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Interview with Scott Aaronson

blogs.scientificamerican.com

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#31
post #19

For those reading comments before the article: the title is rather silly, but it contains lots of interesting stuff. For example the answers to questions 14 and 15 sound very sane to me, compared to most people's views on it.

I agree:

"I think that, if civilization lasts long enough, then sure: eventually we might need to worry about the creation of an AI that is to us as we are to garden slugs, and about how to increase the chance that such an AI will be “friendly” to human values (rather than, say, converting the entire observable universe into paperclips, because that’s what it was mistakenly programmed to want)."

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an incredibly long interview, but I assume it was e-mail. And full of short gems like: "QM isn’t even “physics” in the usual sense: it’s more like an operating system that the rest of physics runs on as application software"

that's a line straight out of his book 'quantum computing since Democritus'. highly recommended if you want to get a bird's eye view of the foundation of quantum logic without all that pesky physics (and physical history) getting in the way.

I've actually read it, I just didn't remember this line. Thanks. And I agree, great read.

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#34
post #12

Wow he seems very smart but not very succinct.

It is an incredibly long interview, but I assume it was e-mail. And full of short gems like: "QM isn’t even “physics” in the usual sense: it’s more like an operating system that the rest of physics runs on as application software"

"Speaking of which, when I look at the thrilling advances being achieved today in AI, I see all sorts of ethical issues that will need to be dealt with soon—like, how can a deep neural network justify to you why it turned down your loan application? Should self-driving cars handle crashes using utilitarian or deontological ethics?"

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#35

News to me that he is moving to UTexas in Austin to build a center for quantum computing and theory. Terribly exciting! With the impetus being a state funded allocation of $4B+ for basic research. It really begs the question: are our governments spending way too little on moon shots? And what could have been accomplished in the last two generations if the focus had been on pure science rather than military technologi…

> the focus had been on pure science rather than military technologies? I find your question a little funny in that Aaronson has said the DOD is where much of the funding for his research will come from for the next 5 years[1]. So, the $4 billion in Texas likely funded his recruitment package, but it is the military that is funding his research. [1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2687

What constitutes a "good return" on research dollars spent? Is it mere value created? Or a breakthrough in fundamental human understanding? I'm actually quite intrigued now to mine some real data!

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#36
The discussion of whether or not we have free will strikes me as confused. Aaronson suggests that we would clearly not have free will in a scenario where “Everything [we] did could be fully traced to causal antecedents external to [us], plus pure randomness—not in some philosophical imagination, but for real, and on a routine basis”. The caveat “external to [us]” is doing a lot of work here, but it really has no discernible meaning. (Is a cause “external to us” if it’s not within our brains? Why would that matter? What is the status of chains of causation that lead from the outside world to goings on in our brains?) Without that essentially meaningless caveat, the statement is simply a trivially true disjunction of the logical possibilities given physicalism. Of course, if physicalism is true, then everything that we do is either determined by the laws of physics or not determined by anything. If that entails that we don’t have free will, then Aaronson should just say that he thinks physicalism is true and that he thinks that physicalism entails the absence of free will. On the other hand, if we don’t simply assume physicalism, then the fact that our behavior is determined by the laws of physics really does nothing to argue against free will. Everything would hang on how minds interact with physical reality, and we simply know nothing about how that might work. For example, it might be that God ensures that the physical world operates so as to respect the free decisions made by our minds. Or it might be that phenomena which are random from the point of view of physics are (sometimes) linked to free decisions made by minds. Nothing is known, so nothing can be concluded.

I'd also have to say that Aaronson lacks imagination in a crucial respect. He claims that in any "imaginable" universe it will hold that "if you knew the complete state of the universe, you could use it to calculate [either deterministically or probabilistically] everything I’d do in the future." But of course it's very easy to imagine a universe where this is not the case. E.g., any universe where minds make free decisions that lack physical causes. We know that people have in fact imagined this sort of universe.

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#37
I'd recommend Scott Aaronson's book Quantum Computing Since Democritus to anyone interested in quantum computing, mathematics, and computer science in general. It covers a vast array of material, from the basics of set theory to Godel and Turing, cryptography, quantum computing, free will and time travel. It doesn't go very in depth into any specific topic, but for an engineer who's been out of college for a few years, it was at a perfect level to rekindle a love of learning and interest in a variety of topics.

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#38
post #28
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how does a lack of even rudimentary knowledge of a specific field of study qualify one to reject it wholesale? The difficulties in meta-analysis in the social sciences vary from field to field -- psychology is qualitatively different from anthropology or history -- but if we had to generalize, they have more to do with the sheer dimensionality of the problem combined with the difficulty of precise measurement (an…

I'd say that scientific fields being "opinion based" or forming around "mutually exclusive schools of thought" is a reaction to "the sheer dimensionality of the problem combined with the difficulty of precise measurement". You see similar social phenomena in other fields with a measurement problem, for example programming language research ...

> You see similar social phenomena in other fields with a measurement problem, for example programming language research ...

Touché! :) (although there's plenty of social science research that is much more empirically rigorous than PL research, and the certainty/evidence ratio is certainly higher in PL)

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#39
post #2

I want to congratulate the person who invited Scott Aaronson to speak (New York university, about integrated information theory) and didn't record and publish it on youtube. /sarcasm Seriously guys, we only have that many people like Scott. Please don't take their smarts, wisdom and time for granted.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1893

Re: Interview with Scott Aaronson

#40
> I’m friendly with many of the people who spend their lives that way [thinking about how to transfer consciousness into a computer]; I enjoy talking to them when they pass through town (or when I pass through the Bay Area, where they congregate).

^ I think that's my favorite quote from his interview. The Bay Area certainly has a reputation.

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