"I wonder which will become self-aware first -- Wolfram Alpha, or Stephen Wolfram."
“Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?”
I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the computer-y people because we've seen discrete automata and have goofed with all sorts of complexity-generating simple formalisms (L-systems, genetic algorithms, ...) that are impressive for giggles (and some industrial applications) but don't amount to a kind of Kurzweilian Transcendence.
... but we're not all mathy enough to pick apart what string/brane theorists or even orthodox quantum gravitationists are doing and say with (possibly misguided) confidence that it's no hope for a theory of everything. The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room, often because they have silly overarching theories (Zizek has a couple of points about quantum physics, but then, he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history) that must be relentlessly mocked.
And for good reason. For example, philosophers (Zizek included) raved about Badiou's Number and Numbers. It is a nice history of the approaches to formalizing the concept of number, but there is no philosophy there. As soon as Badiou or Derrida or any other continental philosophers try to do anything else with mathematics it just becomes a grossly inappropriate and confusing analogy.
The kind of theoritical psychoanalysis Zizek talks about is not really classic psychoanalysis at all. Even Marxism at the lowest level is a theory of psychology.
Not that it excuses his sentiment at all. Seemingly too arrogant to take the time to contemplate himself in an honest light.