Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram
Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.
April 9, 2005
From: Interview by Andres Hax, ClarÃn
How do you see the future of the human race? Will the implications of the Principle of Computational Equivalence, if recognized and adopted, alter the evolution of the human race? If so, how and how soon?
There’s going to be more and more coupling between computers and humans. More and more of our activities—including cognitive ones—will be successfully “outsourced” to computers. Then there’ll be questions about what’s essentially different between computers and humans. And the Principle of Computational Equivalence says there will never be anything fundamentally different. So that means that the difference all has to come from history—it’ll be that thread of history that defines humans.