Weekend reading: The write stuff
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As someone who works daily using quantum mechanics and has been involved involved a few times with quantum information/quantum computing, here are my tuppence:
* The usual cliche ‘nobody understands quantum mechanics’ is rather misleading. The right question is really how can we understand our (classical mechanics) everyday experience given that Nature is really governed by quantum mechanics. This question has been basically answered.
* The best summary of how to make sense of quantum mechanics that I ever came across is Sidney Coleman’s lecture `Quantum Mechanics in your Face.’ There is an old (very grainy) video recording of the whole lecture on YouTube that is worth watching, if you are curious (much better than ChatGPT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyNMlXN-sw
That’s a great piece on ASM, although I might have found space to point out that its market cap makes its Europe’s most valuable company by a considerable distance at the moment. It’s more than double the EU’s second largest (LVMH) and c. $200 billion higher than HSBC (UK’s highest) or Roche (Switzerland’s biggest).
And are today’s non-deterministic LLMs (likely necessary) transitioning to near future neuro-symbolic hybrid AGIs just in a sense the first breadcrumbs that lead, via Quantum ML (in the intermediate term), to long-term full ASI?:
https://open.substack.com/pub/hiddenmarketgems/p/it-was-never-about-ai
Per Gibson, the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
I blow hot and cold about AI writing. Yes the style can be maddening. And I see the argument that something is lost with regard to human creativity. But the contrary argument is – it writes “better” than many people can on their own (present company excepted!), and thus enables people to communicate more clearly than they could otherwise. The important thing to remember is that AI doesn’t self-prompt (yet) – every output is the result of a human prompting it with the ideas that he or she wants to convey. (Thinking here of people genuinely using AI to aid communication of course, not random AI slop selling something.)
@TI as long as you and TA keep this site going, you’ll have a great many committed and engaged readers I’m sure. And I doubt you’ll run out of topics!
P.S. the late, great Iain M. Banks was a proud Scot, hence the spelling of his first name 🙂
@TBDW — Funnily enough my friend said something a bit different when I was talking him, and expressing my brain twisting around the subject. He said yeah but he’s working with classic logic (/physics) and the quantum computer in the middle of it all is a black box that he only needs to care about the inputs and outputs too. That’s not quite it (if you work on say the error checking theory you have to understand why you need to do it a certain Byzantine way for quantum mechanical reasons) but I did feel a bit more like I was in the company of my old mortal student mate after that… 😉
@DH — Agree quantum computing has come on like a train in the past few years, but as far as I can tell it’s so far coincident with the rise of AI and also the future of AI, pending of course ‘developments’.
@Jonathan — Indeed, it’s been a beast of late and now seems to sport a market cap more akin to its global importance. I hold and have done well, but wish I’d had the sense to back up the truck 18 months or so ago when it inexplicably plunged out of favour on the back of one weak quarterly update. (Caveat: I almost never back up the truck!)
@c-strong — Ack! I met the man too, interviewed him for my student newspaper back in the day… Should have run the whole article through the AI checker not just the intro!
I have a Theoretical degree in physics :p
Sometimes I use more that one chatbot to triangulate a point if view, I also use privacy mode so it approaches my questions more neutrally rather than trying to manipulate me around what it knows.
Chatbots too seem to get really adamant, and carry errors like an excel spreadsheet does, I don’t know why it doesn’t double take on what it said and the context
Sort of like finding someone half cut down the pub and asking them for life advice
Nice post this week. I strongly agree with your point that AI is most useful when you understand the field. I find enough errors and hallucinations when I use AI in areas I would consider myself an expert in, so I am extremely cautious if it is a topic I am less familiar with.
I never use it directly for writing, because the output is so far from my own voice that I feel forced to completely rewrite its output anyway.
AI is helpful for proof-reading for spelling, punctuation and grammar (I am as lazy and chaotic as the next writer), but it is also prone to rewriting my sentences to have a completely different meaning. So I look at the suggested alternatives, but only accept those that convey my meaning better than my original version.
I also use it for search to check my thinking and find evidence and examples. For instance, I think these are the most important factors influencing X. Have I missed anything that experts would consider equally significant? Or, give me three real-life citable examples of this thing I am talking about.
So, I use, but with caution. I do take @c-strong’s point #4 about helping people to communicate more effectively, but the risk is that they don’t put enough effort into the prompt to make it work. I have started to get e-mail and letter replies from businesses and agencies that appear to be personalised, but in fact do not address the topic of the exchange in any way.
Maybe in time, when people have been taught enough communication skills to frame a good prompt, it will improve our efficiency. Until then, I prefer someone who is clear in what they are trying to say, even if poorly expressed, over machine generated drivel.
I particularly liked the Harper’s article on gerontocracy in the US. Much of what they wrote would equally apply in the UK and other advanced economies.
And I can see the political difficulties of tackling this demographic time bomb. You only have to read the comments under almost any article that mentions it, however obliquely, on ThisIsMoney to see the seething rage unleashed by any suggestion that they may have to forgo their ‘privileges’ for the good of society.
Unfortunately, the fate of most gerontocracies is pretty awful. Economic and societal stagnation, refusal to consider longer-term issues (eg climate change), disaffected and disenfranchised youth, leading to often sudden and brutal collapse.
As one of the elderly potentially blocking a more vibrant society through self-interest, I realise that I probably have to give up some power and assets to save my children and grandchildren.
Really like Monevator, hope you keep it going. Great tone to the writing, just really enjoyable
Very interesting piece this week, thanks @TI – keep up the outstanding work. My job (should say former job, having recently stepped away) in tendering for new business included technical writing for a mixed audience. In a theme likely common to many industries, AI is fast becoming increasingly ubiquitous in elements of this. Not only are suppliers using AI to respond to tenders, but clients are using AI to set the questions. Responses are also being evaluated using AI, which in turn changes the way that tender submissions are shaped. Where will it all end? (don’t plug that one into CGPT, that way madness lies!)
After I read this latest Monevator piece I went for a walk and had the Merryn talks money podcast with Tom Slater for company. He has published a paper called “AI isn’t coming for your job, its coming for your mind” To me, this is a companion piece.
Key points:
AI isn’t just changing what we do, it’s rewiring our brains as we use it, just like literacy did.
We’re trading deep thinking for quick answers without realising the cost to memory and judgment.
The people who thrive won’t be those who use AI most, but those who can still think without it.
https://www.bailliegifford.com/insights/ic-article/2026-q1-ai-isn-t-coming-for-your-job-it-s-coming-for-your-mind-10061431/
@Bassavoce #11: unless this ends with ASI and the disappearance of humanity then capitalism will still be around and that needs humans as spending agents to create the demand, even if everything else, cognitive or physical, somehow ends up automated eventually. We may have lost our minds by then, but we’ll still be clicking ‘Add to basket’.
@TI #5 Granted fully fault tolerant quantum computing is likely still many (but possibly not so many) years away for most applications, though noisy intermediate scale quantum devices are already being used.
I’d guess that hybrid systems are a realistic pathway through to quantum supremacy, with quantum for the really hard sub problems (e.g., molecular simulation, certain optimisations), and classical (including AI) for everything else.
Coincidentally here, David Stevenson (of The Adventurous Investor) is covering today Nvidia newsroom’s release that Harvard, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and others are adopting Nvidia’s Ising (named after the Ising model in statistical physics) as open source AI models targeting quantum’s biggest bottlenecks:
– Using Ising Calibration (a Vision Language Model) to interpret realtime measurements from quantum processors to automate calibration, and turning a process that took days into hours.
– Using Ising Decoding (running on 3D Convolutional Neural Networks, a type of deep learning architecture that slide across all three dimensions of the input volume) for quantum error correction, with decoding claimed up to 2.5x faster and 3x more accurate than prior standards like pyMatching, and with small enough footprints for realtime use.
Weights, training code, data recipes are all on Hugging Face/GitHub, which, IMHO, is smart for adoption. Maybe this is the next moat for Nvidia after CUDA?
On a slightly lighter? note re the gerontocracy
As an 80+ NHS “patient “ ie I just use the NHS for a yearly check up re BP,Cholesterol etc-on my recent visit I got the vibe from the nurse that NHS will have a more “hands off” approach as I was now 80+ to my various medications
It appears that once 80 is reached NHS considers its main job is done and it’s over to the client be more personally for any further medication
Indeed recently a friend with Alzheimer’s and various other problems has at the request of his wife and daughter had his medication greatly reduced leading to a very obvious and immediate increase in his quality of life but probably (sadly or not?) to a shorter life span
My GP daughter confirms that this state of affairs is indeed the case
Interesting times
xxd09
Thanks for the Terry Godier link, I have learned many new things from it.
Absolute banger of an article this week. Long may it continue. I for one am definitely not reaching for HAL to open the pod bay doors
@xxd09 – Blimey, are you saying that an 80-year-old has to advocate for further treatment while the clinicians step back from a proactive role?
Or are you saying that the approach now is to listen harder to the patient? Essentially to allow the patient to decide how interventionist they want treatment to be when traded against quality of life in the remaining time?
@the thread – Re AI: My personal experience of AI is that it does at first blush seem capable of laying waste to cognition. If I allowed it to spoon food me, or accepted its word like it was brought down a mountain on ten stone tablets.
But I can’t do that. I can’t stop thinking critically. And then AI’s limitations are glaring. My guess is this will be obvious to many, many people because they’re trying to use AI to help do their jobs. The weakness of AI is then all too apparent.
I think this is a great point in the article linked to by @Bassavoce:
“There are reasons to believe the picture need not be this bleak. After AlphaGo defeated the world’s best Go players, human players studied its strategies and developed genuinely new ways of thinking about the game.”
This is why I haven’t binned off AI already. It’s genuinely enabled me to develop new skills where the learning curve would have been too steep before. It’s also a great sounding board for firming up half-baked ideas – so long as I don’t take its claims too seriously.
At the same time, it’s completely unreliable, maddening, hallucinatory and has wasted hours of my time on wild goose chases.
Mostly it seems like a powerful, fickle tool that takes a great deal of perseverance to adapt to. And then it changes on you, so you have to learn how to use it all over again.
If you want a view of how Quantum Computing could affect cryptography, AI and much else: then you could do worse than this Substaker’s work, requoting Scott Aaronson: “Once you understand quantum fault tolerance, asking “so when are you going to factor 35 with Shor’s algorithm?” becomes sort of like asking the Manhattan Project physicists in 1943, “so when are you going to produce at least a small nuclear explosion?”:
https://open.substack.com/pub/murmurationstwo/p/my-takeaways-from-googles-and-oratomics
Accumulator-both your statements have truth
NHS triaging with increasingly aging population and also with the limited resources at its disposal-pragmatic?
I notice having to be a lot more vigorously interactive with the system as I age
Private medicine becoming a requirement for the over 80s ( hips and knees and dentistry) or you wait forever -is your pension/ savings big enough to allow for these possible medical demands -which are much more common in the “aged”?
It’s a changing world out there !
xxd09
Yes, we’ve all had to become our own advocates in the NHS. It’s no country for the diffident.
Also read some interesting discussions on end-of-life dilemmas: specifically the interaction of our desire / ability to extend life vs the advisability of doing so when quality of life is accounted for. Gaining some unwanted real-life experience too.
Thanks for a great (even better than usual) article and links collection this week!
@Jiffy — Cheers to you and all commenters!