Stephen Wolfram is a scientist, inventor, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram is a scientist, inventor, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. He is the creator of the symbolic computation program Mathematica and its programming language, Wolfram Language, as well as the knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. He is also the author of A New Kind of Science. The following is an edited transcript from a live interview with him conducted in December 2015. I see technology as taking human goals and making them automatically executable by machines. Human goals of the past have entailed moving objects from here to there, using a forklift rather than our own hands. Now the work we can do automatically, with machines, is mental rather than physical. It’s obvious that we can automate many of the tasks we humans have long been proud of doing ourselves. What’s the future of the human condition in that situation? People talk about the future of intelligent machines and whether they’Il take over and decide what to do for themselves. But the inventing of goals is not something that has a path to automation. Someone or something has to define what a machine’s purpose should be—what it’s trying to execute. How are goals defined? For a given human, they tend to be defined by personal history, cultural environment, the history of our civilization. Goals are uniquely human. Where the machine is concerned, we can give it a goal when we build it. What kinds of things have intelligence, or goals, or purpose? Right now, we know one great example, and that’s us—our brains, our human intelligence. Human intelligence, I once assumed, is far beyond anything else that exists naturally in the world; it’s the result of an elaborate process of evolution and thus stands apart from the rest of existence. But what I’ve realized, as a result of the science I’ve done, is that this is not the case. People might say, for instance, “The weather has a mind of its own.” That’s an animist statement and seems to have no place in modern scientific thinking. But it’s not as silly as it sounds. What does the human brain do? A brain receives certain input, it computes things, it causes certain actions to happen, it generates a certain output. Like the weather. All sorts of systems are, effectively, doing computations—whether it’s a brain or, say, a cloud responding to its thermal environment. We can argue that our brains are doing vastly more sophisticated computations than those in the atmosphere. But it turns out that there’s a broad equivalence between the kinds of computations that different kinds of systems do. This renders the question of the human condition somewhat poignant, because it seems we’re not as special as we thought. There are all those different systems of nature that are pretty much equivalent, in terms of their computational capabilities. What makes us different from all those other systems is the particulars of our history, which give us our notions of purpose and goals. That’s a long way of saying that when the box on our desk thinks as well as the human brain does, what it still won’t have, intrinsically, are goals and purposes. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history. 182 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016402