Did you know Boston University has a telescope facility in Arizona?
BU has owned and operated thePerkins Telescope Observatory, a dark-sky observatory site just outside of Flagstaff, since the late 1990s. (In 2019, BU became the sole owner and operator after buying out its partner, Lowell Observatory.) The facility is home to the 1.83-meter diameter Perkins Telescope, a powerful telescope used in BU astronomy courses as well as research projects like the study of jets in supermassive black holes, magnetic fields in the Milky Way, andwhite dwarf stars.
Now the Perkins Telescope has some brand-new digs. The observatory closed in April of this year for renovations on its retractable dome, a steel structure built in the 1960s. In September, the facility officially reopened with a fresh dome “skin,” as well as newly aluminized internal telescope mirrors, amounting to $400,000-plus of upgrades.
Buying out Lowell Observatory meant taking sole responsibility for deferred maintenance the Perkins telescope desperately needed, saysDan Clemens, a longtime College of Arts & Sciences professor of astronomy, who helped oversee the project. The dome, which is constructed of circular steel “ribs” covered by heavy steel panels, “had rusted to the point where it was no longer safe to just repaint, which was the panels’ standard fix,” Clemens explains.
Of course, replacing giant steel panels is no small feat.
As for the dome’s old steel panels? They were upcycled by a Lowell Observatory employee to use as material for battle-robot competitions, Clemens reports.
Other renovation difficulties included battling Arizona’s summer monsoon season (the hottest and driest on record), as well as the worries that come with working around very delicate (and expensive) equipment, says E. J. Winslow, Campus Planning & Operations senior project manager for special construction projects.
In an observatory environment, “even dropping a screw can cause havoc,” says Winslow, who oversaw the observatory renovation. “I don’t want to say that the contractors were read the Riot Act, but they were very aware of the value of everything in that room and very on top of things.”
The biggest downside, however? Missing out on stargazing while the telescope was offline. “June was just spectacular out there,” Clemens says. “It was soul-killing to watch the clear skies and know our telescope was shut down.”
In the video below, watch as the observatory sheds its decades-old skin and gets some much-needed TLC. And above, check out some recent pictures taken through the newly refurbished Perkins Telescope and its two optical instruments,PRISM and Mimir.
The villain of the latestMission: Impossiblemovie is a sentient artificial intelligence, called the Entity, that’s out for global domination. The filmmakers clearly boned up on current events, as some real-life critics are warning that AI threatens humans with the “risk of extinction.”
AI’s potential dangers convincedJuliet Floydthat we need to push the pause button on its development.
A College of Arts & Sciences professor of philosophy who specializes in science and emerging media, she is among the tens of thousands ofscientists andothers who requesteda six-month halt to the development of AI systems more powerful than the machine learning algorithm behind ChatGPT. Floyd, BU’s Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, joined high-profile signatories including Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, though not with the expectation that a pause necessarily is in the cards.
“Rather, I expressed an aspiration and solidarity with the activities of increasing numbers of people around the globe concerned about, and discussing and researching, AI and ethics,” she says.
Artificial intelligence heralds economic prosperity, medical miracles, and more. But thedoomsday concernof some, summarized by theNew York Times,is that one day, “Companies, governments or independent researchers could deploy powerful AI systems to handle everything from business to warfare. Those systems could do things that we do not want them to do. And if humans tried to interfere or shut them down, they could resist or even replicate themselves so they could keep operating.”
Less apocalyptic, but still terrifying, are fears that AI could enable “synthetic biology” advances that unleash the next pandemic, or that it could drown the 2024 presidential election in misinformation.
We asked Floyd for her views on the need for a research moratorium.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q&A WITH JULIET FLOYD
BU Today:Why did you sign the petition?
Juliet Floyd:AI can’t solve all our moral problems with algorithms, and it creates new problems. I strongly support further, intensive research into AI generally; in fact, I believe we need it desperately, and in nearly every field. I come at this from the humanities, as a philosopher interested in the ethics of society and everyday life, the better and the worse of it, the discovery of what ultimately matters. From this point of view, we are all stakeholders in our future, and it is time for the engineers and economists to occasionally exit the lab and put work into learning how to discuss these things inclusively and conscientiously and reflectively.
The humanities are becoming more and more foundational in our world, because the capacity to pursue questions we all ask, each from our own individual perspective, is a prerequisite for guiding our journey to a better place. We cannot allow ourselves to become creatures of nudging technology alone.
What about the apocalyptic worry that, someday, AI could be an “existential” threat to humanity?
If computational biology can create cures for terrible diseases, it is obvious that it can be used to create superbugs and biological technologies that have catastrophic potential. Just as concerned scientists and members of the public called for serious discussion of nuclear weapons management from the 1950s onward—and biologists have met to discuss cloning, DNA databases, and nanotechnologies in recent decades—the time has come for discussion of how to protect life in the face of AI, whose workings connect far more immediately to us in the day-to-day than even nuclear physics and biology do. In the 1950s, Alan Turing made several broadcasts on the BBC to respond to cultural hysteria about the existence of an “electronic brain.” We’ve been here before, but AI is ever more powerful in seeping into the interstices of everyday life for most humans on the planet, and a broad discussion is needed.
Critics say AI such as ChatGPT is a source of misinformation. In a society where election denialism fueled an insurrection, is this grounds for a pause?
ChatGPT is not surprising to me. Ordinary language philosophers emphasized in the 1950s that a great deal of our everyday language use is highly predictable, and this is what ChatGPT is built on. Judge P. Kevin Castel recently ruled against a lawyer who submitted a brief filled with nonexistent cases and rulings that had beencreated by ChatGPT. The law won’t work if we have to constantly wonder whether briefs and motions are filled with falsehoods. And the web won’t work if ChatGPT-generated nonsense feeds on its own productions, cramming the airways. We require human checks and efforts; a great deal of new forms of work and creativity will have to go into design of this. A widely shared sense of the importance of how to discuss humanity’s values is crucial. This is what the humanities is for.
ChatGPT can generate a boring C+ paper if it’s short. So what? If this is all the writer cares about doing, it may be our job to say, “I could show you how to do better, something far more interesting.” Most students want to know how to do better; they want to learn how to think, not merely what to think. ChatGPT has already changed the way writing is taught, and I suspect there are opportunities here. My students are writing in journals as part of every class. They are sharing their editing of drafts with me, as well as their experiences with ChatGPT—many find it boring.
The academy and our halls of justice and politics were for too long filled primarily with white gentleman scholars. Now, thanks in part to AI, we may hope that not only access to information, but also the support generated by forms of intense discussion and self-development may be opened up to, and corrected, by everyone.
In Europe there has been legislation to protect privacy and legislation against Facebook. There are many large, international university research grants dealing with AI, sustainability, and smart cities—e.g., in Singapore, where philosophers and ethicists sit on boards. There is a large push on ethics at UNESCO as well. In the United States, there will have to be legislation. Many software developers want legislation if it allows them to understand the field they are playing in, because the Wild West isn’t fun. Cyberlaw is a crucial area of research and education and will be pursued intensively, ideally with the help of faculty and students versed in anthropology, history, and the arts and humanities generally.
I’ve learned much from attending workshops with theCyber Security, Law and Society Allianceat Boston University, a concerned group of faculty brought together through the Hariri Institute and the School of Law. They regularly discuss these matters and are making fundamental contributions to the handling of privacy, disinformation, cybersecurity, and pursuing much-needed discussion of how to mitigate harmful impacts on vulnerable members of our society that AI has already begun to cause. A pause on large training models would allow us to reflect and discuss what we care about, including how to invest in developing ways to include the voices and perspectives of the young, the marginalized, and vulnerable populations in the design of AI in the future.
Don’t forgetHAL’s unforgiving responsein Kubrick’s2001: A Space Odysseywhen Dave asked him to open the pod bay doors.
Daylin Frantin and Ben Sorkin grew up together on Long Island and spent summers upstate at Sorkin’s family cabin on Lake George, where the pair put in a lot of time together working on old boat engines.
“He would always drag me along for strange trips to buy old outboard motors from local folks around the lake,” Frantin says. “As young as middle school, he was fixing outboards, and he made me his assistant. I liked the boating part, but hated the fixing part.”
Now the friends lead Flux Marine Ltd., a start-up that is tantalizingly close to turning the small marine engine market on its head. “We always knew we were going to get it done,” Frantin says, despite many setbacks and challenges. “The passion for the idea kept us going.”
Sorkin went off to Princeton to study engineering, interning at Tesla and writing his thesis on efficient engines. Frantin attended BU’s Questrom School of Business, where he studied business administration, with concentrations in finance and accounting.
He left campus in 2019 with a few liberal arts requirements unfulfilled because he and Sorkin had gotten serious about creating an electric outboard.
Such an outboard would be better for the environment and require less maintenance than those old gas engines they’d worked on. Along with Sorkin’s Princeton friend Jonathan Lord, a heavyweight crew team member and fellow engineer, they founded Flux, a start-up now based on the harbor in East Greenwich, R.I., in 2018. A year later, Flux was a full-time job—if not always a paying one.
Many people already have electric motors on a skiff or canoe, of course—dinky trolling motors that will, eventually, get them from one fishing hole to another. At the high end, you can buy a powerboat with an expensive inboard electric motor to cruise over to the yacht club. The Flux team has a different vision: bringing a reliable, nonpolluting electric motor for marine use to a mass market.
“Unlike our competitors, who are just repurposing gas outboards and putting a new power head on them, we’re designing this from the ground up,” Lord says, “which is allowing us to fully realize all the benefits of electric propulsion.”
The name Flux Marine has a dual meaning, one derived from the definition of “flux”—“We are bringing change to the marine industry,” Frantin says—and the other from engineering—a magnetic flux field is responsible for generating torque in an electric motor. “Without flux, there is no power.”
They say the advantages of the Flux engine are obvious, among them:
Clean energy:Outboard motors are notorious polluters, from gas exhaust fumes in the air to fuel leaks into the water. “Recreational boating releases a tremendous amount of uncombusted gasoline into the environment each year, with researchers suggesting a range from a low of 150 million gallons to a high of 420 million,” according to a story on theEastBayRI website. “It is estimated that operating a family-sized pleasure craft for one hour releases the same amount of pollution as driving a typical gasoline-powered car for 800 miles.”
Superior performance:With the electric motor, Lord says, “you get high torque at low RPMs, which means it’s a totally different proposition than a gas engine. You can use a larger prop, so it’s much faster 0-to-20 and has a higher top speed with higher efficiency.”
Low maintenance:No moving parts or internal combustion means less maintenance. Plus it’s easier to charge a boat than a car: most marinas and other docking facilities have power available so you can plug your Flux motor right in for a charge that takes just a few hours.
Sorkin is Flux Marine CEO, Frantin is COO, and Lord is CTO. But all 3 are deeply involved in all aspects of the business, which currently employs 15 people, including the founders and 5 other full-time employees. Andy Whitman (ENG’20) is their subsea systems engineer, and more than one BU student has rotated through as an intern.
It’s been a long and sometimes rocky cruise. They’ve entered contests—including finishing third and winning $4,000 in an Innovate@BUNew Ventures competitionback in 2018. Together and separately, they’ve worked on the project at BU and in the Seaport, all around Rhode Island, and even in Hawaii—wherever they could find cheap, or better yet, free, workspace.
Flux Marine founders Jonathan Lord (from left), Ben Sorkin, and Daylin Frantin on the dock in East Greenwich, R.I. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
They’ve been through incubators and grants and angel funding, corporate overtures, and mechanical setbacks. They got a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and sold an engine to the East Bay Sailing Club of Bristol, R.I. They’ve designed their own battery systems and built prototype after prototype. Early testers of a 15-horsepower model included coaches with the East Bay Sailing Club and the Brown University sailing team.
Things began to break the Flux team’s way in fall 2019, when they entered, and won, the 19th annual Wye Island Electric Boat Marathon in St. Michaels, Md. With Sorkin at the helm, a Flux outboard–powered rigid inflatable won the 24-mile race in a record for a single-hull boat (one hour and 22 minutes), despite high winds that drove some competitors to sit it out.
In early 2020, Sorkin and Lord quit the corporate day jobs that were putting food on all their tables, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Some Flux investors dropped out, saying they needed to focus on seeing core holdings through the crisis.
But since then, the company has mostly been riding a tailwind. A round of financing last fall put more than $1 million in Flux’s bank account from angel investors, many ones who like boats.
We are bringing change to the marine industry.
—Daylin Frantin
“The next step for us is building this 70-horsepower engine we’re calling the showroom model,” Frantin says. “It will be a little different from prototypes we’ve built in the past, such that there’s going to be a significant amount of money invested in it. Not really refining the system anymore, just putting something in the water that works and will be packaged beautifully.”
The Flux team used some of their funds to buy two new boats, a 22-foot Bowrider Scout Dorado and a 12-foot rigid inflatable that might typically be used as a yacht tender, to mount their FM-X15, FM-X40, and FM-X70 engines on for tests and demonstrations. They hope to be taking consumer models to market next year. And they got a six-figure grant from the National Science Foundation to start developing even larger versions.
“It’s definitely a scramble,” Frantin says. “We have a lot of really good supporters at the moment, and they’re expecting a lot from us.”
Frantin says he came to BU to study finance and accounting, with the idea of working in an investment bank or in corporate finance. “It was not to do this. I can’t say my cofounders knew we were going to do this either. It started with Ben and started with his thesis at Princeton: how do I build a more efficient boat?”
But they had won $315,000 in grants and contest prizes by the time of Frantin’s last class at Questrom. (He hopes to submit final paperwork and transfer credits for his degree soon.) “I only know of one other cohort who won that much, and they were PhD students at MIT. It was the progress we had made that gave us the validation that we are going to do this. It’s not going to be easy, and hardware is tough because there are a lot of risks,” he says. “But we always knew we were going to get it done.”
