#scottaaronson — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #scottaaronson, aggregated by home.social.
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🚨 Breaking News: Scott Aaronson's quantum blog drops *shocking* revelation: quantum computers aren't magic! 🤯 But wait, there's more! 🏆 He casually mentions being elected to the National Academy of Sciences, sandwiched between humblebrags about famous friends. 🙄 Classic Scott, keeping it low-key. 😂
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9718 #QuantumComputing #BreakingNews #ScottAaronson #NationalAcademyOfSciences #TechHumor #HackerNews #ngated -
Scott Aaronson on quantum: "Will you heed my warnings NOW?"
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9718
#HackerNews #ScottAaronson #quantumwarnings #technews #quantumcomputing #sciencecommunication
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🚀💻 Quantum computers won't magically solve all your problems overnight, folks—sorry to burst that #sci-fi bubble! 🤯 Meanwhile, Scott Aaronson's "imminent" claims are as flip-floppy as a politician's promises. 🙃
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425 #quantumcomputing #reality #check #ScottAaronson #technews #problem #solving #HackerNews #ngated -
🚀 #ShtetlOptimized headlines with a groundbreaking revelation: Quantum computers won't magically solve your Rubik's Cube while you nap! Meanwhile, #HSBC introduces the latest "qombie" threat to humanity, and Scott Aaronson reminds us that amplifying is for volume, not quantum supremacy 🎩.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183 #QuantumComputing #RubiksCube #Qombie #ScottAaronson #HackerNews #ngated -
Scott Aaronson's blog post takes us on a bizarre journey where quantum computers don’t magically fix problems, and somehow pivots to K12 education #reform 🧙♂️🔮. Meanwhile, the dramatic narrative about a murderous past reads like a rejected Hollywood script 🤦♂️.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9082 #quantumcomputing #K12education #storytelling #ScottAaronson #bizarrejourney #Hollywoodscript #HackerNews #ngated -
👨🏫🤔 Scott Aaronson tackles the profound question of "How much #math is knowable?" in a #YouTube video, presumably for those who confuse deep philosophical inquiry with a weekend Netflix binge. 📺💡 Meanwhile, the rest of us are busy trying to figure out how many digits of pi we actually need to remember—spoiler: it's less than three. 🥧🔢
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VplMHWSZf5c #philosophy #ScottAaronson #digitsOfPi #knowledge #HackerNews #ngated -
I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8805
#HackerNews #I #speak #at #Harvard #as #it #faces #its #biggest #crisis #since #1636 #Harvard #Crisis #Education #PublicSpeaking #ScottAaronson
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Re: Scott Aaronson • Sad Times for AI Safety
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8367Re: Making the ‘Invisible Hand’ Visible
• https://our.oakland.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/213e10a9-51e5-4a87-896b-b5ead3acf2bc/contentOhMyGoodness Says:
Thank you for the link and I enjoyed reading through it. My hyperbole was intended to provide a Mines of Moria like description for the current halls of academia. 🙂
Dear OMG,
The faults in Academe and either vein of AI are not where they delve too deep but where they cleave too close to the surface.
#AI #AGI #AIHype #CorporateAI #OpenAI
#AlgorithmicIdiocracy #ScottAaronson -
Re: Scott Aaronson • Sad Times for AI Safety
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8367OhMyGoodness Says:
The groves of Academe no longer exist. It has become a dark and foreboding place frozen by the relentless winds of Apocalypse.
Dear OMG,
No true mathematician will object to a little hyperbole, not if it focuses attention on the generative dynamics, and as it happens the forces pulling Academe out of kilter are not unrelated to the ones warping AI out of alignment.
On that score, see the following most excellent essay.
Making the ‘Invisible Hand’ Visible
The Case for Dialogue About Academic Capitalism
Susan M. Awbrey• https://our.oakland.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/213e10a9-51e5-4a87-896b-b5ead3acf2bc/content
#AI #AGI #AIHype #CorporateAI #OpenAI
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Re: Scott Aaronson • Sad Times for AI Safety
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8367I think what happened here is a lot of otherwise savvy people missed the significance of AI's transfer from the modestly ethical groves of Academe to the dark satanic engines of corporate industry. When I see people still talking about “AI Safety” and the “Alignment of AI with Human Interests” instead of the “Alignment of Corporate Agendas with Human Interests”, it tells me those people are still missing the bigger picture.
#AI #AGI #AIHype #CorporateAI #OpenAI
#AlgorithmicIdiocracy #ScottAaronson -
James Damore’s defenders (updated)
(recently saw a post claiming that Damore's firing was an indication of closed minds at Google, so it seemed important to repos this - vy)The Google manifesto is a crackpot political argument combined with basic scientific ignorance, not a scientific argument. The people claiming other
https://www.yodaiken.com/2017/08/16/the-crackpot-google-manifesto/
#academics #business #SoftwareBusiness #damore #GoogleManifesto #ScottAaronson #StuartReges -
#ScottAaronson - What Does #QuantumTheory Mean?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p72vM6qqRxI
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Computing #Computation #QuantumPhysics #Physics #Planck #PlanckTime #TimeTravel #Relativity #SpecialRelativity #BlackHoles #BlackHole #BeckensteinBound #Theories #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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I like #ScottAaronson's attitude toward #QuantumComputing.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/11/17/5-questions-for-scott-aaronson-00127828"I would be excited even if it had no applications, just to find out whether nature has this computational capacity at all. It’s one of the most basic questions that you could possibly ask about physics, and the most stringent test of quantum mechanics that we will possibly ever see."
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Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 5
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/05/22/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-5/Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/07/20/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-2/Re: Mathstodon • Joeri Sebrechts
• https://mathstodon.xyz/@joeri_s@mstdn.social/110401673746671834JS:
❝That's not how it works. The model lacks agency. It is a machine whose gears are cranked by the user's prompt. It can ask questions, but only when prompted to. It is not doing anything at all when it isn't being prompted.❞Sure, I understand that. The hedge “as it were” is used advisedly for the sake of the argument. (I wrote my own language learner back in the 80s.)
Speaking less metaphorically, the program and its database are always in their respective states and the program has the capacity to act on the database even when not engaged with external prompts.
Is there any reason why the program's “housekeeping” functions should not include one to measure its current state of “uncertainty” (entropy of a distribution) with regard to potential questions — or any reason why it should “hurt to ask”?
As it were …
#Peirce #Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystems #InquiryIntoInquiry
#ScottAaronson #AI #ChatGPT #GPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels -
Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 3
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/05/01/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-3/Re: Scott Aaronson • Should GPT Exist?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946961The more fundamental problem I see here is the failure to grasp the nature of the task at hand, and this I attribute not to a program but to its developers.
Journalism, Research, and Scholarship are not matters of generating probable responses to prompts or other stimuli. What matters is producing evidentiary and logical supports for statements. That is the task requirement the developers of recent LLM‑Bots are failing to grasp.
There is nothing new about that failure. There is a long history of attempts to account for intelligence and indeed the workings of scientific inquiry based on the principles of associationism, behaviorism, connectionism, and theories of that order. But the relationship of empirical evidence, logical inference, and scientific information is more complex and intricate than is dreamt of in those reductive philosophies.
Note. The above comment was originally posted on March 1st but appears to have been deleted accidentally.
#Peirce #Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystems #InquiryIntoInquiry
#ScottAaronson #AI #ChatGPT #GPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels -
Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2022/07/20/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-2/Re: Scott Aaronson
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6524
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6534
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6541❝Personally, I'd give neither of them [Bohr or Einstein] perfect marks, in part because they not only both missed Bell's Theorem, but failed even to ask the requisite question (namely: what empirically verifiable tasks can Alice and Bob use entanglement to do, that they couldn't have done without entanglement?). But I'd give both of them very high marks for, y'know, still being Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.❞
To Ask The Requisite Question —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6541#comment-1940887This brings me to the question I was going to ask on the AI post, but was afraid to ask.
Does GPT‑3 ever ask an original question on its own?
Simply asking for clarification of an interlocutor's prompt is not insignificant but I'm really interested in something more spontaneous and “self‑starting” than that. Does it ever wake up one morning, as it were, and find itself in a “state of question”, a state of doubt or uncertainty so compelling as to bring it to ask on its own initiative what we might recognize as a novel question?
Resources —
Survey of Inquiry Driven Systems
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/04/23/survey-of-inquiry-driven-systems-5/Survey of Theme One Program
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/03/30/survey-of-theme-one-program-5/#Peirce #Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystems #InquiryIntoInquiry
#ScottAaronson #AI #ChatGPT #GPT #LLM #LargeLanguageModels -
Re: Scott Aaronson • Will UT Austin and Texas A&M Survive Beyond This Week?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243#comment-1949554As far as the tenure system goes, a little bit of history regurgitated will bring its rationale into focus.
History of the AAUP —
❝In 1900 when noted economist Edward Ross lost his job at Stanford University because Mrs. Leland Stanford didn't like his views on immigrant labor and railroad monopolies, other professors were watching. The incident stuck in the mind of Arthur O. Lovejoy, philosopher at Johns Hopkins. When he and John Dewey organized a meeting in 1915 to form an organization to ensure academic freedom for faculty members, the AAUP was born. “Academic Freedom” was a new idea then.❞
• https://web.archive.org/web/20121221091245/http://www.aaup.org/about/history-aaup
Without a tenure system there is no academic freedom, and without academic freedom universities as organs of free inquiry will simply wither and die.
#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels #GPT
#AcademicFreedom #HigherEducation #Tenure -
Re: Scott Aaronson • Will UT Austin and Texas A&M Survive Beyond This Week?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243#comment-1949542Alas, my friends, read the writing on the wall —
“Money, Money, Techno Upstartin”
Why should society invest in universities, anyway? Why should individuals devote the great measure of their lives and fortunes to acquiring the discipline and joining the calling of responsible research, teaching, and service when that whole apparatus of laborious training can be replaced by a chatbot simulating the conduct of a human being, in particular, an Average Indolent fifth-grader who copies all his book reports off Wikipedia?
No, no, mes amis, the job you lose to a bot will sooner or later be your own.
#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels #GPT
#AcademicFreedom #HigherEducation #Tenure -
Re: ScottAaronson • Should GPT Exist?
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7042#comment-1946764Well, here's one that woke me up in the middle of the night.
All I know is the current spate of intellectual property strip-mine operations is something close to the very antithesis of what attracted me to artificial intelligence (or intelligence amplification as Ashby more aptly conceived it) over fifty years ago. It now has all the hallmarks of yet another capital corporate exploitation of a formerly promising line of scientific inquiry. The movement pulling so many of us in way back when, promising to bring computing power to the people, is now a classic case of enantiodromia, gradually shifting the locus of control from the human individual to the corporate agenda.
The once cute metaphors leading us to personify programs have become misleading misdirections. Programs don't do anything but run, and they run with the agendas particular people give them. It is time to stop falling for the prestidigitation and start paying attention to the corporate pseudo-personhood behind the screen.
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Re: Scott Aaronson • Quips Are What I've Got
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7188My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7188#comment-1948497Most of the discussions I've seen and been involved in on this subject have been more reasoned than otherwise. Not to say I don't enjoy a good quip from time to time. The way I see it, if we look around at all that's going on these days, we shouldn't too quickly dismiss the power of misinformation and disinformation. It doesn't take most people becoming complete morons to put the kind of society we value at risk — evidence suggests a good third becoming terminally gullible will be enough.
When the dust settles to equilibrium, my guess is we'll be looking at just another medium of information, heavily bent in service to the corporate interests with their hands on the tiller.
If we ask who's in charge, they'll refer us to an Invisible Hand. But we'll need to keep our eyes and our AI open anyway.
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Re: Scott Aaronson • If AI Scaling Is To Be Shut Down, Let It Be For A Coherent Reason
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7174My Comment —
• https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7174#comment-1948292My personal Critique of Coherent Reasons — I won't bother addressing a moratorium or shutdown since any pretense of doing that would amount to PR as fake as any other Great Reset we might hear about these days — but why I'd wish for caution and public reflection going forward is the Public Interest in things like Critical Thinking, Information Literacy, not to mention a Healthy Skepticism about Corporate Agendas.
FB just called to mind a thing I wrote a while ago that pretty well speaks to the heart of the issue for me, and I can't do better than preamble with that —
Democracy, Education, Information
Our Enlightenment Forerunners had the insight to see the critical flaw in all historical failures at democratic government, to wit, or not — If The People Rule, Then The People Must Be Wise. The consequence is that equally distributed Education and Information are not just Commodities you buy so you and yours can get ahead of them and theirs — they are Essential to the intelligent functioning of government and the Public Interest. That is why we are supposed to have Universal Free Public Education. That is why we used to have a government operated postal service that enabled the free-flow of information at a nominal fee, not whatever price the market would bear.
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There is nothing new about that failure. There's a whole history of attempts to account for intelligence and indeed the workings of scientific inquiry on the principles of associationism, behaviorism, connectionism, and theories of that order. But the relationship of empirical evidence, logical inference, and scientific information is more complex and intricate than is dreamt of in those reductive philosophies.
#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels
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Journalism, Research, and Scholarship are not matters of generating probable responses to prompts (stimuli). What matters is producing evidentiary and logical supports for statements. That is the task requirement the developers of recent LLM-Bots are failing to grasp.
#ScottAaronson #LargeLanguageModels
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