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Wolfram is going off into the weeds. The whole point of NKS is that the universe is digital. We live in a computational universe, therefore we are living and breathing and interacting with natural (not artificial) intelligence as a function of merely existing. Assuming that by AI, Wolfram is referring to a computational device built by humans, the communication has already happened in the act of designing and constructing the machine. Real communication is over once you flip it on. What Wolfram is proposing is to then run a Wolfram Language interpreter on top of this new machine and use that to communicate, presumably to ask it for the meaning of the universe. Instead of creating a lingua franca between man and machine, this will prove only that the machine can emulate a von Neumann computer and run the Wolfram interpreter on top. You are NOT communicating with the machine at that point, you are communicating with a parser and a nifty collection of mathematical routines. Think of a parrot. You teach it to say "Polly want a cracker!" - and the parrot may even learn a few human words - but are you really communicating? Can the parrot express to you the thrill of flying, can it explain to you what a total mind-fuck it is for it to be stuck in a cage begging for crackers when it should be flying with its flock and living its life? No, the parrot can only ask you for a cracker, just the way you taught it. Man will never have a relationship among equals with a machine, regardless of how much software he pours on top - the machine has a frame of reference that can never be communicated to a human, it's different at the electronic level, never mind the symbolic or linguistic. The machine will have a reality so different from that of the human that even if it could communicate something of substance, it would be as futile as asking your parrot to help you with a math problem - the parrot is not stupid, and in fact can do many things you would find highly mathematical, but it cannot help you with your homework because you are in two different mental universes, no human-invented language can bridge them. |