Greg Egan

The Real AI Risk is ‘Meh’ Technology That Takes Jobs and Annoys Us All While AI doomsday scenarios dwell on the risks posed by superintelligent robot overlords, one Nobel-Prize winning economist fears a more mundane possibility.

IMHO, LLMs will be an economic negative for years.

They'll do a worse job than humans,

but will still replace humans because they're cheaper for employers,

but really they're costlier, it's just that lots of costs get externalized to society by our horrible energy/tax policies.

Lose-lose-lose.

bsky.app/profile/greg...

St. Peter: So ... you claim you studied Applied Mathematics at university?

Me: [Starting to sweat] Sure.

St. Peter: So, remind me ... which one is Neumann boundary conditions, and which one is Dirichlet?

Me: I am so screwed.

But Gemini tells me I’m more than ready.

I believe the best strategy is for the inspector to accelerate towards the smuggler for a time T, and then accelerate away from them, with T chosen so that they later match velocities and positions simultaneously.

Do you believe there’s a better strategy, or are you not getting 3+√10 with that one?

MacOS helpfully offers translations:

I get the greatest share (about 70%) if you buy one of my self-published ebooks.

Photo of front cover and spine of Russian translation of “The Clockwork Rocket”, showing a rocket engine firing against a backdrop of colour-trails of stars.

Just received author’s copies of this translation of “The Clockwork Rocket” [Book One of the Orthogonal Trilogy] from Explorer Books, a Russian-language publisher in the Netherlands.

Explorer Books: explorerbooks.org/product/cloc...

About the Orthogonal Trilogy:
www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/O...

Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle | Quanta Magazine The amplituhedron, a shape at the heart of particle physics, appears to be deeply connected to the mathematics of paper folding.

An astonishing result, beautifully described in @quantamagazine.bsky.social: the mathematics linking scattering amplitudes in particle physics to a geometric object called the amplituhedron can be better understood by also mapping the amplituhedron to the mathematics of origami.

I subscribed to clarkesworld last month and just read this, and as a middle school teacher at an urban public school for very motivated kids, I loved it

Cringing listening to Avi Loeb on Australian Radio National. The journalist tried valiantly to push back as Loeb compared himself to Galileo and dismissed every expert in comets and planetary science as deluded, but I wish they’d had someone qualified to debate him in real time.

“Flow” was eerily beautiful, charming, sad, strange and hopeful.

Part of my brain baulked at the disparity between the lush, near-photorealistic landscapes and architecture versus the blocky palette in which the animals were rendered, but in the end I managed to shut that out and go with the story.

To Understand AI, Watch How It Evolves | Quanta Magazine Naomi Saphra thinks that most research into language models focuses too much on the finished product. She’s mining the history of their training for insights into why these systems work the way they d...

This is a good account of what intelligent technical people with years of expertise on precisely this question do, and do not, understand about how LLMs work.

www.quantamagazine.org/to-understan...

Understudies by Greg Egan Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

In a future where the rich kids are being raised with a digital Cyrano beside them to sweet-talk their way into the best jobs, four friends train together for a battle to prove that other kinds of minds might still have the edge.

My new story “Understudies” in Clarkesworld.

Whew, some good news for a change!

Just spoke to an Afghani friend (in Australia) who said the internet is back across Afghanistan since Wednesday, and incoming flights resumed just in time for some medication he’d sent to a relative to reach her before the last of the previous batch ran out.

These alien planets are astronomers’ favourites: here’s why Space scientists look back on 30 years of exoplanet discoveries — from rows of massive ‘super-Earths‘ to worlds with perfectly synchronized orbits.

This week (!) is the 30th anniversary of the announcement of 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet found orbiting a star like our Sun - since then, we've found over 6,000!

To celebrate, @alexwitze.bsky.social and @nature.com collected some astronomers' favourite planets:

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Issue 229 Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

If you like this story — or any of the other stories in Clarkesworld — please think about subscribing if you can. Clarkesworld pay their contributors and staff for their work, and money doesn’t fall from the sky.

clarkesworldmagazine.com

Understudies by Greg Egan Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

In a future where the rich kids are being raised with a digital Cyrano beside them to sweet-talk their way into the best jobs, four friends train together for a battle to prove that other kinds of minds might still have the edge.

My new story “Understudies” in Clarkesworld.

I haven’t had to actually think about PC video connections for 20 years, so when my mother’s monitor started complaining there was “no VGA cable”, I spent 15 minutes checking, plugging and unplugging the (DVI) cable before realising the VGA input had been selected by mistake.

This map reveals locations of lunar impact flashes detected by the NELIOTA project since 2017.

Meteorites striking the Moon release enough energy that we can see the flashes from Earth. The NELIOTA project has witnessed 193 of them (mapped here), creating a novel catalog of impact threats.

A new upgrade means we'll soon see a lot more. 🧪🔭

www.esa.int/Space_Safety...

A change of variable on an integral from θ to u = sin θ, du = cos θ dθ. The original integral has a cos θ dθ in the numerator, which is correctly changed to du, but as well as substituting u for sin θ elsewhere in the integral, a factor of 1/√(1-u^2) is introduced, effectively dividing the integrand by cos θ for no reason.

2025: Hoorah, this *looks* perfect! The chatbots will do all the calculus for us!

2030: Wait ... why did that bridge fall down?

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” premiered 50 years ago (in August in the UK, September in the US).

Dammit, Janet, that makes me feel old, even though I didn’t see it until 1979, when it was already a cult movie with midnight screenings.

Breaking: Meta are working on a new ML-trained neural implant that will induce the constant belief that you just watched a quite amusing video five seconds ago — even though you can’t recall anything about it — and if you scroll down on your phone you’ll see an even better one!

Mathematica input: Assuming[R > 0 && M > 0 && 2 M < R, FullSimplify[ Series[ Sqrt[2] R ArcTan[(Sqrt[R] - Sqrt[R - 2 M])/Sqrt[2 M]] - Sqrt[M (R - 2 M)], {M, 0, 2}]]] Output: (4*M^(3/2))/(3*Sqrt[R]) + O(M)^(5/2)

There are some expressions whose asymptotic scaling for R >> M I can guess at a glance.

This was not one of them!

Breaking: New FDA panel appointed by RFK Jr finds predominant cause of crime is ice cream consumption. “The signal each summer is very strong: ice cream sales go up, violence follows.”

Just watched the Tylenol press conference because I had to. It's hard to convey how utterly deranged, even by Trump standards, it was.

Creating a database of motivated proofs It’s been over three years since my last post on this blog and I have sometimes been asked, understandably, whether the project I announced in my previous post was actually happening. The ans…

Our project is to create a database of what we call "structured motivated proofs". For more details about this, and for information about how you can get involved (if you have suitable skills), see a blog post I have just written.

gowers.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/c...

A screenshot of a google search for "textbooks on superspace", with the AI response: Key textbooks on superspace include S. James Gates Jr.s Superspace: One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry, which is available as a free PDF online, and the textbook **M. S. M. M. M. M. M. S. C. S. C. S. G. S. C. S. M. S. T. T. T. S. S. S. S. T. S.S. S. S. S. S. S. G. G. M. M. T. T. R. R. R. R. R. D. S. C. S. R. S. R. M. T. T. G. M. M. S. R. R. G. G. G. G. T. D. S. S. S. S. S. G. G. M. T. S. R. R. R. G. S. S. G. S. R. R. R. M. M. S. T. S. S. S. R. M. R. D. D. T. T. G. G. M. M. S. S. R. R. G. D. S. G. S. R. R. S. D. G. G. M. R. S. D. S. S. R. G. G. M. G. S. G. G. S. R. R. M. S. D. D. R. R. R. G. S. D. D. S. S. R. G. D. S. S. S. R. R. S. S. R. S. C. M. T. G. M. M. G. G. M. D. M. D. G. M. M. G. S. S. G. M M. S. S. S. M. D. M. R. S. S. R. M. S. C. G. R. S. S. D. R. S. R. S. D. G. S. S. R. M. T. G. S. R. S. M. M. G. G. G. S. M. T. T. T. T. G. G. G. S. S. R. D. D. G. D. D. G. M. R. T. S. G. G. D. D. G. D. G. G. M. R. S. S. S. S. M. S. T. D. D. M. S. T. M. D. G. S. R. S. M. S. S. M S. R. G. S. S. R. M. S. S. D. T. R. G. S. D. M. T. T. R. D. S. S. S. D. G. M. M. G. S. T. T. R. R. D. G. M. M. S. D. M. R. R. G. D. S. S. R. R. D. T. S. S. R. G. D. M. S. T. R. R. R. G. M. M. D. D. D. S. S. S. M. R. G. S. R. G. D. M. T. M. D. S. S. S. M. R. M. S. M. D. S. D. S. S. M. S. G. S. R. D. G. M. S. M. S. D. S. G. R. R. D. S. M. R. S. G. G. S. M. M. S. D. D. M. S. G. D. R. G. M. S. M. R. G. R. R. D. G. S. G. M. M. T. S. D. S. G. G. D. R. M. S. M. T. S. R. G. M. S. R. D. S. G. M. D. D. S. G. D. D. G. S. D. D. M. M. T. S. R. D. S. G. G. S. T. G. M. M. M. S. M. S. M. M. S. D. D. S. R. R. M. M. G. G. M. R. S. M. M. S. D. D. М.

I didn't ask for AI in my search. This is really not convincing me!

Not a global map, but a local hash: grid cells decorrelate the representation of position and scramble long-range distance information Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex construct an intriguing multiperiodic representation of space whose properties have been the subject of much theoretical speculation. Here we combine modelin...

Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs