Biographical recollection of Stephen Wolfram’s early career and interactions with The Reality Club

Over nearly four decades, Stephen Wolfram has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking and responsible for many innovations in science, technology and business. His 1982 paper “Cellular Automata as Simple Self-Organizing Systems,” written at the age of twenty-three, was the first of numerous significant scientific contributions aimed at understanding the origins of complexity in nature. It was around this time that Stephen briefly came into my life. I had established The Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals who met in New York City to present their work before peers in other disciplines. (Note: In 1996, The Reality Club went online as Edge.org). Our first speaker? Stephen Wolfram, a “wunderkind” who had arrived in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. I distinctly recall his focused manner as he sat down on a couch in my living room and spoke uninterrupted for about an hour before the assembled group. Since that time, Stephen has become intent making the world’s knowledge easily computable and accessible. His program Mathematica is the definitive system for modern technical computing. Wolfram|Alpha computes expert-level answers using AI technology. He considers his Wolfram Language to be the first true computational communication language for humans and AIs. I caught up with him again four years ago, when we arranged to meet in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a freewheeling conversation about Al. Stephen walked in, said hello, sat down, and, looking at the video camera set up to record the conversation for Edge, began to talk and didn’t stop for two and a half hours. The essay that follows is an edited version of that session, which was a Wolfram master class of sorts and is an appropriate way to end this volume—just as Stephen’s Reality Club talk in the ’80s was a great way to initiate the ongoing intellectual enterprise whose result is the rich community of thinkers presenting their work to one another and to the public in this book. 181 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016401