Artificiality: Minds Meeting Machines

David Wolpert: The Thermodynamics of Meaning

11 snips
Apr 5, 2025
David Wolpert, a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, explores the intricate mathematics of meaning and its implications in a world intertwined with AI. He discusses the shift from syntactic to semantic information, revealing how understanding meaning can reshape our interactions. The conversation delves into the challenges of early AI systems, causal information in economics, and the therapeutic potential of AI. Wolpert emphasizes the importance of knowing the difference between correlation and causation, advocating for AI that genuinely understands context.
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ANECDOTE

Herbie: The Beginning

  • David Wolpert's initial work in AI was inspired by his time at the Rockefeller University Neurosciences Institute.
  • His first AI system, "Herbie" (Heuristic Binary Engine), performed simple surface fitting and sparked his interest in the field.
ANECDOTE

Drone Fleets and Economics

  • At NASA Ames, Wolpert shifted to distributed control, treating drones as individual agents in an economy.
  • He aimed to control the drone fleet by designing their interactions, like an economy guided by Adam Smith's "invisible hand."
INSIGHT

Shannon's Syntactic Focus

  • Claude Shannon's information theory focuses on syntactic information (transmitting bits), not semantic information (meaning).
  • This theory has deeply impacted fields like neuroscience, revealing how closely the brain's information processing approaches theoretical limits.
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