Stephen Wolfram

In only 30 years, our technology has kind of advanced to the point where the playing of a helical mechanical track on a phonograph record is now something bizarre.

So that's a cautionary tale, I would say, in terms of the ability to make something that in detail sort of leads by the nose.

some, you know, the aliens or whatever to do something.

It's like, no, you know, best you're going to do, as I say, if we were doing this today, we would not build a helical scan thing with a needle.

We would just take some high resolution imaging system and get all the bits off it and say, oh, it's a big nuisance that they put in a helix, you know, in a spiral.

Let's just, you know, unravel the spiral and start from there.

Well, it's a question of what one wants to do.

I mean, that's the issue.

The issue is, it's like when people were trying to do natural language understanding for computers.

So people tried to do that for years.

It wasn't clear what it meant.

In other words, you take your piece of English or whatever and you say, gosh, my computer has understood this.

Okay, that's nice.

What can you do with that?

Well, so for example, when we did, you know, built Wolf Malfa, you know, one of the things was it's, you know, it's doing question answering and so on.

It needs to do natural language understanding.

The reason that I realized after the fact, the reason we were able to do natural language understanding quite well and people hadn't before, the number one thing was we had an actual objective for the natural language understanding.

We were trying to turn the natural language into this computational language that we could then do things with.

Now, similarly, when you imagine your alien, you say, okay, we're playing them the record.

Did they understand it?