This is a special bonus episode of the Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening.

Reason's editor-in-chief, Catherine Mangy Ward, talks today with revolutionary scientist Stephen Wolfram,

who earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 at the tender age of 20. Wolfram has spent

his legendary career building popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools, Mathematica,

Wolfram Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. His work on computational thinking forms the basis of intelligent assistants such

as Siri. Catherine spoke with him as part of the special AI issue of Reason that's now out on

newsstands. Go to reason.com slash subscribe or pick it up and read it now. Wolfram offers a candid

assessment of what he hopes and fears from

artificial intelligence and the complicated relationship between humans and their technology.

Here is the Reason interview with Stephen Wolfram.

Stephen Wolfram, thank you very much for joining Reason.

We're here today to talk about artificial intelligence.

Are you up for it?

Sure.

Let's start with what's maybe an emotional question, but I think is also a little bit more of a hard-nosed one as well.

Are we too panicked about the rise of AI, or are we not panicked enough? Or are we panicked in the wrong way?

Depends who we is. I interact with lots of different kinds of people and, you know, it ranges from

people who are convinced that AI is going to eat us all to people who say AI is are really stupid

and won't be able to do anything interesting.

So it's a pretty broad range.

I think that the thing to realize throughout kind of the history of human history,

you know, the one thing that's progressively changed is a development of technology.

...