Feynman was the reason that many a young kids became enamored with physics and drawn to science in more general. A true legend.
What many people don't know is that he was also a deep thinker about computers towards the latter part of his life and seems to have been increasingly more fascinated by them after his son started studying computer science at MIT.
I mean, that is definitely spoken from a place of ignorance. Yes, from a surface-level perspective, parallel computers can compute whatever a non-parallel computer can, and nothing more.
However, deeper thinking about parallelism has inspired open problems in a diverse array of fields within CS, including computer architecture, operating systems, distributed systems, PL, and even theoretical computer scientists. People have won various prizes in their respective fields for solving some of these open problems.
It might be because of the audience in this particular case. Apparently talking to a bunch on non-technicals, soooo we spend 8 minutes saying that by "computer" we don't mean the "tv" and keyboard, and talking about 3x5 cards...
After the first few minutes I found the rest quite nice. You'd think it would be pointless and almost agonizing because it's all fundamental concepts that we all (I hope) know. But somehow I didn't find it a chore.
I was just listening while doing something else that didn't involve much reading/writing, so not devoted time.
I particularly liked the bits about asking if a machine will be able to understand the way a human does.
"It's like asking if it will be able to pick lice out of it's hair like a human can." It has no hair and doesn't need to pick lice out of it and it doesn't matter.
That one analogy was almost worth the whole listen.
That's an argument worth undersdtanding but I'd say there is at least an important difference between a purely functional (mechanistic, deterministic) machine, or non-deterministic but only due to included randomness, and one that isn't either mechanistic or merely randomized.
It's the difference between a greeting and an mp3 player producing the sounds "Hello neighbor!".
That non-deterministic-nor-random one may or may not be a thinking being, but if it is a thinking being, it probably is a totally different form than ours, yet may still be equivalently an example of thinking rather than merely processing. (Just to be clear, I mean in theory in principle some day some where some how. There is no way any current llms are anything even remotely in the same galaxy as thinking.)
For most things we probably shouldn't care too much about that. Thinking matters, but thinking the same way a human does probably does not, except for a couple things(1).
And similarly, around the same time, "At some point people probably thought it was important that a machine couldn't flex a wrist or something as well as a human can." By the time of this talk there was enough robotics for enough years that everyone, even these laypeople, probably understood and were used to the idea that there was basically nothing physical that we can't build a machine to do, at least in principle, including every moving part of an organic body. So by that time no one was really pinning their sense of human value on the fact that robots are klunky and only humans can be fluid dancers and surgeons etc. Everyone knows that it's possible to make a machine that replicates everything physical about a human, and don't really feel threatened by that. So it's only more of that same process to next acknowledge that a machine could possibly think equivalently or even superiorly, even if maybe or maybe not in the same fashion or manner as a human, the way a plane flies faster than a bird but not like a bird. Though, we could actually make a machine that flies like a bird if we really wanted to. Though, why would we especially care to? Even if we did that, so what?
Just turns the whole question in to a "who cares?" and "If you think you care, or think anyone should, why?"
(1) I can only think of maybe 2 reasons anyone should care about that.
1, If we ever want to be able to re-home consciousness, we will probably need a substrate that works exactly like a human brain does. Some other equivalent level of processing and even equivalent appearance of self-awareness etc, won't do if it takes a different form. The end result would probably not be your consciousness in the way it is both before and after a sleep.
2, Trust, a feeling of predictability. We tolerate that other humans are self-directed and actually could do anything at any time and could be quite dangerous, mostly because every human has some understanding of every other human, or at least feel that we do. It might be valuable to have AI's that we knew percieved and understood and considered the world the same way we do, in order to trust them with jobs where they might wield the power to harm us.
We take humans, treat them like absolute shit in boot camp, then give them a gun, and the grunt does not immediately shoot the drill seargent, because the grunt and the seargent are both humans who know how the other ticks. If one or the other was inscrutable, it wouldn't work.
We also have actual humans that we don't understand or that we think don't understand us, and we call them psychopaths and sociopaths, and generally consider them highly dangerous or even evil, merely because of that tiny little difference in thought process. They have to be 99.9% the same as anyone else. Surely far closer to how you or I think than any imaginare machine or even an organic that isn't human.
Yet we would probably have no problem letting thinking dogs or even octopi operate dangerous machinery as long as they simply behaved predictably for some amount of time. We will use literally anything as a tool if it works.
These are not new trains of thought for me, yet this talk still made me think about it all over again. That lice remark really got me.
Not exactly one to one, but I feel like Leslie Lamport kind of fits into that?
Lamport has touched a ton of aspects of computer science and made many contributions, but manages to still explain things in a clear, easy-to-understand manner. I feel like his talks are just as fun to watch as they are educational, and I think his papers are generally very approachable while still being pretty information-dense.
I would love to see him write a book, or even just publish a nice compendium of his papers ala Donald Knuth's Collected Papers series (with light editing/updating, background info, commentary, etc.) I think that would truly be a pleasure to read.
In terms of science popularization, Sean Carroll [0], I would think. In terms of the scientific impact (read: major advance in science) we'll have to wait for quantum theory of gravity Nobel prize, probably. I could be wrong, of course.
I found it kind of humorous this was done at the Esalen Institute, ground zero for a lot of the new age woo, considering Feynman's no-nonsense public persona and being the origin of the phrase 'cargo cult.' Maybe it had other draws.
That is kind of an interesting question. The above quote from " Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman", (by my memory) is from a chapter that, iirc, deals with his time there giving talks trying to inject some logic amidst the woo.
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