Nobel Winner: Artificial Intelligence Will Crush Humans, “It’s Not Even Close” (futurism.com)
“Exponential phenomena are almost impossible for us to grasp,” he told The Guardian. “We are very experienced in a more or less linear world. And if things are accelerating, they’re usually accelerating within reason. Exponential change [as with the spread of virus] is really something else. We’re not equipped for it. It takes a long time to educate intuition.”
With Constructor Theory, Chiara Marletto Invokes the Impossible | Quanta Magazine
The standard laws of physics — such as quantum theory, general relativity, even Newton’s laws — are formulated in terms of trajectories of objects and what happens to them given some initial conditions. But there are some phenomena in nature that you can’t quite capture in terms of trajectories — phenomena like the physics of life or the physics of information. To capture those, you need counterfactuals.
The word “counterfactual” is used in various ways, but I mean a specific thing: A counterfactual is a statement about which transformations are possible and which are impossible in a physical system. A transformation is possible when you have a “constructor” that can perform a task and then retain the capacity to perform it again. In biology, we call that a catalyst, but more generally we can call it a constructor.”
Physicists working with Microsoft think the universe is a self-learning computer (thenextweb.com)
“Part of the theory seems to indicate the universe is a learning computer, in that the laws it’s currently constrained by were not set in stone at its inception.
We can’t reverse the universe, as a process, because there exists no record internally verifiable record of its processes — unless there’s a cosmic hard disk floating around out there in space somewhere.”
Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room Experiment and the Limits of Understanding – Scientific American
“The Chinese room experiment serves as a metaphor not only for physics but also for the human condition. Each of us sits alone within the cell of our subjective awareness. Now and then we receive cryptic messages from the outside world. Only dimly comprehending what we are doing, we compose responses, which we slip under the door. In this way, we manage to survive, even though we never really know what the hell is happening.”
The Terrifying Results of a New AI Study | by Ella Alderson | Predict | Feb, 2021 | Medium
“Already there exist today machines completing tasks without help from human programmers. The programmers themselves do not understand how the machines learned to complete these tasks.”
A superintelligence is not just a really smart human. A better way is to think about it as a blender capable of getting its own fruit to blend. And that’s all it cares about.. getting more fruit to blend. If you get in the way of that objective it could hurt you, not because it cares or doesn’t care, but because it’s just doing it’s job.. and you are in it’s way.
We marvel at the vast complexity of ant colonies. You could spend a lifetime studying them, but at the end of the day.. if they are in the way of making your lawn look nice.. good bye ants.
Do quantum effects play a role in consciousness? – Physics World
“An illumination in every sense of the word, it appears that there may be more than metaphor to the action of becoming enlightened.”
Physicists Study How Our Universe Might Have Bubbled Up in the Multiverse | Quanta Magazine
“The multiverse hypothesis sprang from efforts to understand our own universe’s birth. In the large-scale structure of the universe, theorists see signs of an explosive growth spurt during the cosmos’s infancy. In the early 1980s, as physicists investigated how space might have started — and stopped — inflating, an unsettling picture emerged. The researchers realized that while space may have stopped inflating here (in our bubble universe) and there (in other bubbles), quantum effects should continue to inflate most of space, an idea known as eternal inflation.”
What’s more, the new study hints at the existence of a multiverse, in which our universe is just one of many in a broader and more complex structure. If there is an “outside” to our universe, then an external observer might see the entirety of everything we know—stars, galaxies, and billions of light years of space—as a puny primordial black hole.
“We still don’t know what dark matter is made of, but, since the black holes are known to exist, it is natural to ask whether dark matter could be composed of black holes that could form before the stars and galaxies formed,” said Alexander Kusenko, an astrophysicist at UCLA who led the new study, in an email.
https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/
“GPT-3 showed that language can be used to instruct a large neural network to perform a variety of text generation tasks. Image GPT showed that the same type of neural network can also be used to generate images with high fidelity. We extend these findings to show that manipulating visual concepts through language is now within reach.”
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/what-is-life/
A technologist takes a stab at the age old question.
“It turns out that all life on Earth also shares a single architecture. And at least on Earth, that massively simplifies the discussion – Anything built on that architecture is life, and we have yet to encounter anything that is remotely living that is not based on that architecture.”