Stephen Wolfram

Now, we say we're better.

We have three color receptors, red, green, blue.

We're not the overall winner.

I think the mantis shrimp,

is the overall winner with 15 color receptors, I think.

So it can kind of make distinctions that with our current, like the mantis shrimp's view of reality is, at least in terms of color, is much richer than ours.

Mm-hmm.

Now, but what's interesting is how do we get there?

So imagine we have this augmented reality system that is even, you know, it's seeing into the infrared, into the ultraviolet, things like this, and it's translating that into something that is connectable to our brains, either through our eyes or more directly into our brains, you know.

then eventually our kind of web of the types of things we understand will extend to those kinds of constructs just as they have extended.

I mean, there are plenty of things where we see them in the modern world because we made them with technology, and now we understand what that is.

But if we'd never seen that kind of thing, we wouldn't have a way to describe it, we wouldn't have a way to understand it, and so on.

You know, no, but perhaps that's because I'm intrinsically an optimist.

I mean, I think that there are things, I think the thing that one sees is there's going to be this one thing and it's going to just zap everything.

Somehow, maybe I have faith in computational irreducibility, so to speak, that there's always unintended little corners.

That, you know, it's just like somebody says, I'm going to, I don't know, somebody has some bioweapon and they say, we're going to release this and it's going to do all this harm.

But then it turns out it's more complicated than that because, you know, the kind of some humans are different and, you know, the exact way it works is a little different than you expect.

It's something where sort of the great big, you know, you smash the thing with something, you know, the asteroid collides with the earth.

And it kind of, you know, and yes, you know, the earth is cold for two years or something.

And, you know, then lots of things die, but not everything dies.