Stephen Wolfram at The Singularity Summit. Accelerating Future summarizes:

A good introduction to some of Stephen’s ideas for those who haven’t slogged through A New Kind of Science yet. If his ideas are right, they’re damn important, with implications for computer science, AI, and our understanding of the world in general.

The bit about mollusks at 12:00 is very interesting to me. It makes sense that mollusk shells would look like choosing randomly from the computational universe because they were such early organisms — they evolved with the least complex ecological context of any phylum except for a few others. (The late Ediacaran, when many of the Ediacaran fauna were gone but the Cambrian explosion hadn’t occurred yet.) Thesmall shelly fauna were among the first organisms with hard shells, and the first complex known organisms that evolved after the End-Cambrian extinction.

At 24:30, Wolfram shows that he isn’t afraid to look closely at anthropics, and he is smart enough to understand why it’s important. If only more of those “genius” physicists out there would take a cue from him.

Posted at 3:07pm and tagged with: the-future, video,.

The Long Now Foundation gives some more details on The Lava Project:

The Lava Project Documentary was created by White Elephant DesignLab, a group of designers who explore natural phenomena and experiment with various materials and their external influences. Earlier this year, the group created a piece at the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii that was inspired by our promotion of long-term thinking through use of the five-digit date. Using a “02009″ stamp made of hardwood and aluminum, they imprinted the congealing surface crust of Pāhoehoe lava in order to equip the emerging lithosphere with its date of origin.

Posted at 9:04am and tagged with: video, the-future,.