Complete and utter drivel.
>> How could the discipline’s highest award go to research about machines designed to mimic human brains?
AI is not designed to mimic human brains, it is absurd to even pretend that activation functions emulate neurons in any sense at all, this is pure rhetoric and nonsense. This can be learned with a simple visit to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron). At best we might say artificial neurons were "loosely inspired" by a very simplistic model of biological neurons. EDIT: reflexively, since some people are unaware of how complex even single neurons are, see e.g. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00360.20.... The comparison of activation functions in neural nets to actual neurons is absurdly cartoonish and needs to stop.
>> But today, many of my colleagues in physics no longer agree with such dismissals. Instead, we have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human—one that challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries, and could answer essential questions about AI. It may even help redefine the field for the next generation.
Classic weasel words ("many of my colleagues"), no citation, pure, unfounded speculation.
>> Beginning in the 1980s, physicists (along with researchers in other fields) began developing new mathematical tools to study what’s called “complexity”—systems in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things—such as organisms—knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality.
Completely wrong and/or an unproven open question. See e.g. superdeterminism as a serious challenge to this mystical woo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism).
>> From a physicist’s perspective, no complex system is weirder or more challenging than life. For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like a rock, but a dynamic pattern playing out over time. The real challenge for physics, however, is that the patterns that make up life are self-organized.
Sorry, but this is pure nonsense, literally incoherent. "Self-organized" is undefined, and any sensible reading of the phrase is wrong by modern biology (selfish genes, e.g. mitochondria symbiosis, and dysfunctions and diseases like cancer strongly contradict any coherent "self" is organizing things).
> To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their “just the particles, ma’am” mentality.
The article rails against "reductionism" in other points, but, ironically, clearly has an incredibly reductionist (and wrong) view of physics and what exactly may or may not arise from unified field theory.
Stopped reading at this point.
tzury•1mo ago