~scottaaronson_blog | Bookmarks (15)

[WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW] Tonight, on a rare date without the kids, Dana and I saw M3GAN, the new black-comedy horror movie about an orphaned 9-year-old girl named Cady who, under the care of her roboticist aunt, gets an extremely intelligent and lifelike AI doll as a companion. The robot doll, M3GAN, is given a mission […]

Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But if experience has taught me anything, it’s that the quantum hype train never slows down. In the past 24 hours, at least four people […]

The following is what I read at Dana’s 40th birthday party last night. Don’t worry, it’s being posted with her approval. –SA I’d like to propose a toast to Dana, my wife and mother of my two kids.  My dad, a former speechwriter, would advise me to just crack a few jokes and then sit […]

Dear Scott, This is you, from 30 years in the future, Christmas Eve 2022. Your Ghost of Christmas Future. To get this out of the way: you eventually become a professor who works on quantum computing. Quantum computing is … OK, you know the stuff in popular physics books that never makes any sense, about […]

This is going to be one of the many Shtetl-Optimized posts that I didn’t feel like writing, but was given no choice but to write. News, social media, and my inbox have been abuzz with two claims about Google’s Sycamore quantum processor, the one that now has 72 superconducting qubits. The first claim is that […]

Two weeks ago, I gave a lecture setting out my current thoughts on AI safety, halfway through my year at OpenAI. I was asked to speak by UT Austin’s Effective Altruist club. You can watch the lecture on YouTube here (I recommend 2x speed). The timing turned out to be weird, coming immediately after the […]

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers! While I enjoy a family holiday-week vacation in exotic Dallas—and yes, I will follow up on my old JFK post by visiting Dealey Plaza—please enjoy the following Thanksgiving victuals: I recently recorded a 3-hour (!) YouTube video with Timothy Nguyen, host of the Cartesian Cafe. Our episode is entitled […]

Nearly halfway into my year at OpenAI, still reeling from the FTX collapse, I feel like it’s finally time to start blogging my AI safety thoughts—starting with a little appetizer course today, more substantial fare to come. Many people claim that AI alignment is little more a modern eschatological religion—with prophets, an end-times prophecy, sacred scriptures, and […]

I’m thrilled to be able to interrupt your regular depressing programming for 100% happy news. Some readers will remember that, back in September, I announced that an unnamed charitable foundation had asked my advice on how best to donate $250,000 for advanced precollege STEM education. So, just like the previous time I got such a […]

In the past few weeks, I’ve learned two ways to think about online sneerers that have been helping me tremendously, and that I wanted to share in case they’re helpful to others: First, they’re like a train in a movie that’s barreling directly towards the camera. If you haven’t yet internalized how the medium works, […]

Several readers have asked me for updated thoughts on AI safety, now that I’m 5 months into my year at OpenAI—and I promise, I’ll share them soon! The thing is, until last week I’d entertained the idea of writing up some of those thoughts for an essay competition run by the FTX Future Fund, which […]

If I haven’t blogged until now about the midterm election, it’s because I find the state of the world too depressing. Go vote, obviously, if you’re eligible and haven’t yet. How many more chances will you have? While I’m (to put it mildly) neither especially courageous nor useful as an infantryman, I would’ve been honored […]

These days, I often need to remind myself that, as an undergrad, grad student, postdoc, or professor, I’ve now been doing quantum computing research for a quarter-century—i.e., well over half of the subject’s existence. As a direct result, when I feel completely jaded about a new development in QC, it might actually be exciting. When […]

Yesterday I attended a lecture by George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, who’s currently visiting UT Austin, about his new book entitled Don’t Be a Feminist. (See also here for previous back-and-forth between me and Bryan about his book.) A few remarks: (1) Maybe surprisingly, there were no protesters storming the lectern, no security detail, […]

Here’s an observation that’s mathematically trivial but might not be widely appreciated. In kindergarten, we all learned Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, which given a formal system F, constructs an arithmetical encoding of G(F) = “This sentence is not provable in F.” If G(F) is true, then it’s an example of a true arithmetical sentence that’s […]