How should we talk to AIs?

I'm hoping someone closer to the WolframAlpha team and work can shed some light on this - but is the extensive use of the first person warranted here? There's an awful lot of "I" and "I've".

Is the work being done really so directly attributable to Stephen Wolfram or is there a army of hard working individuals behind the scenes not being referenced here? I'm not suggesting they list everyone by name or anything, but a simple shift to something like "our team" would seem more generous. Of course this is all moot if he is indeed primarily or almost solely responsible for the progress being referenced.

It's Standard Wolfram Style. You can see the same pattern in his "New Kind of Science" book - an interesting piece of writing, but the amount of "I", "I've", "my", etc. is plain distracting.

What's the difference between Wolfram Language and just any other programming language?

Also, one of the advantages of natural language is it's imprecision: it makes communication more robust, and leaves room for interpretation.. in much the same way as imprecise duplication of the genome allows for evolution, imprecision in language allows for alternative interpretations of the results.

Plus, if you want to, you can check interpretation and understanding just by asking some questions and creating feedback.

Actually, I just don't get how this is advancing the art in either direction.

It might be interesting to see what language evolves when you train two or more AI's to communicate over a connection to complete some task.

Interesting that the Wolfram Language is very much a LISP dialect, with the syntax swizzled a bit here and there to be a bit more human readable.

Also his Riffle example is thinking about the problem the wrong way round. It looks like he tried to turn code into english, when it should be the other way around. Here is an actual english version:

  1. Start with a purple square
  2. Clone the square, rotate it by 0.1 radians and scale it to fit the previous square
  3. Also alternate the colour between purple and yellow.
  4. repeat clone process until square is just a dot in the middle of the screen

Note how easy it was to understand what I meant, and yet a computer would fail at so many of the instructions: scale how? how to test if it fits? alternate whose colour? repeat what steps? 'clone process'? clone same square or newest created square? what defines a dot? screen? middle?

All these ambiguities we can solve, but a computer cannot hence why our programming languages are so specific to the point of cognitive overload. Also none of his later examples show to me that Wolfram is better than English, unless of course you use wolfram daily (as he 'the creator' likely does/did), in which case you're brain is already optimized to read it...

This isn't even mentioning that language is only part of how we communicate. We can often leave so much out because our visual system, body movements, previous experiences, memory and other senses fill in the rest.