Computation and the Future of the Human Condition

Computation and the Future of the Human Condition

Based on a talk given at H+ Summit @ Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 12, 2010.

Well, today I’m going to do something pretty unusual for me: I’m going to talk in public about the future.

You know, I’ve spent most of my life just quietly trying to make the future happen, mostly in science and technology.

But partly because it’s useful to me, and partly just because it’s interesting, I also do quite a bit of thinking about what might happen in the future, both near and far. And I thought here today it would be fun to share some of that with you.

The things I’m going to talk about are mostly things I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I think I’ve made some progress with them, but I definitely haven’t even close to figured them all out.

But to get into what I have figured out, I first have to tell you about some slightly elaborate and abstract things.

One day I’m sure all of this will be commonplace. But right now they’re still off on the front lines—things that have emerged from the science I’ve worked on.

Well, ok. So really from a conceptual point of view the core framework is the idea of computation.

And you know, when we look back, I think it’s going to become clear that computation is by far the most important idea that’s emerged in the past century.

But in the future I think it’s actually going to become still even more important. Until it’s really the dominant theme of our very nature and existence.

And that’s what I want to get to here today—and talk about some of the implications.

* * *

Well, in my life so far, I’ve basically done three large projects.

And each of them in a different way informs my view of the future.

Mathematica in showing me what large-scale formalization can achieve.

Wolfram|Alpha in helping me understand the span of human knowledge and the automation of a certain kind of intelligence.

But for our purposes here today, the most important is A New Kind of Science—NKS. Because it provides the paradigm for what I’ll be talking about.

And what NKS is really about is the core concept of computation.

You know, when we think of computation today, we typically think of all those sophisticated computers and programs that we’ve set up to do particular tasks.

But what NKS is about is the pure basic science of computation—the science of what’s out there in the computational universe of all possible programs.

Here’s an example of a really simple program. It’s called a cellular automaton, and it’s the first type