[FRIAM] Wolfram interview w/Sean Kim

[Pieter Steenekamp]

Thanks for the reference. Stephen Wolfram is definitely one of my heroes.
Count me among his enthusiastic fans, though I fully recognize (as you
noted) the hubris and narcissism that often come bundled with brilliance.

I never had the privilege of meeting him, but I vividly remember buying A
New Kind of Science when he self-published it in 2002. I’ve just now
reopened it and was struck again by the boldness of his opening:

"Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that
rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural
world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation,
and to introduce a new kind of science that is based on the much more
general types of rules that can be embedded in simple computer programs."

Modesty, clearly, has never been Wolfram's defining trait.

I'm really looking forward to watching the full interview.

Thanks again for sharing this!


On Wed, 21 May 2025 at 17:26, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg1u11IHFj8
>
> No matter your opinion of Wolfram and his works,  I think this is a very
> insightful reflection on the history of AI as observed/experienced from
> his unique perspective.
>
> I met him in 1983 when he was still a "boy genius" at 24.   He attended
> (presenting his Universality and Complexity paper) the Cellular Automata
> conference at LASL that year and as I remember it, he also introduced
> Feynman who gave his "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture
> afterwards.   Dissimilar to our current crop of "boy geniuses", he did
> not present with any of the "on the spectrum" affect, though his hubris
> and narcissism were in full display.  I chose to start watching this
> (2.5hrs!) just to get a fresh taste of his affect, after finding him
> difficult unto insufferable back when New Kind of Science was still new
> (in spite of the work standing well on it's own).
>
> His presentation in this interview (so far - 20 mins in) reads very
> "matter of fact" and nearly dryly historical but (to me) factually
> accurate and astute.   Having lived through most of the same history he
> presents (me mostly as an interested outsider), it is one "greatest
> hits" nostalgia moment after another starting with LISP and Prolog and
> the Japanese 5g computing aspiration, expert systems, early neural nets,
> etc.
>
>
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