(2014-03-25) Wolfram Sxsw Computation Everywhere

Stephen Wolfram gave a SXSW talk on putting Computation Everywhere. But here’s the funny thing: once everything is made of computers, even though it’ll be really cool to find the fundamental theory of physics—and I still want to do it—it’s not going to matter so much. Because in effect that actually physics is just the machine code for the universe. But everything we deal with is on top of a layer that we can program however we want Well, OK, what does that mean for us humans? No doubt we’ll get to deploy in that sort of much-more-than-biology-programmable world. Where in effect you can just build any universe for yourself. I sort of imagine this moment where there’s a box of a trillion souls. Running in whatever pieces of the computational universe they want... Humans define the goals, then technology automatically tries to achieve them. And the more we can inject computation into everything, the more this becomes possible. And, you know, I happen to think that the injection of computation into everything will be a defining feature—perhaps the defining feature—of this time in history.