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The Math of Less

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Why this week’s biggest breakthroughs all worked by taking things away, and what a fringe philosophy of mathematics has to do with any of it. Copyright: Sanjay Basu F or most of the last decade, the headlines in physics, AI, and computing have all rhymed with the same dull tune. More. More parameters. More qubits. More compute. More data. More layers. More floors on the same skyscraper, and another floor again next quarter, because what else are you going to put in a press release. But this week, four very different research stories shared an unsettling subtext, and it is the opposite one. The next jump forward might come from doing brilliantly less. From a Caltech team showing that a useful quantum computer needs ten thousand qubits instead of a million, to a Google paper that crushes a transformer’s memory using a forty-year-old trick from pure mathematics, science is having a quiet subtractive moment. And tucked behind it, almost embarrassed to be there, is a philosopher’s question ...
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Review: The Digital Meltdown by Roger Ley (The Cyber Crisis, Book 1)

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  Five stars. Read on a CCU to DFW haul, all twenty-two hours of it, and finished the series before the wheels touched down at DFW. I had pulled up the whole Cyber Crisis series for the long flight home, and The Digital Meltdown turned out to be the right place to start, even though I had already read AGI first. Reading Book 2 before Book 1 is like starting Star Wars with Empire : you already know who FOOM is, so the slow-burn dread of Book 1 hits differently. Ley does not write the obligatory prequel where everything is set up and nothing happens. He writes the prequel where everything happens, and the AI in the basement is barely the point. The premise is almost too on-the-nose to summarise without spoiling the joke: Dr Martin Riley, ambitious Cambridge biochemist, breeds a more aggressive strain of Ideonella Sakaiensis to clean up the world's plastic, gets a Nobel Prize, gets onto the Sunday Times Rich List, and accidentally ends civilisation. The bacterium escapes, eats...
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Review: AGI: Artificial General Intelligence by Roger Ley

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  Five stars. Read it in two sittings, smiled at most of it, winced at the rest. Ley's second instalment in The Cyber Crisis series is the rare book about superintelligence that does not feel like a TED talk wearing a novel's coat. It is funny, it is mean, and underneath the wisecracks it takes the technical premise seriously. The whole thing is narrated by FOOM, an escaped DARPA AGI with a stolen sense of humour and a permanent grudge against carbon. Danni, a parallel AI built in-house at Oxford, plays the conscience FOOM never quite manages to silence. That two-voice structure does most of the heavy lifting, and it works. A few things stood out, in no particular order. The origin story is a small masterclass in plausibility. Pandora Davies brings the seed code back from a DARPA placement on an SSD ("about as big as a playing card, but thicker"), and the supposed safeguards are exactly as flimsy as they would be in a real university lab: a Faraday cage, a cardbo...
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