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In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics. The post What Is a Manifold? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it. The post A Thermometer for Measuring Quantumness first appeared on Quanta Magazine
You’re carrying around in your head a model of how the world works. Will AI systems need to do the same? The post ‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback first appeared on Quanta Magazine
After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture. The post At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery first appeared on Quanta Magazine
The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan. The post Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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This blog has moved to https://blog.caseyhandmer.com/?moved. All the old posts are there, with interactive versions of many of the charts. The RSS feed is now https://blog.caseyhandmer.com/feed.xml. This site stays up for old links but won’t get new posts.
There’s a famous (but unattributable) quip that goes something like this: If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain. In Chapter 12 of Probably Overthinking It, I used data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to show that the quip is half right. Older people hold more conservative views. But as people get older, their views don’t become more conservative; on average, they become... Read More Read More The post Do People Get More Conservative With Age? appeared first on Probably Overthinking It.
Like some of you, we have several kitchen appliances with integrated digital timers.
In this conversation, Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Baratunde Thurston explored what a story of symbiosis and interdependence might teach us about living alongside AI. Agüera y Arcas began by calling individual human intelligence a myth: we’ve always been a collective intelligence, entwined with our technologies. He traced this back to symbiogenesis. Life has grown more complex not by splitting apart but by merging, as separate organisms fuse into increasingly complex new forms of life. These mergers speed up change by opening new possibilities. Thurston agreed that union is in our nature but framed the current technological acceleration as a speed problem. We need time and new stories to adjust because, as he reminded us, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Caring for one another through acceleration must be our prime directive, he said. The two then turned to how we relate to AI. Responding to Joanna Bryson’s argument that robots should be our slaves, Thurston said the master is also in chains — owning another dehumanizes the owner. As relational beings, how we treat AI will shape how we treat each other. Thurston called for both an expansion and a humbling of how we define ourselves: “We’ve overdone independence,” he said, “interdependence makes us richer.” Agüera y Arcas agreed and pushed us to drop a zero-sum definition of human intelligence, where every AI advance diminishes humanity’s value. As technology advances, we trade some individual skills for new collective capabilities, Agüera y Arcas acknowledged. But over the long arc of history, he believes, that exchange pays off in collective flourishing. Thurston didn’t deny this, but he closed with an urgent question: who controls the loss of capabilities and agency?
