When Stephen Wolfram was 17, he dropped out of college. By the time he was 21, he had a Ph.D. in physics and was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Genius Award. Today, he is the CEO of Wolfram Research and developer of programs such as Mathematica and web tools like Wolfram Alpha. But besides the more well-known projects, he has also amassed one of the largest individual datasets in the world: millions of points of data covering the last 20+ years of his life. He talked to Steve Paulson about what it means, and how automation can change our future.