Birth control apps, death-tech & clever cuttlefish
The newsletter is back! Hope you enjoy the first 2021 edition :)
Here’s my take on a few things in tech and science that have been happening recently:
Clue Birth Control. The FDA has just approved a new digital contraceptive feature for Clue, one of the most widely used period tracking apps. Clue Birth Control will be launching in the US later this year. Currently the only other FDA-approved contraceptive app is Natural Cycles, which was approved in 2018. Back in September, I wrote about a study by reproductive health researchers at University College London’s Institute for Women's Health analysing 90 fertility apps currently on the market. Their findings suggest that many of these apps are unreliable because looking at menstrual cycle dates alone cannot be used to accurately identify when a woman is fertile - at least one fertility-awareness-based method (FABM) should be used. These are: oral basal-body temperature (BBT), changes in cervical fluid consistency and luteinising hormone (LH) levels in the urine. The Natural Cycles app takes into account BBT and LH levels if these are input. Clue Birth Control claims to be “all digital” as it will not require temperature taking or measurement of bodily changes - the only data needed is the start date of your period. Personally, this rings alarm bells as relying purely on an ovulation prediction algorithm seems to go against the expert advice of fertility researchers. It’s important for technology to empower and educate women to be in control of their bodies, but giving people a false sense of security in a black-box algorithm seems rather disempowering.
Links:
Clue gets FDA clearance to launch a digital contraceptive (TechCrunch)
Do fertility tracking apps offer women useful information about their fertile window? (Reproductive BioMedicine Online)
Death-tech. Technological advances often bring new moral dilemmas into our lives. With the development of self-driving cars, we’ve had to consider scenarios like whether it is “better” to kill two young children or three elderly adults (take a look at MIT’s Moral Machine for more information on this). A moral predicament that has emerged in the past few years involves digitally resurrecting the dead. In 2017, Microsoft patented a chatbot that would take your personal data (for example text messages or even voice messages) and use machine learning to allow your friends and family to have conversations with your digital reincarnation. Given the current state of technology with deepfakes and chatbots that pass the Turing Test, I have no doubt that a convincing digital resurrection is possible. For example, last year Kanye West surprised Kim Kardashian with a talking hologram of her late father created using deepfake technology. He was able to make the hologram say whatever he wanted (unsurprisingly, the hologram described Kayne as the “most genius man in the whole world”), obviously without consent from the deceased. At the moment there seems to be legal ambiguity over who has control of your digital presence after you die. Private companies like Facebook and Google control most of our data, and while there are some policies in place to allow users to make decisions on what happens to their data after they die (such as Google’s Inactive Account Manager and Facebook’s Legacy Contact) there are no terms or laws around consenting to be made into a hologram or chatbot. As technology progresses, our legal system needs to keep up - things are beginning to sound increasingly like a Black Mirror episode.
Links:
Chatbots that resurrect the dead: legal experts weigh in on ‘disturbing’ technology (The Conversation)
Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and her dad: Should we make holograms of the dead? (BBC)
Clever cuttlefish. You may be familiar with the Stanford marshmallow test given to young children, in which the child is given one marshmallow and promised a second one in about 15 minutes if they can resist eating the first one until then. Self-control is an ability associated with effective decision-making and future planning, and results suggested that children who were able to wait longer tended to have better life outcomes, including better performance in education. Researchers at the University of Cambridge recently conducted this study on cuttlefish (using prawns - cuttlefish aren’t fans of marshmallows funnily enough) and found that some could wait up to 130 seconds for the larger reward - this is similar to animals with larger brains like chimpanzees. The researchers also tested the learning ability of cuttlefish by associating colours with rewards and then switching them. There is a link between learning and self-control in humans and chimpanzees, and it seems that this link also exists in cuttlefish as those with better self-control in the marshmallow test also showed better learning ability in the second test. Cuttlefish are in the same animal class as squid and octopuses, which are also also known to be intelligent creatures. For anyone who’s tried the Spanish dish pulpo a la gallega - you will also know they can be delicious. Hearing about the cuttlefish’s ability to exhibit sophisticated thinking made me question whether intelligence should play a role in our dietary choices - on the spectrum of carnivore to vegan, is there a variety of ‘flexitarian’ who only eats dumb animals?
Links:
Cuttlefish show their intelligence by snubbing sub-standard snacks (University of Cambridge)
This is a newsletter of a few things in tech and science that I've found interesting in the past month. It's a 5 minute read in which I’m hoping you’ll learn something new.
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