How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything—Stephen Wolfram Writings

Wolfram is an impressive and deep thinker. He's one of the people that I think it would be amazing to just have a cup of coffee with, even if I don't think I would understand much of what he was saying. This TED AI talk frames up some very large concepts that he has been working on for decades. The expanse of it is amazing for 18 minutes.

And I ended that talk with a question: is computation ultimately what's underneath everything in our universe?

I gave myself a decade to find out. And actually it could have needed a century. But in April 2020--just after the decade mark--we were thrilled to be able to announce what seems to be the ultimate "machine code" of the universe.

And, yes, it’s computational. So computation isn't just a possible formalization; it’s the ultimate one for our universe.

Wolfram later reflecting how how that affects are view of time…

Can one predict what will happen? No, there's what I call computational irreducibility: in effect the passage of time corresponds to an irreducible computation that we have to run to know how it will turn out.

Then he blew my mind with this idea that we see the laws of the universe the way we do because they are the laws we would see, and that entities that had different characteristics would see different laws.

So then here's the big result. What observers with those characteristics perceive in the ruliad necessarily follows certain laws. And those laws turn out to be precisely the three key theories of 20th-century physics: general relativity, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics and the Second Law.

It’s because we're observers like us that we perceive the laws of physics we do.

And we are the LLMs?

You know, for much of human history we were kind of like LLMs, figuring things out by matching patterns in our minds. But then came more systematic formalization--and eventually computation. And with that we got a whole other level of power--to create truly new things, and in effect to go wherever we want in the ruliad.

And lines like this are ones that give me great pause because he connects something to be incredibly true.

A society of AIs untethered by human input would effectively go off and explore the whole ruliad. But most of what they'd do would seem to us random and pointless. Much like now most of nature doesn't seem like it’s "achieving a purpose".

Highly recommend taking 18 minutes to watch this, and then another 18 to watch it again. I often wonder how Wolfram will be viewed in a 100 years. Might he be an Einstein personality?