Stephen Wolfram

For all X, there was a computational X. And that was the thing that the people were responding to.

Um, and, but then kind of this idea emerged that to get to that point, the main thing you had to do was to learn this kind of trade or, or, or skill of doing, you know, programming language type programming.

And, and that, uh, you know, it, it kind of is a strange thing actually, because I, you know, I remember back when I used to be in the professoring business, which is now 35 years ago.

So gosh, that's rather a long time.

Yeah.

You know, it was right when they were just starting to emerge kind of computer science departments at sort of fancy research universities and so on.

I mean, some had already had it, but the other ones that were just starting to have that.

And it was kind of a thing where they were kind of wondering, are we going to put this thing that is essentially a trade-like skill, are we going to somehow attach this to the rest of what we're doing?

And a lot of these kind of knowledge work type activities have always seemed like things where that's where the humans have to go to school and learn all this stuff, and that's never going to be automated.

And it's kind of shocking that rather quickly, a lot of that stuff is clearly automatable.

But the question then is, okay, so if it isn't worth learning how to do car mechanics, you only need to know how to drive the car, so to speak, what do you need to learn?

In other words, if you don't need to know the mechanics of how to tell the computer in detail, make this loop, set this variable, set up this array, whatever else, if you don't have to learn that stuff, you don't have to learn the kind of under-the-hood

things, what do you have to learn?

I think the answer is you need to have an idea where you want to drive the car.

In other words, you need to have some notion of, you know, you need to have some picture of sort of what the architecture of what is computationally possible is.

Well, yeah, you know, it's interesting.

It's a question of who's going to be a great prompt engineer.

Okay.

So my current theory this week, good expository writers are good prompt engineers.

Somebody who can explain stuff well.