Adam Becker

Adam Becker has obviously taken to heart the story that every equation drops the sales of a book by half (or whatever the fraction is)....because I don't think there is an equation in there. And that is no mean feat for a book written by a PhD in Astrophysics, writing (essentially) about quantum theory. Actually, I found the book a delight to read...maybe because of the lack of equations. It's written as a story. The story of the development of ideas about quantum theory and in particular show more the dominance of the Copenhagen theory (championed by Bohr) and all the other theories that have been put forward to either supplement it or replace it. Famously, Einstein refused to accept the Copenhagen interpretation which basically denies that there is any reality associated with the theorems. It's a "shut up and calculate" approach. The theory gives the right answers ...so who cares what it actually means in terms of the underlying reality.
I found this book fascinating on so many levels. At one level it is the story of the attempts by many scientists to peer behind the equations and understand what is "really" going on at the quantum level and at another level it is a sociological study about the way that a paradigm is backed by its supporters and they use every trick in the book to frustrate, confound and undermine any deviations from the orthodoxy ....despite clear evidence that something is not quite right with their theory. It's also an interesting historical study about the rise of Naziism in Europe and the impact that this had on physics; the development of the atomic bomb and the consequent militarisation of physics; the rise of McCarthyism and the persecution on political grounds of some physicists ...noteably David Bohm; and the narrow, specialised education of modern physicists.....divorced from philosophy.
I must say that my own education as a scientist was remote from any philosophy of science. We learned it on the job and absorbed attitudes from other scientists....but it was very much in the mode of: idea>theory> experiment test> confirmation or refutation> next idea. I remember a chemist when I was working in the Riverina who refused to accept the interpolation of data from a range of points on a graph...which made perfect sense to everybody else....including me. He argued, "How do we know that between those two points there is not a peak?". Well...in a sense he was right ..we didn't know but most of us were content to accept Occam's Razor......"don't multiply entities beyond necessity". (At least we had picked this idea up in our science courses). And I've always found that a pretty good guide in life. But I digress...my point is that in my experience scientists are not educated to think about the foundations of their knowledge and most are content to "Shut up and calculate". This even applies to the ethical consequences of what they are doing. Plant breeders have very reluctantly come to accept that there might be some ethical implications from their collections of plant materials from the lands of indigenous people and there might be some ethical (or other issues) with the use of genetically modified organisms. People were only starting to think about plant rights when I was a scientist. And some people were taking out patents. Up until then, plant breeders (in my experience anyway) tended to be totally altruistic. We, agricultural scientists, were about feeding the world... not about trying to make our fortunes. We looked askance at those who had gone "over to the other side" and were working for Dekalb or other seed companies.
In summary....scientists are not being taught philosophy ...and as Becker points out... the physicists are openly contemptuous of philosophy.....usually not realising that they are subscribing to one form of philosophy or another and often to a form that has been disproven or undermined.
Becker does a good job of demonstrating the strength of the Copenhagen interpretation and (I assume that he is correct) the force of personality of Bohm and his acolytes in both developing that and in ruthlessly undermining any others bold enough to question it...or to want to do a PhD in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
I was shocked by the treatment meted out to a number of students who pursued research that was contrary to the Copenhagen interpretation ..and, in particular, to Bohm who really (it seems) developed a viable alternative. Why do these guys have such similar names (Bohr, Bohm, Born)??
I remember the words of Bertram Russell in advising a young graduate......(I paraphrase) ...do something in the accepted paradigm to establish your reputation ....only then can you be bold enough to challenge this. Likewise Einstein commenting upon some line of his research that had come up negative. "It's important that I publish these negative results...because I have established my reputation and others could not afford the risk to their reputation....but it is important that others do not repeat the same mistakes".
Becker, I think, makes the point very well that contrary to the popular story, Einstein was not defeated in the famous Bohr- Einstein debates and the EPR thought experiment was never satisfactorily answered. And Einstein was right in insisting that the Copenhagen interpretation was incomplete.
I really learned a lot from this book. Happy to award it 5 stars. show less

As opposed to examining the case for Mars in detail, this is a tour through the dumb things that rich white men in Silicon Valley believe. Becker cogently demonstrates that, by the same logic that leads them endorsing death now to improve the chances of hypothetical zillions a million years in the future, the whole project is nonsensical. For example, if energy use continues to grow at the same rate as it does now, “3,700 years from right now, we’d be using all the energy produced by all show more the stars in the observable universe. If Bezos believes that ceasing to grow our energy usage must lead to a culture of stagnation, he’d better get used to the idea.”

Becker argues that these ideas, now shaping AI (a huge target of capital investment and justification for energy use), are reductive, since key problems that can supposedly be “solved” with technology are not technological problems but social problems. The gap between “we can make everything we want” and “everyone has access to the things they want” is one of policy. “The solution to, say, border disputes between India and Pakistan isn’t throwing more technology at the problem.”

But pretending that tech is always the solution is profitable. Perhaps even more importantly, their ideas about the future allow them to deny the inevitability of death—in imagining they can live forever, they’re threatening the future of all. Becker calls this “transcendence, allowing adherents to feel they can safely ignore all limitations. Go to space, and you can ignore scarcity of resources, not to mention legal restrictions. Be a longtermist, and you can ignore conventional morality, justifying whatever actions you take by claiming they’re necessary to ensure the future safety of humanity. Hasten the Singularity, and you can ignore death itself, or at least assure yourself that you can put it off for a few billion years.”

But haven’t we been on an exponential upwards technological trajectory? It took thousands of years for the Industrial Revolution, but the pace of change has been much faster since, and if we can now do things impossible before because we imagined they might be possible (antibiotics, spaceflight) then why aren’t all the technologies we’ve imagined possible in the foreseeable future? “The fate of Moore’s law is the fate of all exponential trends: they end.” That includes innovation.

Becker points out that, as with many political positions, positioning huge leaps forward as inevitable is rhetorically effective, including by excusing responsibility for any nasty stuff that comes mid-leap. The AI will decide all, fix all. It also furthers a desire for control—the fantasy that we’re living in a computer-generated universe is a fantasy of total control, “especially for those who know how to control computers.”

But this is nonsense. For example, the internet’s beloved Maciej Cegłowski points out, “If Einstein tried to get a cat in a carrier, and the cat didn’t want to go, you know what would happen to Einstein…. He would have to resort to a brute-force solution that has nothing to do with intelligence, and in that matchup the cat could do pretty well for itself. So even an embodied AI might struggle to get us to do what it wants.” Cegłowski also jokes about the smartest person he knew, “and all he did was lie around and play World of Warcraft between bong rips…. The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation.” Continuing his bangers, he notes that toxic individualism is also doing work here: “A recurring flaw in AI alarmism is that it treats intelligence as a property of individual minds, rather than recognizing that this capacity is distributed across our civilization and culture.”

Becker gets equally good quotes from several of his interviewees. Philosopher Brian Weatherson devastates the foundational assumption of longtermism: that we can know now what choices now will be good for people ten thousand, or million, years in the future. “The Seven Years’ War is about as far in the past as 2300 is in the future. And the Seven Years’ War had a causal impact on just about every country on the planet, in many cases a massive impact…. But did it make those countries better or worse, richer or poorer, more or less just, etc? Who knows! The [what-ifs] are too hard, even knowing how one particular run of history turned out. Our ability to know what will change extinction likelihoods [in] 250+ years, and the size and direction of those changes, is worse than our ability to know the size and direction of the causal impact of past events. And we don’t know that.”

Becker also provides biting readings of various sub-species of tech bro futurism, including the “simulation hypothesis”: we’re in the Matrix, not in nature. “It is hard not to read into this shades of Genesis: We are made in the creator’s image, the world was made with us in mind,” and “If we live in a computer simulation, then expertise in software engineering really is expertise in everything.” They’re in control.

But these dumb ideas have been around, in various forms, for a long time. “The fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is the fundamental problem at the core of this book. They’re the reason this is a polemic rather than a quirky tour of wacky ideas.” We must push back against the claimed inevitability of their domination and remember that “no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. … They are too credulous and shortsighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now.” show less

Betteridge's law states when the headline is in the form of a question, the answer is always "No." Applying that to this book, nothing is real and nothing to get hung about. The subtitle admits that searching for the real is an unfinished quest but implies it is finishable. Indeed, our view of science is that its goal is to get to the bottom of things and is the only way to do so we have.

Full disclosure: I side with J. B. S. Haldane and against David Deutch, both of whom show up in this book show more that "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." But I'm also a human and would like to know what is real. More disclosure: I don't think science will tell us, at least the science we have now, because I don't believe a view from nowhere will come up with a view compatible with a view from my perspective.

I'll explain a little so you don't think I'm one of those Continental philosophers that Steven Hawking and Neil DeGrasse Tyson declared irrelevant. I see science, like cartography, as providing maps and all maps leave some things out. You wouldn't use, say, a subway map to measure the distance between two points. As such, I'm fine with the Copenhagen interpretation that Adam Becker clearly dislikes. He never comes out and says so but I believe he sides with David Albert whom he quotes as calling Copenhagen "gibberish." (More disclosure: I also like Copenhagen's TV shows like Borgen and Forbrydelsen.) My background is in mathematics and I understand the concept of isomorphism which allows complementary descriptions for the same underlying systems. As for "shut up and calculate," I don't require the "shut up" part because, as a sometime teacher, I appreciate the need for good explanations. I'll talk more about good explanations when I review David Deutsch later on.

Adam Becker provides lots of explanations. His "Bell's Theorem" description was among the clearest I'd seen. And his historic approach was enlightening, exposing the political and economic underpinnings of what gets studied and which explanations prevail in a subject that is supposed to only be seeking truth. Also, I somehow hadn't been aware before that Heisenberg was a Nazi. I wonder if that entered into Walter White's borrowing his name.

Adam Becker is comes right out and says that Science is mired in the political, but like a good physicist, hopes this can be minimized in practice. He cites the creationists and climate change deniers as being unable or unwilling to make that effort but he forgets that physicist Freeman Dyson (who also appears in this book) thinks much of the climate science is flawed and that too much is being made of global warming.

All in all, this book is a good approach for novices to the cross between philosophy and quantum physics and I enjoyed reading it. show less

Ideas like the tech Singularity, superintelligent-AI apocalypse, machine consciousness, mind uploading, cryptocurrency, effective altruism, longtermism, (Yudkowskian) rationalism, extropianism, immortality, colonization of other worlds, self-replicating nanobots, and transhumanism are simply crazy. People who believe in some subset of them, like Ray Kurzweil, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jeff Bezos, I J Good, Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, David Chalmers, Eric Drexler, show more William MacAskill, Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec, Max More, Elon Musk, Toby Ord, Peter Thiel, Vernor Vinge, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, are deluded fools. I don't entirely subscribe to these propositions, and author Becker himself takes a far more moderate and considered stance toward them than might be thought. But the existence of books like this one, casting a skeptical eye on the ideas and the people in question, is very important. There are major chapters centering on the Singularity (Kurzweil, mostly), AI apocalypse (Yudkowsky, mostly), effective altruism and longtermism (Ord, Sandberg, MacAskill, Bostrom et al), and extreme techno-optimism (Andreessen, Bezos, Musk et al). The closing chapter includes useful ruminations on science fiction, a statement that "the futures of technological salvation are sterile impossibilities", and the suggestion that billionaires be taxed out of existence. show less