“Will AI Destroy Us?”: Roundtable with Coleman Hughes, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gary Marcus, and me (+ GPT-4-enabled transcript!)
A month ago Coleman Hughes, a young writer whose name I recognized from his many thoughtful essays in Quillette and elsewhere, set up a virtual “AI safety roundtable” with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gary Marcus, and, err, yours truly, for his Conversations with Coleman podcast series. Maybe Coleman was looking for three people with the most widely […]
Because they could
Why did 64 members of Israel’s Knesset just vote to change how the Israeli government operates, to give the Prime Minister and his cabinet nearly unchecked power as in autocratic regimes—even as the entire opposition walked out of the chamber rather than legitimize the vote, even as the largest protests in Israel’s history virtually shut […]
On students as therapy
This summer, I’m delighted to report, we’ve had four (!) students complete their PhDs in computer science through UT Austin’s Quantum Information Center: A fifth, Dr. Yuxuan Zhang, completed his PhD in condensed-matter physics. We also had two postdocs finish this summer: All told, I’ve now supervised or co-supervised a total of 12 PhD students […]
Common knowledge and quantum utility
Yesterday James Knight did a fun interview with me for his “Philosophical Muser” podcast about Aumann’s agreement theorem and human disagreements more generally. It’s already on YouTube here for those who would like to listen. Speaking of making things common knowledge, several people asked me to blog about the recent IBM paper in Nature, “Evidence […]
Life, blogging, and the Busy Beaver function go on
Update (July 11): If you’re interested in blogging about progress in science and technology, check out a new fellowship from The Roots of Progress (h/t Jason Crawford). Update (July 10): Speaking of the Busy Beaver function, check out this beautifully-produced YouTube video about BB by Duane Rich—a video that Duane says was directly inspired by […]