斯蒂芬·沃尔夫勒姆认为我们需要哲学家来研究人工智能的大问题

来源：科技世代千高原

罗恩·米勒

2024 年 8 月 25 日

图片来源： Stephen McCarthy/Getty Images

数学家兼科学家斯蒂芬·沃尔夫勒姆 (Stephen Wolfram) 的母亲是牛津大学的哲学教授，因此，年轻时的他并不想与哲学有任何关系，但年长且更加睿智的沃尔夫勒姆认为深入思考事物很有价值。现在，他希望将这种深奥的哲学严谨性带入人工智能研究，以帮助我们更好地理解随着人工智能变得越来越强大而遇到的问题。

沃尔夫勒姆可以说是一位神童，15 岁时发表了第一篇科学论文，20 岁时从加州理工学院毕业并获得博士学位。他令人印象深刻的工作涵盖了科学、数学和计算领域：他开发了 Mathematica、Wolfram Alpha 和强大的计算编程语言 Wolfram 语言。

沃尔夫勒姆告诉 TechCrunch：“除了基础科学之外，我的主要人生工作就是构建我们的 Wolfram 语言计算语言，以便找到一种以计算方式表达事物的方法，使人类和计算机都受益。”

随着人工智能开发人员和其他人开始更深入地思考计算机与人类如何相互交织，沃尔夫勒姆表示，这正变得越来越像一项哲学活动，涉及纯粹意义上的思考这种技术可能对人类产生的影响。这种复杂的思考与古典哲学有关。

他说：“问题在于你在想什么，这是一个不同类型的问题，这个问题在传统哲学中比在传统的 STEM 中更常见。”

例如，当你开始谈论如何为人工智能设置护栏时，这些本质上是哲学问题。“有时在科技行业，当人们谈论我们应该如何为人工智能设置这样或那样的东西时，有些人可能会说，‘好吧，让我们让人工智能做正确的事情。’这导致‘什么是正确的事情？’”而确定道德选择是一项哲学活动。

他说，他与那些将人工智能推向世界但显然没有考虑到这一点的公司进行了“令人震惊的讨论”。“尝试苏格拉底式的讨论来探讨你如何看待这类问题，你会惊讶于人们对这些问题的思考程度之深。现在，我不知道如何解决这些问题。这是一个挑战，但我认为，这类哲学问题在当前具有重要意义。

他说，科学家通常很难用哲学的眼光来思考问题。“我注意到一件非常引人注目的事情，那就是当你和科学家交谈，谈论重大的新想法时，他们会感到困惑，因为在科学界，这种情况并不常见，”他说。“科学是一个渐进的领域，你不会想到会遇到一种截然不同的思考方式。”

如果哲学的主要工作是回答重大的存在问题，那么他认为，由于人工智能的影响力不断增长以及它所引发的所有问题，我们将进入哲学的黄金时代。在他看来，我们现在面临的许多人工智能问题实际上是传统哲学问题的核心。

他说：“我发现，与我交谈的哲学家群体在以范式思考不同类型事物时实际上要敏捷得多。”

沃尔夫拉姆在旅途中与佐治亚州萨凡纳市拉尔斯顿学院的一群哲学硕士生进行了一次这样的会面。沃尔夫拉姆向那里的学生讲述了文科和哲学与科技即将到来的碰撞。事实上，沃尔夫拉姆说他重读了柏拉图的《理想国》，因为他想在自己的思想中回归西方哲学的根源。

“而这个问题是‘如果人工智能统治世界，我们希望它们怎么做？我们如何看待这个过程？人工智能时代的政治哲学现代化是什么样的？’这类问题，这又回到了柏拉图所谈论的基本问题，”他告诉学生们。

拉尔斯顿项目的学生鲁米·奥尔伯特 (Rumi Allbert) 一直从事数据科学工作，同时也参加了沃尔夫勒姆暑期学校 (Wolfram Summer School)，这是一项年度计划，旨在帮助学生了解沃尔夫勒姆将科学应用于商业理念的方法，他对沃尔夫勒姆的思想非常着迷。

“像沃尔夫勒姆博士这样的人对哲学如此感兴趣，这非常非常有趣，我认为这说明了哲学和人文主义生活方式的重要性。因为在我看来，他在自己的领域已经取得了如此大的成就，[它已经演变成]更多的哲学问题，”奥尔伯特说。

沃尔夫勒姆已经涉足计算机科学的前沿领域半个世纪了，他看到了哲学与技术之间的联系，这可能表明是时候开始以更广泛的方式解决这些有关人工智能使用的问题，而不是单纯地将其视为数学问题。也许让哲学家参与讨论是一个实现这一目标的好方法。

https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/25/stephen-wolfram-thinks-we-need-philosophers-working-on-big-questions-around-ai/

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Image Credits: Stephen McCarthy / Getty Images

Mathematician and scientist Stephen Wolfram grew up in a household where his mother was a philosophy professor at Oxford University. As such, his younger self didn’t want anything to do with the subject, but an older and perhaps wiser Wolfram sees value in thinking deeply about things. Now he wants to bring some of that deep philosophical rigor to AI research to help us better understand the issues we encounter as AI becomes more capable.

Wolfram was something of a child prodigy, publishing his first scientific paper at 15 and graduating from Caltech with a doctorate at 20. His impressive body of work crosses science, math and computing: He developed Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram Language, a powerful computational programming language.

“My main life work, along with basic science, has been building our Wolfram language computational language for the purpose of having a way to express things computationally that’s useful to both humans and computers,” Wolfram told TechCrunch.

As AI developers and others start to think more deeply about how computers and people intersect, Wolfram says it is becoming much more of a philosophical exercise, involving thinking in the pure sense about the implications this kind of technology may have on humanity. That kind of complex thinking is linked to classical philosophy. 

“The question is what do you think about, and that’s a different kind of question, and it’s a question that’s found more in traditional philosophy than it is in the traditional STEM,” he said.

For example, when you start talking about how to put guardrails on AI, these are essentially philosophical questions. “Sometimes in the tech industry, when people talk about how we should set up this or that thing with AI, some may say, ‘Well, let’s just get AI to do the right thing.’ And that leads to, ‘Well, what is the right thing?’” And determining moral choices is a philosophical exercise.

He says he has had “horrifying discussions” with companies that are putting AI out into the world, clearly without thinking about this. “The attempted Socratic discussion about how you think about these kinds of issues, you would be shocked at the extent to which people are not thinking clearly about these issues. Now, I don’t know how to resolve these issues. That’s the challenge, but it’s a place where these kinds of philosophical questions, I think, are of current importance.”

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He says scientists in general have a hard time thinking about things in philosophical terms. “One thing I’ve noticed that’s really kind of striking is that when you talk to scientists, and you talk about big, new ideas, they find that kind of disorienting because in science, that is not typically what happens,” he said. “Science is an incremental field where you’re not expecting that you’re going to be confronted with a major different way of thinking about things.”

If the main work of philosophy is to answer big existential questions, he sees us coming into a golden age of philosophy due to the growing influence of AI and all of the questions that it’s raising. In his view, a lot of the questions that we’re now being confronted with by AI are actually at their core of traditional philosophical questions.

“I find that the groups of philosophers that I talk to are actually much more agile when they think paradigmatically about different kinds of things,” he said.

One such meeting on his journey was with a group of masters’ philosophy students at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. Wolfram spoke to students there about the coming collision of liberal arts and philosophy with technology. In fact, Wolfram says he has reread Plato’s “Republic” because he wants to return to the roots of Western philosophy in his own thinking.

“And this question of ‘if the AIs run the world, how do we want them to do that? How do we think about that process? What’s the kind of modernization of political philosophy in the time of AI?’ These kinds of things, this goes right back to foundational questions that Plato talked about,” he told students.

Rumi Allbert, a student in the Ralston program, who has spent his career working in data science and also participated in Wolfram Summer School, an annual program designed to help students understand Wolfram’s approach to applying science to business ideas, was fascinated with Wolfram’s thinking.

“It’s very, very interesting that a guy like Dr. Wolfram has such an interest in philosophy, and I think that speaks to the volume of importance of philosophy and the humanistic approach to life. Because it seems to me, he has gotten so developed in his own field, [it has evolved] to more of a philosophical question,” Allbert said.

That Wolfram, who has been involved on the forefront of computer science for a half century, is seeing the connections between philosophy and technology, could be a signal that it’s time to start addressing these questions around AI usage in a much broader way than purely as a math problem. And perhaps bringing philosophers into the discussion is a good way to achieve that.

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