Scott Aaronson is the Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science and Director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he got his bachelor’s in CS from Cornell, his PhD in complexity theory at UC Berkeley, held postdocs at Princeton and Waterloo, and taught at MIT. Currently, he’s on leave to work on OpenAI’s Superalignment team.

• Scott’s blog, Shtetl-Optimized: https://www.scottaaronson.blog

• Scott’s website: https://www.scottaaronson.com

PODCAST LINKS:

• Video Transcript: https://www.theojaffee.com/p/8-scott-aaronson

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IJRtB8FP4Cnq8lWuuCdvW?si=eba62a72e6234efb

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theo-jaffee-podcast/id1699912677

• RSS: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/989123/s/75569/private/129f6344-c459-4581-a9da-dc331677c2f6.rss

• Playlist of all episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVN8-zhbMh9YnOGVRT9m0xzqTNGD_sujj

• My Twitter: https://x.com/theojaffee

• My Substack: https://www.theojaffee.com

CHAPTERS:

Intro (0:00)

Background (0:59)

What Quantum Computers Can Do (16:07)

P=NP (21:57)

Complexity Theory (28:07)

David Deutsch (33:49)

AI Watermarking and CAPTCHAs (44:15)

Alignment By Default (56:41)

Cryptography in AI (1:02:12)

OpenAI Superalignment (1:10:29)

Twitter (1:20:27)

Rationalism (1:24:50)