Links for 2022-06-19
“The next big breakthrough in AI will come from hardware, not software. Training giant models like PaLM already require 1000s of chips consuming several MW, and we will probably want to keep scaling these up several orders of magnitude. How can we do it?” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1537358275523407873.html
Ancient DNA solves mystery over origin of medieval Black Death https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/ancient-dna-solves-mystery-over-origin-medieval-black-death-2022-06-15/
Artur Ekert’s intro lectures on quantum information https://www.youtube.com/c/ArturEkert/playlists
"American young adults were most romantic, followed by the Turkish students, & Indians had the lowest romanticism score. Female college students in all three cultures were significantly more romantic than males" https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/jcfs.33.2.155
Efficiently irrational: deciphering the riddle of human choice — “...why are humans and animals so predictably inconsistent in their choices? In the language of economics, why are they irrational? Data suggest that this reflects an optimal trade-off between the precision with which the brain represents the values of choices and the biological costs of that precision...” https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/decision/2022-glimcher.pdf
Making Robotic Assistive Walking More Natural https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/making-robotic-assistive-walking-more-natural
“The Langlands program provides a beautifully intricate set of connections between various areas of mathematics, pointing the way toward novel solutions for old problems.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-langlands-program-20220601/
The Software Advances Powering the Next Generation of Brain Implants https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/blog/the-software-advances-powering-the-next-generation-of-brain-implants-362551
Scroll down for a list of famously long-kept secrets https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/06/ufos-as-usa-psychop.html
An overview of the delivery of heavy weapons systems into Ukraine https://youtu.be/Sd4xRBuVs48
"Russia’s entire annual military budget is $60 billion, and that includes a large navy, tactical nukes, strategic air defenses, and other big-ticket budget items. The United States alone is on track to deliver 25% of that budget to Ukraine in a matter of months, with billions more donated by other partners." https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/1/2101780/-Ukraine-Update-Not-enough-Here-s-the-challenge-of-moving-even-four-HIMARS
Although "sentience" is not a well-defined concept, many people are confident that it points at something real and important.
One hypothesis underlying our inability to pinpoint what exactly we mean by "sentience" is neurodiversity: fundamental and insurmountable differences in how humans communicate and experience the world.
Conditions such as aphantasia show how easy it is to talk past each other. The act of imagining a beautiful sunset can have fundamentally different interpretations depending on a person's neurological setup.
And yet, despite all this, we can be more confident of the sentience of a chimp than the current version of the Windows operating system because the former is closer in design space to humans who believe to be sentient than Microsoft Windows.
Another fundamental concept that almost everyone agrees has meaning but whose meaning is fuzzy is "existence". If you think there's evidence that love exists, what evidence do you have that numbers do not exist? Personally, I believe that numbers do exist because it is hard to come up with a definition of existence that excludes numbers without also excluding something whose existence we already agree about: