The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

In his book A New Kind of Science, Wolfram offers a comprehensive analysis of how the processes underlying a mathematical construction called “a cellular automaton” have the potential to describe every level of our natural world.59 (A cellular automaton is a simple computational mechanism that, for example, changes the color of each cell on a grid based on the color of adjacent or nearby cells according to a transformation rule.) In his view, it is feasible to express all information processes in terms of operations on cellular automata, so Wolfram’s insights bear on several key issues related to information and its pervasiveness. Wolfram postulates that the universe itself is a giant cellular-automaton computer. In his hypothesis there is a digital basis for apparently analog phenomena (such as motion and time) and for formulas in physics, and we can model our understanding of physics as the simple transformations of a cellular automaton.