Stephen Wolfram on Singularity 1 on 1: To Understand the Future, Explore the Computational Universe

This is an excellent interview!

Some great quotes;

“I think the big challenge for the future is not what’s possible, but what do you chose to do”

“There will come a time where our thinking-like processes are well encapsulated in digital form. There will be things we can do there with Wolfram Alpha or whatever else that are just be vastly more complicated than anything we humans have been able to do…The real question is ‘if we can do anything, what do we chose to do”

“All these programs out there in the computational universe, they may be nice and fun and make nice pictures and so on but what are they for? What purpose do they serve? This is where we kind of get into something where an important problem is understanding purposes, understanding human purposes, understanding the evolution of human purpose”

And;

(in addressing whether he is an optimist or a pessimist)

“It all relates to purpose. We’ll be able to do almost everything. And then you know, that means that many purposes can be achieved. This question of optimism and pessimism is kind of a derivative of purpose. Its hard to be optimistic or pessimistic if you don’t know what the purpose is”

His views on purpose are somewhat unique in the tradition of western existentialism. Traditional western existentialism acknowledges that purpose can be ‘relative’ (Sartre; “I am myself, I make myself”), but maintains that we have objective, ‘fixed’ purposes, things that do not change, that are part of ‘being human’ (to survive, to evolve, will to power).

Wolfram points out in this interview that objective purposes are (at least somewhat) relative as well. It seems to me that he is arguing that it is not just that we think of it differently at different points of time, but that it actually is different at different points in time.

This is exciting.

Because the rate at which things change is something that accelerates, and will become rapid in its pace in the next 30-40 years, if we follow Wolfram’s view regarding purpose, our shared purpose could be something radically different from what its ever been in a relatively short period of time. Truly ‘post-human’ in the existential sense in the near future.

How he factors this view of purpose into his beliefs about the future is interesting and unique. That optimism and pessimism are dependent to some extent on what you define your purpose as is a valuable insight. However, as you pointed out Socrates, its pretty obvious that failure to survive is always an outcome that is ‘pessimistic’, no matter what you define as your purpose. Its great to hear that such an intelligent and highly respected person is so confident that we will survive.

Thanks Socrates, great interview! I will be listening to it many times!

Thanks Socrates!

I just listened to it again and wanted to correct myself.

I realize that I was incorrect in my discussion on how you respond to his answer regarding optimism/pessimism. I said;

“However, as you pointed out Socrates, its pretty obvious that failure to survive is always an outcome that is ‘pessimistic’, no matter what you define as your purpose”

But I realize now on second listening that you were more specific, saying instead that if one took a Darwinian point of view on human purpose that ‘failure to survive’ would (then) be interpreted as pessimistic.

Another great quote I found in the second listening;

“But we can also look at a rock, which also (like humans) has all these processes going on, all these electrons whizzing around, and this principle of computational equivalence tells us that there is nothing less sophisticated probably about that which happens in all kinds of rocks, then there is in this funny creation that’s been created by this ultimate future projection of human technology. And so then we’d say ‘well then what’s special about the future of human technology as opposed to the one that’s just the rock?’ And the answer is not something that we’ll be able to abstractly say. We won’t be able to say ‘oh look’, ‘there’s an emotion running around there’, or, ‘oh look’, ‘there’s some kind of general intelligence factor there’. There will be no such distinction. The distinction will be something about history. The distinction will be the thing that encapsulates the particulars, that it’s not a question of the general computation that we’re achieving. It’s a question of the particulars of human history and so on that we have that will be the thing that’s special about what it is that sort of is that is the successor of us in the future.”

Stephen Wolfram talks in this interview about how ‘purpose’ is found by looking back, by looking to history. How historical particulars play a special role in answering questions about a given thing’s purpose is, about what makes something special. He remarks about a time when ‘when anything is possible’, and how when this is the case, the real question of what to do will hinge on defining purpose. That the importance of questions regarding purpose in some ways positively correlate with ‘choice’, with ‘how many things there are to chose from’, so that as we approach the Singularity, and technology creates more and more options, questions regarding purpose become more and more important.

What happens when you take this insight and juxtapose it with the belief that we are the evolutionary predecessors to AI in the ‘evolution of intelligence’?

In some senses at least, humans will represent ‘the roots’ of AIs. We will be their Neaderthals in a way.

One frequently asked question in the AI community is whether or not future advanced AIs will want to keep humans around. Some argue there is no reason they would want to since we would be far inferior to them. Others argue that they will be interested in us like humans are interested in those they conquer.

Given Wolfram’s insight regarding purpose, I think it is reasonable to predict that AIs will be interested in us for the sake of figuring out their ‘purpose’. How long that interest will be sustained is another question.

Given the nature of these advanced AIs, this could be only milliseconds. But I think envisioning future AIs as the next evolutionary step is an interesting framework from which to answer speculative questions regarding the behavior of advanced AI.