Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Alpha) is doing an AMA at Reddit. (That stands for “ask me anything”; it’s what it sounds like.) His username there is “StephenWolfram-Real”; it’s probably best to just search for that and not wade through the comments.
Some interesting points:
- it’s a big challenge to let people know what’s available. I’ve run into this, even just using it for mathematical stuff, although this is mostly because I don’t know Mathematica syntax.
- Wolfram believes that W|A will invent more things on the fly ten years from now. That certainly seems like what you’d get out of an increase in computing power.
- a big difficulty in going from developing Mathematica to developing W|A is that W|A uses a lot more heuristics.
God plays dice 