Blaise Agüera y Arcas: commitment

Transcript context

…It's essential for life to have some functionality. In 2019, the family of the Braveback programs, their strings, in which gain their functionality by its external goal, aka the CPU. I agree. So I made claims that maybe sound contradictory, you know, 1 of which was that Von Neumann is embodied computation and different from Turing in that sense, but on the other hand that BFF looks like, you know, very much like a Turing machine, and yet I also said it was embodied because I made 1 tape. Know, even the question of whether something is embodied or not is a little bit perspective dependent as well. Because in a in a Von Neumann system, for instance, there's of course the same rule operating at every pixel. You know, you can ask yourself the question, is a computer the thing that I make? You know, with lots of parts, right, you know, the kinds that von Neumann designed, or is it just the operation of a single pixel? The usual answer is to say what happens at a single pixel is just the physics of that world. But what constitutes the physics and what constitutes the computation is actually a movable boundary. So, you know, embodiment is is is essential in a very minimal sense that you need to be able to, to operate on the the thing that is going to that you need to be able to make quines essentially. Right? And and and and in ordinary brain fuck, you you can't make a quine because the data tape is separate from the from the program tape. But you bring them together, you're now in the same realm as as a as a cellular automaton, albeit with a different coarse graining of what you consider to be the physics and what you consider to be the the code. Now, I mean, in our world, we know that it's possible to build computers or else we wouldn't be able to build computers and we wouldn't be here either. But what constitutes the physics, if you like, the physics that makes up computers itself had to evolve. We began as, I guess, nothing but a quantum field theory and then things came together into particles, and the particles come together into atoms, the atoms come together into molecules and so on. Those are essentially what I would call the inanimate replicators, right, in in the system. And and there's an important phase transition when those suddenly are rich, form a rich enough set that not only do you have an autocatalytic system as Walter Fontana would have said, but also that that you can form a Turing complete instruction set and and therefore, you know, open the door to generality of of computing. I hope that I hope that makes some sense. Alright. And I think we're And, yeah, I'm afraid we have to wrap up. So let's thank, please, once again. Thank you so much. It was amazing. It was amazing talk. Great questions too.…

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