In preparing my keynote at our 31st annual technology conference, I tried to collect some of my thoughts about our long-term mission and how I view the opportunities it is creating…
What I’ve Spent My Life On
I’ve been fortunate to live at a time in history when there’s a transformational intellectual development: the rise of computation and the computational paradigm. And I’ve devoted my adult life to doing what I can to make computation and the computational method achieve their potential, both intellectually and in the world at large. I’ve alternated (about five times so far) between doing this with basic science and with practical technology, each time building on what I’ve been able to do before.
The basic science has shown me the immense power and potential of what’s out there in the computational universe: the capability of even simple programs to generate behavior of immense complexity, including, I now believe, the fundamental physics of our whole universe. But how can we humans harness all that power and potential? How do we use the computational universe to achieve things we want: to take our human objectives and automate achieving them?
I’ve now spent four decades in an effort to build a bridge between what’s possible with computation, and what we humans care about and think about. It’s a story of technology, but it’s also a story of big and deep ideas. And the result has been the creation of the first and only full-scale computational language—that we now call the Wolfram Language. Continue reading