In a Sea of Complexity, Does a "Successor" Exist? - with Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research

**Daniel Faggella** (0:06)
This is Daniel Faggella, you're tuned into the AI in Business Podcast, and this is a special AI Futures episode. While most of our episodes here, in fact, nearly everything we publish, is all about the ROI and workflow impact of AI in the enterprise, which we're proud to do, every now and again on the weekend, we'll run an AI Futures series, where we'll look a little bit at where is artificial general intelligence taking us? What are the implications of this technology for humanity, for our place in the world, for the future of civilization? And what you're about to hear is an episode from my other podcast called The Trajectory. The Trajectory is focused entirely on artificial general intelligence, kind of grand concerns around morality, power, civilization, related to the emergence of post-human intelligence. So if you're here just for business, this might be an episode you skip. But if you're here interested in what this all means and what it's all building up to, this episode is with someone who you might be interested in. This is with Stephen Wolfram, the famed founder of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha. Stephen Wolfram has been thinking about complexity, AI and computation for many, many decades and has made some very interesting discoveries on his own about the nature of complexity and computation. In this episode, again, this is taken directly from The Trajectory, which is my other podcast focused on AGI. In this episode, Stephen discusses the theme of the worthy successor. That is to say, what should intelligence turn into? You know, intelligence seems to be bubbling beyond the biological. What are the directions or trajectories that maybe we would consider to be beneficial or not beneficial for that grand confluence of intelligence to come? Stephen has some very interesting perspectives there that are very different from some of the other worthy successor interviews we've done. And because Stephen has so many interesting takes and because he's been on the AI in Business Podcast before, we wanted to air this in two places, not just the trajectory but also here on AI in Business. So if you are interested in the future of intelligence, then you may want to stick around and learn more about the trajectory and that separate newsletter around artificial general intelligence. But I'm not going to interrupt us now because I'm excited to fly in. If you are staying tuned and you're buckled up to go more in the far future as opposed to just enterprise applications, then hopefully you'll enjoy this episode. This is Stephen Wolfram here on the AI in Business Podcast for a special AI Futures episode.
So Stephen, welcome to the show.

**Stephen Wolfram** (2:38)
Thank you.

**Daniel Faggella** (2:40)
Glad to be able to dive in on sort of the future of life, trajectories, unfolding complexity. I'm gonna get into the normal worthy successor questions that our audience is gonna be familiar with from the other great thinkers we've had on. But there's a lot of table setting with your worldview around computation and sort of the nature of the complex and unfolding process through the rural space lens of which you often orient us in your writing. I wanna kind of get into a few questions that I think would help to set the table for people that are maybe familiar with your work but wanna know how it would apply to certain things. Often you're sort of discussing the system of living, like living creatures, kind of unfolding and acting in a way that's very similar to what you suspect that non-biological creatures were. In other words, there's an equivalency, a computational equivalence, et cetera, of sort of substrate independence for what complexity is. And many people who've come on the show have sort of opinions of what bio life versus non-bio life would be able to do. I wonder, there's maybe a tertiary explanation of why you see so much potential unity undergirding it. And if there are distinctions of what, at least as of today, you see the bio world outstripping the digital world in and vice versa, just to help people understand your take.

**Stephen Wolfram** (3:57)
So let's start from the beginning. The sort of great paradigm, I think, of 21st century is this idea of computation. We're somewhat familiar with it because we use computers all the time. But what sort of intellectually, foundationally is computation? I think the core of it is you set up rules by which some system operates, and then you just run with those rules a billion times, a trillion times, a quadrillion times, whatever. It's all about the unfolding of things from potentially very simple rules. So the big discovery that I made in the early 1980s is, even when the rules are very simple, the things you make can be very complicated.