"you know I can tell chat gbt create a piece of code and then just run it on my computer and I'm like you know that that sort of personalizes for me the what could what could possibly go wrong so to sp..."

"has been a Pioneer in exploring the computational nature of reality and so he's the perfect person to explore with together the new quickly evolving landscape of large language models as human civiliz..."

"here's Stephen Wolfram you've announced the integration of chat gbt and Wu from Alpha and Wolfram language so let's talk about that integration what are the key differences from the high philosophical..."

"stack that I spent the last I don't know 40 years or so building which has to do with what can you compute many steps potentially a very deep computation it's not sort of taking the statistics of what..."

"accumulated it's a very it's a it's a much more sort of labor-intensive on the side of kind of being creating kind of the the computational system to do that um obviously the in the the kind of the ch..."

"kind of the story of what what we're trying to do computationally is to be able to build those kind of tall towers of what implies what implies what and so on um and uh as opposed to kind of the yes I..."

"complicated things really surprised me it took me several years to kind of realize that that was a thing so to speak but that that realization that even very simple programs can do incredibly complica..."

"the the real thing the real challenge is how do you take what is computationally possible how do you take how do you encapsulate the kinds of things that we think about in a way that kind of plugs int..."

"story of of symbolic programming and you know what what that turns into is something which I didn't know at the time it was going to work as well as it has but back in the 1979 or so I was trying to b..."

"and then that's your new foundation for that little piece of knowledge yeah somehow all of that is integrated right so the the sort of a very important phenomenon that that is kind of a thing that I'v..."

"that happens is okay you've got a model of the universe at the low level in terms of atoms of space and hypographs and rewriting typographs and so on and it's happening you know 10 to the 100 times ev..."

"know we can talk about physics project and so on but I think the thing we realize is we kind of exist in a slice of all the possible computational irreducibility in the universe we exist in a slice wh..."

"that there's sort of this level of predictability of what's going on that's us finding a slice of reducibility in what is underneath this computationally reducible kind of system and I think that's th..."

"through time that's kind of a key assumption I think it's a key aspect of what we see as sort of our Consciousness so to speak is that we have this kind of consistent thread of experience well isn't t..."

"kind of computationally happen in the universe so it's a feature of a computationally limited system that's only able to observe reducible Pockets so yeah so I mean this word Observer it means somethi..."

"kind of observers like us which is kind of The Observers we're interested in you know we could imagine an alien Observer that deals with computational irreducibility and it has a mind that's utterly d..."

"approximation sure that on average is is correct I mean if we look at the Observer that's the human mind it seems like there's a lot of very um as represented by natural language for example there's a..."

"no but it's it's much more than that I mean snowflakes are fluffy you know typical snowflakes have little little dendritic Arts yeah and what actually happens is it's kind of kind of cool because you ..."

"it's fluffy snow is okay so you know what makes we're really uh we're really in it it's multiple snowflakes become fluffy a single snowflake is not fluffy no no single snowflake is Fluffy and what hap..."

"snowflakes all I care about is the growth rate of the arms in which case you know you have you can have a good model without knowing anything about the fluffiness um but the fact is as a practical you..."

"universe itself but okay so what you care about is an interesting concept so that's a that's a human concept so that's what you're doing with uh wolf from Alpha and Wolfram language is you trying to c..."

"of building a structure where we can sort of build this Tower of consequences of things so if we're just saying well let's talk about it in natural language it doesn't really give us some hard Foundat..."

"to know that with some degree of certainty so to speak and then then we can compute things from this and that's that's kind of the um yeah that's that's that's the idea but then something like GPT lar..."

"of thing yeah right there's so many things that are really interesting that that work and so on so first thing is can you just walk up to the computer and expect to sort of specify a computation what ..."

"aspects of the world mathematics is another one computation is this very broad way of sort of formalizing the way we think about the world and the thing that's that's cool about computation is if we c..."

"that that toss is the prompter task could also kind of debug in the from language code or is your hope to not do that debugging no no no I mean so so there are many steps here okay so first the first ..."

"which you know programming languages tend to be this one-way story of humans write them and computers execute from them orphan language is intended to be something which is sort of like math notation ..."

"output of the code itself right the plug-in that we have the the you know for chat GPT it does that routinely you know it will send the thing in it will get a result it will discover the llm will disc..."

"it's able to then come up with oh this is the explanation of what's happening and and what is the data the stack trace the the code you've written previously the natural language you've written yeah i..."

"important piece of fundamental science that basically just jumped out at us with Chachi BT um because I think you know the the real question is why does chat GPD work how is it possible to encapsulate..."

"know if the uh if the Persians do this then this does that Etc et cetera et cetera and what what Aristotle realized is there's a structure to those sentences there's a structure to that rhetoric that ..."

"computation story that's you know you've gone beyond the pure sort of templates of natural language to something which is an arbitrarily deep computation but the thing that I think we realize from fro..."

"language yes what's sort of interesting is in the computational universe there's a lot of other kinds of computation that you could do they're just not ones that we humans have cared about and and ope..."

"rock you say okay this is a nice silicate it contains all kinds of silicon I don't care then you realize oh we could actually turn this into a you know semiconductor wafer and make it microprocessor o..."

"the world or things that are meaningful well how do you know logic is not the last step you know what I mean so because we can plainly see that that thing I mean if you say here's a sentence that is s..."

"those sentences may not be realized in the world I mean I think you know the elephant flew to the moon yeah a a syntactic a semantically you know we know we have an idea if I say that to you you kind ..."

"but once you have the idea of motion you can start once you have the idea that you're going to describe things as being the same thing but in a different place that sort of abstracted idea then has yo..."

"love right it's like what what are they what do they mean exactly like what um so especially when you have relationships between complicated objects we seem to take this kind of shortcut descriptive s..."

"think the answer to that is that that what one can do in computational language is Define make a def make a specific definition and if you have a complicated word like let's say the word eat okay you'..."

"sort of the ordinary meaning of things and try and make it precise make it sufficiently precise you can build these towers of computation on top of it so it's kind of like if you start with a piece of..."

"there's sort of a a type of effect that is well defined let's say where where for example it's very independent of the two minds that the it doesn't you know that there there's communication where it ..."

"that you know if we look at the you know some ancient language that where we don't have a chain of translations from it until what we have today we may not understand that ancient language um and we m..."

"has to do with computation which seems like a more rigorous precise ways of reasoning right which are Beyond human I mean much of what computers do human humans do not do I mean you might say humans a..."

"that's really hard to do it's not what people do I mean well in some sense people program they build a computer they program it just to answer your question about what the system does after 50 steps I..."

"we'll understand more about I have some ideas about understanding more about that but uh you know that's that's another ins you know it's another representation of computation things that happen in th..."

"neither of those things because the fact is people say for example that people will say oh but you know I have free will I I kind of um you know I operate in a way that is uh uh you know you you the t..."

"seen the cat sat on the floor the cat sat on the sofa the cat sat on the whatever so it's minimal thing to do is just say let's look at what we saw on the internet we saw you know 10 000 examples of t..."

"can use math you can use mathematical formulas to make a model for how long it will take the ball to fall so now the quest question is well okay you want to make a model for for example something much..."

"know the cat set on the green blank even though it never didn't see many examples of the cat set on the green whatever it can make a or the aardvark sat on the green whatever I'm sure that particular ..."

"know the thing worth understanding about what is chat gpg in the end I mean what is a neuron that's in the end a neural net in the end is each neuron has a it it's taking inputs from a bunch of other ..."

"it just every every new word it's going to compute just says here are the here are the numbers from the words before let's compute the what is it compute it computes the probabilities that it estimate..."

"immediately knows that that isn't right it immediately can recognize that was a you know a bad syllogism or something and uh can see what happened even though as it was being led down this Garden Path..."

"like you know that they're things that it's like this question of what can we formalize what can we turn into computational language what is just sort of oh it happens that way just because brains are..."

"explicit if you want how about I just pop into my head um iterate through all the members of Congress and figure out how to convince them that they have to let me this meaning the system become presid..."

"it's going to be an interesting phenomenon because you know sort of individualized teaching is is a thing that has been kind of a you know a goal for a long time I think we're going to get that I thin..."

"trend of let's be more and more specialized because we have to you know we we have to sort of Ascend these towers of knowledge but by the time you can get you know more automation of being able to get..."

"well that's a it's interesting yes I mean that you know the the kind of the specialization this kind of tower of specialization which has been a feature of you know we've accumulated lots of knowledge..."

"thing that we humans are necessarily involved in so to push back a little bit don't you think that GPT feature versions of GPT would be able to give a good answer to what objective would you like to a..."

"right so I mean this this question of what uh you know if you say to the AI um you know uh what does the species want to achieve yes okay there'll be an answer right that'll be an answer it'll be what..."

"innovative Direction but don't you think the large language models would see beyond that simplification will say maybe intellectual and career diversity is really important so you need the crazy peopl..."

"manipulated to let the AI system run it right well I mean look one of the things that sort of interesting is we might say we always think we're making progress but yet if you know in a sense by by say..."

"system it'll be the noise it'd be full of uncertainty it's not like GPT will tell you exactly what to do it'll tell you approx A Narrative of what like uh uh you know it's like turn the other cheek ki..."

"sort of as we explore what we can think of as the computational universe as we explore all these different possibilities for what we could do all these different inventions we could make all these dif..."

"absolutely like if that becomes more and more source of our education and wisdom and knowledge right the AIS take over I mean my you know I've thought for a long time that you know it's the you know A..."

"going to do or not that's kind of a we can make all kinds of interesting things in the computational universe we when we look at them we say yeah you know that's that's a thing we don't it doesn't rea..."

"be something where we look at and we say yeah I recognize that or will it be something that looks to us like something that's out there in the computational universe that one of my you know cellular a..."

"physical strength I wonder if there's uh something in more in the realm of uh intelligence where an animal like a cat could out well I think there are things certainly in terms of the the speed of pro..."

"those kinds of abstract kinds of things now you know that doesn't make us smarter at catching a mouse or something it makes us smarter at the things that we've chosen to to sort of con you know concer..."

"describe it we wouldn't have a way to understand it and so on all right so that actually stemmed from our conversation about whether AI is going to kill all of us and you we've discussed this kind of ..."

"rulio proximity to humans to where we're like holy crap this thing is really intelligent uh let's select the present and then there could be perhaps more terrifying intelligence that starts moving awa..."

"them all real quick so uh I mean is that something you think about that yeah I thought about that yes the threat of it yeah you as concerned about it as uh somebody like Elias yakovski for example jus..."

"question of of what you know what what do I think the realistic paths are I think that there will be sort of an increasing I mean the the people have to get used to phenomena like computational irredu..."

"speak was that exciting or scary that possibility it was a little bit scary actually because it's kind of like like I realize I'm I'm delegating to the AI just write a piece of code you know you're in..."

"it wasn't intended to do and that's sort of a another version of computational irreducibility is you can you know you can kind of you get it to do the thing you didn't expect it to do so to speak ther..."

"so we hope yeah I mean you could probably analyze that you could show you can't prove that it's always going to be true computational disability uh but it's gonna be more true than not it's look the f..."

"speak and you know what do we think is right and so on and I think that's a thing which you know one feature is uh we don't all agree about that there's no theorems about kind of uh you know there's n..."

"things that is tricky sometimes is when is it true when is it a fact when is it not a fact yes I think the best we can do is to say uh you know we we have a procedure we follow the procedure we might ..."

"yes it's it's a it has a view of kind of roughly how the world works at the same level as as books of fiction talk about roughly how the world Works they just don't have happened to be the way the wor..."

"again as we've discussed you know the the atoms in the world arranged you know you say I don't know you know was there a tank that showed up you know that that you know drove somewhere okay well you k..."

"understand chat GPT because you've been con you've been contending with this idea of what is fact and not and it seems like Chachi Patrice used a lot now I've seen it used by journalists to write arti..."

"don't I don't quite understand that yet I've yeah there's so many programming related things like uh for example uh translating for one programming language to another is really really interesting it'..."

"kind of connects to the collective understanding of language then somebody else can look at it and say okay I understand what you're talking about now you can also have a situation where that thing th..."

"democratization of access to computation yeah and and um you know I think that when you look at sort of the there's been a long period of time when computation and the ability to figure out things wit..."

"you know a lot of what they do is write slabs of boilerplate code and in a sense you know I've been saying for 40 years that's not a very good idea you know you can automate a lot of that stuff with a..."

"yeah well I mean the I think the thing is that right now you know the average you know art history student or something probably isn't going to you know they're not probably they don't think they know..."

"sometimes it'll be obvious that you got the thing you wanted to get because you were just describing you know make me this interface that has two sliders here and you can see it has that those two sli..."

"worth learning kind of uh you know how to do car mechanics you only need to know how to drive the car so to speak what do you need to learn and you know in other words if you don't need to know the me..."

"about things but it is bizarre to me some of the things that kind of are sort of expository mechanisms that I've learned in trying to write clear you know expositions in English that you know just for..."

"thing is the reverse engineering can be done by a very large percentage of the population now because it's natural language interface right it's kind of interesting to see that you were there at the b..."

"uh you know there is a thing that everybody should know and that's how to think about the world computationally and that means you know you look at all the different kinds of things we deal with and t..."

"wonder I mean I wonder if it's if you think natural language will evolve such that everybody's doing computational thinking oh yes well so one question is whether there will be a pigeon of computation..."

"you know that's far from impossible and what's the incentive for young people that are like eight years old nine ten they're starting to interact with Chad GPT to learn the normal natural language rig..."

"be something where you know the fact is it's a tree structured language just like human language is a tree structured language and I think it's going to be one of these things where one of the require..."

"what what like well you see what happens to computer science like really this is the question this is you know everybody should learn kind of whatever CX really is okay this how to think about the wor..."

"things which have gotten taught in in computer science as part of the trade of programming but but kind of the the conceptual points about what these things are you know it surprised me just at a very..."

"I think so if you ask what's going to happen to like the computer science departments and so on there's there's some interesting models so for example let's take math you know math is the thing that's..."

"different issue um the uh uh well I think it it reminds me of my kind of as I've tried to help people do technical writing and things I'm I'm always reminded of my zeroth law of technical writing whic..."

"flakes I said that because you know it turns out the way food tastes depends a lot on its physical structure and you know it really you know I've noticed when I eat piece of chocolate I usually have s..."

"tell you to say I'm afraid just at the right time when people that love you are listening and so you know you're manipulating them by saying so that's not your biology that's no that's a well but the ..."

"that are leaving the comments asking the questions I might even become fake employees yeah I mean or or or uh worse or better at yet friends friends of yours right look I mean one point is my mode of ..."

"human there yeah imagine like a therapist or even higher stake like a suicide hotline operated by a large language model yeah who boy is a pretty high stake situation right but I mean but you know it ..."

"back in the 1820s when steam engines were a big thing and the big question was how efficient could a steam engine be and there's this chap called Sadi Kano who was a a French engineer actually his fat..."

"um and then that that quickly became sort of a global principle about how things work question is why does it happen that way so you know let's say you have a bunch of molecules in a box and they're a..."

"does it happen that way and so throughout in the later part of the 1800s a lot of work was done on trying to figure out can one derive this principle this second law of Thermodynamics this law about t..."

"so on and then I I got interested from being interested in kind of spacecraft I got interested so like how do they work what all the instruments on them and so on and that got me interested in physics..."

"it's a fact that relativity works or something not it's something you can derive from some fundamental sort of it has to be that way as a matter of kind of of mathematics or logic or something so it w..."

"anyway I didn't know that until many many years later so at the time it was like you have these balls bouncing around in this box but I was using this computer with eight kilowatts of memory there wer..."

"important about those systems The computational Primitives of that system yes and so that's what ended up with the cellular automata where you just have a line of black and white cells you just have a..."

"I realized this was uh well actually it's it's one of these things where it was a discovery that I should have made earlier but didn't so you know I had I've been studying so a little automata what I ..."

"it's so far as one can tell it's completely random and it's kind of a little bit like digits of pi once you you know you know the rule for generating the digit Supply but once you've generated them yo..."

"right but you know this is yeah you can't yeah right this is the intuitional surprise of computational irreducibility and so on that even though the rules are simple you can't tell what's going to hap..."

"now in principle if you you know if you sort of traced the detailed motions of all those molecules backwards you would be able to it it will it will the reverse of time makes you know as you as you go..."

"okay so now we come many many years later and um uh I was trying to sort of uh well having done this big project to understand fundamental physics I realized that sort of a key aspect of that is under..."

"so that we would get this ordered thing produced from it what does it mean to be computationally bounded Observer so observing a computational reducible system so the computationally bounded is there ..."

"computation so to us another big formulation of the second order of thermodynamics is this idea of the law of entropy increase the characteristic that this universe the entropy sees to be always incre..."

"matter be as a feature of space Oh I don't know yet all right um I mean I think the the thing I'm really one of the things I'm hoping to be able to do is to find the analog of brown in Motion in space..."

"fact we're beginning to have some guesses we have some some evidence that black hole mergers work differently when there's discrete space and there may be things that you can see in gravitational wave..."

"question of whether um so people this sort of paradox in a sense of oh if we knew where all the molecules were the entropy wouldn't increase there was this idea introduced by by Gibbs in the early 20t..."

"that's why and and because the what's what's going on underneath is it's kind of filling out this this the the different possible you're ending up with something where the sort of underlying computati..."

"that and it wouldn't be uh you know I think the the to imagine what an observer who is not computationally bounded would be like it's an interesting thing because okay so what does computational bound..."

"being able to make make sort of narrative statements yeah I wonder if it's just like you imagined as a thought experiment what it's like to be a computer I wonder if it's possible to try to begin to i..."

"so to speak and I I really it's it's funny because a lot of the questions about the existence of the universe and so on they they transcend what kind of the science of the last few hundred years has r..."

"boy would it be fun to take a walk down the woolly ad and see what kind of stuff we find there you write about alien intelligences yes I mean just these worlds yes well computation problem with these ..."

"though that I've kind of increasingly realized is that in a sense this this whole question of kind of the the um sort of one is embedded in a certain moment in in time and you know kind of the things ..."

"it's a it's a um uh but yeah it's a it's a you know it's one of these things where particularly you know I've had the I don't know good or bad fortune I'm not sure I think it's it's a mixed thing that..."

"speak rather than well I I think I speak for a very very large number of people in saying that I hope you stick around for a long time to come you've had so many interesting ideas you've created so ma..."