Singularity Summit 2009: Supreme Mathematics of Gods and Earths
Even before Stephen Wolfram took the stage, he evoked the largest applause of the conference so far. As the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and author of A New Kind of Science, Wolfram stands almost as tall as Kurzweil himself in the eyes of the audience. His pronouncements carry more weight than most of the conference's other speakers, which is why I felt relieved when Wolfram disregarded worry about our extinction at the hands of sentient robots, and instead focused on a very different concept of what role AI will play in our future. Wolfram belongs to a set of mathematicians who believe that fundamental programs, like the instructions for different fractals or the Fibonacci sequence, underlie all the behavior in our universe, as well as many phenomena that don't exist in a universe with our physics. Unlike mathematical equations, a significant portion of which humans derived simply to...