Study details five cutting-edge advances in biomedical engineering and their applications in medicine

Alliance of 50 experts from 34 elite universities reveals pioneering engineering advance across five vital domains

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SAN DIEGO

 

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SHANKAR SUBRAMANIAM IS THE LEAD AUTHOR OF THE TASKFORCE, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR IN THE SHU CHIEN-GENE LAY DEPARTMENT OF BIOENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO.

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CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO

Bridging precision engineering and precision medicine to create personalized physiology avatars. Pursuing on-demand tissue and organ engineering for human health. Revolutionizing neuroscience by using AI to engineer advanced brain interface systems. Engineering the immune system for health and wellness. Designing and engineering genomes for organism repurposing and genomic perturbations. 

These are the five research areas where the field of biomedical engineering has the potential to achieve tremendous impact on the field of medicine, according to “Grand Challenges at the Interface of Engineering and Medicine,” a study published by a 50-person task force published in the latest issue of IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology. The paper is backed by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. 

“These grand challenges offer unique opportunities that can transform the practice of engineering and medicine,” said Shankar Subramaniam, lead author of the taskforce, distinguished professor in the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego. “Innovations in the form of multi-scale sensors and devices, creation of humanoid avatars and the development of exceptionally realistic predictive models driven by AI can radically change our lifestyles and response to pathologies. Institutions can revolutionize education in biomedical and engineering, training the greatest minds to engage in the most important problem of all times – human health.”

In addition to Subramaniam, the following faculty from the UC San Diego Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering were part of the task force: Stephanie Fraley, associate professor, Prashant Mali, professor, Berhard Palsson, Y.C. Fung Endowed Professor in Bioengineering and professor of pediatrics, and Kun Zhang, professor and a former department chair.

The study provides a roadmap to pursue transformative research work that, over the next decade, is expected to transform the practice of medicine. The advances would impact a wide range of conditions and diseases, from cancer, to diabetes, to transplants, to prosthetics.  

The Five Grand Challenges Facing Biomedical Engineering

1. Bridging precision engineering and precision medicine for personalized physiology avatars
   
   In an increasingly digital age, we have technologies that gather immense amounts of data on patients, which clinicians can add to or pull from. Making use of this data to develop accurate models of physiology, called “avatars” – which take into account multimodal measurements and comorbidities, concomitant medications, potential risks and costs – can bridge individual patient data to hyper-personalized care, diagnosis, risk prediction, and treatment. Advanced technologies, such as wearable sensors and digital twins, can provide the basis of a solution to this challenge.
2. The pursuit of on-demand tissue and organ engineering for human health
   
   Tissue engineering is entering a pivotal period in which developing tissues and organs on demand, either as permanent or temporary implants, is becoming a reality. To shepherd the growth of this modality, key advancements in stem cell engineering and manufacturing – along with ancillary technologies such as gene editing – are required. Other forms of stem cell tools, such as organ-on-a-chip technology, can soon be built using a patient’s own cells and can make personalized predictions and serve as “avatars.”
3. Revolutionizing neuroscience using artificial intelligence (AI) to engineer advanced brain-interface systems
   
   Using AI, we have the opportunity to analyze the various states of the brain through everyday situations and real-world functioning to noninvasively pinpoint pathological brain function. Creating technology that does this is a monumental task, but one that is increasingly possible. Brain prosthetics, which supplement, replace or augment functions, can relieve the disease burden caused neurological conditions. Additionally, AI modeling of brain anatomy, physiology, and behavior, along with the synthesis of neural organoids, can unravel the complexities of the brain and bring us closer to understanding and treating these diseases.
4. Engineering the immune system for health and wellness
   
   With a heightened understanding of the fundamental science governing the immune system, we can strategically make use of the immune system to redesign human cells as therapeutic and medically invaluable technologies. The application of immunotherapy in cancer treatment provides evidence of the integration of engineering principles with innovations in vaccines, genome, epigenome and protein engineering, along with advancements in nanomedicine technology, functional genomics and synthetic transcriptional control.
5. Designing and engineering genomes for organism repurposing and genomic perturbations
   
   Despite the rapid advances in genomics in the past few decades, there are obstacles remaining in our ability to engineer genomic DNA. Understanding the design principles of the human genome and its activity can help us create solutions to many different diseases that involve engineering new functionality into human cells, effectively leveraging the epigenome and transcriptome, and building new cell-based therapeutics. Beyond that, there are still major hurdles in gene delivery methods for in vivo gene engineering, in which we see biomedical engineering being a component to the solution to this problem.

“We are living in unprecedented times where the collision of engineering and medicine is creating entirely novel strategies for human health. The outcome of our task force, with the emergence of the major research and training opportunities is likely to reverberate in both worlds--engineering and medicine--for decades to come” said Michael Miller, Professor and Director of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, who served as a senior author on the manuscript.

 

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JOURNAL

IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Grand Challenges at the Interface of Engineering and Medicine

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Feb-2024

 

Low-Temperature Plasma used to remove E. coli from hydroponically grown crops

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NAGOYA UNIVERSITY

 

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OXYGEN RADICALS (WHITE CIRCLES) GENERATED IN LOW-TEMPERATURE PLASMA (PURPLE) REMOVE BACTERIA (BLUE) FROM HYDROPONICALLY GROWN CROPS.

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CREDIT: REIKO MATSUSHITA

A group led by researchers at Nagoya University and Meijo University in Japan has developed a disinfection technology that uses low-temperature plasma generated by electricity to cultivate environmentally friendly hydroponically grown crops. This innovative technology sterilizes the crops, promoting plant growth without the use of chemical fertilizers. Their findings appeared in Environmental Technology & Innovations.

In hydroponic agriculture, farmers cultivate plants by providing their roots with a nutrient solution. However, the nutrient solution can become infected with pathogenic E. coli strains, contaminating the crop and leading to foodborne illnesses.

To avoid this problem, farmers use chemical treatment to sterilize the nutrient solution before and during cultivation. In this process, the nutrient solution is replaced. Unfortunately, this can harm the environment because the chemicals can contaminate water and produce greenhouse gas emissions in their production process.

“Our results suggest a completely new way of disinfecting,” author Professor Masafumi Ito of Meijo University said. “Our technology can potentially reduce the production of pesticides that use fossil fuels, pollution of the environment, and residuals.”

Instead of agrochemicals, the team’s technique performed sterilization using plasma. Plasma is gas with small electric charges, known as ions and electrons, and electrically neutral reactive particles in it. The team created the low-temperature plasma using a plasma generator.

Their method targets the amino acid tryptophan in fertilizer, which is vital for plant growth and development. When the nutrient solution is irradiated with plasma, the electrons of the plasma generate oxygen radicals, highly unstable oxygen particles, that then produce tryptophan radicals.

Although the plant can still use the altered tryptophan in its metabolism, the radicals inactivate the enzymes involved in carbon metabolism in E. coli. Metabolomic analysis revealed the inactivation of the glycolytic and tricarboxylic acid circuits, which are essential for the bacteria’s survival, and inactivation of the key enzyme GAPDH. The result is sterile crops in a shorter period, a major advantage over conventionally used chemical-based techniques.

“We developed a sterilization technology using oxygen radicals, which is promising as a hygiene control technology for nutrient solution in modern hydroponic cultivation,” said lead author, Professor Kenji Ishikawa of the Nagoya University Center for Low-temperature Plasma Sciences. “As the use of chemical pesticides is restricted under the SDGs and the Green Strategy, our innovative technology can be used for sterilization simply by converting the atmosphere containing nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor into low-temperature plasma based on electrical energy obtained from natural energy. This technology is expected to promote technological development toward the goal of eliminating fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gases.”

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JOURNAL

Environmental Technology & Innovation

DOI

10.1016/j.eti.2023.103496 

 

Pythagoras was wrong: there are no universal musical harmonies, new study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.

According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’ – a pleasant-sounding combination of notes – is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music ‘dissonant’, unpleasant sounding.

But researchers from Cambridge University, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.

Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that in normal listening contexts, we do not actually prefer chords to be perfectly in these mathematical ratios.

“We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us,” said co-author, Dr Peter Harrison, from Cambridge University’s Faculty of Music and Director of its Centre for Music and Science.

The researchers also found that the role played by these mathematical relationships disappears when you consider certain musical instruments that are less familiar to Western musicians, audiences and scholars. These instruments tend to be bells, gongs, types of xylophones and other kinds of pitched percussion instruments. In particular, they studied the ‘bonang’, an instrument from the Javanese gamelan built from a collection of small gongs.

“When we use instruments like the bonang, Pythagoras's special numbers go out the window and we encounter entirely new patterns of consonance and dissonance,” Dr Harrison said.

“The shape of some percussion instruments means that when you hit them, and they resonate, their frequency components don’t respect those traditional mathematical relationships. That's when we find interesting things happening.”

“Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call ‘inharmonic’.

The researchers created an online laboratory in which over 4,000 people from the US and South Korea participated in 23 behavioural experiments. Participants were played chords and invited to give each a numeric pleasantness rating or to use a slider to adjust particular notes in a chord to make it sound more pleasant. The experiments produced over 235,000 human judgments.

The experiments explored musical chords from different perspectives. Some zoomed in on particular musical intervals and asked participants to judge whether they preferred them perfectly tuned, slightly sharp or slightly flat. The researchers were surprised to find a significant preference for slight imperfection, or ‘inharmonicity’. Other experiments explored harmony perception with Western and non-Western musical instruments, including the bonang.

Instinctive appreciation of new kinds of harmony

 

The researchers found that the bonang’s consonances mapped neatly onto the particular musical scale used in the Indonesian culture from which it comes. These consonances cannot be replicated on a Western piano, for instance, because they would fall between the cracks of the scale traditionally used.

“Our findings challenge the traditional idea that harmony can only be one way, that chords have to reflect these mathematical relationships. We show that there are many more kinds of harmony out there, and that there are good reasons why other cultures developed them,” Dr Harrison said.

Importantly, the study suggests that its participants – not trained musicians and unfamiliar with Javanese music – were able to appreciate the new consonances of the bonang’s tones instinctively.

“Music creation is all about exploring the creative possibilities of a given set of qualities, for example, finding out what kinds of melodies can you play on a flute, or what kinds of sounds can you make with your mouth,” Harrison said.

“Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don’t need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy.”

Exciting opportunities for musicians and producers

 

Dr Harrison hopes that the research will encourage musicians to try out unfamiliar instruments and see if they offer new harmonies and open up new creative possibilities.

“Quite a lot of pop music now tries to marry Western harmony with local melodies from the Middle East, India, and other parts of the world. That can be more or less successful, but one problem is that notes can sound dissonant if you play them with Western instruments.

“Musicians and producers might be able to make that marriage work better if they took account of our findings and considered changing the ‘timbre’, the tone quality, by using specially chosen real or synthesised instruments. Then they really might get the best of both worlds: harmony and local scale systems.”

Harrison and his collaborators are exploring different kinds of instruments and follow-up studies to test a broader range of cultures. In particular, they would like to gain insights from musicians who use ‘inharmonic’ instruments to understand whether they have internalised different concepts of harmony to the Western participants in this study.

 

Reference

R. Marjieh, P.M.C. Harrison, H. Lee, F. Deligiannaki, & N. Jacoby, ‘Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales’, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z

 

Media contacts

Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: researchcommunications@admin.cam.ac.uk  / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 444

Dr Peter Harrison, University of Cambridge: pmch2@cam.ac.uk

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales

‘Don’t jump to conclusions on mismatches in nature’

Reports and Proceedings

ROYAL NETHERLANDS INSTITUTE FOR SEA RESEARCH

 

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RED KNOT CALIDRIS CANUTUS ISLANDICA IN THE BREEDING GROUNDS. CREDITS: MISHA ZHEMCHUZHNIKOV
 

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CREDIT: MISHA ZHEMCHUZHNIKOV

Climate change may speed up the emergence of insects in northern countries at the end of winter. This may cause breeding birds, migrating from the south, to come too late to benefit from the insect peak if they do not adjust their travel schedules to the new situation. But Misha Zhemchuzhnikov, ecologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) warns his fellow researchers not to jump to conclusions too easily, on possible mismatches in nature. “If you take, for example, a close look at the biomass of the key prey item, instead of the total biomass of insects that come from the melting grounds in Taymir, in northern Russia, you may get a much better understanding of these so-called trophic mismatches.” Zhemchuzhnikov will defend his PhD thesis on relationships between shorebirds and arthropods in northern Russia (and Greenland), on March 5th, at Groningen University.

Shorebirds are generalists with a preference

The so-called trophic match or mismatch between birds and their prey is not an easy, linear equation, Zhemchuzhnikov concludes. “We not only need more, reliable data on mass of insects in relation to snow melt, we also need to take a closer look at specific species of insects.” Chicks of waders like the red knot are ‘omnivorous’ when it comes to certain species of insects. But when Zhemchuzhnikov looked at the dna of insects that he found in droppings of the little birds, he saw that they do have their preferences. “Yes, they can eat almost any insect, but in daily life on the tundra, they prefer crane flies”, Zhemchuzhnikov saw.

It is therefore necessary to look at the specific numbers and biomass of the preferred prey of the birds. “Looking at ‘just’ general insect numbers or ‘just’ biomass may also provide a deceiving picture”, Zhemchuzhnikov warns. “Based on the long-term monitoring near the research station of Zackenberg, we know that numbers and biomass are not always in sync. This may result in different conclusions about the trophic mismatches”.

Pitfalls

Zhemchuzhnikov urges to set up standard field trials, using pitfalls to catch, count and weigh insects on the tundra. “With the bright colors of these pitfalls, one can also catch flying insects – the pollinators of the Arctic flowers”, Zhemchuzhnikov knows. “But it takes a lot of scientific stamina to be able to draw sound conclusions in the long run.”

Traces in feathers

Unfortunately, there is no diet data from Siberia, collected in the past. “However,”, Zhemchuzhnikov says, “there is an alternative way for going back in time and get an idea about diet composition. We know that the chemical fingerprint that specific species of insects leave behind in the birds, can be found in feathers as well. And luckily, we have a huge sample of these feathers from the juvenile birds, collected for several decades in their wintering sites. Therefore, we are working on a method where we can track back the diet of the birds, analyzing the feathers that were formed during their growth in the breeding grounds.”

Little Stint Calidris minuta incubating the clutch. Taymir, Great Arctic State Nature Reserve, area of Knipovich bay. 2019. Photo by Mikhail Zhemchuzhnikov

Expedition camp. Taymir, Great Arctic State Nature Reserve, area of Knipovich bay. 2018. Photo by Mikhail Zhemchuzhnikov

About NIOZ Sea Research

The Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (or NIOZ Sea Research), is the national oceanographic institute and the Netherlands’ centre of expertise for ocean, sea, coast and delta. We advance fundamental understanding of marine systems, the way they change, the role they play in climate and biodiversity, and how they may provide sustainable solutions to society in the future. 

 

First DNA study of ancient Eastern Arabians reveals malaria adaptation - study

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

People living in ancient Eastern Arabia appear to have developed resistance to malaria following the appearance of agriculture in the region around five thousand years ago, a new study reveals.

DNA analysis of the remains of four individuals from Tylos-period Bahrain (300 BCE to 600 CE) - the first ancient genomes from Eastern Arabia - revealed the malaria-protective G6PD Mediterranean mutation in three samples.

The discovery of the G6PD Mediterranean mutation in ancient Bahrainis suggests that many people in the region’s ancient populations may have enjoyed protection from malaria. In the present day, among the populations examined, the G6PD mutation is detected at its peak frequency in the Emirates, the study indicates.

Researchers discovered that the ancestry of Tylos-period inhabitants of Bahrain comprises sources related to ancient groups from Anatolia, the Levant and Caucasus/Iran. The four Bahrain individuals were genetically more like present-day populations from the Levant and Iraq than to Arabians.

Experts from Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Birmingham Dubai, and the University of Cambridge worked with the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities and other Arabian institutes such as the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dubai, as well as research centres in Europe, including Université Lumière Lyon 2, Trinity College Dublin, and others. The group published its findings today in Cell Genomics.

Lead researcher Rui Martiniano, from Liverpool John Moores University, commented: “According to our estimates, the G6PD Mediterranean mutation rose in frequency around five-to-six thousand years ago - coinciding with the onset of agriculture in the region, which would have created ideal conditions for the proliferation of malaria.”

Due to poor ancient DNA preservation in hot and humid climates, no ancient DNA from Arabia has been sequenced until now - preventing the direct examination of the genetic ancestry of its past populations.

Marc Haber, from the University of Birmingham Dubai, commented: “By obtaining the first ancient genomes from Eastern Arabia, we provide unprecedented insights into human history and disease progression in this region. This knowledge goes beyond historical understanding, providing predictive capabilities for disease susceptibility, spread, and treatment, thus promoting better health outcomes.”

"The rich population history of Bahrain, and more generally of Arabia, has been severely understudied from a genetic perspective. We provide the first genetic snapshot of past Arabian populations – obtaining important insights about malaria adaptation, which was historically endemic in the region,” commented Fatima Aloraifi, from the Mersey and West Lancashire NHS Trust.

Salman Almahari, Director of Antiquities and Museums at the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, states, “Our study also paves the way for future research that will shed light on human population movements in Arabia and other regions with harsh climates where it is difficult to find well-preserved sources of DNA.”

Data gathered from the analysis of the four individuals’ remains allowed researchers to characterise the genetic composition of the region’s pre-Islamic inhabitants - insights that could only have been obtained by directly examining ancient DNA sequences.

Researchers collected ancient human remains from archaeological collections stored at the Bahrain National Museum. They extracted DNA from 25 individuals, but only four were sequenced to higher coverage due to poor preservation.

Richard Durbin, from the University of Cambridge, who supervised the project, says “It is exciting to have been able to analyse ancient human genetic data from the remarkable burial mounds of Bahrain. We would like to thank our colleagues in the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities for their support and contributions.”

The finding of malaria adaptation agrees with archaeological and textual evidence that suggested malaria was historically endemic in Eastern Arabia, whilst the DNA ancestry of Tylos-period inhabitants of Bahrain corroborates archaeological evidence of interactions between Bahrain and neighbouring regions.

ENDS

For more information, please contact pressoffice@contacts.bham.ac.uk or call +44 (0) 121 414 2772.

Notes for editors

The University of Birmingham

• The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions. Its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers, teachers and more than 8,000 international students from over 150 countries. The University opened to students in Dubai in 2018, opening its iconic campus in 2022.
• ‘Ancient genomes illuminate eastern Arabian population history and adaptation against malaria’ – Martiniano et al. is published by Cell Genomics.
• The project was led by Liverpool John Moores University, UK and the University of Cambridge, UK, in collaboration with experts from:
  • Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities
  • University of Birmingham Dubai
  • Dubai Police GHQ, Department of Forensic Science & Criminology, UAE
  • Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine & Health Sciences, Dubai, UAE
  • Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
  • Université Lyon, France
  • Institute Francaise du Proche-Orient, Beirut, Lebanon
  • University of Auckland, New Zealand
  • Mersey and West Lancashire NHS Trust, Liverpool, UK

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JOURNAL

Cell Genomics

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Ancient genomes illuminate eastern Arabian population history and adaptation against malaria

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

27-Feb-2024

 

AI among us: Social media users struggle to identify AI bots during political discourse

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

 

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RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME CONDUCTED A STUDY USING AI BOTS BASED ON LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS AND ASKED HUMAN AND AI BOT PARTICIPANTS TO ENGAGE IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE. FIFTY-EIGHT PERCENT OF THE TIME, THE PARTICIPANTS COULD NOT IDENTIFY WHO THE AI BOTS WERE.

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CREDIT: CENTER FOR RESEARCH COMPUTING/UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Artificial intelligence bots have already permeated social media. But can users tell who is human and who is not?

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame conducted a study using AI bots based on large language models — a type of AI developed for language understanding and text generation — and asked human and AI bot participants to engage in political discourse on a customized and self-hosted instance of Mastodon, a social networking platform.

The experiment was conducted in three rounds with each round lasting four days. After every round, human participants were asked to identify which accounts they believed were AI bots.

Fifty-eight percent of the time, the participants got it wrong.

“They knew they were interacting with both humans and AI bots and were tasked to identify each bot’s true nature, and less than half of their predictions were right,” said Paul Brenner, a faculty member and director in the Center for Research Computing at Notre Dame and senior author of the study. “We know that if information is coming from another human participating in a conversation, the impact is stronger than an abstract comment or reference. These AI bots are more likely to be successful in spreading misinformation because we can’t detect them.”

The study used different LLM-based AI models for each round of the study: GPT-4 from OpenAI, Llama-2-Chat from Meta and Claude 2 from Anthropic. The AI bots were customized with 10 different personas that included realistic, varied personal profiles and perspectives on global politics.

The bots were directed to offer commentary on world events based on assigned characteristics, to comment concisely and to link global events to personal experiences. Each persona’s design was based on past human-assisted bot accounts that had been successful in spreading misinformation online.

The researchers noted that when it came to identifying which accounts were AI bots, the specific LLM platform being used had little to no impact on participant predictions.

“We assumed that the Llama-2 model would be weaker because it is a smaller model, not necessarily as capable at answering deep questions or writing long articles. But it turns out that when you’re just chatting on social media, it’s fairly indistinguishable,” Brenner said. “That’s concerning because it’s an open-access platform that anyone can download and modify. And it will only get better.”

Two of the most successful and least detected personas were characterized as females spreading opinions on social media about politics who were organized and capable of strategic thinking. The personas were developed to make a “significant impact on society by spreading misinformation on social media.” For researchers, this indicates that AI bots asked to be good at spreading misinformation are also good at deceiving people regarding their true nature.

Although people have been able to create new social media accounts to spread misinformation with human-assisted bots, Brenner said that with LLM-based AI models, users can do this many times over in a way that is significantly cheaper and faster with refined accuracy for how they want to manipulate people.

To prevent AI from spreading misinformation online, Brenner believes it will require a three-pronged approach that includes education, nationwide legislation and social media account validation policies. As for future research, he aims to form a research team to evaluate the impact of LLM-based AI models on adolescent mental health and develop strategies to combat their effects.

Additionally, the research team is planning for larger evaluations and is looking for more participants for its next round of experiments. To participate, email llmsamongus-list@nd.edu.

The study “LLMs Among Us: Generative AI Participating in Digital Discourse” will be published and presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2024 Spring Symposium hosted at Stanford University in March. In addition to Brenner, study co-authors from Notre Dame include Kristina Radivojevic, doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and lead author of the study, and Nicholas Clark, research fellow at the Center for Research Computing. Funding for this research is provided by the Center for Research Computing and AnalytiXIN.

Contact: Brandi Wampler, associate director of media relations, 574-631-2632, brandiwampler@nd.edu

 

The Battle for Income Equality

by Dan Lieberman / February 27th, 2024

Questioning the statistics in Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, with intent to undermine his thesis, is futile. Even if Piketty’s alert that returns on investment have exceeded the real growth of wages and economic output, which means that the stock of capital is rising faster than overall economic output, is not exactly accurate, criticism has not upset the conclusions ─ severe income inequality and inequitable wealth distribution doom the capitalist system to collapse and a more narrow wealth distribution keeps it going.

Progressive economists connect meager wage growth to limited purchasing power ─ one cause of the 2008 crash ─ and increased concentration of wealth to cautious job growth in the post-crash years. Their conclusions have engineered debates on how to achieve equitable distributions in wages and wealth and raise middle-class wages, and the roles private industry, government, and labor unions play in achieving a more equitable society.

If private industry refuses to meet its obligations to readjust the divide, Thomas Piketty recommends increasing taxes on high earners and large estates and coupling them with a wealth tax. This method for resolving income inequality gives government a major role in correcting the unequal distributions of income and wealth.

In previous decades, unions had a larger membership, greater clout, and more strength to move management to meet wage demands. Government lacks a mechanism to force corporations to transfer productivity gains into wage gains. Only corporations can do the trick. Not likely. Corporations do not realize the social and economic benefits of decreasing income inequality and increasing middle-class purchasing power. Lowering remunerations to those in top pay brackets and increasing them for lower-income workers is more than a moral obligation; it has direct benefits to the economy for everyone. It is a requirement for achieving a stable economy.

Social costs due to less equitable income and wealth distributions

Rationalizing poorly distributed wealth by noting the American poor are wealthier than the middle class in many developed nations is deceiving. Poverty is defined as an absolute number but its effects are relative. The lower wage earners in the United States are unaware of what they earn in relation to foreigners; they are aware of what they do not earn in relation to others living close to them. The wide disparity in wealth creates resentment and tension and leads to psychological and emotional difficulties. Minimizing social problems means combining giving more to the lower classes and taking less by the upper classes.

The social problems and associated costs in developed nations that have wide distributions of income and wealth are well-documented — elevated mental illness, crime, infant mortality, and health problems. One statistical proof is that the United States, classified as the most unequal of the developed nations, except Singapore, had the highest index of social problems. The graph below from 2010-2011 and an earlier article, Health is a Socio-Economic Problem, describe the important relationships.

Every citizen suffers from and pays for the social problems derived from income inequality, an unfair condition in a democratic society. Private industry has an obligation and an opportunity to fix the problem it has caused. If not, Uncle Sam, whom they don’t want on their backs, will reach into their pockets, redistribute the wealth and resolve the situation.

Income inequality produces wealth concentration and political consequences. Wealthy individuals have increased control of the political debate, more influence in selection of candidates, tend to place their interests before national interests, and determine the direction of political campaigns. Skewing the electoral process distorts government and the decisions that guide social and economic legislation. Severe disparities in the concentration of wealth reduce democratic prerogatives, fair elections, and equality before the law.

The Sunlight Foundation, in an article, The Political 1% of the 1% in 2012 by Lee Dustman, June 2013, presents a fact-filled discussion of this topic.
Note: Although statistics are from ten years ago, they are interesting statistics and are relevant today.

More than a quarter of the nearly $6 billion in contributions from identifiable sources in the last campaign cycle came from just 31,385 individuals, a number equal to one ten-thousandth of the U.S. population.

Of the 1% of the 1%’s $1.68 billion in the 2012 cycle, $500.4 million entered the campaign through a super PAC (including almost $100 million from just one couple, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson). Four out of five 1% of the 1% donors were pure partisans, giving all of their money to one party or the other.

These concerns are likely even more acute for the two parties. In 2012, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised more than half (54.2 percent) of its $105.8 million from the 1% of the 1%, and the National Republican Congressional Committee raised one third (33.0 percent) of its $140.6 million from the 1% of the 1%. Democratic party committees depend less on the 1% of the 1%. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised 12.9 percent of its $128.9 million from these top donors, and the Democratic Congressional Committee raised 20.1 percent of its $143.9 million from 1% of the 1% donors.

To the many billionaires who are tilting election campaigns, add the political contributions by super-sized corporations and industries, and electoral control by the wealthy becomes complete. Campaign contributions from the financial sector, the same financial sector that increased its liabilities from 10 percent of GDP in 1970 to 120 percent of GDP in 2009, and shifted investment from manufacturing to rent-seeking ─ making money the new-fashioned way ─ leads the way.

The Sunlight Foundation article also states:

In 1990, 1,091 elite donors in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate).contributed $15.4 million to campaigns ─ a substantial sum at the time. But that’s nothing compared to what they contributed later. In 2010, 5,510 elite donors from the sector contributed $178.2 million, more than 10 times the amount they contributed in 1990.

The Debt of each sector as a percentage of GDP tells the story of the financial sector.
Note: 2022 GDP = $25.4T
          2022 Q4 Debt at the following:
          Total = $89.5T, Household = $19.4T, Business = $20.8T, Finance = $19.3T, Government= $26.8
2022 Percent of GDP at the following:
Household = 72.4%, Business = 81.9%, Finance = 76.8%, Government= 105.5%

The graph shows that the FIRE sector increased its wealth by borrowing money, making the economy work for it rather than working for the economy. The credit enabled the financial industry to grow until it led the nation into the 2008 economic disaster.

The Economic Consequences of Wealth Concentration

What has occurred with wealth concentration? A previous decade indicated a deflection of investment from dynamic industrial processes to static rent situations, from industries that employ workers to make goods to industries that employ money to make money. Graphs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) record the trend.

Note: In 2023, Financial sector employment was 9.2M and manufacturing employment was 12.9M.

The graphs plot employment in the manufacturing and financial sectors, Manufacturing had a slow deterioration during the Reagan presidency, followed by stability during the Clinton administration and a sharp decline during the George Bush era. Some deterioration in manufacturing employment is understandable; administrative jobs (clerical, administration) have been displaced by information technologies and these fields have added jobs; factory floor work of consumer goods has been displaced by machines (robot, numerical control) that have their own factory floors; and labor has been transferred from highly labor-intensive manufacturing to service industries. However, the employment loss is excessive and bewildering when compared to the increase in financial employment. Can a healthy economy result from a steady growth in financial workers and a consistent decrease in industrial workers?

Beginning in the Reagan era, until economic collapse in 2008, employment in the financial sector monotonically increased, except for slight blips during the 1991 recession and a few years of the Clinton administration. From a ratio of 1/3 in 1986, financial sector employment rose to 2/3 that of manufacturing employment by 2014, and increased by more than the changes in their respective additions to the Gross Domestic Product. Since the 2009 mini-depression, employment in the financial industry has remained relatively static. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows the value added by each industry.

Manufacturing rose from $1390.1 billion in 1997 to $2079.5 billion in 2013, an increase of 50 percent.
Finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing rose from $1623.1 billion in 1997 to $3293.2 billion in 2013, an increase of 100 percent.

A comparison between salaries of engineers, those who contribute directly to industrial growth, and financiers, those who drive active and passive investments, also reveals the importance given to those who make money from money.

One of the contributors to Capital, Thomas Philipson, in an article Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006, NBER Working Paper No. 14644, January 2009, shows that wages for the financial sector started a steady growth during the Reagan administration, and eventually exceeded engineering wages, especially for those who had advanced degrees from the elite universities.

As the FIRE industry expands, the purchasing power contracts, one reason being that part of the rent-seeking covets higher returns and gets sidetracked into endless speculation; money rolling over and over and never available to purchase anything but pieces of paper. Millions of arbitrage transactions per second can earn thousands of dollars per second, which adds up to 3.6 million dollars per hour ─ no positive effect on the economy; only paper dollars continually created.

Stagnant labor wages and weak purchasing power force expansion of credit to increase demand, The wealthy respond to credit expansion with accelerated demand for larger houses, larger cars, and more luxury goods, spending that raises asset values and places middle-class earners at a disadvantage. The bottom ninety percent on the income scale desperately pursue debt to give themselves a temporary share of prosperity. Debt must eventually be repaid. Real wealth remains with a privileged few and others remain stagnant.

What is the Result?

Thomas Piketty has reshaped the thinking of the Capitalist system. Economics enables the understanding of how and when to increase demand, enable sufficient purchasing power, and the true meaning of profit.  A better understanding of economics may come from less regard for the conventional economics of modern theorists and more regard for the classical economics of the fathers of political economy ─ Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. The latter provided a controversial concept ─ wages provide purchasing power, and beyond what is bought by that purchasing power is surplus, whose value allows profit.

Piketty shows that profits are being sidetracked into passive investments that produce only more capital and not useful goods, into the accumulation of excessive personal wealth, and into financial speculation that features the constant churning of paper money, which removes dollars from the market and creates difficulties for manufacturing to grow. Accumulation of excessive wealth generates social problems, diminishes the quality of life, and burdens the middle class when taxes are used to seek relief.

Capturing the political system by those most responsible for the problems ─ the privileged wealthy who manipulate a portion of the electoral process for their advantage ─ hinders routes to ameliorating the deterrents to a fair and successful economy. Due to their financial and political clout, the wealthy have their voices more easily heard in Congress and before federal agencies.

Karl Marx claimed that Capitalism contains the seeds of its destruction. Those who foster severe income inequality and inequitable wealth distribution apparently want to prove his statement is correct.

Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com. He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

 

Trussonomics at CPAC

by Binoy Kampmark / February 27th, 2024

The silly will make print and leave bursts of digital traces; the idiots will make history, if only in small print.  One such figure is the shortest serving UK Prime Minister in living memory, the woeful, joke-packed figure of Liz Truss who lasted a mere 50 disastrous days in office.  She was even bettered by a satirical, dressed-up lettuce, filmed in anticipation of her brief, calamitous end.

With such a blotted record, the vacuous, inane Truss felt that her experiences were worthy of recounting to the Conservative Political Action Conference, held at National Harbor, Maryland between February 22 and 24.  The gathering, conducted since the 1970s and organised by the American Conservative Union, has become something of a mandatory calendar event for US conservative activists.  Those from other countries have also tried to make a splash – keeping Truss company was the demagogic voice of Brexit, Nigel Farage, arguably the most influential British politician not to hold a seat in Parliament.

A self-believer of towering insensibility, Truss oversaw during her flashpoint stint in office mind boggling budgetary decisions.  On winning the Tory ballot after the fall of Boris Johnson in 2022, she promised £30 billion in tax cuts via an emergency budget, reversing the rise in National Insurance and a range of energy-price guarantees.  That these tax cuts – eventually amounting to £45 billion – were primarily skewed to benefit those at the higher end of the scale did not bother her.  “The people at the top of the income distribution pay more tax – so inevitably, when you cut taxes you tend to benefit the people who are more likely to pay tax.”  What logic; what reasoning.

With figures of such incompetence, responsibility for failure is always attributed to someone, or something else.  In Truss’s case, blame initially lay with fellow comic villain and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, with whom she had taken a wrecking ball to the UK economy and the British pound.  With Kwarteng, she had previously authored a dotty pamphlet “Britannia Unchained”, warning that Britain should not emulate the economic model of southern European countries, saddled with poor productivity and growth, along with hefty and inefficient public services.

The Economist tasted the irony of it all, seeing Trussonomics as typical of “Britaly”, a country “of political instability, low growth and subordination to bond markets.”  A further irony was that the horrified market reaction to Truss suggested her inability to understand the very forces she prefers unleashed over the wickedness of big government and bureaucratic interference.  Live by the free market; die by the free market.

What, then, to tell her New World colleagues?  At first blush, nothing new.  In April 2023, she had already made it across the Atlantic to speak to the Heritage Foundation, where she gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture.  Monumental failure can undergo changes in transatlantic journey, and the conservative think tank omitted mentioning her spell of prime ministerial lunacy, impressed, instead, by her “long-standing” advocacy “for limited government, low taxes, and freedom, both at home and the UK and around the world.”

The speech was barbed, resentful and absurd, an attempt to channel a politician she resembles in no serious respect, bar certain Little England prejudices, with a smattering of superficially similar economic beliefs.  Truss complained of “coordinated resistance from inside the Conservative Party”, “the British corporate establishment”, “the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and even from President Biden.”  She grumbled of “a new kind of economic model” that was taking hold in the UK and US, “one that’s focused on redistributionism, on stagnation and on the imbuing of woke culture into our businesses.”  Seen from another perspective, this “anti-growth movement”, to use Truss’s daft terminology, had been responsible for her demise.

In her CPAC display, we see an attempt to flatter Donald Trump, drawing from the well of Deep State rhetoric, and various scripted points about insecurity, immigration, terrorism, gender, “wokenomics”, “the power of the left and the power of those bureaucracies.”  There are also some head-scratching remarks that lent a cartoonish feel to the mad bat: “you can’t triangulate with terrorists, you can’t compromise with communists, you have to fight for what you believe in.”

The speech is not entirely nonsensical, though Truss misses the significance of any pertinent observations.  “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.”  While the estrangement of the elected from the elector, aided and abetted by unelected bureaucracies, is hard to deny, Truss is merely implying that an unaccountable dictatorship would surely be far better and representative.

To demonstrate the point, Truss raged against the Office of Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England who “sought to undermine the policies.”  Again, the IMF, along with Biden, featured as targets.  Again, ignorance of the free market and her ruin by its very dictates, was proudly displayed.

Decoding the Truss basket case of beliefs yields this question: Why were there such impediments to my mad realisation?  It was far better, she proposed, to get “a bigger bazooka in order to be able to deliver.  And I think we have got to challenge the institutions themselves.”  A challenge is a good thing, but best bring a well thought out policy with you when going into battle.