Roger Penrose

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
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    • Mathematician; won a Nobel for his work on black holes.
    • Inventor of Penrose Tiles
    • Critic of AI in books The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.
      • Something about AI inspires a huge variety of terrible arguments against it. Penrose's had something to do with Gödel. Another famous one, Searle's Chinese Room, had flaws that anybody with any programming experience at all could see through in an instant.
      • It's kind of a boring topic at this point? I mean, does anybody these days worry about if AI is possible? Mostly they worry that it will either destroy to the world or propagate various forms of discrimination. Nobody writes books stoutly defending the human soul against the encroachments of the mechanical.
      • On the other hand it's kind of interesting that you find very smart people on both sides of this issue, all convinced in their bones that they are right. Marvin Minsky was a brilliant mathematician (he won the Turing award, the closest thing computation has to the Nobel), so was Penrose, but they clashed on this
    • [not sure what I am trying to do here or what this has to do with anything. The general issue of how to think about computation and minds is interesting but these debates usually aren't ]