2026-02-13 00:18:21
The following are prepared remarks that I delivered by Zoom to a student group at my old stomping-grounds of MIT, and which I thought might interest others (even though much of it will be familiar to Shtetl-Optimized regulars). The students asked me to share my “optimistic vision” for the year 2050, so I did my best to oblige. A freewheeling discussion then followed, as a different freewheeling discussion can now follow in the comments section.
I was asked to share my optimistic vision for the future. The trouble is, optimistic visions for the future are not really my shtick!
It’s not that I’m a miserable, depressed person—I only sometimes am! It’s just that, on a local level, I try to solve the problems in front of me, which have often been problems in computational complexity or quantum computing theory.
And then, on a global level, I worry about the terrifying problems of the world, such as climate change, nuclear war, and of course the resurgence of populist, authoritarian strongmen who’ve turned their backs on the Enlightenment and appeal to the basest instincts of humanity. I won’t name any names.
So then my optimistic vision is simply that we survive all this—“we” meaning the human race, but also meaning communities that I personally care about, like Americans, academics, scientists, and my extended family. We survive all of it so that we can reach the next crisis, the one where we don’t even know what it is yet.
But I get the sense that you wanted more optimism than that! Since I’ve spent 27 years working in quantum computing, the easiest thing for me to do would be to spin an optimistic story about how QC is going to make our lives so much better in 2050, by, I dunno, solving machine learning and optimization problems much faster, curing cancer, fixing global warming, whatever.
The good news is that there has been spectacular progress over the past couple years toward actually building a scalable QC. We now have two-qubit gates with 99.9% accuracy, close to the threshold where quantum error-correction becomes a net win. We can now do condensed-matter physics simulations that give us numbers that we don’t know how to get classically. I think it’s fair to say that all the key ideas and hardware building blocks for a fault-tolerant quantum computer are now in place, and what remains is “merely” the staggeringly hard engineering problem, which might take a few years, or a decade or more, but should eventually be solved.
The trouble for the optimistic vision is that the applications, where quantum algorithms outperform classical ones, have stubbornly remained pretty specialized. In fact, the two biggest ones remain the two that we knew about in the 1990s:
Quantum simulation could help with designing better batteries, or solar cells, or high-temperature superconductors, or other materials, but the road from improved understanding to practical value is long and uncertain. Meanwhile, breaking public-key cryptography could help various spy agencies and hackers and criminal syndicates, but it doesn’t obviously help the world.
The quantum speedups that we know outside those two categories—for example, for optimization and machine learning—tend to be either modest or specialized or speculative.
Honestly, the application of QC that excites me the most, by far, is just disproving all the people who said QC was impossible!
So much for QC then.
And so we come to the elephant in the room—the elephant in pretty much every room nowadays—which is AI. AI has now reached a place that exceeds the imaginations of many of the science-fiction writers of generations past—excelling not only at writing code and solving math competition problems but at depth of emotional understanding. Many of my friends are terrified of where this is leading us—and not in some remote future but in 5 or 10 or 20 years. I think they’re probably correct to be terrified. There’s an enormous range of possible outcomes on the table, including ones where the new superintelligences that we bring into being treat humans basically as humans treated the dodo bird, or the earlier hominids that used to share the earth with us.
But, within this range of outcomes, I think there are also some extremely good ones. Look, for millennia, people have prayed to God or gods for help, life, health, longevity, freedom, justice—and for millennia, God has famously been pretty slow to answer their prayers. A superintelligence that was aligned with human values would be nothing less than a God who did answer, who did deliver all those things, because we had created it to do so. Or for religious people, perhaps such an AI would be the means by which the old God was finally able to deliver all those things into the temporal world. These are the stakes here.
To switch metaphors, people sometimes describe the positive AI-enabled future as “luxury space communism.” AI would take care of all of our material needs, leaving us to seek value in our lives through family, friendships, competition, hobbies, humor, art, entertainment, or exploration. The super-AI would give us the freedom to pursue all those things, but would not give us the freedom to harm each other, to curtail each others’ freedoms, or to build a bad AI capable of overthrowing it. The super-AI would be a singleton, a monotheistic God or its emissary on earth.
Many people say that something would still be missing from this future. After all, we humans would no longer really be needed for anything—for building or advancing or defending civilization. To put a personal fine point on it, my students and colleagues and I wouldn’t needed any more to discover new scientific truths or to write about them. That would all be the AI’s job.
I agree that something would be lost here. But on the other hand, what fraction of us are needed right now for these things? Most humans already derive the meaning in their lives from family and community and enjoying art and music and food and things like that. So maybe the remaining fraction of us should just get over ourselves! On the whole, while this might not be the best future imaginable, I would accept it in a heartbeat given the realistic alternatives on offer. Thanks for listening.
2026-02-10 11:29:11
This is just a quick announcement that I’ll be hosting Nate Soares—who coauthored the self-explanatorily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky—tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5PM at UT Austin, for a brief talk followed by what I’m sure will be an extremely lively Q&A about his book. Anyone in the Austin area is welcome to join us.
2026-02-07 11:16:47
Friend-of-the-blog Salil Vadhan has asked me to share the following.
The Trevisan Award for Expository Work is a new SIGACT award created in memory of Luca Trevisan (1971-2024), with a nomination deadline of April 10, 2026.
The award is intended to promote and recognize high-impact work expositing ideas and results from the Theory of Computation. The exposition can have various target audiences, e.g. people in this field, people in adjacent or remote academic fields, as well as the general public. The form of exposition can vary, and can include books, surveys, lectures, course materials, video, audio (e.g. podcasts), blogs and other media products. The award may be given to a single piece of work or a series produced over time. The award may be given to an individual, or a small group who together produced this expository work.
The awardee will receive USD$2000 (to be divided among the awardees if multiple), as well as travel support if needed to attend STOC, where the award will be presented. STOC’2026 is June 22-26 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The endowment for this prize was initiated by a gift from Avi Wigderson, drawing on his Turing Award, and has been subsequently augmented by other individuals.
For more details see here.
2026-02-02 06:36:42
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and had zero email or any other contact with him … which is more (less) than some of my colleagues can say.
The bulk of the correspondence involves Epstein wanting to arrange a meeting with me and Seth Lloyd back in 2010, via an intermediary named Charles Harper, about funding a research project on “Cryptography in Nature.”
Searching my inbox, it turns out that this Charles Harper did contact me in May 2010, and I then met him at S&S Deli in Cambridge (plausible, although I have zero recollections of this meeting—only of the deli). Harper then sent me a detailed followup email about his proposed Cryptography in Nature project, naming Jeffrey Epstein for the first time as the project’s funder, and adding: “perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation.”
For whatever reason, I forwarded this email to my parents, brother, and then-fiancee Dana. My brother then found and shared a news article about Epstein’s prostitution conviction, adding to a different article that I had found and shared. (At that time, like many others, I’d probably vaguely heard of Epstein, but he didn’t have 0.1% the infamy that he has now.) Then my mom wrote the following: “be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”
It appears from emails that Charles Harper tried again later that summer to arrange a meeting between me and Epstein, but that I took my mom’s advice and largely blew him off, and no such meeting ever happened. Amazingly, I then forgot entirely that any of this had occurred until last night. By way of explanation, some business/finance dude trying to interest me in half-baked ideas involving quantum, AI, cryptography, etc., often dangling the prospect of funding for my students and postdocs, shows up in my life like every month. Most of their world-changing initiatives go nowhere for one reason or another. There really wasn’t much reason to think further about this, until Epstein had become history’s most notorious sex criminal, which (again) wouldn’t happen until years later, after I’d forgotten.
It gets better, though. In the Epstein Files, one also finds a November 2010 letter from Charles Harper to Epstein about organizing a conference on the same Cryptography in Nature topic, which includes the following idea about me:
Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: “hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s.” This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.
I see no indication that any such conference ever happened; in any case, I didn’t get invited to one!
On my Facebook, some friends are joking that “it tracks that someone into teenage girls might think Scott Aaronson was a hot property in his nubile 20s, who would get old and boring in his 30s”—and that maybe Epstein was less sexist about such matters than everyone assumes. I replied that I wished I could say the proposition that I’d gradually get slower and more senile through the 2010s and 2020s was entirely false.
But the best comment was that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have such an astute family. If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.
2026-02-01 01:50:28
The following guest post was written by a Shtetl-Optimized fan in Iran, who’s choosing to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. I’m in awe of the courage of this individual and the millions of other Iranians who’ve risked or, tragically, sacrificed their lives these past few weeks, to stand for something about as unequivocally good and against something about as unequivocally evil as has ever existed on earth. I’m enraged at the relative indifference of the world, and of the US in particular, to these brave Iranians’ plight. There’s still time for the US to fulfill its promise to the protesters and do the right thing—something that I’ll support even if it endangers my friends and family living in Israel. I check the news from Iran every day, and pray that my friends and colleagues there stay safe—and that they, and the world, will soon be free from the Ayatollahs, who now stand fully unmasked before the world as the murderous thugs they always were. –SA
Guest Post from an Iranian
The protests began in Tehran on 28 December 2025, triggered by economic instability and high inflation, and spread to other provinces. People, tired of the regime and aware that every president is just a puppet with no real power, began targeting the source of authority by chanting directly against Khamenei. After government forces killed several protesters, Trump said on 3 January that if they shoot, then U.S. will come to rescue. Protests continued, and on 6 January, Reza Pahlavi called for demonstrations at 8 PM on January 8 and 9. At first, all the regime supporters mocked this and said nobody will come. On these days, they shared videos of empty streets on the news to claim that nobody had shown up. But actually, many people joined the protests. Right around 8 PM on January 8, the government shut down the internet. Only Iran’s internal network remained active, meaning local apps and websites that use Iranian servers work, but the rest of the world was completely cut off.
The regime fears the internet so much that it has officially announced that anyone using Starlink is considered a spy for foreign countries, especially Mossad, and will be punished. As a result, Starlink owners are extremely cautious and rarely let others know they have it.
I know many students who missed deadlines or interviews because of internet shutdown. Some students were forced to travel near Iran’s borders and use Afghanistan’s or Iraq’s internet just to check their email. I personally missed the deadlines for two universities. Just before the internet shutdown, a professor sent me a problem sheet that was part of the application process, and I could not even inform him about the situation. For the past four years since completing my undergraduate studies, my only dream has been to pursue a PhD. I come from a low-income family, and I did everything in my power to reach this stage. I tried to control every variable that might disrupt my four-year plan. Yet now it seems I have failed, and I face an uncertain future.
At the same time, U.S. sanctions have significantly limited Iranian opportunities to study at universities worldwide. With Trump’s travel ban on all Iranians, along with some European countries following U.S. sanctions by rejecting Iranian applicants solely based on nationality, our options have become limited (for example, see the “Evaluation criteria” section). The recent internet shutdown has worsened the situation and left us with even fewer opportunities. While the regime shuts down our internet and takes away our opportunities, the very people responsible for this suppression are ensuring their own children never face such obstacles (I will return to this at the end of the post).
On January 8, my sister and I participated. We were inside our car when Special Units and Basij thugs shot at civilians on the pedestrian path using a shotgun, exactly two meters away from us. I was so shocked that I could not even respond. My sister pushed my head under the car’s dashboard to prevent me from getting shot. I come from a very small town, and this was the level of suppression we witnessed there. Now imagine the scale of suppression in major cities like Tehran, and suddenly the number of protesters reported killed in the news begin to make sense.
We now see tweets on X that not only deny the killings but openly mock them. Is it really possible to deny the body bags in Kahrizak? If a government shuts down the internet across an entire country for three weeks to prevent information from leaking out, do you believe it when it claims the sky is blue? (Check NetBlocks.org and this on Mastodon.)
After January 8, many of the regime’s puppets, who are funded to spread its propaganda in Western media, began whitewashing events on U.S. and European TV, claiming that nobody was killed or that it was a terrorist attack and the government had to act. Some even claim that the protesters are violent rioters and the government has the right to shoot them with war ammunition. Iranians call these puppets “bloodwashers.”
These bloodwashers forget that since 1979, people have tried every possible way to express their opinions and demands, and all of it was ridiculed by the regime and its supporters. Every attempt was suppressed without even being heard. So how do you think things will turn out? Clearly, people become more aggressive in each wave of protests, a pattern you can see in every uprising since 2009. This is also accompanied by worsening poverty. Ordinary people suffer from hunger because some radicals refuse to talk with the U.S., while regime supporters enjoy unlimited access to money and privileges.
Out of the four presidential elections held after 2009, people elected three presidents who promised to pursue a deal with U.S, the so-called Reformist party. People were desperate for change because they knew their situation could only improve if the regime talks with U.S. Many called the voters naïve, arguing that presidents cannot truly make a difference and lack real power, often saying, “Khamenei would never allow that.” I believe many of the voters knew that deep down. They knew that each time a president speaks about negotiating with the U.S., Khamenei suddenly gathers all his supporters and states “No, I am not okay with talking with the U.S.”. Still, people felt they had no real alternative but elections. After the 2015 Nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), people thought they can finally live normal lives and have normal relations with other countries (See how people celebrated the deal on the night it was finalized). At the time, I was even planning to assemble a new PC and thought it might be better to wait and buy parts from Amazon! We didn’t yet know what the IRGC had planned for us over the next ten years. Now, all their actions and stubbornness have led them to this point where they have to surrender completely (the deal Trump is talking about, which essentially takes away everything that makes Islamic Republic the Islamic Republic), or force another war on our people, and then surrender disgracefully. People are now saying that “Come on, the U.S. you wanted to destroy so badly has come. Take all your supporters and go fight it. Or perhaps you are only brave against ordinary unarmed people” This was an inevitable outcome after October 7 attacks, that their time will come one day, but they still did not want to listen. I often see debates about whether U.S. involvement in other countries is good or whether it should isolate itself as it is not its people’s business. I believe decisions regarding Iran were made weeks ago, and we now have no choice but to wait and see what happens. I just hope that the situation turns out better for the people.
As I mentioned earlier, Islamic regime officials chant “death to the U.S. and the West,” yet they send their children to Western countries. These children use funds and opportunities that could have gone to far more deserving people, while living comfortably and anonymously in the very societies their parents want to destroy.
They flee the country their parents made and climb the social ladder of western societies, while ordinary students cannot even afford a simple TOEFL exam and survive on as little as five dollars a month.
When ordinary Iranian students apply for visas, especially for the U.S. and Canada, they are forced to provide every detail of their lives to prove they are not terrorists and that they will return to Iran. Sometimes, they may have to explain to the embassy officer the topics of their professors’ papers, the health condition of their father, and whether they own houses, which the last two indirectly indicate whether they will return or not. If they are lucky enough not to be rejected within ten minutes, they may enter a clearance process that takes at least a year. Only then might they receive a visa. But how is it that when it comes to the children of regime’s officials, they freely enter and live there without issue.
There are countless examples. Mohammad Reza Aref, a Stanford graduate and current Vice President who has repeatedly worn IRGC uniforms in public support, has sons who earned PhDs from EPFL and the University of Florida, and one publicly attributed this success to “good genes”. Ali Larijani, an IRGC officer, had a daughter working at Emory University until last week. Masoumeh Ebtekar, who climbed the wall of the U.S. Embassy during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has a son, Eissa Hashemi, who is an adjunct faculty member at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Many Iranians are now actively raising awareness through petitions and protests at these individuals’ workplaces. One example is the petition regarding Eissa Hashemi. Protests at Emory University have reportedly led to Fatemeh Larijani’s recent unemployment. (Larijani family hold critical roles in the regime, and in fact, many members of the family have studied or currently live in Western countries. There is even a saying that while people were forced to fight the U.S., the Larijanis were filling out university application forms.)
When these individuals occupy seats in your labs or use your tax-funded resources, it directly affects the integrity of your institutions and the opportunities available to those who actually share your values. You do not even need to spend time investigating these people yourself. Iranians will protest outside offices or send emails about your colleagues with this condition. All I ask is that the next time you receive multiple emails about a particular Iranian colleague, or hear about protests near your workplace, you spend just five minutes considering what is being said.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this. I know it is long, and I know it is heavy. I wrote it because silence and denial only help suppression survive, and because attention, however brief, matters.
I hope that better and freer days come.
2026-01-29 13:16:20