Category: scottaaronson

Unrelated Announcement (Feb. 7): Huge congratulations to longtime friend-of-the-blog John Preskill for winning the 2024 John Stewart Bell Prize for research on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics! On the heels of my post on the […]

Unrelated Announcement: The Call for Papers for the 2024 Conference on Computational Complexity is now out! Submission deadline is Friday February 16. Every month or so, someone asks my opinion on the simulation hypothesis. Every […]

David Soloveichik, my friend and colleague in UT Austin’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, and I are looking to hire a postdoc in “Unconventional Computing,” broadly defined. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: […]

This fall, I’m honored to have made a new friend: the noted Chinese dissident scholar Rowena He, currently a Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at UT Austin, and formerly of Harvard, the Institute for […]

I’m being attacked on Twitter for … no, none of the things you think. This time it’s some rationalist AI doomers, ridiculing me for a podcast I did with Eliezer Yudkowsky way back in 2009, […]

Over at Astral Codex Ten, the other Scott A. blogs in detail about a genetically engineered mouth bacterium that metabolizes sugar into alcohol rather than acid, thereby (assuming it works as intended) ending dental cavities […]

Happy Hanukkah! I’m returning to Austin from a Bay Area trip that included the annual Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference. This year, for the first time, I opened the conference, with a talk on “The […]

For the many friends who’ve asked me to comment on the OpenAI drama: while there are many things I can’t say in public, I can say I feel relieved and happy that OpenAI still exists. […]

No, I don’t know what happened with Sam Altman, beyond what’s being reported all over the world’s press, which I’ve been reading along with everyone else. Ilya Sutskever does know, and I talk to Ilya […]

I’ve been drowning in both quantum-computing-related and AI-related talks, interviews, podcasts, panels, and so on. These activities have all but taken over my days, leaving virtually no time for the actual research (especially once one […]