I love this comparison, and IMO is probably a useful way to think about LW, where they got “AI will change the world in very extreme and weird ways” as correct, but most of the specific stories are wrong, and way too much time was focused on elaborating the theories rather than discovering new ones.
Technical note, while supersymmetry and it’s particles can still exist, they can’t stabilize the Higgs mass or solve the hierarchy problem.
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It reminds me of the pre-2012 situation in particle physics, in which it was correctly anticipated that the Higgs boson exists, but was also incorrectly expected that it would be accompanied by other new particles and a new symmetry, involved in stabilizing its mass. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of papers were produced, proposing specific detectable new symmetries and particles that could provide this mechanism. Instead only the Higgs has shown up, and people are mostly in search of a different mechanism.
The analogy for AI would be: important but more straightforward topics have been neglected in favor of these fashionable possibilities, and, when reality does reveal a genuinely new aspect, it may be something quite different to what is being anticipated here.
I love this comparison, and IMO is probably a useful way to think about LW, where they got “AI will change the world in very extreme and weird ways” as correct, but most of the specific stories are wrong, and way too much time was focused on elaborating the theories rather than discovering new ones.
Technical note, while supersymmetry and it’s particles can still exist, they can’t stabilize the Higgs mass or solve the hierarchy problem.
Quote below: