Thursday, May 25, 2023

David Goldman: US-China competition, AI, Electric Vehicles, and Manufacturing — Manifold #36

 

David Paul Goldman is an American economic strategist and author, best known for his series of online essays in the Asia Times under the pseudonym Spengler with the first column published January 1, 2000. 

Steve and David discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 
2:22 David’s background in music, finance, and Asia 
16:55 Looking back at the financial crisis 
23:04 Rise of the Chinese economy 
29:44 How Huawei’s strength is tied to China’s economic power 
36:49 Competition in the global electric vehicles market 
38:06 Why David thinks European countries like Germany will become closer with China 
45:29 U.S. manufacturing is falling behind 
52:08 Potential for war and ongoing U.S.-China competition 
1:04:07 Predictions for Taiwan 



Links: 

David Goldman in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Goldman 
 
Spengler column: https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/ 

You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-form the World https://www.amazon.com/You-Will-Be-Assimilated-Sino-form/dp/1642935409 

Prisoner’s Dilemma: Avoiding war with China is the most urgent task of our lifetime https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/prisoners-dilemma/ 

David Goldman articles in Claremont Review: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/author/david-p-goldman/

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Quantum Hair During Gravitational Collapse

This is a follow up to our earlier work on quantum gravitational corrections to the exterior graviton field of a compact object, also known as quantum hair. Here we follow the gravitational collapse of a dust ball and show that the quantum hair persists through the formation of a black hole horizon.

The detailed calculations are possible due to an effective field theory formulation of quantum gravity in the long wavelength, low spacetime curvature limit.
 
Quantum Hair During Gravitational Collapse 
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09466 
X. Calmet, R. Casadio, S. Hsu, F. Kuipers 
We consider quantum gravitational corrections to the Oppenheimer-Snyder metric describing time-dependent dust ball collapse. The interior metric also describes Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker cosmology and our results are interpreted in that context. The exterior corrections are an example of quantum hair, and are shown to persist throughout the collapse. Our results show the quantum hair survives throughout the horizon formation and that the internal state of the resulting black hole is accessible to outside observers.

 


 

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Artificial Intelligence & Large Language Models: Oxford Lecture — Manifold #35

 

This week's episode is based on a lecture I gave to an audience of theoretical physicists at Oxford University. 


Audio-only version, transcript: 


Outline: 

0:00 Introduction 
2:31 Deep Learning and Neural Networks; history and mathematical results 
21:15 Embedding space, word vectors 
31:53 Next word prediction as objective function 
34:08 Attention is all you need 
37:09 Transformer architecture 
44:54 The geometry of thought 
52:57 What can LLMs do? Sparks of AGI 
1:02:41 Hallucination 
1:14:40 SuperFocus testing and examples 
1:18:40 AI landscape, AGI, and the future


Final slide: