Bill Nye: We’re all born scientists — most people just get distracted; here’s how the ‘Science Guy’ thinks critical thinking can make the world better

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WICHITA, Kansas — Even with a looming (and divisive) election within weeks, the impacts of severe weather becoming more clear, and an increasingly uncertain future written within online algorithms, now — more than any other time in the course of human history — is the best moment to be alive, iconic media personality Bill Nye told a crowded room of Kansas tech enthusiasts.

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” speaks during the Ad Astra Tech Summit in Wichita; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

“As messed up as things seem to be in a lot of places, it’s better for more people than ever in human history,” explained the former host of “Bill Nye The Science Guy” at the Ad Astra Tech Summit earlier this month in Wichita. “We’re getting there. We can make the world better.”

According to Nye — a former engineer — the three most important elements to make the world better for all people are access to clean water, renewable, reliable electricity, and the internet.

“If you had electricity day and night and you had access to the internet, you could have education for everybody in the world,” he continued. “Yes, you could have misinformation, oh, to be sure. But you could have education.”

“The big goal is to raise the standard of living of women and girls,” Nye added. “I think with those three things, we can change the world. It’s all about fairness. You want everybody to have an even shot.”

Nye served as keynote speaker at the one-day Ad Astra summit, which took place among events organized for Wichita Startup Week and included the State of Kansas Tech Industry address, tech awards, and breakout sessions for industry, workforce, startup, and education.

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Bill Nye “The Science Guy” speaks alongside moderator Troy Tabor, director of Wichita State University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, during the Ad Astra Tech Summit in Wichita; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

Topics during the conversation with Nye — moderated by Troy Tabor, director of Wichita State University’s Center for Entrepreneurship — ranged from the importance of algebra (“Algebra enables you to think abstractly about numbers, but it may be enabling you to think about all sorts of things abstractly”) and recent scientific advancements he’s excited about (“I’m all hot for fusion”) to how he started wearing a bowtie in high school when they boys were servers for a girls athletic banquet (“It doesn’t fall into the tray of food; it doesn’t slide into the soup; and in a laboratory, it does not flop into the flask or what have you”), and the importance of voting (“If young people voted at the same percentage as people my age, elections would be generally more progressive than they have been”).

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” speaks alongside moderator Troy Tabor, director of Wichita State University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, during the Ad Astra Tech Summit in Wichita; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

To a crowd filled with many educators, Nye also stressed the importance of critical thinking — “the habit of evaluating evidence” — and staying curious in today’s world, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” speaks during the Ad Astra Tech Summit in Wichita; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

“Everybody starts out a scientist and then just gets distracted,” he noted. “Everybody starts out as a critical thinker. You talk to somebody who’s 3 or 4 years old, they’re full of hypotheses about how the world works and why things happen.”

“We don’t want everybody to become a scientist,” he continued. “We certainly don’t want everybody to become an engineer — the fashion consequences alone are frightening — but we do want everybody to have an appreciation for the process of science.”

Nye joked that there are probably AI-generated images floating around of him saying things like the Earth is flat or climate change is a hoax.

“We’ve got to develop so-called critical thinking skills,” he added. “This is easy to say, but hard to do. We’ve all been fooled by artificial intelligence generated images or just photographs that are fake.”

When computers were created, Nye said, you would put in a mathematical formula and you had a pretty good idea of what was going to come out. Now things have changed.

“What everybody’s afraid of: now systems have been created where you’re not sure what’s going to come out,” he explained. “We created these social media systems that just devolved to racism and devolved to economic disproportionality and stuff that was unintended. So we’ve got to learn to be skeptical.”

On the flip side, Nye noted that AI does have the potential to streamline things — in a network, not a top-down fashion — like energy usage and traffic patterns. 

“It’s not a panacea,” he cautioned. “It doesn’t solve all your problems.”

This story is made possible by Entrepreneurial Growth Ventures.

Entrepreneurial Growth Ventures (EGV) is a business unit of NetWork Kansas supporting innovative, high-growth entrepreneurs in the State of Kansas. NetWork Kansas promotes an entrepreneurial environment by connecting entrepreneurs and small business owners with the expertise, education and economic resources they need to succeed.

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