Infinite Quack

Karl Popper made a big stink about falsifiability . If you’re making a statement about the real world, there had better be some way to disprove (falsify) your statement. Let’s say your statement is “It’s raining”. I should be able to open my window and stick my arm outside and see if it gets wet. Writing as a software developer, I might use the shorter word “testable”. If your assertion is testable, it may be right or it may be wrong. I and others are empowered to figure that out. If the assertion is that life continues after death, how does one render that assertion testable? We must say more. “Ghosts exist”, for example, is testable, as long as your definition of “ghost” includes that they have some observable impacts on the living world. It should be possible to take a picture of a ghost, record a ghost saying something or moving an object. People make ghost hunter TV shows, of course, but the wider scientific community remains unconvinced because this “evidence” doesn’t meet the hi...

This post was inspired by a talk called Being Human , given by Jason Wodicka, someone I worked with at Amazon. This is a great talk, and you should watch it. Jason is a smart guy, and while he and I may not have arrived at exactly the same conclusions (or perhaps we "violently agree" and are just looking at similar ideas from different directions), I absolutely appreciate where he is coming from. What follows are my personal reactions and responses to the talk. Also I should note that this is hardly my first blog post on AI; if you'd like to read the others, see Never Is A Long Time and Buckle Up and... well, any of these . Yes, Jason: You're quite right about the boom-and-bust, summer-and-winter cycle of AI. It's looked promising before, and we've been disappointed before. I, too, have been around for a while, and I too used to read Wired magazine in print. 😄 We must approach reputed AI developments with a big ol' grain of salt. Turing's "imi...

chatGPT can never replace programmers "Never" is a long time. In a narrow sense, yes: maybe you can say that ChatGPT will never replace programmers entirely. But that's a straw man. We don't really care about the narrow statement, do we? Even if you expand it to "Large Language Models will never replace programmers entirely" (and I grok the argument that they can only ever mimic human-produced writing), that's not what we care about, either. What keeps us up at night is this: Can we never build any machine that can think well enough to replace programmers? There's no way to avoid the philosophical, with questions like this, so let's not mince words or dodge the key issue. Is there a magical component to the human brain? You, reader, can believe what you like. I can only describe my own beliefs: I'm a physicalist. I believe that matter and energy exist, the stuff that physics tries to study and understand... and that's it. If you believe t...

Bagel, please. (Pronounce that in your head not like “Coffee, please”, but like “Bitch, please.”) The Multiverse has been in the zeitgeist lately. Notably in movies, it often happens that different films touching on similar topics will emerge around the same time. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is one. Everything Everywhere All At Once is another. Spoilers ahead, particularly for those two films, some Marvel Cinematic Universe backstory, and also – for physics. We all love a good story. Stories, as Sir Terry Pratchett was fond of pointing out, are a huge part of how we think about the world. “Fisherman catches fish. Poor man begs for fish. Fisherman refuses. Poor man turns out to be King pretending to be poor man. Fisherman begs forgiveness, learns lesson about being kind to strangers.” That sort of story sticks with us and is retold over centuries, because it encodes some basic truths. Kings are useful plot devices because they’re powerful. They allow things to happen t...

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened.”  -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Trigger warning: Discussion of death, the meaning of existence, and a brief mention of suicide are ahead.) Douglas Adams was a remarkable man who wrote some wholly remarkable books. His Hitchhiker series made a huge impression on me in my childhood, introducing me all at once to quirky British comedy and witty science fiction parody, painting a Universe that was colorful, whimsical, yet mysterious and absurd, in which -- when you came right down to it -- nothing ultimately made sense. Then he died, which is less remarkable, really. Everyone who’s ever been born has eventually done that . He was living, you see, and then... he stopped doing th...