The Universe Was Once Hotter Than the Large Hadron Collider @PeterMcCormack

WHALES evolved from WOLVES!

Roman Yampolskiy (@romanyam) vs Joscha Bach (@Plinz): Can Anyone Control Superintelligence? Two brilliant people, one microphone, and almost no common ground. Roman has spent more than a decade on the AI control problem and thinks keeping a superintelligence safe forever is like building a perpetual motion machine. Joscha thinks today’s AI is more controllable than anyone expected, and that pulling the plug would doom us anyway. I mostly tried to keep up. We argue about whether “P(doom)” is even a real number, whether nukes actually kept the peace, and why nobody has bothered to wipe out the spiders. My favorite line came near the end: being conscious does not make you kind. Watch the video: youtube.com/watch?v=ayW7SDyA…

On October 14, 1066, William of Normandy defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, 960 years ago this week. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story in wool on linen, nearly 70 meters of it. Strictly speaking it isn’t a tapestry at all: it’s an embroidery, stitched, not woven. Here Harold sits crowned, with the Latin overhead: HIC RESIDET HAROLD REX ANGLORUM, “Here sits Harold, King of the English.” On the right, a crowd points up at something we can’t yet see. History likes a cliffhanger. In the next scene we find out: it’s Halley’s Comet, which passed over England that spring and was read as an omen of Harold’s fall. Embroidered in England, kept for centuries in France, it is now on display in Britain for the first time, at the British Museum through July 11, 2027. A little kosmos of its own: order and adornment, one stitch at a time. Credit: Bayeux Tapestry (11th century), scenes 29 to 31, the coronation of Harold. Photo by Myrabella, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Exhibition dates: BBC News.