The William S. Hart Union High School District’s College and Career Fair and the Valley Industry Association’s Connecting to Success are both coming up next month. They aim to help students think about what comes next. Â
Some people know from an early age just what they want to do in life. Most of us need a little spark to get going in a certain direction.
Recently I overheard some graduating high school students talking about where they were going to college and what they’d be studying. I found myself in a cluster of engineering and science students at a high school band concert!
At least anecdotally, there’s a lot of overlap between the creativity of music and the math/engineering orientation of some students. That gives me hope, because I fear the current wave of “science” is actually wrecking science.
We need science even more in the age of artificial intelligence. AI is all the rage, but AI won’t save us from bad data.
It has great potential, and great potential to be wrong. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, some of the reasons for this are biases in the input training materials used, a reliance on an autocomplete model, which places importance on an answer (even if wrong), and the fact that AI can’t distinguish between factual inputs and false inputs. This is akin to someone presenting a table of data in Excel as fact, without checking if the formulas make sense.
We’re going to need subject matter experts for a good long time.
We need science to think big and for a reality check. I heard an example of a false input (ripe for AI misquoting) on the radio this week.
July 2023 was the hottest EVER, the announcer said as I was sitting in traffic. Hmm, I thought, I know that’s not true. I waited. Finally, there was the clarification that it was the hottest “since records were kept” or about 174 years. Digging just a bit more, one can find that the Earth was much hotter before, and that we are coming out of an ice age.
There are also fascinating documentaries about measuring temperature, where the scientists talk about their trials and tribulations with getting accurate data. Yes it’s hot. Yes we should reduce pollutants to our air and water.
Are there long periods of no data, data interferences, margins of error and other drivers of climate? Also yes.
When AI picks up only bits of the picture, or your average casual listener hears science reported this way, the inaccuracy replicates and influences public perception and public policy.
Have you heard of “Blue Zones” or places on the planet where people live the longest? According to Anna Gora on Livescience.com, “the high number of recorded supercentenarians, or those older than 110, in these regions might be due to poor record keeping or even pension fraud.”
It’s great to discover something, but it’s equally important to be able to evolve in your thinking. Take what is helpful and move on. Science isn’t black and white. Correlation does not always equal causation.
We need science and math geeks out there to look below the surface and make sure the basis for the next amazing thing matches reality. For fascinating examples of retractions, oopsies and general misapplication of science for one reason or another, see datacolada.org/toc.
One of the biggest movies this summer was “Twisters,” about tornado chasers. In it, one of the stars, a “city girl” who had grown up in tornado alley, repeatedly out-predicts teams of technicians with lots of gadgets. In one scene, she looks at a field of wheat swirling oddly in the wind and knows from experience that the weather is changing before the instruments do.
In another reality-based film, “Deepwater Horizon,” drill rig operators see something wrong, albeit too late because critical sensors were disabled. Technology is hardly replacing people. Technology needs people to correct for blind spots.
It takes humans to find patterns, accumulate lived experience, question results and say, “We don’t know yet, but we will find out.”
Likewise we need risk takers, decision makers, and implementers.
To all the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM-)inclined kids out there, I hope you find your spark. We need you!
Maria Gutzeit is a chemical engineer, business owner, water agency official, and mom living in Santa Clarita.
