In January 2011, I spent an hour on the phone with Stephen Wolfram.

Put that in context. Deep learning had not yet won ImageNet. Transformers were six years away. Wolfram|Alpha was barely a year old, and most people filed it under “search engine that does your homework.”

His answer to my questions kept coming back to the same place: if you want to understand the future, go explore the computational universe. Run the simple programs. Watch what they actually do. Stop assuming that complicated behavior requires complicated causes.

I had spent three days preparing for that conversation and still came away thinking I had just talked to one of the smartest people alive.

Fifteen years later, the industry is quietly rediscovering his argument. You cannot know what a system will do without running it. Wolfram had a name for that long before anyone needed it to explain why #AI alignment is so hard.

What I find strangest on re-listen is what he said about the singularity itself, and how carefully he refused to say what everyone else in 2011 was saying.

Watch it and tell me whether he called it. #Wolfram #ArtificialIntelligence #Singularity.

Full interview here: [ https://snglrty.co/4omIS6j](https://snglrty.co/4omIS6j)

Want to hear Stephen Wolfram on Wolfram Alpha, AI, the singularity and other interesting topics? Check out his interview on www.SingularityWeblog.com