Learn about OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid-sampling spacecraft, and why it’s about to make history; the moral dilemmas facing driverless car AI systems; and how many friends you can have at one time, despite what social media tells you. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: NASA's First Asteroid-Sampling Spacecraft Is About to Reach Its Destination. Here's What's Next — https://curiosity.im/2DMy5A6 Self-Driving Cars Have to Decide Whether Passengers or Pedestrians Are More Important — https://curiosity.im/2DLaHml Despite Social Media, You Can Only Have 150 Friends at a Time — https://curiosity.im/2DPkND1 Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Learn about OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid-sampling spacecraft, and why it’s about to make history; the moral dilemmas facing driverless car AI systems; and how many friends you can have at one time, despite what social media tells you.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Please tell us about yourself and help us improve the show by taking our listener survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/curiosity-listener-survey
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron!
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/moral-dilemmas-of-driverless-cars-how-many-friends-you-can-have-and-nasas-osiris-rex-spacecraft
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about NASA's first asteroid sampling spacecraft and why it's about to make history, the moral dilemmas facing driverless car AI systems, and how many friends you can have at one time, despite what social media tells you.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity on the award-winning Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: A NASA's spacecraft is on a rendezvous with history. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on final approach to an asteroid for a December 3rd arrival. Once OSIRIS-REx arrives, it'll spend 18 months preparing to land, so it can pick up a sample to send back to Earth. And I'm going to tell you why that's a big deal.
CODY GOUGH: Because it has one of those giant space slugs, like the one on the asteroid the Millennium Falcon flies into in The Empire Strikes Back?
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, we can only hope, right?
CODY GOUGH: That'll be so cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: So OSIRIX-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer. But we'll stick with OSIRIX-REx for obvious reasons. So a spacecraft is about to pick up samples of an asteroid called Bennu. Who cares? Well, you can think of asteroids as time capsules. Billions of years ago, the solar system used to be full of asteroids, and meteoroids, and comets, and not much else besides the sun. But these little worlds crashed into each other and gradually formed planets, and moons, and dwarf planets.
We examine asteroids to learn more about the ancient history of the solar system. That matters because we want to know where the Earth came from and potentially, where life itself came from. One of the burning questions for biologists is learning where the heck we got our water. Some say small bodies in the solar system brought it to Earth. And others say Earth's chemistry somehow generated it. Investigating asteroids can help settle that debate.
So this asteroid Bennu is one piece of a larger puzzle, telling us more about Earth, our history, and the origins of life. Something we can then extrapolate to that ultimate question of our existence, are we alone? Yeah. Like I said, this is a big deal. Even now, OSIRIX-REx is taking pictures and measuring things, like how much ice might be on the asteroid, how big it is, and its shape and gravity field.
OSIRIX-REx will spend about 18 months circling Bennu, gathering data, before it tries to land, since investigators want to make sure they find a smooth landing site. It's a long time, but science is built on patience. And the spacecraft can't leave the asteroid until 2021 anyway because of the positions of the Earth and Bennu. But when OSIRIX-REx finally uses a robotic arm to pick up a sample from the surface, we'll eagerly be watching for its landing here in 2023. Want to keep an eye on it? You can follow OSIRIS-REx on Twitter at O-S-I-R-I-S-R-E-x. We live in exciting times.
CODY GOUGH: You may have heard that self-driving cars are safer than cars with human drivers. And that's probably true. But even artificial intelligence isn't perfect. And when an accident does happen, have you ever wondered how an AI system is supposed to decide who it should try to protect? A new study might have some answers. By the way, if you find this story interesting, then I need to recommend that you read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. I finished it a couple of months ago, and it is mind-blowing.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's actually one that I haven't read all the way through. I need to do that.
CODY GOUGH: You read part of it?
ASHLEY HAMER: I think so. It was like high school, so I can't quite remember.
CODY GOUGH: I'll bring you a copy if you need it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: It's like legit, and it holds up. And you think, oh, OK. A book about robots from the '60s. This is going to be totally outdated. And then you finish like two chapters, and your mind is blown. And like, wow, this guy really had some really smart ideas.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: And this is one of those kinds of dilemmas that you wouldn't think about without this story. So let's say a driverless car is about to hit five people in a crosswalk. It doesn't have time to break, but it does have time to swerve into a barricade, which would kill its only passenger. So what should it do?
It's like a real life AI version of to trolley problem, that classic problem in moral philosophy that we've talked about on this show before. Basically in that situation, a train is about to run over a few people who are tied to the tracks, and you can hit a switch to move the train onto a different track. But there's one person tied to that track who would get hit. So in a way, you would be killing that person, even though you're saving multiple other people.
So what should a driverless car do? A new study set out to answer this question by having online participants choose what a vehicle should do in a similar situation. Here, staying on the road would endanger the life of a pedestrian on the street, and swerving would threaten a bystander on the sidewalk. Different scenarios had different levels of certainty of a collision with either victim. You can read the details of all the test results in our full write-up on curiosity.com and on our free Curiosity app for Android and iOS.
But in general, people prefer to the self-driving car to stay in its lane, even if the odds were pretty high that doing that would injure somebody. But when they were asked what they would prefer if there were a human driver, most of the participants would have swerved out of the way, not knowing how likely they were to hit a bystander on the sidewalk.
So what's the, quote unquote, right answer? Well, maybe MIT's Moral Machine has an answer. The Moral Machine gives anyone the chance to make a multitude of hard decisions, each guaranteed to leave at least one person dead. You can actually take the Moral Machine's tests for yourself, but the options are brutal. This whole story is just a reminder that artificial intelligence and morality are going to be a philosophical quagmire. Here's hoping we find a way to stop accidents like these in the first place.
ASHLEY HAMER: Before we get to our last story, remember a couple of months ago when we asked you to take our listener survey for a chance to win a Curiosity t-shirt? Well, we're closing the survey at the end of this week.
CODY GOUGH: We're bringing this up for a couple of reasons. And one is that we want to bring you some of the best, most curiosity-satisfying stories of the year as we count down to 2019 at the end of December. One of the questions in our listener survey asks you to tell us about your favorite recent story. And we're going to use your answers to plan our last few episodes counting down to the New Year.
ASHLEY HAMER: We've tallied up the existing responses, and we have some great ideas already. But we need more responses to help us figure out what our audience wants within a 5% margin of error. So please fill it out this week if you haven't already. You should be able to finish it in less time than it takes to listen to one episode of our show.
CODY GOUGH: You can find a link to our listener survey in the show notes of today's episode. Just open it on your favorite podcast app. Or find a link on our podcast website at about.curiosity.com/podcast. We'll also post a link on our Patreon page.
ASHLEY HAMER: We're closing the survey for real at the end of November. Thanks again to those of you who have already taken it. Seriously, it means a lot to us.
CODY GOUGH: One more time. Our podcast website is about.curiosity.com/podcast.
ASHLEY HAMER: You might have a lot of Facebook friends, but research suggests that there's a limit to how many friends you can maintain at the same time. Care to guess how many?
CODY GOUGH: 2,000.
ASHLEY HAMER: Is that how many Facebook friends you have?
CODY GOUGH: I think it's actually something around there, yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: I think mine is too. Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: It's a lot of friends.
ASHLEY HAMER: I have fewer Twitter followers than I have Facebook friends. But I'm working on it.
CODY GOUGH: We're like way above the average for Facebook friends.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. No big deal. Well it's not 2,000, I'll just tell you that. This number comes from Robin Dunbar. He's an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Oxford. And Dunbar's number says you can only have, ready for it? 150 friends at a time. By friends, he means casual friends. People you'd invite to a party. Not people you'd introduce to your mom.
And you can break that down into Dunbar's numbers. Within that 150, you get about 50 medium close friends, 15 friends you can rely on for emotional support, and five intensely intimate friends. The intensely intimate friend number goes down to four if you have a romantic partner, since your partner takes up the bandwidth of two close friends.
This number is backed by research. Across cultures, communities of 150 tend to thrive. And that counts companies too. It's also common to have 150 members in military companies and other close knit communities, like Native American tribes and Amish villages. Even on Facebook, where you probably know someone with 1,000 friends, the most common number of friends is about 120 or 130 according to Dunbar. Pretty close to 150, huh?
This is in part because friendships rely on two finite resources. Your mental capacity and your time. That might sound sad and restrictive, but it doesn't have to be. Really, it's just a restatement of what we already know. Life is short. And you can't do everything or befriend everyone. Instead, you have to use the time and mental energy you have wisely. Maybe we should all be throwing more big parties too. So we can keep in touch with all 150 of our friends.
CODY GOUGH: Before we wrap up, I want to give a quick shout-out to a few of our patrons for supporting our show. Thank you Kyle Hewitt, Anthony Hyland, Kerry Greenwald, Rebecca Broberg, Reed, and the recently one year older Manny Blaze for contributing to our Patreon page. If you're listening and you want to support Curiosity Daily, then visit patreon.com/curiosity.com, all spelled out.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's patreon.com/curiosity.com. Join us again tomorrow with the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
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