How to tell a computer what to do? - Stephen Wolfram: Founder & CEO Wolfram Alpha

Foreign.

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. Today I interviewed Stephen Wolfram. Stephen is the CEO and founder of Wolfram Alpha, a knowledge engine. And he's also the author of a newly released book called the Adventures of a Computational Explorer, which I highly recommend you guys get on Amazon again. That's the Adventures of a Computational Explorer. Stephen has been exploring computation for quite a long time and as we get into, on, on the show, and in a, in a very interesting way, and his book is, is basically a round out of his life as he's been exploring these different computational universes. And I've been reading it for the past couple weeks and one of the most interesting things was that he was a consultant for the movie Arrival and he let them. He gave them a window into what the physics would actually look like in terms of what they were projecting on the TV screen. And also he got into language because he's created his own software language programming language called Mathematica. And he basically helps them develop a new language for these aliens that are communicating with Earth, with humans. And he helps them kind of think through some of these issues of what would an alien civilization, how would they, how would they communicate through language? And so highly recommend checking out this book. It's called Adventures of a Computational Explorer. This interview is really interesting and unfortunately there's a technical issue on my end and so my part of the sound, it doesn't sound that great, but the content is so good. And luckily I wasn't speaking that much during this whole interview, so most of it's pretty good. But when I start speaking, the sound isn't that great. But the information and the questions that we're talking about are so interesting and important, particularly as AI starts to take over more and more of the mechanical jobs of humanity. What we get into this show is like, well, what is the role of humans? And the role of human beings is to find out what we want so that we can tell the computers what we want. And that is a bigger job than most people are prepared to do. I don't know if you've ever asked yourself the question, what do I want? Some people have the answer, some people have the answer immediately. But it's pretty rare to find somebody who has the answer of what do I want? And be able to explain that and articulate that. And so now, as computers essentially take over a lot more of those lower level tasks and we automate a lot more, this becomes a more and more of an important question.