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Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I have heard, what you're missing is Wolfram's ego. That's why he magnifies the importance of what he has done.
I mean, Mathematica is a truly great, great piece of software, but his "New Kind of Science" was both utterly worthless and a fantastic treatise on how a person's grandiose religion of self leads to utter delusion.
So he's comparing his eponymous programming language to the arrival of mathematical notation 400 or so years ago, and the advent of written language.
I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…
It's quite clear what he is saying. Programming languages are what programmers use. And how programmers think is dominated by how a computer works, which is usually a gigantic distraction to actually solving real world problems. Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on. If I ask Google for the 2018 Wimbledon Champ it…
>Right now, most of what the computers in the world do is to execute tasks we basically initiate. But increasingly our world is going to involve computers autonomously interacting with each other, according to computational contracts. Once something happens in the world—some computational fact is established—we’ll quickly see cascades of computational contracts executing. And there’ll be all sorts of complicated intr…
I agree, it has long been a key trope of sci-fi;
>We've crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas, but her defenses are specifically geared to cope with that kind of official intrusion. Her most sophisticated ice is structured to fend off warrants, writs, subpoenas. When we breached the first gate, the bulk of her data vanished behind core-command ice, these walls we see as leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow. Five separate landlines spurted May Day signals to law firms, but the virus had already taken over the parameter ice. The glitch systems gobble the distress calls as our mimetic subprograms scan anything that hasn't been blanked by core command.
>The Russian program lifts a Tokyo number from the unscreened data, choosing it for frequency of calls, average length of calls, the speed with which Chrome returned those calls.
>"Okay," says Bobby, "we're an incoming scrambler call from a pal of hers in Japan. That should help."
from Burning Chrome, by William Gibson.
You could even argue that it is one of science fiction's founding tropes, as it can be traced back to the stories regarding golem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…
Without some robust general intelligence in the loop, whether that be AGI or human, computers will always have countless strange, unpredictable, and devastating failure modes, especially if given increasing responsibility. This is the reason why few systems of significant complexity and risk exist today without humans in the loop.
Sounds like most people I know. We are much better at reflecting on them though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe if economy can be crashed in 15 seconds it should be crashed in 15 seconds do we can have a saner economy? How do you know that would be the outcome?
Numbers getting smaller on the stock market doesn't destroy any real value. Companies still have all the IP they had before, all the real estate, all machines... If the bits in some computer's RAM are so disconnected from reality that they can change so dramatically without any catastrophe in the real world, then the rational choice is to disregard those bits.
The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more ego gets in the way, the more the truth is compromised. Intelligence can be used in service of finding truth or in feeding our delusions. My view on the distinctions made here between genius and madness are that they correspond to the degree in which intelligence serves truth or delusions. Therefore I'd expect the most outstanding scientists in history were also very humble (perhaps someone with better knowledge on the personality of great scientists can shed more light on this).
And to keep things consistent - I might be wrong and thus welcome challenges to this theory :)
I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…
It's quite clear what he is saying. Programming languages are what programmers use. And how programmers think is dominated by how a computer works, which is usually a gigantic distraction to actually solving real world problems. Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on. If I ask Google for the 2018 Wimbledon Champ it…
The cursor for the slide rule was invented by Newton.
To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but y…
The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. Google search, world champion chess players, Fortnite are all examples. I don't know of any impressive results with arranging forks. If there were, you could model the fork behavior on computers and probably run it 1000000x faster. It's certainly possible that some other elements than the simple…
I view that as biological intelligence figuring out all sorts of clever ways to make calculating tools produce impressive results.
> Perhaps quantum computation is needed.
But why invoke physics if we're comparing biological intelligence to our computing tools? Isn't it enough to note the big differences? And here I'm not talking so much brain function as I am being a living, social animal that has to survive with a vast human culture.
This is the difference between looking at computers as as stepping stones to artificial replacements as opposed to enhancing our abilities. The AI stuff captures the imagination, promises fully automated utopias, scares us with apocalyptic scenarios, and is the stuff of lots of SciFi. While the reality is that computers have always been tools aiding human intelligence.
For some reason we view these tools as one day being like Pinocchio. The mythos of the movie AI is based on that vision where the robot boy becomes obsessed with a the blue fairy turning him into a real boy so his adoptive biological mother will love him and take him back.
But maybe like in the movie, someday the sentient robots will show up and gave our robot boy his wish.
Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more e…
Therefor it's a form of arrogance to dismiss (generally) arrogant people as always wrong. We have to be selective or we might miss something important they've seen.
Wolfram is a combination of irritating ego and inspiration.