Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

Stephen Wolfram at Singularity Summit 2009

Stephen Wolfram at Singularity Summit 2009 -- A Conversation on the Singularity from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.

He doesn't talk too much about the Singularity in this "conversation on the Singularity", but he does touch on a LOT of interesting issues, including AI, science, the complexity of nature, his ideas about cellular automata, simple programs, etc. A good introduction to some of Stephen's ideas for those who haven't slogged through A New Kind of Science yet. If his ideas are right, they're damn important, with implications for computer science, AI, and our understanding of the world in general.

The bit about mollusks at 12:00 is very interesting to me. It makes sense that mollusk shells would look like choosing randomly from the computational universe because they were such early organisms -- they evolved with the least complex ecological context of any phylum except for a few others. (The late Ediacaran, when many of the Ediacaran fauna were gone but the Cambrian explosion hadn't occurred yet.) The small shelly fauna were among the first organisms with hard shells, and the first complex known organisms that evolved after the End-Cambrian extinction.

At 24:30, Wolfram shows that he isn't afraid to look closely at anthropics, and he is smart enough to understand why it's important. If only more of those "genius" physicists out there would take a cue from him.