Symmetric Monoidal Categories: a Rosetta Stone

The Topos Institute is in business! I’m really excited about visiting there this summer and talking to David Spivak, Brendan Fong, Evan Patterson and many others.

They recently had a meeting with some people concerned about AI risks, called Finding the Right Abstractions, organized by Scott Garrabrant, David Spivak, and Andrew Critch. I gave a gentle introduction to the uses of symmetric monoidal categories:

• Symmetric monoidal categories: a Rosetta Stone.

To describe systems composed of int...