Knightian Freedom: Can a quantum computer swerve from determinism?

In this episode of the Justin Riddle Podcast, Justin dives into the concept of Knightian Freedom where large enough computational spaces become intractably complex to the point where maybe freewill is possible. The focus of this episode is a paper put out by Hartmut Neven (of Google’s Quantum AI Lab) and colleagues from 2021 entitled “Do robots powered by a quantum processor have the freedom to swerve?” This paper discusses how the exponentially large spaces that quantum computers evolve into are so large that they cannot be represented or simulated on digital computers. The size is so vast that it would take a computer the size of the universe computing for trillions of years to simulate even a few femtoseconds of the quantum computers that are about to be commonplace. Similar to modern AI, we will won’t be able to understand why a quantum computer generated the output that it did and perhaps this is the essential ingredient that leads to freewill. Rampant incomputable complexity is freewill. Second, Hartmut and colleagues propose a simple experiment to reveal whether or not there are additional factors that play into what output is generated by a quantum computer. Assume you run a quantum circuit that generates a perfect uniform distribution between many different possible outputs. Then, you observe that the quantum computer does not behave as if there was a uniform distribution, but instead selects one of those possible outputs more often. This is the ‘preference’ of the quantum computer. Next, you develop a circuit to amplify these deviations from uniformity with the intention of amplifying the probability of entering into that preferred state. Now, we have essentially created a ‘happy circuit’ which embraces the quirky preference of our quantum computer. Finally, you can correlate deviations from this happy state to psychological data in an effort to build up a taxonomy of subjective experiences that the quantum computer can enter into. Finally, you embed the quantum computer with its happy circuit into an artificial neural network such that errors produced by the AI push the quantum computer away from happiness and this unhappiness is fed back into the AI. Now we have created an AI system with quantum feelings! Will this newfound sense of subjectivity enable more effective AI systems or will the AI get bogged down by a spiral of despair and refuse to compute?! All of these questions and more are explored here. Enjoy!