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TIL that notorious Internet crackpot Mentifex, who inserted himself into every AI discussion he could in the olden days of the Internet, passed away in 2024.
https://obituaries.seattletimes.com/obituary/arthur-murray-1089408830
2I didn't know anything about him besides being an AI pest on SL4 and elsewhere who I disliked greatly. He sounds like he was a surprisingly cool guy offline (or should that be, 'before'?). It makes me wonder why he was such an AI crank and if something happened late in life which contributed to that.
I don’t know, the impression I got was that he had a rather troubled life on and off the internet, for example “Ted loved his family dearly even while he struggled to connect.”
I’m sad to hear he didn’t quite live to see the arrival of real AGI.
I have a bone to pick with high school chemistry textbooks.
When I took chemistry in high school, there was a section of the textbook that described some features of quantum mechanics and tried to explain electron orbitals. The orbitals chapter in particular made basically no sense; I was able to extract enough out of it to be able to do the homework problems, but most of the class was totally lost. When I took a semester of modern physics in college (and also read Eliezer's QM sequence), I learned that the reason the explanation made no sense was that it was entirely bullshit - among other things, it followed the usual route of describing the history of quantum mechanics and mistaking that for an actual explanation.
Is there an explanation for high school students that actually bites the bullet and says "This is the Schrodinger equation, which is what physicists eventually came up with to describe how subatomic particles actually behave. It's advanced math and you don't have to understand what it says, but here are some facts about it and what they mean for chemistry?" I'm annoyed enough with how awful my textbook was to actually write one myself, but I also don't want to duplicate someone else's work if there's already a good explanation out there for high school chemistry teachers to use instead of the nonsense most textbooks have. Does anyone here know of one?
the reason the explanation made no sense was that it was entirely bullshit
the usual route of describing the history of quantum mechanics and mistaking that for an actual explanation.
Are you sure you understand Pauling's work on the nature of the chemical bond?
No. I'm actually fairly certain I don't understand Pauling's work (not least because I haven't read it!) and I'll definitely want to have anything I write reviewed by an actual expert, but I do think I'd be able to explain what a "quantum number" really is to high school students in a way that makes more sense to them than my textbook did.
Us physicists never beating the allegations!
Just give them Griffiths, and you'll do okay for teaching Quantum Mechanics, but for chemistry … you're correct, of course, that the Schrödinger equation is what all those heuristics about orbital hybridization are trying to approximate, and sure, you could add some lines emphasizing that at the beginning if it's not clear, but I don't think the pedagogy would be improved by dispensing with the heuristics altogether.
Trying to say something like "the solutions to differential equations often include parameters that can take different integer values, and quantum numbers come from those parameters in (approximate?) solutions to the Schrodinger equation" in a way that makes sense to high school students seems difficult but not impossible, and I'm willing to at least try. 🤷♂️
And then I can get into the usual cookbook stuff that students would need to answer the homework problems at the end of the textbook chapter. (Also, unless I'm badly mistaken, almost nobody does chemistry by actually working directly with the Schrodinger equation.)
Yeah, also in my experience textbooks suck at doing this "hey, I cannot explain this fully because it is too complicated for you, but here are the facts that are accessible for you, just remember that it is all more complicated than this".
And I learned to recognize talking about history too much as red flag. Sure, history has its place in the textbook, but some people use it as a substitute for the real thing. It's like "hey, if I tell them when the scientist was born, and whether he had a dog, maybe they won't mind that the part where I explain his invention actually does not make much sense; non-nerds are more interested in trivia anyway, aren't they?"
My father thinks that ASI is going to be impractical to achieve with silicon CMOS chips because Moore's law is eventually going to hit fundamental limits - such as the thickness of individual atoms - and the hardware required to create it would end up "requiring a supercomputer the size of the Empire State Building and consume as much electricity as all of New York City".
Needless to say, he has very long timelines for generally superhuman AGI. He doesn't rule out that another computing technology could replace silicon CMOS, he just doesn't think it would be practical unless that happens.
My father is usually a very smart and rational person (he is a retired professor of electrical engineering) and he loves arguing, and I suspect that he is seriously overestimating the computing hardware it would take to match a human brain. Would anyone here be interested in talking to him about it? Let me know and I'll put you in touch.
Update: My father later backpedaled and said he was mostly making educated guesses on limited information, that he knows that he really doesn't know very much about current AI, and isn't interested enough to talk to strangers online - he's in his 70s and if AI does eventually destroy the world it probably won't be in his own lifetime. :/
This report by Joe Carlsmith on How Much Computational Power Does It Take to Match the Human Brain? seems relevant.
I think this is a sufficient crux, e.g. his views imply disagreement with this report.
The main issue with this report is that it doesn't take into seriously take into account memory bandwidth constraints (from my recollection), but I doubt this effects the bottom line that much.
requiring a supercomputer the size of the Empire State Building and consume as much electricity as all of New York City
why does he think that is unlikely to occur? such things seem on the table. existing big super computers are very, very big already. I've asked several search engines and AIs and none seem to be able to get to the point about exactly how big a datacenter housing one of these would be, but claude estimates:
Frontier: 5,000-8,000 square feet (70% confidence)
Eagle: 6,000-9,000 square feet (70% confidence)
I’d be delighted to talk about this. I am of the opinion that existing frontier models are within an order of magnitude of a human mind, with existing hardware. It will be interesting to see how a sensible person gets to a different conclusion.
I am also trained as an electrical engineer, so we’re already thinking from a common point of view.
I brought it up with him again, and my father backpedaled and said he was mostly making educated guesses on limited information, that he knows that he really doesn't know very much about current AI, and isn't interested enough to talk to strangers online - he's in his 70s and figures that if AI does eventually destroy the world it probably won't be in his own lifetime. :/
He might also argue "even if you can match a human brain with a billion dollar supercomputer, it still takes a billion dollar supercomputer to run your AI, and you can make, train, and hire an awful lot of humans for a billion dollars."