The Importance of Community

I mentioned the book by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard, AI and the Science of Being Human, in a previous blogpost. I love its optimism about how all of us could work with AI without letting it take us over simply to make money for Silicon Valley folk, although I’m not sure I share it. The idea that groups of individuals, in their daily lives or at work, might ‘fight back’, as it were, take control of the messaging so that humanity not money wins, is wonderfully positive, but it is based around imagined ‘stories’ as much as current reality. Can we get there from here?

One thing that is very obvious about how the authors describe their new world, is that it works via a sense of community, of people coming together. As it happens Maynard was a PhD student in my own department, the Cavendish Laboratory. We must have overlapped in the department, but I’m not sure we interacted back then, and my infrequent exchanges with him since have purely been digital. Nevertheless, he describes something I well remember: the importance of the Cavendish canteen and the tea breaks we all enjoyed.

‘I remember tea breaks and seminars from when I was a grad student, where we’d get together in person and talk about everything and nothing; in the process sparking ideas and hashing out new possibilities. Now we’re all in our offices (or more likely at home), doors closed, “connecting” through email chains that nobody fully reads.’

Those tea breaks were fundamental to the rhythm of the day for condensed matter physicists, both when I was a student myself and also, later, as a young lecturer. Every research group had its own timing for turning up and its own table(s) to sit at. So, you had the opportunity to talk casually about politics, or football – or science – on a daily basis with everyone else in your group. Group sizes varied from a handful to dozens of students and postdocs, and sometimes group technicians joined in (although workshop technicians had their own space in the comfortable chairs by the window).

It built a strong sense of community, which was often extended to the pub in the evenings. Different groups had a reputation for being more or less friendly. Some academic staff were more likely to be seen in the tea room than others, but in principle you could meet and engage with anyone there. Indeed, it was in the tea room that I recall Brian Pippard (already retired from the Cavendish Chair, the senior chair in the department, but still much in evidence) questioning why I wanted to get a research grant, when I admitted my first application had been turned down. He was definitely in the ‘you can do it all with string and sealing wax’ school (although for him, this would have been along with fantastic workshops and technicians to help build the apparatus, which were properly funded by the department under the funding mechanisms of the day.)

I mention this was the case for condensed matter physicists because, as I recall, the astronomers and high energy physicists always stayed away, with their own tea room(s). In due course the theoreticians got their own fancy coffee machine and were no longer to be seen, and over time that whole habit was essentially lost, except possibly amongst the workshop technicians for whom the 30 (I believe) minute breaks were sacrosanct. I note the new Cavendish building, recently fully opened as the Ray Dolby Centre, has preserved the idea of a large tea room, open to anyone without the need to get through the security gates with a University card. It will be interesting to see how it is utilised. I was struck, on arranging a meeting with an active member of the department (as I clearly am no longer) that they chose the canteen as a place to meet, rather than their office.

That is all a long-winded way to say that personal interactions matter, access to people you might not otherwise see during the course of your day crouched over some apparatus or screen. That sense of a community where you can ask naïve questions over a cup of tea as well as discuss the latest gossip is important for science to progress. As Abbott and Maynard say ‘Digital spaces optimize for transaction, not relationships…’ I’ve not forgotten the last huge US conference I went to, now many years ago but already people were sitting in the corridors staring at phones/laptops/tablets rather than attending the talks themselves. I found it deeply dispiriting and have avoided all such conferences since. I didn’t travel across the Atlantic simply to read the emails I could have read more comfortably from my desk.

Abbott and Maynard stress the importance of working in close collaboration and discussions with others in the context of AI, neighbours as well as work colleagues, and the importance of social interactions form the backdrops to another book I’m currently reading: Pete Etchell’s Unlocked about screen time and whether or not it is bad for us, particularly for adolescents. There is mass media discussion of how bad staring at a screen can be for teenagers, but the evidence is far from clear. In part this is because looking at email is vastly different from TikTok, which is different again from gaming or watching a film, let alone doom-scrolling. Obvious though that point is, it isn’t usually possible to detect that level of nuance in headlines. Nevertheless, people matter to adolescents as to PhD students and indeed to (just about) all of us. I am very conscious of this as a retiree, where I no longer have a place of work to go to and could just spend my life staring at a screen, even if I’m reading books on my iPad rather than getting worked up by what I find on social media.

The pandemic upended all our lives, for the current generation of adolescents and those a bit older probably more than for us older folk. I appreciate that I can give webinars without stirring from my desk, or attend committees without suffering the vagaries of the trains (Cambridge to London trains seem to have been particularly unreliable recently), but if chairing I find hybrid meetings unsatisfactory however convenient. I hope we will not voluntarily return to never being in the same room as other people as the default setting which was forced on us during the Covid era; or let AI tell us what it wants us to do, without human intervention and discussion.