In this episode of Intel on AI host Amir Khosrowshahi talks with Stephen Wolfram about the current state of artificial intelligence. Stephen is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, maker of the Wolfram Mathematica software system and WolframAlpha computational knowledge engine, author of A New Kind of Science, and most recently originator of the Wolfram Physics Project, which is a collaborative effort to find the fundamental theory of physics.

In the podcast episode, Stephen talks about the computational universe and the idea that even simple programs possibly have sophisticated abilities under the Principle of Computational Equivalence, but that these abilities are perceived to be useless to humans and therefore underexplored. He discusses the need for shared computational languages that will allow people and machines to mine the wealth of available historic data so that it can be translated into useable knowledge.

Amir and Stephen talk about a number of subjects during their two-hour conversation, including Emanuel Kant, Noam Chomsky, if aliens might view a completely different part of physical reality than humans, encoding values for AI content ranking, and why Stephen left academia to develop his own research institute. Stephen discusses his predictions about the limitations of quantum computing, the potential of computing at the molecular scale, and what comes after semiconductor processing. He also explains why Einstein’s theory of relatively and spacetime is misunderstood. Amir asks Stephen to explain how multiway systems and the biology of neuroscience can be viewed in harmony.

Academic research discussed in the podcast episode:

• Critique of Pure Reason
• A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
• Perceptrons
• Workshop on Environments for Computational Mathematics
• A programming language
• Modern Cellular Automata: Theory and Applications
• Space and Time
• Gravitation
• My Time with Richard Feynman
• Some Relativistic and Gravitational Properties of the Wolfram Model
• The Wolfram Physics Project: A One-Year Update
• Multicomputation with Numbers: The Case of Simple Multiway Systems
• Algorithms for Inverse Reinforcement Learning
• Spiders are much smarter than you think
• Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems
• A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines
• The Computational Brain