Stephen Wolfram

So for example, here's an example of an issue.

Is there an apex intelligence?

Just like there might be an apex predator in some ecosystem.

Is there gonna be an apex intelligence?

The most intelligent thing that there could possibly be.

I think the answer is no.

And in fact, we already know this, and it's a kind of a back to the whole computational irreducibility story.

There's kind of a question of, even if you have sort of a Turing machine and you have a Turing machine that runs as long as possible before it halts, you say, is this the machine, is this the apex machine that does that?

There will always be a machine that can go longer.

And as you go out to the infinite collection of possible Turing machines, you'll never have reached the end, so to speak.

You'll never... You'll always be able to... It's kind of like the same question of whether there'll always be another invention.

Will you always be able to invent another thing?

The answer is yes.

There's an infinite tower of possible inventions.

That's one definition of apex.

Yeah, it's not trivial, I agree.

It's a, you know, I think one of the things that I've long been curious about kind of other intelligences, so to speak.

I mean, you know, I view intelligence is like computation.

And it's kind of a, you know, you're sort of, you have the set of rules, you deduce what happens.

I have tended to think now that there's this sort of specialization of computation that is sort of a consciousness-like thing that has to do with these, you know, computational boundedness, single thread of experience, these kinds of things that are the specialization of computation that corresponds to a somewhat human-like experience of the world.