Stephen Wolfram

I don't think many people can run a program in their minds.

of any sophistication.

It's just not something people do.

It's not something people have even thought of doing, because it's kind of not, you know, you can easily run it on a computer.

An arbitrary program.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if I say to you, here's a Turing machine, you know, tell me what it does after 50 steps, and you're like trying to think about that in your mind, that's really hard to do.

It's not what people do.

Yes, yes, yes, that's right.

But they've created something which is then, you know, then when they run it, it's doing something different than what's happening in their minds.

I mean, they've outsourced that piece of computation from something that is internally happening in their minds to something that is now a tool that's external to their mind.

They invented the technology of computers.

Well, for sure.

I mean, the particular ways that we make computers out of semiconductors and electronics and so on, that's the particular technology stack we built.

I mean, the story of a lot of what people try to do with quantum computing is finding different sort of underlying physical infrastructure for doing computation.

You know, biology.

does lots of computation.

It does it using an infrastructure that's different from semiconductors and electronics.

It's a molecular scale sort of computational process that hopefully we'll understand more about.