Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

July 27, 2015

From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom

Would you agree that AI, up there with space travel, has kind of always been the thing of tomorrow and hasn’t advanced at the rate we thought they would?

Oh, yes. But there’s a very definite history. People assumed, when computers were first coming around, that pretty soon, we’d automate what brains do just like we’ve automated what arms and legs do, and so on. Nobody had any real intuition for how hard that might be. It turned out, for reasons that people simply didn’t understand in the ’40s, and ’50s, and ’60s, that lots of aspects of it were quite hard, and also, the specific problem of reproducing what human brains choose to do may not be the right problem. Just like if you want to build a transportation system, having it based on legs is not the best engineering solution. There was an assumption that we can automate brains just like you can automate mechanical kinds of things, and it’s only a matter of time, and in the early ’60s, it seemed like it would be a short time, but that turned out not to be true, at least for some things.

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