WHAT MAKES YOU SO SMART, STEPHEN WOLFRAM?

Noah Davis talks to the founder of Wolfram Alpha about computing the world's knowledge, how his kids got him to start traveling, and why he's not scared of AI.

NOAH DAVIS

 

Stephen Wolfram. (Photo: Stephen Faust/Wolfram Research, Inc.)

At 12, Stephen Wolfram started writing a dictionary about physics, and the California Institute of Technology awarded him a Ph.D. at age 20. The brilliant, enigmatic creator of Mathematica and founder of Wolfram Alpha now runs a massive company remotely, spending his days on the phone and with screen share as he works through problem after problem with his staff. His latest development is the Image Identification project, which will enable your computer to tell you what picture it's looking at. He talked to Pacific Standard about computing the world's knowledge, how his kids got him to start traveling, and why he's not scared of artificial intelligence.

How young were you when you first realized that you were smarter than almost anyone else in the room?

I had the good fortune to go to good schools in England where I had the perception that there were a lot of people who were much smarter than me. After, I went on a search for places where there would be a large collection of people much smarter than me. When I went to college at Oxford, that's what I thought. When I went to graduate school at CalTech, that's what I thought. I have to say that I was a little disappointed that at each of these places I thought that everybody would be much smarter than me and that didn't happen. Eventually, I realized: "Gosh, it's pretty scary. I may be pretty smart compared to people out there." After that, I thought I should do something that makes use of being decently smart.

You once said, "Ever since I was a kid, I'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable." Why were you drawn to that goal?

I probably wouldn't have characterized it precisely that way, but when I look back to what I was doing when I was 12, it was collecting knowledge, organizing it, and trying to set things up so there would be ways to work things out. At that time, it was typewriters and diagrams rather than much with computers. I started using computers about when I was 13, but at the time the computers were primitive enough that there wasn't a lot that could be done in terms of storing knowledge with them.

I got much more seriously interested in organizing knowledge on a computer probably around the time I was 16 or so. I started using computers to do mathematical calculations for physics problems, and I started to think seriously about how you would store technical knowledge in a way that could be used automatically. I started writing serious code for that kind of thing. I built a ground floor for the next 40 years of my work.

You gave a commencement address to one of your children's high school classes and said that a reason for developing a computer program that could do computations was because you were bad at them. Is that true?

Definitely. It's not my skill or interest. I guess I just found it kind of boring. I'm quite a meticulous person, so as I think about it now, I'm not sure why I would make the type of simple mistakes that I made over time. I guess it was because I wasn't very interested in the calculations. I don't know what would happen if I tried to do them today. I haven't done calculations for 30-something years. When I see my kids doing calculations, I tell them I didn't know humans still did that kind of thing.

You've talked about how the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was thinking about organizing knowledge in the same way you want to, only he was doing it 300 years earlier. You live in a time where doing so has become more technologically possible. Do you think you came about at the right time?

I've been very lucky. I think that different people have different things that they are good at that resonate with their personalities and skills. Understanding computation and its significances happens to be a good match for my particular skills and personality. The time I've lived happens to be the time when that stuff has first emerged as possible. That's a break that was lucky.

What's a typical day like for you? Are there any typical days?

I actually have a very regimented routine. I've been collecting all this personal analytics data on myself for 25 years, so I actually know that I have a deeply habitual life. I was a little disappointed to find that out actually. I get up at about 10:30 in the morning. I have my day absolutely full of meetings with people at my company. I have spent many years of my life trying to build this engine for turning ideas that I have into real things. That's the company that I've built. I've been a remote CEO for 22 years, so my day is very virtualized. It's phone plus screen sharing all day. Particularly in the last decade, my basic approach to things has been that I spend the day figuring stuff out. But I like to think in public as much as possible because I'm trying to have other people and the team understand why we are doing something and maybe learn from the process. My day is booked into half-hour or hour blocks: think about this project, think about the next step in figuring out this thing. I have a great time. On any given day, I'll have a bunch of ideas and most of them will go through the pipeline to turn into real things. I feel quite useful doing that sort of thing.

Yesterday, we launched a website called ImageIdentify.com, which is a thing for doing the sort of AI-ish thing of identifying possible images and telling you what they are. That had a certain amount of visibility today, and we've been trying to start to understand the feedback we've gotten and from the various things people have put into the site. It's pretty funny. It's like, "When does one identify a person?" versus "When does one identify a superhero?"-type things.

One of the things that is a characteristic of a lot of stuff that I do is that we're trying to figure stuff out and some judgment call will have to be made somewhere. I guess that I kind of like trying to get as clear as possible in terms of how I think about things so that I'm able to make the best judgment call as quickly as possible. That's what I spend much of my time doing.

I usually work until six, then I do things with my kids and so on for a couple of hours, then I work again and go on until about two in the morning. I have tried to optimize the work that I do to try to be the stuff that I like to do. This works pretty well for me.

You're talking to a lot of people during the day. Is it difficult to communicate what you're getting at because you're so smart?

I work with lots of smart people. This is the very nice thing that I have been able to do over the last 28 years, building up this company of mine. There are people who maybe didn't originally think along the same lines as I did but have gradually learned to develop in that direction. For some things I'm interested in doing, like computer language design, it took me fully 10 years to get to the point where I could work with people and be comfortable that they really got what I was saying. Now, they can take an idea and run with it.

I'm always coming up with a lot of ideas that are a little bit further out than most of the rest of the team is coming up with. Maybe it's insanity or something, but they are used to the "Why don't we do this?"-type of idea from me.

Communicating is something I put lots of effort into, and I got lucky to be able to find smart people to work with. It would be a very different experience for me if I was embedded in some organization that I hadn't built myself and it was just, "OK, here are some people you need to work with." Maybe that wouldn't resonate nearly as well.

Do you read for pleasure?

I'm really bad at reading books. It's terrible. I have about 8,000 books that I've collected over the years, and my wife told me I had to stop buying books because I've overfilled any possible space for them completely. I have rarely, if ever, read a fiction book. I read a lot of stuff, but it's mostly scanning it for content rather than absorbing it for pleasure. There are a few things that I've said to myself I'm reserving for later in life. I have a few of those. Reading is one of those things.

What are some of the others?

One of them for a long time was travel. I traveled when I was quite young, but I haven't traveled much for 20 years. What broke that was my children got to an age where they said I got these invitations to places all around the world and I would say no or do video conferences. They started to pick the exciting places so they could come along on vacation with me. The last two or three years we've traveled to all kinds of exotic places, and I have to say I've learned a lot from it.

Image identification is another step toward AI. What's your interest in AI?

I think the overarching story of civilization is trying to automate as much as possible. AI is just another step in that trajectory toward automation. I find it worthwhile to contribute to that trajectory of technology. For me, what I've tried to do in building Wolfram Language and stuff like that is encapsulate as much knowledge as possible in a computable way.

Why do I want to do this? Good question. I'll make a statement: When you think about AI, you think about what AI makes possible and what the role of humans is in a world where AI has been completely successful. What one realizes is that AI does not in and of itself create goals. The AI can execute, but it has to be told the goal. Where do goals come from? For people, they come from personal history, culture, trajectory of civilization, and things like that. When you ask why someone would be interested in automating as much as possible, I would ask where goals come from in any situation. I can't answer why I'm interested in AI in a meaningful way. It's just something that I have always been interested in. I feel like it's a central issue in the history of civilization. But why that's what I choose to do rather than choosing to sit silently and do nothing with my life, I don't think I can answer that in a meaningful way.

Elon Musk thinks AI is more dangerous than nukes. You aren't worried about the potentially dystopian side of AI?

I think that's a complicated issue. I think that depends on what you think the future of history should be like. There are questions like, "When so much is automated, what will humans do?" Yes, those are real questions. Americans watch an average of two hours of television per day. Gosh, if there's really nothing that needs to be done, what do people choose to do? For a person like myself, I have many lifetimes worth of stuff that I'd like to do. Much of what I'm interested in doing, at least in my theory of AI, is a lot of goal-setting-type stuff, which is precisely the kind of thing that by definition is not automatable because it makes no sense to make an AI that invents goals for itself.

The thing to understand about this—and it's a bit philosophical at some level—is that AI and humans are all doing various types of computations. Nature is also doing computations. When we look at the computations that we do in our brains, we think of them as having purposes, having goals. Nature is doing lots of elaborate computations, probably similar to the ones that go on in our brain, but we don't know how to assign purposes to those computations. They are just things that happen. That's what one has in a situation where there is a human connection.

I have sort of been thinking about this for ages, but this happens to be an area that I'm thinking about a lot right now. It's always terrible when I talk about it before I'm at a point where I fully understand it because it sounds more complicated than it does when I've actually understood it all. This is one of those cases where I'm a certain distance from having what I consider to be a really crisp understanding.

In my life, I've chosen to work on a lot of different things, and it's worked out pretty well. I'm always in a situation where I'm trying to climb the hill of the next thing that I'm trying to figure out. What I've found is that I like that. It feels fulfilling when one figures the things out. I've also discovered that the more one knows, the easier it is to figure the next thing out. There's an amazing network effect of knowledge in different areas. I am lucky that I have a fairly good memory, and I'm spoiled in that I have all these computers systems that try to enhance my memory by automating things. That means that when I have learnt stuff in the past, I end up remembering it and having a decent chance to apply it to some new thing.

I suppose another feature of my life and times is that I have been building things for a long time. Some people do one thing, then throw that one away, and go on to the next thing. For better or worse, I have tended to be someone who builds a taller and taller tower on things that they've done before. I've done that from the technology stacks that I have tried to build and from the development of the things that I know about. It's amusing to talk about all kinds of weird stuff.

Who should I talk to next?

Terry Sejnowski, a professor and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute.

WHAT MAKES YOU SO SMART, WEB EDITOR?

Noah Davis talks to Owen Thomas about late nights on his old high school literary magazine, early HTML, and his editorial philosophy.

 

Owen Thomas is an outlier in his family, the only one who didn't fall in love with computer programming. But that didn't stop Thomas from finding a career in technology, first as a webmaster for trade publications, then as a writer and editor for outlets like Red Herring, Business 2.0, Gawker Media, Business Insider, and ReadWrite, where he's currently editor-in-chief. He talked to Pacific Standard about getting in trouble for staying late to finish his high school literary magazine, speeding to a Russian language competition, and writing about the early days of Silicon Valley.

What was your education like growing up?

I was very lucky. My mom had a master's degree in metallurgical engineering. My dad got a Ph.D. in economics. I don't recall talking about education a lot growing up. It was just taken for granted that my brother and I would probably turn out to be pretty smart and would probably be pretty interested in school. We were lucky in that we grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia, right outside Washington, D.C. It's a primarily suburban county and had a really strong school system, even at the elementary school level. I switched elementary schools twice, basically because we were following the Gifted and Talented program. We were going to a school that was farther away, then a new G&T program opened up a little closer.

The school provided resources. Andrew Kirmse and I were in a special math group. There were five of us studying on our own. We studied algebra and a little bit of computer science. I learned really early on that programming didn't scratch any itch that I had. I was the odd one out in my family in that regard. My mom was working as a computer programmer for IBM and a few other companies in northern Virginia. My dad was an economist but he programmed on the side to tinker around with the family computer. Even my grandfather in his last year of life was so taken with our Apple II that he went out and bought one. He was always giving me and my brother some new game or utility that he had come across. We ended up with two Apple IIs when he passed away. People thought that was extravagant, but it reduced fighting between me and my brother.

THERE WAS ALSO THE TIME I GOT A SPEEDING TICKET BECAUSE I WAS GOING TO A RUSSIAN LANGUAGE CONTEST IN BALTIMORE. I CAME HOME WITH THAT SPEEDING TICKET AT THE SAME TIME THAT I GOT AN ACCEPTANCE PACKAGE AND SCHOLARSHIP FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.

Were you into writing?

What I remember about computers early on was that I really liked writing on them. I was submitting printed papers as early as elementary school. The teachers didn’t like that because I was supposed to be working on my writing. But I felt that I thought better and expressed myself better at a keyboard.

In junior high, I went to a local high school for math classes. Andrew and I were taking calculus in eighth grade. It was great to do it together. Picture two eighth graders in this senior high school class. We were like their mascots. They didn't pick on us. You can pick on a freshman but picking on an eighth grader is just weird.

When it came time to go to high school, Thomas Jefferson had just opened up. Andrew and I, and a fair number of our friends in the Gifted program, applied to TJ. It was so experimental back then. I think now TJ is much more of an institution. It's a force to be reckoned with, but back then they were figuring out what this high school was going to look like and stand for. I haven't talked to a lot of recent graduates, but my feeling is that back then there was much more emphasis on being well rounded. Now, I think it's more hard driving about excellence in science and technology.

Did you gravitate toward the humanities when you were at TJ?

I took two years of post-calculus. Differential equations and stuff like that. I ran out of math to take there. I looked at taking math at a nearby college, but they didn't have any math classes that I could take and still go to high school because of the schedule. I ended up taking French and Russian instead because I discovered I was really skilled at languages.

I was also getting really into the literary magazine. I was really thrilled that when I went back to TJ over the Thanksgiving holiday not only was the literary magazine still around but so was a science journal that I had helped start called Teknos. I started that my senior year at the same time I was serving as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine. That was my own particular insanity.

I really loved the process of putting words and images on the page, and then assembling them into a cohesive whole. That act of publication was really compelling to me. There was something I liked about the late nights. The one time I really got in trouble was for staying out late, laying out pages. I think our magazine advisor and I were trying to get pages in the mail. There was one post office in the area that was open until midnight, and then my advisor drove me home. My parents were not happy about me getting home so late.

That's the lamest excuse for getting in trouble ever.

Yep. There was also the time I got a speeding ticket because I was going to a Russian language contest in Baltimore. I came home with that speeding ticket at the same time that I got an acceptance package and scholarship from the University of Chicago. I stacked them together for my mom to read so she could have a little perspective.

Which one did you put on top? Did you go good news, bad news or bad news, good news?

[Laughs] I think I went good news, bad news.

You loved publishing but was that something you wanted to do as a career?

I went to the University of Chicago, which doesn't have a journalism program. It did have a school newspaper, but it wasn't until my junior year that I gravitated toward that. I became the production editor, which was a mix of laying out pages and writing headlines. It was about packaging the publication instead of writing or assigning. I really liked those late nights of putting the paper together. I missed that from high school.

I also hung out in the teacher's science lab. The University of Chicago had a bunch of NeXT computers, which was Steve Jobs' company between stints at Apple. It was also the first platform that ran a World Wide Web browser or server. Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web on a NeXT. A friend of mine showed me the Web on those computers. He suggested I learn a little HTML. Right next door to the computer lab was the periodicals section of the library. I stumbled across a copy of Mother Jones, and they were advertising for interns. I applied, figuring I'd get a page layout internship because I knew Quark and Pagemaker. I threw in that I knew a little HTML on my resume, which in 1994 was pretty uncommon. It was also pretty uncommon that Mother Jones had a website. I think it was one of three magazines to have one.

The IT director of Mother Jones was the person who got all the internship applications. He found mine, intercepted it, and steered me away from the art department. I came on as a Web intern. That's where I really learned HTML, enough UNIX to be dangerous, and it got me out to San Francisco, which was key.

You have a strong analytical side. Has that helped the writing?

I always laugh when programmers throw attitude about the term FLAM (Friggin' Liberal Arts Majors). The fact is that I probably took more math by 10th grade than they ever did even in college. I learned early on that storytelling was what I loved. I guess you could frame it as analysis but I view analysis as just answering the why of the story. Isn't that what you're supposed to do as a reporter? Not just the who, what, when, where, how, but also why? If you can at least attempt to dig at that why, I think you're doing a better job of telling the story.

I often talk about Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. It's the story of a kid who is drafted to be the commander of all humanity's military forces fighting against what people believed was an all-or-nothing war against an alien species. He ends up killing off the species and spends the rest of his life trying to make amends. He tells stories of people's lives, one of them being the hive queen who was the mother of this entire insectoid species, and anyone [could request] his services as a speaker for the dead. It becomes a secular religion of sorts where the speaker delivered the good and the bad. That's how I view my charge as a journalist. It's not just the good speech; it's the true speech. It certainly has always cut against the grain of Silicon Valley. Even back to Red Herring, there was a certain tone of cheerleading for the technology industry and the Valley. You see that tone in contemporary publications: Journalists should sit down, take notes, and wave their pom poms. I just disagree that it's healthy to do.

You've covered a lot of start-ups. Have you ever been interested in working at one?

I did do a media start-up. I came away with the learning that it's very tough to reconcile the conditions of great media with the lifecycle of a start-up. Building an audience takes time. It takes diligence and a steady hand. Reading is a habit. Your preferences among publications are habits. That's hard to do in the lifecycle of a start-up.

I never found myself tempted to do a start-up outside of media. I do think that we live in a very exciting time for technology-empowered media. When you look at so many companies that are investing in their own content management systems with the thought that working with something off the shelf is going to limit their journalists. If you're trying to pick up the thread of the organizations that I join, from Gawker Media to Business Insider to Say Media, they are all companies that are investing in the technology that journalists use every day.

Who wins Jeopardy! between you, Nick Denton, and Henry Blodget?

I think Nick is going to have a much better knowledge of pop culture. He's omnivorous in his interests. Henry is very focused on finance and tech. I'm going to give it to Nick. Henry would be very fast on the buzzer but not always have the right answer. Meanwhile, I would just be throwing my hands up. I'm not going to compete with either of them. They are both brilliant in their own ways. I think I might have the edge on them in geography. I can draw a pretty faithful map of the world from memory.

Who should I talk to next?

I’m going to pull an Andrew Kirmse and recommend you talk to our classmate Matt Blum, editor-in-chief of GeekDad.