THE POWERFUL UNPREDICTABILITY OF AI

Physicist and engineer Stephen Wolfram on whether artificial intelligence can fix science, regulation, and innovation

- KATHERINE MANGU-WARD

STEPHEN WOLFRAM IS, strictly speaking, a high school and college dropout: He left both Eton and Oxford early, citing boredom. At 20, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech and then joined the faculty in 1979. But he eventually moved away from academia, focusing instead on building a series of popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools: Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and the Wolfram Language. He self-published a 1,200-page work called A New Kind of Science arguing that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules. The book enjoyed surprising popular acclaim.

Wolfram’s work on computational thinking forms the basis of intelligent assistants, such as Siri. In an April conversation with Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward, he offered a candid assessment of what he hopes and fears from artificial intelligence, and the complicated relationship between humans and their technology.

Reason: Are we too panicked about the rise of AI or are we not panicked enough?

Wolfram: Depends who “we” is. I interact with lots of people and it ranges from people who are convinced that AIs are going to eat us all to people who say AIs are really stupid and won’t be able to do anything interesting. It’s a pretty broad range.

Throughout human history, the one thing that’s progressively changed is the development of technology. And technology is often about automating things that we used to have to do ourselves. I think the great thing technology has done is provide this taller and taller platform of what becomes possible for us to do. And I think the AI moment that we’re in right now is one where that platform just got ratcheted up a bit.

You recently wrote an essay asking, “Can AI Solve Science?” What does it mean to solve science?