What makes us different from all these things? What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history.

The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes—execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate. We've been automating it for thousands of years. We will succeed in having very good automation of those goals. I've spent some significant part of my life building technology to essentially go from a human concept of a goal to something that gets done in the world.

There are many questions that come from this. For example, we've got these great AIs and they're able to execute goals, how do we tell them what to do?...

STEPHEN WOLFRAM, distinguished scientist, inventor, author, and business leader, is Founder & CEO, Wolfram Research; Creator, Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha & the Wolfram Language; Author, A New Kind of Science. Stephen Wolfram's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Nicholas Carr, Ed Regis

ED. NOTE: From an unsolicited email: "For me, watching the video in small bites gave me the same thrill as reading JJ Ulysses I looked at the screen and clapped aloud." 

This can't be the end of human evolution. We have to go someplace else.                                 

It's quite remarkable. It's moved people off of personal computers. Microsoft's business, while it's a huge monopoly, has stopped growing. There was this platform change. I'm fascinated to see what the next platform is going to be. It's totally up in the air, and I think that some form of augmented reality is possible and real. Is it going to be a science-fiction utopia or a science-fiction nightmare? It's going to be a little bit of both.                              

JOHN MARKOFF is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covers science and technology for The New York Times. His most recent book is the forthcoming Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. John Markoff's Edge Bio Page

THE NEXT WAVE

I'm in an interesting place in my career, and it's an interesting time in Silicon Valley. I grew up in Silicon Valley, but it's something I've been reporting about since 1977, which is this Moore's Law acceleration. Over the last five years, another layer has been added to the Moore's Law discussion, with Kurzweil and people like him arguing that we're on the brink of self-aware machines. Just recently, Gates and Musk and Hawking have all been saying that this is an existential threat to humankind. I simply don't see it. If you begin to pick it apart, their argument and the fundamental argument of Silicon Valley, it's all about this exponential acceleration that comes out of the semiconductor industry. I suddenly discovered it was over.                

Now, it may not be over forever, but it's clearly paused. All the things that have been driving everything that I do, the kinds of technology that have emerged out of here that have changed the world, have ridden on the fact that the cost of computing doesn't just fall, it falls at an accelerating rate. And guess what? In the last two years, the price of each transistor has stopped falling. That's a profound moment. 

...Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket. This is the sense in which it doesn't matter. You can do it today. How it works today isn't how it's going to work in the future but you don't need to wait twenty years for it. Anybody can make almost anything almost anywhere.              

...Finally, when I could own all these machines I got that the Renaissance was when the liberal arts emerged—liberal for liberation, humanism, the trivium and the quadrivium—and those were a path to liberation, they were the means of expression. That's the moment when art diverged from artisans. And there were the illiberal arts that were for commercial gain. ... We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans.

...I'm happy to take claim for saying computer science is one of the worst things to happen to computers or to science because, unlike physics, it has arbitrarily segregated the notion that computing happens in an alien world.

NEIL GERSHENFELD is a Physicist and the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. He is the author of FAB. Neil Gershenfeld's Edge Bio Page

DIGITAL REALITY

What interests me is how bits and atoms relate—the boundary between digital and physical. Scientifically, it's the most exciting thing I know. It has all sorts of implications that are widely covered almost exactly backwards. Playing it out, what I thought was hard technically is proving to be pretty easy. What I didn't think was hard was the implications for the world, so a bigger piece of what I do now is that. Let's start with digital.

Digital is everywhere; digital is everything. There's a lot of hubbub about what's the next MIT, what's the next Silicon Valley, and those were all the last war. Technology is leading to very different answers. To explain that, let's go back to the science underneath it and then look at what it leads to.