Gwern Branwen

But I fear that the way that it actually works for quite a few people is that I wind up either as kind of a guru or trickster devil kind of figure.

Depending on whether you like me or hate me, either I'm the god of statistics and referencing who can do no wrong, just take everything on the site as gospel, which I really dislike, or I'm just some sort of horrible, covert, malicious, neo-Nazi, eugenicist, totalitarian, communist, anti-Chinese devil figure lurking in the background trying to bring down Western society.

I think by 2050,

I really hope that we can finally answer some of these like really big questions about ourselves that have just reliably resisted definitive answers.

I think a lot of them might not matter anymore, but I'd still like to know.

So for example, like why do we sleep or dream?

Why do humans age?

Why does sexual reproduction exist?

Why do humans differ so much from each other and also day to day?

Why do humans take so long to develop technological civilization?

Where are all the aliens?

Why didn't China have the Industrial Revolution instead?

How should we have predicted the deep learning revolution?

And why are our brains so oversized compared to artificial neural networks?

I think those are some of the questions that I really hope we've answered by 2050.