Ever since the movie Transcendence came out, it seems like the idea of the ‘technological singularity‘ has been in the air. Maybe it’s because I run in an unorthodox circle of deep thinkers, but over the past couple months, I’ve been roped into three conversations related to this topic. The conversations usually end with some version of “ah shucks, machine learning is developing at a fast rate, so we are all doomed. And have you seen those deep learning videos? Computers are learning to play 35 year old video games?! Put this on an exponential trend and we are D00M3d!”

So what is the technological singularity? My personal translation is: are we on the verge of narcissistic flesh-eating robots stealing our lunch money while we commute to the ‘special school for slow sapiens’?

This is an especially hyperbolic view, and I want to be clear to distinguish ‘machine learning‘ from ‘artificial consciousness.’ The former seems poised for explosive growth but the latter seems to require breakthroughs in our understanding of the fundamental science. The two concepts are often equated when defining the singularity, or even artificial intelligence, but I think it’s important to distinguish these two concepts. Without distinguishing them, people sometimes make the faulty association: machine_learning_progress=>AI_progress=>artificial_consciousness_progress.

I’m generally an optimistic person, but on this topic, I’m especially optimistic about humanity’s status as machine overlords for at least the next ~100 years. Why am I so optimistic? Quantum information (QI) theory has a secret weapon. And that secret weapon is obviously Scott Aaronson (and his brilliant friends+colleagues+sidekicks; especially Alex Arkhipov in this case.) Over the past few years they have done absolutely stunning work related to understanding the computational complexity of linear optics. They colloquially call this work Boson sampling.

What I’m about to say is probably extremely obvious to most people in the QI community, but I’ve had conversations with exquisitely well educated people–including a Nobel Laureate–and very few people outside of QI seem to be aware of Aaronson and Arkhipov’s (AA’s) results. Here’s a thought experiment: does a computer have all the hardware required to simulate the human brain? For a long time, many people thought yes, and they even created a more general hypothesis called the “extended Church-Turring hypothesis.”

An interdisciplinary group of scientists has long speculated that quantum mechanics may stand as an obstruction towards this hypothesis. In particular, it’s believed that quantum computers would be able to efficiently solve some problems that are hard for a classical computer. These results led people, possibly Roger Penrose most notably, to speculate that consciousness may leverage these quantum effects. However, for many years, there was a huge gap between quantum experiments and the biology of the human brain. If I ever broached this topic at a dinner party, my biologist friends would retort: “but the brain is warm and wet, good luck managing decoherence.” And this seems to be a valid argument against the brain as a universal quantum computer. However, one of AA’s many breakthroughs is that they paved the way towards showing that a rather elementary physical system can gain speed-ups on certain classes of problems over classical computers. Maybe the human brain has a Boson sampling module?

More specifically, AA’s physical setup involves being able to: generate identical photons; send them through a network of beamsplitters, phase shifters and mirrors; and then count the number of photons in each mode through ‘nonadaptive’ measurements. This setup computes the permanent of a matrix, which is known to be a hard problem classically. AA showed that if there exists a polynomial-time classical algorithm which samples from the same probability distribution, then the polynomial hierarchy would collapse to the third level (this last statement would be very bad for theoretical computer science and therefore for humans; ergo probably not true.) I should also mention that when I learned the details of these results, during Scott’s lectures this past January at the Israeli Insitute of Advanced Studies’ Winter School in Theoretical Physics, that there was one step in the proof which was not rigorous. Namely, they rely on a conjecture in random matrix theory–but at least they have simulations indicating the conjecture should be true.

Nitty gritty details aside, I find the possibility that this simple system is gaining a classical speed-up compelling in the conversation about consciousness. Especially considering that finding permanents is actually useful for some combinatorics problems. When you combine this with Nature’s mischievous manner of finding ways to use the tools available to it, it seems plausible to me that the brain is using something like Boson sampling for at least one non-trivial task towards consciousness. If not Boson sampling, then maybe ‘Fermion smashing’ or ‘minimal surface finding’ or some other crackpottery words I’m coming up with on the fly. The point is, this result opens a can of worms.

AA’s results have bred new life into my optimism towards humanity’s ability to rule the lands and interwebs for at least the next few decades. Or until some brilliant computer scientist proves that human consciousness is in P. If nothing else, it’s a fun topic for wild dinner party speculation.