Computer music, photography, some poetry and fiction, and something more or less like theology or philosophy of religion
Michael Gogins 29 July 2026 This just in: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/ . This is Mark Zuckerberg’s take on what I am discussing below. I wrote this essay before I read Zuckerberg’s manifesto. There clearly are some common threads. I have very mixed feelings about Facebook, which I think has done a great deal of social harm, but then I also use Facebook just about every day. I…
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann By Ananyo Bhattacharya Illustrated. 353 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $30. I have read much about the life and work of John von Neumann, including other biographies, and about his contemporaries and colleagues such as Alan Turing and Kurt Godel. I have also read parts (I am no mathematician) of von Neumann’s books Games and Economic…
I recently spent a few hours viewing a huge trove of videos on the YouTube channel Fantasy Universe . These are all generated by some unidentified person or group using artificial intelligence. Sometimes the music sounds like it also was generated by AI, sometimes it sounds more like stock music. In the following when I say transparent I mean that whatever it is, is obviously and completely…
A future in which: Standard issue human beings exist. AIs have created human bodies with AI brains. Some humans have direct neural interfaces to AIs. AIs have created robot bodies with AI brains. Humans have created robot bodies with human brains (i.e. a direct neural interface to a human’s brain). How does this end up working out? Does that depend on AIs having agency, or moral agency?
I have just read through “Solomonoff Induction” by Thomas K. Sterkenburg ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20274v1 ). I quote: 2.3. Universal optimality . One philosophical concern is the identification of universal reliability with reliability for computability, that is, reliability for all the ways the sequence under investigation could be computably generated. While certainly general,…
Electroacoustic music is a troublesome term. On the one hand, it would seem to refer to a set of instruments and procedures for making music; essentially, any acoustical waves that come out of an electrically driven transducer at the instruction of a musician. On the other hand, the term would seem to refer to a genre of music, a set of related styles that are associated with computer music and…
I have been programming computers in order to algorithmically compose music since 1979 or 1980, that’s 46 years. And I am still doing it…. During this period, I made a lot of mistakes that have ended up costing me a great deal of wasted time and effort. I will discuss these here, in the faint hope what I have learned might save somebody else some pain. However, first I must say, I am…
A scientist at Columbia University has posted a preprint of research on using a new technique of genome editing, called base editing , to change the genes in human embryos without the damaging side effects that are too easily caused by using the CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit. A tool like base editing would be used to cure genetic defects in human embryos. But the tool could also be used to add or modify…
In a number of recent posts here, I have been exploring the nature and risks of artificial intelligence. This has been based partly on theoretical understanding, and partly on personal experience using AI tools. Here I simply wish to state, for the record, the following thesis. There is no such thing as infinite intelligence. Just as no signal can travel faster than light, and in fact for that…
A few days ago, the New York Times published an article on artificial-intelligence powered computer worms invented at the University of Toronto that can invent new attacks on new vulnerabilities as it spreads. See the original paper here . I can do no better here than quote in full its abstract: A computer worm is malware that spreads on a network by replicating itself from one machine to another.…
The Leiden Declaration is not just for mathematicians Recently some leading mathematicians have been studying the use, impact, and risks of using artificial intelligence in mathematical research and institutions. They have now published the Leiden Declaration to articulate their concerns and to make recommendations. I learned about this today from the New York Times , and you can learn a lot by…
Progress in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT continues, and the importance of results from LLMs in mathematics continues to increase . I see no rational way to identify a near-term ceiling to this progress. Therefore, I think that artificial intelligence will become able to solve problems that human experts cannot solve. And this will probably happen within a few years. This of course…
A few days ago I installed and subscribed to Cursor, a branch of Visual Studio Code that builds in agentic artificial intelligence. Agentic means that the AI doesn’t just propose things, it does things, e.g. creating branches in one’s local repository, rewriting code there, and committing that code. When things are working you can ask Cursor to push it to origin. Note: Cursor is not at…
In his very useful blog about theoretical physics, Peter Woit has started to pay attention to artificial intelligence and its uses by mathematicians and physicists. In this post , Woit references another post by mathematician David Bessis. I found Bessis’ post to be the most intelligent, incisive, and informed discussion of the impact of AI on human thinking, and on the difference between…
Empowered, befuddled, diseased, enslaved, or extinct are the possible outcomes that I think apply to our future with artificial intelligence (AI). The critical factor that will determine our future is agency . Of course, the possible agency of artificial intelligence itself is another, and perhaps decisive, factor. Agency simply means that we can do things for our own reasons. And these things are…
Today my wife Heidi and I drove to the préfecture d'Ariège in Foix, and picked up our cartes de séjour, our residence permits. These make it legal for us to live year round in France, apply for French social security, and join the universal health care system. These permits are renewable.
This 1996 album of 15th -18th century court music by an honored sarod maestro and a famous Bollywood playback singer is one that I go back to listen to again and again. When I first acquired the CD , I talked it up with my Indian friend and colleague Vipin, who sort of put it down and offered alternative singers for me to audition. That puzzled me, because I am pretty sure I have very good ears…
I have made a discovery that seems to set limits on the usefulness of ChatGPT for my music programming work. In retrospect, my discovery is not surprising. It is simply that ChatGPT spits out so much stuff, so fast, that if I do not proceed step by step and verify every response, before I can notice it, ChatGPT will fix one thing and break another, or fail to keep track of which are the latest…
Here is a dialectical opposition that I have been pondering since 1969. Current artificial intelligence is neither conscious nor, in the sense of fundamental creativity, actually intelligent at all. (Although I do find it to be trermendously useful.) However, there can be little doubt that some form of artificial intelligence is possible that is not only significantly smarter than contemporary…
Querents on Quora sometimes ask whether immortality will someday be possible for human beings. There’s the little matter that some believe we already are immortal, or eternal, or have immortal souls, or Buddha-nature, or something, but that’s not what these people are asking about. They are asking about physical immortality. Of course not, because our best physical science indicates…