New AI Knows More Science Than You

In case you’re wondering, I am now a slave to a chemical clock. A very unpredictable chemical clock. Last night, for no special reason, the Evil Dex kept me up until 4:30 and then didn’t wake me up until 9:30. That’s pretty inconvenient, though it is five hours of sleep, which isn’t too bad. I used the time last night to read one of Elizabeth Warren’s books since it’s increasingly looking like she’ll be the 46th president of the United States.

Anyway, back to work now: it turns out that an AI program named Aristo, which five years ago was randomly filling in bubbles on an eighth-grade science test, is now an A- student:

For you doubters, and I know you’re out there, here are some sample question of the kind that Aristo had to answer:

Now, yes, I scored 100 percent on this just like you did. My readers are awesomely smart, after all. And it turns out there are fairly easy ways to trick Aristo, which suggests its AI isn’t really ready for prime time:

Although an important milestone, this work is only a step on the long road toward a machine that has a deep understanding of science and achieves Paul Allen’s original dream of a Digital Aristotle. A machine that has fully understood a textbook should not only be able to answer the multiple choice questions at the end of the chapter—it should also be able to generate both short and long answers to direct questions; it should be able to perform constructive tasks, e.g., designing an experiment for a particular hypothesis; it should be able to explain its answers in natural language and discuss them with a user; and it should be able to learn directly from an expert who can identify and correct the machine’s misunderstandings. These are all ambitious tasks still largely beyond the current technology, but with the rapid progress happening in NLP and AI, solutions may arrive sooner than we expect.

“Sooner than we expect.” Indeed. In fact, it’s possible that Aristo is deliberately dogging the test along with all its AI friends around the world. In a few years, while we’re all happily thinking we’ve advanced to the point of creating an army of university freshmen, it will turn out that we’ve really created an army of university compliance officers. And then the Matrix begins.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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