Adam Brown: belief

Transcript context

…And we're confident that there's no way to make computers that don't make errors? It is a very interesting question what the fundamental limits on errors are in a computer, how far down they can be pushed. In terms of never making errors, I think that's very unlikely. If for no other reason than there is a minimum background temperature caused by the expansion of our universe—again, it all comes back to the cosmological constant—that gives a very small but non-zero temperature to our universe, that I think will inevitably mean that we make errors. You might imagine we could just set up some kind of perpetual motion machine that's just thinking happy thoughts over and over again in a quantum computer that never tires and never stops. I think that inevitably the universe would leak in, and there would be errors. But what the minimum error rate is, is not—I don't have a clear answer to that question. Physics doesn't have a clear answer to that question. One question you might have is: What will be the nature of not only the things that our descendants might care about, but what will they be able to produce domestically? What will they want to trade for? If something like alchemy is just super—you know, it's like equals MC squared is all you care about—then it's just like, look, your star system or your galaxy has a certain amount of mass, and you can convert that to energy, and there's fundamentally no reason to trade if there's not that high transaction cost to make it into whatever you want. On the other hand, if there are some limits, like in fact you had to make galaxy-wide factories, or you had to do these NP-hard calculations that even with a galaxy you can only trace down certain segments of the search space or something, there might be reasons to trade extremely—sort of a pie-in-the-sky question—but how much can we intuit about these kinds of constraints?…

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