Science bits: AI moral reasoning advances; Brain cancer vaccine progress

Humans do moral reasoning about right vs wrong all the time. AI (artificial intelligence) software can also do its own moral reasoning. Researchers are looking for a point where humans cannot distinguish human moral reasoning from AI. We are at or close to that point. Nature Scientific Reports reports:

We conducted a modified Moral Turing Test (m-MTT), inspired by Allen et al. (Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 352:24–28, 2004) proposal, by asking people to distinguish real human moral evaluations from those made by a popular advanced AI language model: GPT-4. A representative sample of 299 U.S. adults first rated the quality of moral evaluations when blinded to their source. Remarkably, they rated the AI’s moral reasoning as superior in quality to humans’ along almost all dimensions, including virtuousness, intelligence, and trustworthiness, consistent with passing what Allen and colleagues call the comparative MTT. Next, when tasked with identifying the source of each evaluation (human or computer), people performed significantly above chance levels. Although the AI did not pass this test, this was not because of its inferior moral reasoning but, potentially, its perceived superiority, among other possible explanations. The emergence of language models capable of producing moral responses perceived as superior in quality to humans’ raises concerns that people may uncritically accept potentially harmful moral guidance from AI.

Here, humans in this study judged AI moral reasoning as better than human, but they could still tell the difference between reasoning by humans and AI. It is not clear if most humans will ever judge AI to produce superior moral reasoning and not be able to tell human from machine. The perceived superiority of machine moral reasoning may tip people off to the fact that a better answer comes from a machine. 

Think about that for a moment.

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Scientists are reporting some encouraging progress in developing mRNA vaccines that stimulate immune responses against brain cancers. It has taken decades to get to this point. I suspect that the boost in mRNA vaccine technology for COVID has been leveraged into cancer vaccine design. An article from The Conversation reports:

Brain cancers remain among the most challenging tumors to treat. They often don’t respond to traditional treatments because many chemotherapies are unable to penetrate the protective barrier around the brain. Other treatments like radiation and surgery can leave patients with lifelong debilitating side effects.

We developed a new messenger-RNA, or mRNA, cancer vaccine, described in newly published research, that can deliver treatments more effectively in children who have brain cancer and teach their immune systems to fight back.

First, we designed our vaccines by using the RNA of a patients’ own cancer cells as a template for the mRNA inside our nanoparticles. We also packaged our cancer vaccine inside of nanoparticles made up of specialized lipids, or fat molecules. We maximized the amount of mRNA packaged within each nanoparticle by sandwiching them between lipid layers like the layers of an onion.

Instead of injecting nanoparticles into the skin, muscle or directly into the tumor, as is commonly done for many therapeutic cancer vaccines, our mRNA nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream. From there, they travel to organs throughout the body involved in the immune response to teach the body to fight against the cancer. By doing so, we’ve found that the immune system launches a near immediate and powerful response. Within six hours of receiving the vaccine, there is a significant increase in the amount of blood markers connected to immune activation.

Clinical trials are in early stages, so it is not yet clear if or how well these vaccines will work in children. An answer should be fairly clear within ~3 years.

By Germaine: Not an anti-vaxx crackpot

Not Germaine