we self-destruct?

We want to intervene in genetic diseases in which a single gene, which there are not many,

It can change and improve a person's life a lot.

But to go further we must have an increasingly strong social dialogue with science.

Science is a central pillar of democracy.

It is a central pillar of society.

Since the 19th century it has transformed how we live and yet it is not embedded in all governance institutions and most of the news does not include that perspective.

Science has to enter our way of thinking because if not, we destroy ourselves.

And that is the challenge before us.

What do we do with all this?

We have the ability to create an interesting world where people can be free or horror.

It is what we always have: the strength to be free, but at the same time the responsibility to do things well.

But to go further we must have an increasingly strong social dialogue with science.

Science is a central pillar of democracy.

It is a central pillar of society.

Since the 19th century it has transformed how we live and yet it is not embedded in all governance institutions and most of the news does not include that perspective.

Science has to enter our way of thinking because if not, we destroy ourselves.

And that is the challenge before us.

What do we do with all this?

We have the ability to create an interesting world where people can be free or horror.

It is what we always have: the strength to be free, but at the same time the responsibility to do things well.

But to go further we must have an increasingly strong social dialogue with science.

Science is a central pillar of democracy.

It is a central pillar of society.

Since the 19th century it has transformed how we live and yet it is not embedded in all governance institutions and most of the news does not include that perspective.

Science has to enter our way of thinking because if not, we destroy ourselves.

And that is the challenge before us.

What do we do with all this?

We have the ability to create an interesting world where people can be free or horror.

It is what we always have: the strength to be free, but at the same time the responsibility to do things well.

Since the 19th century it has transformed how we live and yet it is not embedded in all governance institutions and most of the news does not include that perspective.

Science has to enter our way of thinking because if not, we destroy ourselves.

And that is the challenge before us.

What do we do with all this?

We have the ability to create an interesting world where people can be free or horror.

It is what we always have: the strength to be free, but at the same time the responsibility to do things well.

Since the 19th century it has transformed how we live and yet it is not embedded in all governance institutions and most of the news does not include that perspective.

Science has to enter our way of thinking because if not, we destroy ourselves.

And that is the challenge before us.

What do we do with all this?

We have the ability to create an interesting world where people can be free or horror.

It is what we always have: the strength to be free, but at the same time the responsibility to do things well.

What do we do with all this?

We have the ability to create an interesting world where people can be free or horror.

It is what we always have: the strength to be free, but at the same time the responsibility to do things well.

What do we do with all this?

We have the ability to create an interesting world where people can be free or horror.

It is what we always have: the strength to be free, but at the same time the responsibility to do things well.

Science is a central pillar of democracy.

It is a central pillar of society.

Since the 19th century it has transformed how we live

P. A

large part of the efforts in the development of artificial intelligence are directed by large technology companies, which steal brains from the academy, also in nanotechnology?

R.

Many people leave, because of the salaries in the academic world and the ridiculous competition between researchers, which makes no sense.

People in my field are starting to go to Amazon and Google.

P.

And what do they do there?

R.

Well, for example, I am now developing new materials for the electrodes that are implanted in mice, trying to improve the system so that the mouse does not feel them.

And maybe they can be used in the future, in the brains of people with ailments.

I, using nanotechnology, am going to make them out of cellulose.

Cellulose will be the material of the future because it is the most abundant polymer on Earth and although it seems like a very simple thing, the one that forms the structure of plants, it is a nanomaterial that at the nanometric scale is very hard, it has a lot of hardness, it has some mechanical properties of steel and also joins the electrical properties to the mechanical properties.

If one day I get tired of teaching and working 16 hours a day and going after everyone like a dog because I'm Spanish and a woman in physics, then I'm going with Elon Musk.

What is this Neuralink [a company that aims to connect human and machine brains] garbage doing, which thank God is not going to work [laughs].

Because what he is doing is a big piece of garbage, thank goodness.

But it is a problem.

These companies have some leaders with quite naive agendas, they live in very special worlds.

P.

They lack readings.

R.

People will react against the abuses of technology and end science.

I mean, if people are seeing it being used against them, why trust these people?

The anti-vaccine movements, in part, stem from that.

And in the end we will end science.

It's going to be a big challenge, because these California companies are very dangerous.

And they're going to drag a lot of scientists, they're going to take a lot of people.

There is beginning to be a fairly pronounced exodus of scientists from the academy, it is another challenge that must be reported.

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