Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, a company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, and the new Wolfram Physics project. He is the author of several books including A New Kind of Science, which on a personal note was one of the most influential books in my journey in computer science and artificial intelligence.

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
4:16 - Communicating with an alien intelligence
12:11 - Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey
29:06 - What is computation?
44:54 - Physics emerging from computation
1:14:10 - Simulation
1:19:23 - Fundamental theory of physics
1:28:01 - Richard Feynman
1:39:57 - Role of ego in science
1:47:21 - Cellular automata
2:15:08 - Wolfram language
2:55:14 - What is intelligence?
2:57:47 - Consciousness
3:02:36 - Mortality
3:05:47 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist, who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, a company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, and the new Wolfram Physics Project.

He's the author of several books, including A New Kind of Science, which on a personal note, was 1 of the most influential books in my journey in computer science and artificial intelligence.

It made me fall in love with the mathematical beauty and power of cellular automata.

It is true that perhaps 1 of the criticisms of Stephen is on a human level, that he has a big ego, which prevents some researchers from fully enjoying the content of his ideas.

We talk about this point in this conversation.

To me, ego can lead you astray, but can also be a superpower.

1 that fuels bold, innovative thinking that refuses to surrender to the cautious ways of academic institutions.

And here, especially, I ask you to join me in looking past the peculiarities of human nature and opening your mind to the beauty of ideas in Stephen's work and in this conversation.

I believe Stephen Wolfram is 1 of the most original minds of our time and at the core is a kind, curious, and brilliant human being.

This conversation was recorded in November 2019 when the Wolfram Physics Project was underway but not yet ready for public exploration as it is now.

We now agreed to talk again, probably multiple times in the near future, so this is round 1, and stay tuned for round 2 soon.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.

As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation.

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And now here's my conversation with Stephen Wolfram.

You and your son, Christopher, helped create the alien language in the movie Arrival.

So let me ask maybe a bit of a crazy question, but if aliens were to visit us on Earth, do you think we would be able to find a common language?

Well, by the time we're saying aliens are visiting us, we've already prejudiced the whole story.

Because the concept of an alien actually visiting, so to speak, we already know they're kind of things that make sense to talk about visiting.

So we already know they exist in the same kind of physical setup that we do.

They're not, you know, it's not just radio signals, it's an actual thing that shows up and so on.

So I think in terms of, you know, can 1 find ways to communicate?

Well, the best example we have of this right now is AI.

I mean, that's our first sort of example of alien intelligence.

And the question is, how well do we communicate with AI?

You know, if you were to say, if you were in the middle of a neural net and you open it up and it's like, what are you thinking?

It's not easy, but it's not absolutely impossible.

So I think by the time, but given the setup of your question, aliens visiting, I think the answer is yes, 1 will be able to find some form of communication, whatever communication means, communication requires notions of purpose and things like this.

So if AI is a kind of alien life form, what do you think visiting looks like?

So if we look at aliens visiting, and we'll get to discuss computation and the world of computation, but if you were to imagine, you said you already prejudiced something by saying you visit, but how would aliens visit?

By visit, there's kind of an implication, and here we're using the imprecision of human language.

You know, in a world of the future, and if that's represented in computational language, we might be able to take the concept visit and go look in the documentation basically and find out exactly what does that mean, what properties does it have and so on.

But By visit in ordinary human language, I'm kind of taking it to be there's something, a physical embodiment that shows up in a spacecraft, since we kind of know that that's necessary.

We're not imagining it's just photons showing up in a radio signal, photons in some very elaborate pattern.

We're imagining it's physical things made of atoms and so on that show up.

I mean, whether there is the possibility, what counts as intelligence?

I mean, it's, and I used to think there was sort of a, oh, there'll be, it'll be clear what it means to find extraterrestrial intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I've increasingly realized as a result of science that I've done that there really isn't a bright line between the intelligent and the merely computational, so to speak.

So, you know, in our kind of everyday sort of discussion, we'll say things like, you know, the weather has a mind of its own.

You know, we realize that there are computational processes that go on that determine the fluid dynamics of this and that and the atmosphere, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

How do we distinguish that from the processes that go on in our brains, of the physical processes that go on in our brains?

How do we say the physical processes going on that represent sophisticated computations in the weather, oh, that's not the same as the physical processes that go on that represent sophisticated computations in our brains.

The answer is I don't think there is a fundamental distinction.

I think the distinction for us is that there's kind of a thread of history and so on that connects kind of what happens in different brains to each other, so to speak.

And it's a, you know, what happens in the weather is something which is not connected by sort of a thread of civilizational history, so to speak, to what we're used to.

In our story, in the stories that the human brain's told us, but maybe the weather has its own stories that

And that's where we run into trouble thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence, because It's like that pulsar magnetosphere that's generating these very elaborate radio signals.

Is that something that we should think of as being this whole civilization that's developed over the last however long, millions of years of processes going on in the neutron star or whatever, versus what we're used to in human intelligence.

And I think in the end, when people talk about extraterrestrial intelligence and where is it and the whole Fermi paradox of how come there's no other signs of intelligence in the universe, my guess is that we've got sort of 2 alien forms of intelligence that we're dealing with, artificial intelligence and sort of physical or extraterrestrial intelligence.

And my guess is people will sort of get comfortable with the fact that both of these have been achieved around the same time.

And in other words, people will say, well, yes, we're used to computers, things we've created, digital things we've created, being sort of intelligent like we are.

And they'll say, oh, we're kind of also used to the idea that there are things around the universe that are kind of intelligent like we are, except they don't share the sort of civilizational history that we have.

And so we don't, you know, they're a different branch.

I mean, it's similar to when you talk about life, for instance, I mean, you kind of said life form, I think, almost synonymously with intelligence, which I don't think is, you know, the AIs would be upset to hear you equate those 2 things.

Because they really probably implied biological life.

But you're saying, I mean, we'll explore this more, but you're saying it's really a spectrum and it's all just a kind of computation.

And so it's a full spectrum and we just make ourselves special by weaving a narrative around our particular kinds of computation.

Yes, I mean the thing that I think I've kind of come to realize is, you know, At some level it's a little depressing to realize that there's so little that's

Well, yeah, but I mean, it's the story of science, right?

From Copernicus on, it's like, first we were convinced our planet's at the center of the universe.

Well, then we were convinced there's something very special about the chemistry that we have as biological organisms.

And then we're still holding out that hope.

Oh, this intelligence thing we have, that's really special.

However, in a sense, as you say, it's kind of liberating for the following reason, that you realize that what's special is the details of us, not some abstract attribute that we could wonder, oh, is something else gonna come along and also have that abstract attribute?

Well, yes, every abstract attribute we have, something else has it.

But the full details of our kind of history of our civilization and so on, nothing else has that.

That's what, that's our story, so to speak.

And that's sort of almost by definition special.

So I view it as not being such a, I mean, initially I was like, this is bad.

This is kind of, you know, how can we have self-respect about the things that we do?

Then I realized the details of the things we do, they are the story.

Everything else is kind of a blank canvas.

So maybe on a small tangent, you just made me think of it, but what do you make of the monoliths in 2001 Space Odyssey in terms of aliens communicating with us and sparking the kind of particular intelligent computation that we humans have?

Is there anything interesting to get from that sci-fi?

Yeah, I mean, I think what's fun about that is, you know, the monoliths are these, you know, 1 to 4 to 9 perfect cuboid things.

And in the, you know, Earth of a million years ago, whatever they were portraying with a bunch of apes and so on, a thing that has that level of perfection seems out of place.

It seems very constructed, very engineered.

What's the techno signature, so to speak?

What is it that you see it somewhere and you say, my gosh, that had to be engineered?

Now, the fact is we see crystals, which are also very perfect.

And the perfect ones are very perfect, they're nice polyhedra or whatever.

And so in that sense, if you say, well, it's a sign of sort of, it's a techno signature that it's a perfect, you know, a perfect polygonal shape, polyhedral shape.

And so then it's an interesting question.

I mean like, you know, Gauss, famous mathematician, you know, he had this idea, you should cut down the Siberian forest in the shape of sort of a typical image of the proof of the Pythagorean theorem on the grounds that, it was a kind of cool idea, didn't get done, but it was on the grounds that the Martians would see that and realize, gosh, there are mathematicians out there.

In his theory of the world, that was probably the best advertisement for the cultural achievements of our species.

What do you, what can you send or create that is a sign of intelligence in its creation or even intention in its creation.

Yeah, you talk about if we were to send a beacon, what should we send?

I think it's a philosophically doomed issue.

I mean, in other words, you send something, you think it's fantastic, but it's kind of like we are part of the universe, we make things that are, you know, things that happen in the universe.

Computation, which is sort of the thing that we are, in some abstract sense, using to create all these elaborate things we create, is surprisingly ubiquitous.

In other words, we might have thought that, you know, we've built this whole giant engineering stack that's led us to microprocessors, that's led us to be able to do elaborate computations.

But this idea, computations are happening all over the place.

The only question is whether there's a thread that connects our human intentions to what those computations are.

And so I think this question of what do you send to kind of show off our civilization in the best possible way, I think any kind of almost random slab of stuff we've produced is about equivalent to everything else.

I just, sorry to interrupt, but I just talked to Ann Druyan, who's the wife of Carl Sagan.

And so, I don't know if you're familiar with The Voyager.

I mean, she was part of sending, I think, brainwaves of, you know, I want you to see.

Her brainwaves when she was first falling in love with Carl Sagan, right, so this beautiful story.

That perhaps you would shut down the power of that by saying we might as well send anything else and that's interesting.

All of it is kind of an interesting, peculiar thing that's.

I mean I think it's kind of interesting to see on the Voyager golden record thing, 1 of the things that's kind of cute about that is, you know, it was made, when was it?

And, you know, 1 of the things, it's a phonograph record, okay?

And it has a diagram of how to play a phonograph record.

And it's kind of like, it's shocking that in just 30 years, if you show that to a random kid of today and you show them that diagram, I've tried this experiment, They're like, I don't know what the heck this is.

And the best anybody can think of is, you know, take the whole record, forget the fact that it has some kind of helical track in it, just image the whole thing and see what's there.

In only 30 years, our technology has kind of advanced to the point where the playing of a helical, you know, mechanical track on a phonograph record is now something bizarre.

So, you know, that's a cautionary tale, I would say, in terms of the ability to make something that in detail sort of leads by the nose some, you know, the aliens or whatever to do something.

It's like, no, you know, best you're gonna do, as I say, if we were doing this today, we would not build a helical scan thing with a needle.

We would just take some high resolution imaging system and get all the bits off it and say, oh, it's a big nuisance that they put in a helix, you know, a spiral.

Let's just, you know, unravel the spiral and start from there.

Do you think, and this will get into trying to figure out interpretability of AI, interpretability of computation, being able to communicate with various kinds of computations.

Do you think we'd be able to, if you put your alien hat on, figure out this record, how to play this record?

Well, it's a question of what 1 wants to do.

I mean, it is- Understand what the other party was trying to communicate or understand anything about the other party.

The issue is, it's like when people were trying to do natural language understanding for computers, right?

In other words, you take your piece of English or whatever and you say, gosh, my computer has understood this.

Well, so for example, when we did, you know, built WolfMalpha, You know, 1 of the things was, it's, you know, it's doing question answering and so on, and it needs to do natural language understanding.

The reason that I realized after the fact, the reason we were able to do natural language understanding quite well, and people hadn't before, the number 1 thing was we had an actual objective for the natural language understanding.

We were trying to turn the natural language into this computational language that we could then do things with.

Now, similarly, when you imagine your alien, you say, okay, we're playing them the record.

If there's a representation that they have, if it converts to some representation where we can say, oh yes, that's a representation that we can recognize is represents understanding, then all well and good.

But actually the only ones that I think we can say would represent understanding are ones that will then do things that we humans kind of recognize as being useful to us.

Maybe trying to understand, quantify how technologically advanced this particular civilization is.

So are they a threat to us from a military perspective?

That's probably the first kind of understanding that I'll be interested in.

I mean, that's like in the Arrival movie, that was sort of 1 of the key questions is, why are you here, so to speak?

Right, but even that is, it's a very unclear, it's like, are you gonna hurt us?

That comes back to a lot of interesting AI ethics questions, because we might make an AI that says, well, take autonomous cars, for instance, you know, are you gonna hurt us?

Well, let's make sure you only drive at precisely the speed limit, because we wanna make sure we don't hurt you, so to speak.

Because that's some, and then, well, something, you know, but you say, but actually, that means I'm gonna be really late for this thing, and, you know, that sort of hurts me in some way.

Even the definition of what it means to hurt someone is unclear.

And as we start thinking about things about AI ethics and so on, that's something 1 has to address.

There's always trade-offs, and that's the annoying thing about ethics.

And I mean, I think ethics, like these other things we're talking about, is a deeply human thing.

There's no abstract, you know, let's write down the theorem that proves that this is ethically correct.

You know, You have to have a ground truth, so to speak, that's ultimately sort of what humans want, and they don't all want the same thing.

additional complexity in thinking about that.

1 convenient thing in terms of turning ethics into computation, you can ask the question of what maximizes the likelihood of the survival of the species?

But then when you say survival of the species, right, you might say, you might for example, for example, let's say, forget about technology, just hang out and be happy, live our lives, go on to the next generation, go through many, many generations where in a sense nothing is happening.

In terms of the attempt to do elaborate things and the attempt to might be counterproductive for the survival of the species.

Like for instance, I mean, and I think it's also a little bit hard to know.

So, okay, let's take that as a sort of thought experiment.

You know, you can say, well, what are the threats that we might have to survive?

You know, the super volcano, the asteroid impact, all these kinds of things.

Okay, so now we inventory these possible threats and we say, let's make our species as robust as possible relative to all these threats.

I think in the end, It's sort of an unknowable thing, what it takes to, so given that you've got this AI and you've told it maximize the long-term, what does long-term mean?

Does long-term mean until the sun burns out?

Okay, there are probably optimizations for the next thousand years that it's like, it's like if you're running a company, you can make a company be very stable for a certain period of time.

Like if your company gets bought by some private investment group, then you can run a company just fine for 5 years by just taking what it does and removing all R&D and the company will burn out after a while, but it'll run just fine for a little while.

So if you tell the AI, keep the humans okay for a thousand years, there's probably a certain set of things that 1 would do to optimize that, many of which 1 might say, well, that would be a pretty big shame for the future of history, so to speak, for that to be what happens.

But I think in the end, as you start thinking about that question, it is, what you realize is there's a whole sort of raft of undecidability, computational irreducibility.

In other words, it's, I mean, 1 of the good things about sort of the, what our civilization has gone through and what sort of we humans go through is that there's a certain computational irreducibility to it in the sense that it isn't the case that you can look from the outside and just say, the answer is gonna be this.

At the end of the day, this is what's gonna happen.

You actually have to go through the process to find out.

And I think that's both, that feels better in the sense it's not a, you know, something is achieved by going through all of this process.

But it also means that telling the AI, go figure out, you know, what will be the best outcome?

Well, unfortunately, it's gonna come back and say, it's kind of undecidable what to do.

We'd have to run all of those scenarios to see what happens.

And if we want it for the infinite future, we're thrown immediately into sort of standard issues of kind of infinite computation and so on.

So yeah, even if you get that the answer to the universe and everything is 42, you still have to actually run the universe.

like, the question, I guess, or the, you know, the journey is the point.

Right, well I think it's saying to summarize, this is the result of the universe.

If that is possible, it tells us, I mean, the whole sort of structure of thinking about computation and so on, and thinking about how stuff works.

If it's possible to say, and the answer is such and such, you're basically saying there's a way of going outside the universe.

And you're getting yourself into something of a sort of paradox, because you're saying, if it's knowable what the answer is, then there's a way to know it that is beyond what the universe provides.

But if we can know it, then something that we're dealing with is beyond the universe.

So then the universe isn't the universe, so to speak.

And in general, as we'll talk about, at least for our small human brains, it's hard to show the result of a sufficiently complex computation.

It's hard, I mean, it's probably impossible, right?

And the universe appears, by at least the poets, to be sufficiently complex that we won't be able to predict what the heck it's all going to.

Well, we better not be able to because if we can, it kind of denies, I mean, it's, you know, we're part of the universe.

It means that we, that our little part of the universe is able to jump ahead of the whole universe.

And, you know, this, this quickly winds up, I mean, it is conceivable.

The only way we'd be able to predict is if we are so special in the universe, we are the 1 place where there is computation more special, more sophisticated than anything else that exists in the universe.

That's the only way we would have the ability to, sort of the almost theological ability, so to speak, to predict what happens in the universe, is to say somehow we're better than everything else in the universe, which I don't think is the case.

Yeah, perhaps we can detect a large number of looping patterns that reoccur throughout the universe and fully describe them, and therefore, but then it still becomes exceptionally difficult to see how those patterns interact and what kind of complexity emerges.

The most remarkable thing about the universe is that it has regularity at all.

Absolutely, it's full of, I mean, physics is successful.

It's full of laws that tell us a lot of detail about how the universe works.

I mean, it could be the case that, you know, the 10 to the 90th particles in the universe, they all do their own thing, but they don't.

They all follow, we already know, They all follow basically the same physical laws, and that's a very profound fact about the universe.

What conclusion you draw from that is unclear.

I mean, in the early theologians, that was exhibit number 1 for the existence of God.

Now, people have different conclusions about it, but the fact is, right now, I mean, I happen to be interested, actually.

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Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #89