On 9/27/2024 11:51 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Sep 27, 2024 at 1:45 PM PGC <multiplecit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> /there are profound theoretical and practical obstacles that
remain unresolved. Issues such as error correction, decoherence,
and the physical scalability of qubit systems/
*As AAronson explains, for quantum error correction to kick in you
need about 99.99% reliability, otherwise you create more errors than
you correct; 25 years ago the reliability was about 50%, today it's
99.9%. And there's no indication that the rate of improvement is about
to stop or even slow down. I suggest you read Aaronson's entire
article, he addresses many of your other concerns, and those of Gil
Kalai.*
*Quantum Computing: Between Hope and Hype*
<https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8329>
/> Aaronson's enthusiasm is reminiscent of earlier hype cycles in
technology. For instance, his optimistic views on artificial
intelligence /
*Huh? Aaronsonwas never on the AI hype train, but on his blog I
criticized him for NOT being on it. He said he was very surprised at
the extraordinarily rapid development of AI during the last two years
but said "/Even with hindsight, I don’t know of any principle by which
I should’ve predicted what happened/". We then had the following
dialogue: *
*
*
*_ME_: But you knew that Albert Einstein went from understanding
precisely nothing in 1879 to being the first man to understand General
Relativity in 1915, and you knew that the human genome only contains
750 megs of information, and yet that is enough information to
construct an entire human being. *
Also takes certain nourishment and environment, which is not zero
information.
*So whatever the algorithm was that allowed Einstein to extract
information from his environment was, it must have been much much less
than 750 megs. That's why I've been saying for years that
super-intelligence could be achieved just by scaling things up, no new
scientific discovery was needed, just better engineering. Quantity was
needed not quality, although I admit I was surprised it happened so
fast because I thought more scaling up would be required.
*
*
*
*_Aaronson_: /Knowing that an algorithm takes at most 750MB (!) to
describe doesn’t place any practical upper bound on how long it might
take to discover that algorithm!”
/*
*
*
*_Me_: I say why not? We know for a fact that the human genome is only
750 MB (3 billion base pairs, there are 4 bases, so each base can
represent 2 bits and there are 8 bits per byte) and we know for a fact
it contains a vast amount of redundancy (for example 10,000
repetitions of ACGACGACGACG) and we know it contains the recipe for an
entire human body, not just the brain, so the technique the human mind
uses to extract information from the environment must be pretty
simple, vastly less than 750 MB. I’m not saying an AI must use that
exact same algorithm but it does tell us that such a simple thing must
exist. For all we know an AI might be able to find an even simpler
algorithm, after all random mutation and natural selection managed to
find it so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that an intelligence might
be able to do even better. *
*
*
*_Aaronson_: /Come on! 256^750,000,000 is vastly greater than the
number of possibilities one could search through within the lifetime
of the universe./*
*
*
*_Me_: I agree, and yet it's a fact that random mutation and natural
selection managed to stumble upon it in only about 500 million years. *
More like 3.5 billion years. First life evolved then eukaryotic life
evolved then...
Brent*
*
*The only conclusion that one can derive from that is there must be a
VAST number of algorithms that works just as well or better than the
one that Evolution found. And if it had found one that worked I'm
certain intelligence can find one too and could do so in a lot less
than 500 million years because evolution is a slow, extremely
inefficient and cruel way to create complex objects, but until it
finally got around to making a brain it was the only way to do it. *
*Also, 750 Mb is just the upper limit, the real number must be much
much less. *
*
*
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
mml
Even if I share the security concerns at this point: Improved gate
fidelity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for building
a scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computer. As physicist Mikhail
Dyakonov has cautioned, there are profound theoretical and
practical obstacles that remain unresolved. Issues such as error
correction, decoherence, and the physical scalability of qubit
systems pose significant challenges. The threshold theorem
suggests that below a certain error rate, quantum error correction
can, in theory, make quantum computation feasible. However, the
overhead in terms of additional qubits and operations required for
error correction is enormous. Peter Shor himself has acknowledged
that the resources needed for practical quantum error correction
are daunting with current technology.
Aaronson's enthusiasm is reminiscent of earlier hype cycles in
technology. For instance, his optimistic views on artificial
intelligence did not always engage deeply with how general
reasoning abilities were being achieved or demonstrated! Fully on
hype train there. This pattern raises concerns about the balance
between genuine technological progress and premature excitement
that may not fully account for underlying complexities.
Other experts advocate for a more measured perspective. Gil Kalai,
for example, has been a vocal skeptic about the scalability of
quantum computers, emphasizing that quantum error rates might not
be reducible to the levels required for practical machines. His
arguments suggest that noise and decoherence could be fundamental
barriers, not just engineering challenges to be overcome with
incremental improvements.
On Friday, September 27, 2024 at 6:36:21 PM UTC+2 John Clark wrote:
*It looks like conventional Superintelligence is not the only
revolution that's going to make our world almost
unrecognizable before 2030 or so. Scott Aaronson has been
working in the field of quantum computing since the late 1990s
but he has always strongly objected to the hype surrounding
them, for years he said practical quantum computers might not
be possible and even if they were he didn't expect to see one
in his lifetime. But I noticed Aaronson's tone started to
change about two years ago and he now thinks we will either
have a practical quantum computer very soon or we will
discover something new and fundamental about quantum mechanics
that renders such a thing impossible. He says "/Let’s test
quantum mechanics in this new regime. And if, instead of
building a QC, we have to settle for “merely” overthrowing
quantum mechanics and opening up a new era in physics—well
then, I guess we’ll have to find some way to live with that"./*
*
*
*The following are more quotations from Aaronson's latest blog
but I think it would be well worth your time to read the
entire thing: *
*/"/*/If someone asks me why I’m now so optimistic, the core
of the argument is 2-qubit gate fidelities. We’ve known for
years that, at least on paper, quantum fault-tolerance becomes
a net win (that is, you sustainably correct errors faster than
you introduce new ones) once you have physical 2-qubit gates
that are ~99.99% reliable. The problem has “merely” been how
far we were from that. When I entered the field, in the late
1990s, it would’ve been like a Science or Nature paper to do a
2-qubit gate with 50% fidelity. But then at some point the 50%
became 90%, became 95%, became 99%, and within the past year,
multiple groups have reported 99.9%. So, if you just plot the
log /of the infidelity/as a function /of year/and stare at
it—yeah, you’d feel pretty optimistic about the next decade too!/
/Or pessimistic, as the case may be! To any of you who are
worried about post-quantum cryptography—by now I’m so used to
delivering a message of, maybe, eventually, someone will need
to start thinking about migrating from RSA and Diffie-Hellman
and _elliptic curve crypto_/[which bitcoin uses]/to
lattice-based crypto, or other systems that could plausibly
withstand quantum attack. I think today that message needs to
change. I think today the message needs to be: yes,
unequivocally, worry about this now. Have a plan./"
*Quantum Computing: Between Hope and Hype*
<https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8329>
ecc
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