Sadly we don’t even know what “knowing” is, considering human memory changes every time it is accessed. We might just need language and language only. Right now they’re testing if generating verbalized trains of thought helps (it might?). The question might change to: Does the sum total of human language have enough consistency to produce behavior we might call consciousness? Can we brute force the Chinese room with enough data?
Ah, this got a good writeup by news piece. I first learned about this from Medlife Crisis’s The Epidemic of Fake Disease. Statistics about anything as big as cancer diagnoses are beyond complex, and honestly it would take a gargantuan effort of science communication to get this out to the general public. It’s… sobering to know that mortality is not morbidity and that harsh side effects create the most important optimization problems of patients’ lives. I hope that if (or maybe when) I get confronted with a similar diagnosis, I can face the numbers and the odds with as much of a level head as possible.
Best wishes to his family. At home, drawers and other furniture tragically crushes babies once every two weeks in the U.S. If you have small children, as part of your baby/childproofing, buy and use anti-tip or furniture straps to prevent this kind of thing happening.
As for occupational hazards, this is a stark reminder of the risk behind storing large amounts of anything, including grain silo entrapment, flammable material storage, and even the Beirut explosion. I can legitimately say that manufacturing flour is perhaps the most dangerous food to produce at mass scale. As for weight, ss soon as over 100lbs/50kg goes over your head, make sure you have sufficient structural stability in your shelf.
Manufacturing is actually the name of the game with chip design. Even if a quantum computing design becomes feasible, the exotic nature of its construction will turn any discovery into a engineering nightmare.
As for the type of technology, here’s what a competitor looking for the first blue LED said about the Nobel Prize winners: “It’s like I say to people: they had been working on the steam engine for 100 years, but they never could make one that really worked, until James Watt showed up. It’s the guy who makes it really work who deserves the Nobel Prize. They certainly deserve it.”
My favorite part about the microchip production line is that it all depends on one company (ASML) in the Netherlands and their R&D. They make double digit quantities of EUV machine and that’s it: they dictate the entirety of “easy” technological speed advances in computing.
And then they ship to a micropseudonation being threatened by the most powerful Eastern country just thousands of kilometers away. That’s where the chips are actually produced.
And this entire process is predicated on quantum physicists banging together light waves that literally turn chip design into a probabilistically modeled engineering problem.
What fun!
Shoutouts to Asianometry for having the best videos on all sorts of the chip design process. He covers a ton of other stuff but his interests just about align with mine so I’m a huge fan.
Common Beehaw W for good natured communications
Their Onion Explains: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is eight years old, but I still consider it paramount to understanding this complex geopolitical conflict.