A Language Model Trained with Populscience

Since this blog has almost 550 posts, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the information you're looking for, my friend Manuel Márquez suggested allowing readers to ask questions to a Language Model (LLM) trained with the blog's content. I thought it was an excellent idea, so I used Google's NotebookLM tool, and you can use it from now on.

One of the features this product offers is the automatic generation of blog posts. To test it, as an experiment, I requested it to generate one, without specifying a particular topic. Of course, I’ll go on writing my posts without the help of the LLM. Before publishing it here, I corrected it manually, because there were many references to my name (which I removed), and also some curious errors, such as making its title 5 Keys to the Universe, 'AI,' and Evolution and then dividing the text into six points. The following is the resulting post, which summarizes the content of this blog in just two pages:

500 posts in PopulScience

This is the 500th post I have published on the Spanish version of this blog, just after 11 years since the creation of, on January 15, 2014. The English blog, PopulScience, where I almost always publish the same posts, translated into English, came about later. I did not publish the first article until August 12, 2014, so it was half a year late. However, over the years, it has gradually recovered the lost ground, to the point that right now there are 498 posts, only two less than the Spanish blog.

Why is this? It is very simple: in the United States the summer holidays are shorter and end in mid-August, while in Spain the whole month of August is a non-working month. When I take a vacation from the blog, I stop publishing posts in the Spanish version for most of July and all of August, and start the new course at the beginning of September. On the English blog, however, I start in mid-August, and so every year I catch up on two or three posts. After eleven years, I have almost made up for the half-year delay that the English blog was behind. This summer, God willing, the two blogs will be on a par.

Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience

Next Monday marks ten years since the creation of my blog Populscience (called Divulciencia in its Spanish version). In this time, I have published 438 articles in both languages, plus another fifteen only in Spanish and eleven only in English.

You may remember that in the post I published one year ago to celebrate the nine years of existence of the blog, I included a figure that seemed to indicate that, after reaching a maximum of about 6,000 visits per month in October 2018, this number slowly decreased until reaching about 3000 visits (one half) in January 2023.

One year later, the figure is this:

Is popular science in crisis?

In the last thirty years, interest in scientific popularization has decreased worryingly. Perhaps not unrelated to this is the loss of prestige of science, which the man in the street tends to consider guilty or accomplice in some threats, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the uncontrolled destruction of the environment or climate change.

During this time, several permanent sections of the media dedicated to popular scientific have disappeared, as well as a few important magazines, while books on popular science do not usually achieve great sales, with few exceptions, mainly related to health.

In the mass media, the only thing that matters now is the appeal of the headline, at the expense of scientific accuracy. Thus the effects of this type of dissemination are often negative and counterproductive: instead of informing, they distort the public opinion. I have spoken about the harmful effects of this type of disclosure in several posts in this blog.

The golden age of scientific popularization

Scientific popularization, as it was carried out after 1970, can be divided into three large groups:

• High-level scientific popularization, represented by magazines aimed at readers with a good scientific base, who want to stay up to date on the advances made in disciplines other than their own:

o   Scientific American, which had entered its second century of existence and published monthly each year less than one hundred long select articles, in addition to a small number of short information articles. Its prestige increased even more when it became the medium through which some important discoveries were made public, this journal being chosen instead of better-known scientific publications, such as Nature or Science. Thus, in October 1970, Martin Gardner published in his section (Mathematical Games) the first article dedicated to the Game of Life, devised by the British mathematician John Conway: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". And in May 1975, Gregory Chaitin published in Scientific American his famous article Randomness and Mathematical Proof, where he showed that the randomness of integers is undecidable, an undecidability theorem comparable to Gödel’s.

The prehistory of scientific popularization

Being interested in the world, being curious to find out the causes of natural phenomena, is as old as man, but in the strict sense one cannot speak of science until the invention of writing, as the knowledge communicated through oral transmission was disorganized, imprecise, and fragmentary. For science to appear, the body of knowledge must constitute a coherent and ordered whole, which was practically impossible before more permanent means of storing information than human memory could be used.

As soon as writing systems appeared in the Middle East, India, China and America, sciences began to develop. The first three were medicine, mathematics, and astrology. They arose for practical reasons: to cure diseases; for the good management of the economy; to predict natural phenomena related to the cycle of the seasons. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and geology) were less necessary for early human societies, so they did not emerge until the Greek civilization.

Will we be able to build conscious beings?

I use the term conscious beings, because the term conscious machines has materialistic connotations that I do not share, while artificial intelligence has been burned and abused by generalist media.

Before trying to answer this question, I want to make a few previous clarifications:

1. We are now capable of building conscious beings: our children. Four billion years of evolution have led to the appearance of a type of beings (us) endowed with self-awareness and capable of reproducing. This was a natural process, which we have not designed ourselves, but has been given to us since before we existed. However, when someone poses the question in the title of this post, it is usually interpreted thus: will we be able to build artificial conscious beings, by means other than natural, devised and developed exclusively by ourselves?