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Alien Intelligence and the Concept of Technology
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

Alien Intelligence and the Concept of Technology

Stephen Wolfram

“We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”.

But as I thought about it, I realized that beyond the “absurdly extreme moonshot” character of this pitch, there’s some science that I’ve done that makes it clear that it’s also fundamentally philosophically confused. The nature of the confusion is interesting, however, and untangling it will give us an opportunity to illuminate some deep features of both intelligence and technology—and in the end suggest a way to think about the long-term trajectory of the very concept of technology and its relation to our universe.

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The Concept of the Ruliad
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

The Concept of the Ruliad

Stephen Wolfram

I call it the ruliad. Think of it as the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways. It’s yet another surprising construct that’s arisen from our Physics Project. And it’s one that I think has extremely deep implications—both in science and beyond.

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Exploring Rulial Space: The Case of Turing Machines
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

Exploring Rulial Space: The Case of Turing Machines

Stephen Wolfram

Let’s say we find a rule that reproduces physics. A big question would then be: “Why this rule, and not another?” I think there’s a very elegant potential answer to this question, that uses what we’re calling rule space relativity—and that essentially says that there isn’t just one rule: actually all possible rules are being used, but we’re basically picking a reference frame that makes us attribute what we see to some particular rule. In other words, our description of the universe is a sense of our making, and there can be many other—potentially utterly incoherent—descriptions, etc.

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