Keith Olbermann said I should be fired for criticizing Scott Galloway. Scott said I am a credit to my employer.
Dear Magicians,
More than 30 years ago, Sergiu Klainerman and Demetrios Christodoulou proved that empty spacetime is stable. That sounds like a technicality. It isn’t. Every exact solution of Einstein’s equations has to pass that kind of test before it can count as physics. Sergiu is a mathematician at Princeton, and in his new essay for Inference, AI Will Not Make Mathematicians Obsolete, he pushes back on the idea that machines are about to replace human thinking. We talked about both.
The moment
Sergiu told me that the Kerr solution, the math describing a rotating black hole, is uncontestable on paper. You can check it by hand. The real question is whether it means anything physically. If the tiniest nudge makes a solution fall apart, he calls it a ghost: perfectly valid mathematics with no manifestation in the real world. Slowly rotating black holes survive the nudge. Wormholes, as far as he can see, don’t.
Then he turned the same scalpel on AI. He calls the idea of an AI apocalypse absurd, and he thinks the deeper limit is language. Today’s models work by guessing the next word. Our best thoughts, he argues, come before the words.
“We have an intuition about something and then we find the words to explain it.” Sergiu Klainerman |
Take this with you
Run Sergiu’s stability test on one idea you’re sure of this week. Change one assumption a little. If the idea still holds, it’s real. If it falls apart, it was a ghost.
Until next time,
Brian
Missed Monday? How do you explain the multiverse, the Big Bang and the end of the universe in 200 words each? Here’s what I told The New York Times. Read this week’s musing
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