Opinion
Aaronson: Human stupidity is a bigger near-term threat than superintelligent AI
“When I think about, like, the future of civilization, you know, let's say the next 20 years, the next 50 years, I tend to worry less about super intelligence than I do about super stupidity. You know, I tend to worry about, you know, killing ourselves off or y…”
Insight
Aaronson: Quantum error correction turned scaling into an engineering challenge
“What changed everything for most of us in the nineties was the discovery of quantum error correction, right? And quantum fault tolerance. The upshot of which was if you want to build a scalable quantum computer, you don't need to get perfect qubits. That are p…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Aaronson: Certified randomness may be quantum computing's first near-term application
“As far as I can see, may be the first application of quantum computing that people could actually be able to realize with, like, near-term devices with 50 or 60 or 70 qubits. And this application is to generate cryptographically secure random bits.”
Assertion Supported
Aaronson: Differential privacy and quantum shadow tomography share a mathematical connection
“There's a, you know, precise mathematical connection between these two problems. You can prove it. You know, it goes in both directions, and then we were actually able to use it to, you know, take work that's been done in differential privacy by people who don…”
Assertion Supported
Aaronson: Holographic bulk-boundary mapping is a quantum error-correcting code
“The mapping between the bulk theory and the boundary theory in recent years, people realize that it is literally an example of one of these quantum error correcting codes that I talked, told you about before.”
Opinion
Aaronson: Most important quantum computing use case is simulating nature
“Maybe the most important application that we know about is just giving us this new way to simulate nature, simulate physics and chemistry, and maybe discover new drugs, discover new materials, right?”
Assertion Supported
Aaronson: Snowden documents revealed NIST pseudorandom standard was NSA-backdoored
“In fact, you know, NIST did have a standard for pseudorandom bits, which we learned a few years ago because of the Snowden documents was backdoored. By most likely by the NSA, right?”
Opinion
Aaronson: P vs NP is likely this century's most important math problem
“Well, I think it's, you know a strong contender for the most important unsolved problem in math, you know, of this century.”
Insight
Aaronson: Laws of physics allow intelligence far beyond human level
“There's no reason to believe that we are near the limits of intelligence that are allowed by the laws of physics, right? And so, eventually, sure, you know, it could be possible to produce beings that are much more intelligent than we are.”
Assertion Supported
Aaronson: Set theory can only determine finitely many Busy Beaver values
“Axioms of set theory can only determine finitely many values of this function. Okay, so in some sense, beyond a certain point, you know, the standard rules of mathematics cannot even prove what are the values of this function.”
Opinion
Aaronson: A 10-state Turing machine might exceed set theory provability
“I suspect that there may even be a machine with 10 states that would already exceed the ability of set theory to know what it does.”
Insight
Aaronson: Quantum speedups require choreographing destructive interference for wrong answers
“The entire hope of getting a speed advantage from a quantum computer is to exploit the way that amplitudes work differently. It's to try to choreograph a pattern of interference Where for each wrong answer to your computational problem, like some of the paths …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Aaronson: Physics and computer science have converged around statistical mechanics and optimization
“Large parts of physics and CS have been coming together in the last decades you know, partly statistical physics made this very, very deep connection between like spin glasses and condensed matter physics and combinatorial optimization problems.”
Assertion Supported
Aaronson: Busy Beaver grows faster than any computable function
“The amazing thing about this function is that it increases more rapidly than any function that could be calculated by any computer program. This is provable, right? So you know, it is a ridiculously quickly growing function.”
Scott Aaronson