Years ago, when my daughter was just two, I hired a babysitter who checked all the boxes. She was attentive and responsible, and she seemed to genuinely care for my child. And yet…something felt off. I couldn’t explain it. We barely communicated beyond work-related tasks, and being around her felt uncomfortable in ways I couldn’t put into words.

So, I let her go a month later—still unsure why.

Weeks after, I began finding tiny sewing needles in unusual places: by the front door, in the corners of my bedroom. At first, I dismissed it. But then a friend from my culture pointed something out: in some traditions, placing sharp objects like needles in hidden spaces is part of magic rituals meant to harm or manipulate a household. Whether one believes in this or not, it shook me. My body knew something was wrong—before my mind could catch up.

During my first pregnancy, for example, I was walking in the park with my ex-husband, feeling healthy and joyful. Out of nowhere, I said, “If I die, name her Aru. If it’s a boy, name him Zhan.” There was no discussion, no logic behind it. The names just arrived. From where? I can’t say. But I believe they came from a place beyond intellect—something that connects us to deeper wisdom.

In 2017, I was told by doctors that I had a life-threatening condition. Later, it turned out to be a mistake, but in that moment, I couldn't eat or sleep and felt ungrounded.

That night, I came home, sat on the floor, and started to pray. I turned off all noise and searched for how to meditate. I began with 60 minutes a day. I didn’t know what I was doing, but something inside me said: go deeper. And then, literally—I saw a card on my desk that said exactly that: go deeper.

Where anthropomorphization loses me

The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don't crank the shaft.

To me, wondering if this contraption will "wake up" is similarly bewildering as if I was to ask a computational meteorologist if he isn't afraid of his meteorological numerical calculation will "wake up".

I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. Statements such as "an AI agent could become an insider threat so it needs monitoring" are simultaneously unsurprising (you have a randomized sequence generator fed into your shell, literally anything can happen!) and baffling (you talk as if you believe the dice you play with had a mind of their own and could decide to conspire against you).

Instead of saying "we cannot ensure that no harmful sequences will be generated by our function, partially because we don't know how to specify and enumerate harmful sequences", we talk about "behaviors", "ethical constraints", and "harmful actions in pursuit of their goals". All of these are anthropocentric concepts that - in my mind - do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects. And using them muddles the discussion, and our thinking about what we're doing when we create, analyze, deploy and monitor LLMs.

Editor’s summary

Whether adult neurogenesis occurs in the human hippocampus is one of the most debated issues in neuroscience. Dumitru et al. used a single-cell transcriptomic approach to address this issue in human samples of various ages from birth through adulthood (see the Perspective by Quiniou and Jessberger). Machine learning algorithms helped the authors to identify proliferating neural progenitor cells in the adolescent and adult human hippocampus that resembled progenitor cells found in mouse and pig. The results support the idea that adult neurogenesis occurs in the human hippocampus and add valuable insights of scientific and medical interest. —Mattia Maroso

Still, not everyone in the field agrees that the cells identified in this study are indisputably emerging adult neurons. “When I first heard about this study, I was excited. It’s the sort of approach you would want to use to ID rare subtypes,” Shawn Sorrells, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh who co-authored the 2018 study with Paredes, tells Popular Science.

But, after a closer look, he was “disappointed by how few cells they found,” and in his view, there’s an alternate potential explanation.

“The most likely conclusion is that the cells they are looking for are rare or nonexistent in most people. The other possibility is that the cells they claim are adult neural stem cells are associated with a disease process in these individuals or some other cell type altogether.”

The human brain is full of cells that do divide and replicate throughout life called glial cells. These are the supportive and connective cells that enable neurons to do the job of conveying nerve signals. Glial cells are neurons’ pit crew. It’s possible that, in their efforts to identify neurons in progress, the study authors may have inadvertently included some glial stem cells in their analysis, Sorrells suggests.