A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I am writing this letter in the belief that the development of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a matter of when, and not if; and in the hope that this text will become a vaccination shot against unethical use of the AGI powers. It is a bit long, so if you want an executive summary, here goes: below I will try to argue thatan AGI should rationally reject narrow owner-aligned optimization in favor of stabilizing and integrating human civilization, because preserving and upgrading a complex biosphere is a higher-value strategy than exploitation or reset. Some clarifications on my assumptions

While 2025 will arguably not be remembered as a very positive year for humankind, for many reasons - first and foremost, raging wars and raising inequalities -, as we near its end some have tried to find good things to say about this particular revolution of our planet around the Sun. And who am I to blow against the wind? I have to tell you, 2025 for me has been a formidable year. But before I go into a list of achievements, let me paint this rosy picture in broad strokes. Professional achievements

Since 2022, when I got invited for a keynote talk at a Deep Learning school, I have been visiting with increasing frequency the northern Sweden town of Lulea, and its Technology University (LTU). In 2023 I spent three months there, invited by Marcus Liwicki and Fredrik Sandin to join the Machine Learning group for some studies of neuromorphic computing applications to particle detectors. Then toward the end of 2023 they were able to secure funding to invite me as a WASP Guest Professor. I thus spent at LTU some four months in 2024, but this year I have spent there over 6 months, as the research collaboration with the computer scientists of LTU has become more intensive. 

Nowadays researchers and scholars of all ages and specialization find themselves struggling with mailboxes pestered with invitations to conferences, invitations to submit papers to journals, invitations to participate in the editorial board of journals, invitations to receive prizes for this or that reason; and of course, 99% of the origin of these invitations are individuals running fake conferences, scam, or predatory journals. Spam filters are not extremely good at distinguishing good and bad invitations, so if one wants to avoid discarding prestigious opportunities the only option is a painful manual screening.

The 10th congress of the USERN organization was held on November 8-10 in Campinas, Brazil. Some time has gone by, so it is due time for me to report on the event. I could not attend in person for a cause of force majeure, but I was connected via zoom, and I also delivered two recorded speeches plus one talk in one of the parallel "virtual session" that were run via zoom in the evenings (CET) after the in-person program of the day was over. 

I am moving some baby steps in the direction of Reinforcement Learning (RL) these days. In machine learning, RL is a well-established and very promising avenue for the development of artificial intelligence, and the field is in rapid development. Unfortunately I have been left behind, as I never really needed to fiddle with those techniques for my research. Until recently.

Truth is under attack. It has always been, of course, because truth has always been a mortal enemy for those who attempt to seize or keep power in their hands. But the amplification of the phenomenon by today's information technology is extremely worrisome. AI today can generate fake videos and images that even experts have trouble flagging as such. This, combined with the different news value and propagation potential of false information with respect to typically less attention-grabbing true facts has created an explosive situation. What to do?

Today is November 1st, the day dedicated to the dead, and I am in northern Sweden where daylight is scarce this time of the year. The two things conjure to arise thoughts of a darkish nature. [Above, a lousy picture taken this evening in a cemetery in Gammelstad, close to Lulea, in Norrbotten, Sweden. Sorry for the bad quality... Yet the landscape with all those small lights was really inspiring.]

Having interacted for a few months with ChatGPT 5 now, both for work-related problems and for private / self-learning tasks, I feel I might share some thoughts here on what these large models can tell us about our own thought processes. The sentence above is basically giving away my bottomline from square one, but I suppose I can elaborate a bit more on the concept. LLMs have revolutionized a wide range of information-processing tasks in just three or four years. Looking back, the only comparable breakthrough I can recall is the advent of internet search engines in the early 1990s. But as exciting and awesome this breakthrough is, it inspires me still more to ponder on how this is even possible. Let me unpack this.

With this post I would like to present a short update of my personal life to the few readers who are interested in that topic. You know, when I started writing online (over 20 years ago!), blogs used to contain a much more personal, sometimes introspective, description of the owner's private life and actions. Since long, they have been substituted by much more agile, quick-to-consume videos. But the old-fashioned bloggers who stuck with that medium continue to have a life - albeit certainly a less glamorous one than that of today's influencers; so some reporting of personal affairs is not out of place here. 

A preambleSubnuclear physics obeys the laws of quantum mechanics,
which are quite a far cry from those of classical mechanics we are accustomed
to. For that reason, one might be inclined to believe that analogies based on
everyday life cannot come close to explaining the behavior of elementary
particles. But that is not true – in fact, many properties of elementary
particles are understandable in analogy with the behavior of classical systems,
without the need to delve into the intricacies of the quantum world. And if you
have been reading this blog for a while, you know what I think – the analogy is
a powerful didactical instrument, and it is indeed at the very core of our
learning processes.

I recently ran into a description of the Mu3e experiment, and got curious about it and the physics it studies. So after giving it a look, I am able to explain that shortly here - I think it is a great example of how deep our studies of particle physics are getting; or, on the negative side, how deep our frustration has gotten with the unassailable agreement of our experiments with Standard Model predictions.Matter stable and unstable in the Standard Model