Computation and the Future of the Human Condition

by Stephen Wolfram

And among other things, I think it’s at the center of the phenomenon of free will. That there can be a kind of irreducible distance between underlying deterministic laws, and overall observed behavior. So that the overall behavior can appear free of the determinism of the underlying laws. Let me not get sidetracked onto this now. But suffice it to say that I think there is perfectly good free will in lots of computational systems; it’s certainly not a special human feature.

Well, ok, so I think it’s really not hard to achieve the abstract attributes that one might associate with artificial intelligence. But to create artificial intelligence that’ll pass the Turing test—and take over customer service, and all that—the hard work that has to be done is on encoding all the human-like qualities. In a sense carving out of the space of all possible computations those that we humans, in our current state, care about.

And while we may soon routinely mine the computational universe essentially at random to find our technological systems, the same probably cannot happen for the evolution of our purposes. Because the whole point is that purpose is defined only with respect to a thread—and in effect a sequential thread—of history.