Editors' Picks: Our Favorite Opinions of 2022 - Scientific American

A year of incredible science news was complemented with wide-ranging commentary at Scientific American. Our opinion section featured some of the best and brightest minds, taking us to the front lines of COVID, teaching us about the many fraught Supreme Court decisions involving science and evidence, and more. We learned, for example, about the pitfalls of artificial intelligence, how racists misuse evolutionary biology, and how our children's troubled mental health is another ongoing epidemic. Whether they were thought-provoking, deeply moving or challenged long-held beliefs, here are some of our editors' favorite opinion articles of 2022. This year, language models proved they can write humanlike text, with one AI chatbot generating such impressive responses that it convinced an engineer it was sentient.