Mathematician and scientist Stephen Wolfram grew up in a household where his mother was a philosophy professor at Oxford University. As such, his younger self didn’t want anything to do with the subject, but an older and perhaps wiser Wolfram sees value in thinking deeply about things. Now he wants to bring some of that deep philosophical rigor to AI research to help us better understand the issues we encounter as AI becomes more capable.
Wolfram was something of a child prodigy, publishing his first scientific paper at 15 and graduating from Caltech with a doctorate at 20. His impressive body of work crosses science, math and computing: He developed Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram Language, a powerful computational programming language.
“My main life work, along with basic science, has been building our Wolfram language computational language for the purpose of having a way to express things computationally that’s useful to both humans and computers,” Wolfram told TechCrunch.
As AI developers and others start to think more deeply about how computers and people intersect, Wolfram says it is becoming much more of a philosophical exercise, involving thinking in the pure sense about the implications this kind of technology may have on humanity. That kind of complex thinking is linked to classical philosophy.
“The question is what do you think about, and that’s a different kind of question, and it’s a question that’s found more in traditional philosophy than it is in the traditional STEM,” he said.
For example, when you start talking about how to put guardrails on AI, these are essentially philosophical questions. “Sometimes in the tech industry, when people talk about how we should set up this or that thing with AI, some may say, ‘Well, let’s just get AI to do the right thing.’ And that leads to, ‘Well, what is the right thing?’” And determining moral choices is a philosophical exercise.
He says he has had “horrifying discussions” with companies that are putting AI out into the world, clearly without thinking about this. “The attempted Socratic discussion about how you think about these kinds of issues, you would be shocked at the extent to which people are not thinking clearly about these issues. Now, I don’t know how to resolve these issues. That’s the challenge, but it’s a place where these kinds of philosophical questions, I think, are of current importance.”
He says scientists in general have a hard time thinking about things in philosophical terms. “One thing I’ve noticed that’s really kind of striking is that when you talk to scientists, and you talk about big, new ideas, they find that kind of disorienting because in science, that is not typically what happens,” he said. “Science is an incremental field where you’re not expecting that you’re going to be confronted with a major different way of thinking about things.”
If the main work of philosophy is to answer big existential questions, he sees us coming into a golden age of philosophy due to the growing influence of AI and all of the questions that it’s raising. In his view, a lot of the questions that we’re now being confronted with by AI are actually at their core of traditional philosophical questions.
“I find that the groups of philosophers that I talk to are actually much more agile when they think paradigmatically about different kinds of things,” he said.
One such meeting on his journey was with a group of masters’ philosophy students at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. Wolfram spoke to students there about the coming collision of liberal arts and philosophy with technology. In fact, Wolfram says he has reread Plato’s “Republic” because he wants to return to the roots of Western philosophy in his own thinking.
“And this question of ‘if the AIs run the world, how do we want them to do that? How do we think about that process? What’s the kind of modernization of political philosophy in the time of AI?’ These kinds of things, this goes right back to foundational questions that Plato talked about,” he told students.
Rumi Allbert, a student in the Ralston program, who has spent his career working in data science and also participated in Wolfram Summer School, an annual program designed to help students understand Wolfram’s approach to applying science to business ideas, was fascinated with Wolfram’s thinking.
“It’s very, very interesting that a guy like Dr. Wolfram has such an interest in philosophy, and I think that speaks to the volume of importance of philosophy and the humanistic approach to life. Because it seems to me, he has gotten so developed in his own field, [it has evolved] to more of a philosophical question,” Allbert said.
That Wolfram, who has been involved on the forefront of computer science for a half century, is seeing the connections between philosophy and technology, could be a signal that it’s time to start addressing these questions around AI usage in a much broader way than purely as a math problem. And perhaps bringing philosophers into the discussion is a good way to achieve that.