Mathematician and scientist Stephen Wolfram grew up in a family where his mother was a philosophy professor at Oxford University. As such, the younger Wolfram wanted nothing to do with the subject, but the older, wiser Wolfram sees the value in thinking things through. Now he wants to bring some of that deep philosophical rigor to AI research to help us better understand the issues we face as AI becomes more powerful.
Wolfram was a child prodigy, publishing his first scientific paper at the age of 15 and graduating from Caltech with a PhD at 20. His impressive work spanned science, mathematics, and computing: he developed Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and the Wolfram Language, a powerful computer programming language.
“My main life work, besides basic science, has been to build our own computing language, the Wolfram language, with the goal of finding a way to express things computationally that is useful to both humans and computers,” Wolfram told TechCrunch.
As AI developers and others begin to think more deeply about how computers and humans intersect, Wolfram says, it’s become a philosophical exercise, involving thinking in the purely nuanced sense about what impact this kind of technology might have on humanity. This kind of complex thinking is associated with classical philosophy.
“The question is what are you thinking about, and that’s a different kind of question, one that’s more in traditional philosophy than in traditional STEM fields,” he said.
For example, when you start talking about how to put barriers to AI, these are fundamentally philosophical questions. “Sometimes in the tech industry, when people talk about how to set up this or that thing with AI, some people might say, ‘Well, let’s make AI do the right thing.’ And that leads to, ‘Well, what is the right thing?’ And making ethical choices is a philosophical exercise.
He says he’s had “terrifying conversations” with companies working to deploy AI in the world that clearly haven’t thought about this. “If you try to have a Socratic discussion about how to think about these kinds of issues, you’re shocked at how clearly people don’t think about these issues. Right now, I don’t know how to solve these issues. That’s the challenge, but I think that’s where these philosophical questions are becoming more important right now.”
Scientists in general have a hard time thinking about things philosophically, he says. “I’ve noticed something really interesting is that when you talk to scientists, and you talk about big, new ideas, they find it kind of confusing because that’s not what happens in science,” he says. “Science is a progressive field where you don’t expect to encounter a completely different way of thinking about things.”
If the main business of philosophy is to answer the great existential questions, he sees us entering a golden age of philosophy because of the growing influence of artificial intelligence and all the questions it raises. In his view, many of the questions we are now facing through artificial intelligence are actually at the heart of traditional philosophical questions.
“I’ve found that the groups of philosophers I’ve talked to are actually more flexible when they think about different kinds of things in a typical way,” he said.
One such encounter was on his trip with a group of master’s students in philosophy at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. I talked to the students. There is talk of a coming collision between the liberal arts, philosophy, and technology. In fact, Wolfram says he has reread Plato’s “The Republic” because he wants to get back to the roots of Western philosophy in his own thinking.
“And this question, ‘If AI is running the world, how do we want it to do that? How do we think about that process? What kind of update is political philosophy in the age of AI?’ That kind of thing, it goes right back to the fundamental questions that Plato talked about,” he told the students.
Romy Albert, a Ralston student who has spent his career working in data science and also participated in the Wolfram Summer School, an annual program designed to help students understand Wolfram’s approach to applying science to business ideas, was fascinated by Wolfram’s thinking.
“It is very interesting that someone like Dr. Wolfram has such an interest in philosophy, and I think it indicates how important philosophy and the humanistic approach to life are. Because it seems to me that he has become very sophisticated in his field, [it has evolved] “To a more philosophical question,” Albert said.
The fact that Wolfram, who has been at the forefront of computer science for half a century, sees the connection between philosophy and technology may be a sign that it’s time to start addressing these questions about the use of AI on a much broader scale than just a mathematical problem. And bringing philosophers into the discussion might be a good way to do that.