A new room-temperature quantum device uses twisted light to entangle photons and electrons, overcoming one of the biggest hurdles in quantum technology. The breakthrough could pave the way for smaller, cheaper quantum systems with applications ranging from secure communications to future AI and computing platforms.
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Roman Yampolskiy has spent two decades being right about things people wished he wasn’t — and in this conversation, he’s not here to scare you, but to be precise. He makes the case that AI alignment isn’t merely unsolved but fundamentally under-defined: no agreed-upon values, no way to formalize them even if there were, and no mechanism for enforcing them on something smarter than its creators. His strongest argument isn’t a doom scenario, it’s that you cannot indefinitely control something smarter than you.
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00:00:00 — Defining General Intelligence.
00:05:58 — AI Instrumental Convergence.
00:11:11 — The Orthogonality Thesis.
00:16:15 — Escaping the Simulation.
00:21:45 — Principle of Indifference.
00:27:51 — Acquired Savant Syndrome.
00:33:51 — LLM Internal States.
00:41:02 — AI Safety Impossibility Results.
00:47:16 — Public Misconceptions.
00:53:21 — Existential vs. Suffering Risks.
01:01:20 — AI Alignment Definition Crisis.
01:09:28 — Computational Irreducibility.
01:16:20 — Substrate Independence.
01:22:50 — Philosophical Zombie Critique.
01:29:57 — The Cassandra Paradox.
01:37:35 — Religion and Simulation.
01:46:03 — Digital Physics Evidence.
01:51:20 — Limits of Control.
LINKS MENTIONED:
Roman’s Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?…
Roman’s Podcast: / @romanyampolskiy.
Roman’s Twitter: https://x.com/romanyam.
Roman’s Facebook: / roman.yampolskiy.
AI Identity [Paper]: https://philarchive.org/archive/ZIETPO-7
Basic AI Drives [Paper]: https://selfawaresystems.com/wp-conte…
Qualia in Agents [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04020
Orthogonality Thesis [Paper]: https://nickbostrom.com/superintellig…
Escape the Simulation [Paper]: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat…
Could This AI Be Conscious? [Article]: https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the–…
Impossibility Results in AI [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00484
When AIs Act Emotional: • When AIs act emotional.
Hacking the Simulation [Paper]: https://philarchive.org/rec/YAMHTS-2
Autonomous Machine Intelligence [Paper]: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r–…
Hinton on Maternal Instincts [Article]: https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/godfat…
Singleton Hypothesis [Paper]: https://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.
New Kind of Science [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1579550088?tag=…
On AI Controllability [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04071
Universe as Numerical Simulation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847
Nir Lahav [TOE]: • The Physicist Rethinking the Hard Problem.
Joscha Bach [TOE]: • Joscha Bach: Time, Simulation Hypothesis,…
Bas Van Fraassen [TOE]: • Bas van Fraassen: Why Science Doesn’t Reve…
Simulation Hypothesis [TOE]: • Why I Don’t Buy the Simulation Hypothesis.
Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: • Why The \
The security of modern communications heavily relies on systems that can rapidly and reliably verify users and the devices they are using. This process, known as authentication, essentially entails confirming that users or devices are legitimate (i.e., who or what they claim to be).
Conventional authentication systems rely on static cryptographic keys, fixed digital keys that allow encryption algorithms to scramble readable data into unreadable texts or vice versa. While these systems perform well in some contexts, they often struggle when networks include billions of devices that continuously connect and disconnect.
Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) recently developed a new system that could authenticate devices faster and more reliably in real time, even when they are connecting to large-scale networks, cloud services or virtual environments.
SUTD researchers have developed a reinforcement-learning-based safety system that teaches a stair-traversing service robot to brace itself mid-fall, addressing one of the biggest barriers to deploying autonomous robots on staircases.
Staircases are among the most challenging terrains a mobile robot can face. A multi-year field study found that robots designed for stair traversal fail at least 35 times more often on stairs than on level ground. The consequences can be significant. A robot that loses balance on a step accumulates momentum as it tumbles, threatening severe damage to itself, the building, and anyone in its path.
The paper is published in the journal Results in Engineering.
Artificial intelligence chatbots need to work on their social judgment, recent events suggest. At one end of the spectrum, they’re facing lawsuits for recommending dangerous actions. At the other end, the models can be so nice they’re considered sycophantic.
The problem could get worse as AI bots work more with humans, such as handling customer complaints, says Yan Leng, assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
But help may be on the way. In new research, Leng has devised a sort of personality test—more precisely, a behavioral audit —for large language models (LLMs), the technology that drives products such as ChatGPT. The paper is published in the journal Information Systems Research.
