~scottaaronson_blog | Bookmarks (10)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – From the university campuses of Assyria to the thoroughfares of Ur to the palaces of the Hittite Empire, students across the Fertile Crescent have formed human chains, camel caravans, and even makeshift tent cities to protest the oppression of innocent Egyptians by the rogue proto-nation of “Israel” and its vengeful, warlike […]

For those who don’t yet know from their other social media: a week ago the cryptographer Yilei Chen posted a preprint, eprint.iacr.org/2024/555, claiming to give a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve lattice problems. For example, it claims to solve the GapSVP problem, which asks to approximate the length of the shortest nonzero vector in a […]

I can’t find it now, but nearly 20 years ago, in the midst of an unusually stupid debate in the comment section of Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s blog, someone chimed in: “the argument about who’s the world’s most badass theoretical computer scientist is officially over. Wigderson owns you. You can all go home, punks.” […]

Pissing away my life in a haze of doomscrolling, sporadic attempts to “parent” two rebellious kids, and now endless conversations about AI safety, I’m liable to forget for days that I’m still mostly known (such as I am) as a quantum computing theorist, and this blog is still mostly known as a quantum computing blog. […]

Dear Twitter Anti-Zionists, For five months, ever since Oct. 7, I’ve read you obsessively. While my current job is supposed to involve protecting humanity from the dangers of AI (with a side of quantum computing theory), I’m ashamed to say that half the days I don’t do any science; instead I just scroll and scroll, […]

In fact, don’t try to take kids to Washington DC if you can possibly avoid it. This is my public service announcement. This is the value I feel I can add to the world today. Dana and I decided to take the kids to DC for spring break. The trip, alas, has been hell—a constant […]

Update: Alright, I’m back in. (After trying the same recovery mechanisms that didn’t work before, but suddenly did work this afternoon.) Thanks also to the Facebook employee who emailed offering to help. Now I just need to decide the harder question of whether I want to be back in! So I’ve been locked out of […]

Here, as promised in my last post, is a written version of the talk I delivered a couple weeks ago at MindFest in Florida, entitled “The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI.” The talk is designed as one-stop shopping, summarizing many different AI-related thoughts I’ve had over the past couple years (and […]

Unrelated Announcement (Feb. 7): Huge congratulations to longtime friend-of-the-blog John Preskill for winning the 2024 John Stewart Bell Prize for research on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics! On the heels of my post on the fermion doubling problem, I’m sorry to spend even more time on the simulation hypothesis. I promise this will be the […]

Unrelated Announcement: The Call for Papers for the 2024 Conference on Computational Complexity is now out! Submission deadline is Friday February 16. Every month or so, someone asks my opinion on the simulation hypothesis. Every month I give some variant on the same answer: Recently, though, I learned a new twist on this tired discussion, […]