The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: What can you say about the future of physics? - Something practical: do you think pens and pencils still have room for improvement, or has writing technology been perfected? - ​Should we prioritize adding new senses to ourselves (a magnetic north sense with some device, for example) to discover more physics as pockets of computational reducibility? What possible senses? - ​When will it become the mainstream view that mathematics is merely a branch/form of computational discipline, and as such a physical science, free of Platonistic misconceptions? - ​I like the thought that there are kids now playing four-dimensional multiplayer games. The next generations won't even be able to understand the "trivial" stuff we were thinking about. - How do you envision mathematics (research to application) being practiced in the long-term future? - ​I think World of Warcraft may have helped me understand calculus better. You have a goal with a particular group setup, so what is the optimal scenario for victory given one's resources? - Which area of tech is advancing the fastest? Will this change in the future? - Will you ever invent a new language again? - Is there anything you have recently changed your mind on? If so, what is it and what might the implications be for the future of science and technology?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: If human reaction speed were faster, would that be helpful? How much faster could it be? Is the limiting factor the nerve signal relays or brain processing time?​ - Do you find it weird that on Earth, animals with bigger brains are considered the more intelligent species, but in technology, the smarter computer chips seem to always be smaller?​ - ​Could these (neuron connections) "prove" precognitions with "impossible" results from certain people?​ - Do you think the brain can be trained (or not) like a muscle?​ - ​How will brains change through Neuralink connecting to AI?​ - ​I think some parts of our brains adapted to modern (laggy) typing, so we don't really perceive it anymore.​ - By the way, they have done the same thing to brains of whales etc. and found that those whales actually have fewer neurons than humans. It's just that the size of those neurons is very big.​ - ​I'd say societies/groups are our larger-scale developing "brains." - Would bigger brains run into heating/cooling issues?​ - ​I get the feeling we'll realize nature is so much more efficient than what we hope to do with electronics that we'll soon be relying on cells for major computation.

Stephen reads a recent blog from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com and then answers questions live from his viewers.

Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/03/when-exactly-will-the-eclipse-happen-a-multimillennium-tale-of-computation/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7Eqhd34ytoc

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: ​Were the 70s truly the golden age of electronics? - What's the history of hacking? When did security risks become a prominent issue? - ​Did you get to know Carver Mead at Caltech? - What progress did the antigravity research movement gain in the 50s–60s, and why did research eventually stop?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Would an alien intelligence experiencing a different slice of the ruliad (a "ruster") close to ours likely experience black holes in a similar way? - ​Is rulial space bigger than branchial space? - Maybe it's a Gaussian distribution around a point in rulial space that makes human minds? - What do you think about NASA's recently released plans to build a Moon-based radio telescope? - ​How would the signal get back to Earth from the dark side of the Moon? - Why would so many nations be interested in the Moon? - Suppose we've just gotten lucky and developed our current level of technology during a period of unusual solar calm. How do we adapt if we expect solar storms to cause havoc with our electronics, say, every few decades? - Fiber optics have reduced our vulnerability from the days when landlines were all copper. Only the power grid remains. - What does the future look like for computational language? Will it be adopted on a larger scale? - How do you anticipate biotechnology shaping the future of biomaterials and tissue engineering? - How do you see the future of information consumption? Will it all be digital? Will physical books still be relevant? Will it even be reading, or simply data chips that are inserted into the brain? - Will we ever get to a point of other mammals evolving to the intelligence level of humans?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Is writing the same as thinking? - After reviewing your Wikipedia page, I noticed that you left undergraduate/postgraduate study before graduation for whatever reason. My question pertains to how you found the application process and background study for being accepted into a PhD program. If you could give some background into how much studying you had completed by that point and how you demonstrated your ability to be accepted, I would be very grateful. - ​Great piece about Doug Lenat and CYC. Any further thoughts about such intrinsically driven, lifelong research pursuits–including your own–be it their significance, their risks or anything in between? - ​I'm finishing my PhD. There are so many industries/groups! Much more than I know, for sure... How can one find "the one" in the ocean? - What made you and Jonathan decide to go on a livestream? Was it planned, or do you just randomly decide to do a livestream if the discussion is interesting enough? - ​How do you determine whether a decision should be decided short term or long term? - How did you allocate your time across strategy, product development, operations, etc., during the early stages of Wolfram Research, and how has that evolved as the company has grown? - If you could create and design a school, how would you structure the curriculum? Would it be different for elementary, middle and high school vs. college? - Do you have a favorite of your livestream series? Are there other types you'd be interested in? - ​Would you suggest working for a startup that is building on an idea from a renowned research institution, or working directly at that institution? - That's basically what they teach you when learning to ride a motorcycle. You trend toward where you're looking. - Along these lines, is it better to say "This is going to be difficult" or "Don't worry, it's not complicated"? - Do you have any advice for people who want to be independent researchers?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: ​Do you believe we had an exploration age? Sometimes the hype feels exponential, but maybe it's just linear. What are your thoughts? - When was it that we learned about weather being essentially mathematics and physics, which could be utilized to create weapons that can control weather and weather conditions? - ​Are you aware of any efforts (past or present) to use nature to understand mathematics instead of the other way around? - Happy belated birthday! Anything notable to say about the history of Stephen Wolfram? - What is the history of naming mathematical terms? How has this branched off into other areas of naming? - ​The major reason Greek is overused in science is the fact that ancient Greek vocabulary literally has a word for everything. - Which is better, autobiographies or biographies? Which gives a better historical record of a person?

Stephen reads a recent blog from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com and then answers questions live from his viewers.

Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/03/can-ai-solve-science/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/goYaSkxG8LA

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Could we be inside of a black hole? Can biological life survive?​ - Would something trapped in the liminal space between the event horizon and "singularity" eventually be able to escape?​ - ​In a black hole, does time stop? Is this a case for string theory?​ - What are the implications of a naked black hole (one without an event horizon)​ on the universe? - ​It is very interesting that the more the black hole "eats," the larger the surface gets. So what exactly is the singularity?​ - If matter and antimatter both have positive mass, then wouldn't Hawking radiation increase the mass of a black hole?​ - How small can a black hole be? "Micro-black holes," maybe?​ - Do you think it will ever be possible to reproduce a black hole situation in a lab for practical research/experimentation?​ - What is spinning in a spinning black hole?​ - Can black holes have a charge? Can the effect of the charge propagate out of the black hole if photons cannot escape?​ - Why are they named black holes and not after the name of the people who found/discovered this phenomenon?​ - ​Could lasers be used to display an advertisement (or perhaps a clock) on the Moon? Can high-bandwidth internet connections be bounced off reflectors on the Moon?​ - If the Moon is responsible for the tides, can the Earth be responsible for some micro-movement of moon dust?​ - Buying an ad that burns up upon reentry sounds incredibly wasteful.​ - ​Would the tea dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party have affected the underwater ecosystem?​ - How would biologists test for the effects of caffeine on fish?​ - ​Why are the elements on the Earth not more homogeneous? Why are there areas/mines abundant with certain metals? Is the heterogeneity of elements increasing or decreasing on Earth? Is this the same for other planets? Galaxies?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Just saw your new blog about Ed Fredkin–what an interesting read! What was writing the blog like? Do you enjoy these more biographical pieces vs. more purely technical pieces you've written? - ​When you first created Wolfram Language and the other products around it (Mathematica), how did you develop a team of engineers/scientists to work on building your vision? - Any advice for students returning to school in the coming weeks? - ​Any advice regarding trying to promote technology "from the future"? - I really would like to program, but I feel like I need to grasp every concept before moving forward. Should I give up? It seems like there's always something I don't know, and sometimes others can't explain it, either. Do you deal with this? Any tips? - Do you think it's harder to kick-start a business today than it was 40 years ago? - Agree: Finance, especially quantitative finance, is a black hole for talent/smart minds. - Picking a major that determines your life/career at 18 seems daunting. What advice do you have? I worry about picking something and regretting it later, or feeling like I've wasted my time if I decide to change my major after a year or two. - Some industries just squeeze the juice out of bright young people until there's nothing left and you're replaced: finance, consulting, law, advertising, etc. How do you avoid this? - Regarding: Picking a major that determines your life/career at 18 seems daunting. What advice do you have? I worry about picking something and regretting it later, or feeling like I've wasted my time if I decide to change my major after a year or two. - What do you think is the best way to organize creative work? Personally, I don't think much of creative work is possible to formulate in a step-by-step plan off the bat. - I envy cats with their 18–20 hours/day of sleep. - If you are running a business, is it necessary to have the knowledge or ability to run any aspect of that business yourself, or can you rely on people to run those areas for you? - If you read books, you get better at reading books. If you program, you get better at programming. If you program with a book next to you, you get better at finding relevant examples in that book. But you don't learn to program by reading a book. - Do you think philosophy is still relevant in all these areas? - How would you deal with falling down the recursive rabbit hole too much? Because this makes learning about a specific subject extremely slow. - What do you make of company governance? Is there a "best way to set up a company board" etc.? - I'm really curious on your thoughts about these UAPs as a leader in your field. What is your opinion on what's going on?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Do you think houses are going to change much in the future? Will we reach the age of true "smart houses"? - Within the next 20 years, will "artificial intelligent" image recognition and/or image segmentation systems equal the accuracy of expert humans? For example, will an AI pathologist or radiologist equal the performance of a human pathologist or radiologist? - How long do you estimate before AI can do creative mathematics? How will this technology be similar to or different from GPT? - Do you think smartphones will replace desktop computing? - Does it make sense to pursue a math degree in the age of AI? - ​Will different advanced AGIs try to compete with each other for resources? - ​Which is more of an existential threat: AI or quants? - ​Are we now stuck with COBOL running most of the world economy for the rest of our lives? - In your opinion, is the concept of Maxwell's demon theoretically possible, and does it have the potential to violate the second law of thermodynamics? Furthermore, could you shed light on how computational limits may affect physical phenomena and our understanding thereof? And what about time: how are the second law of thermodynamics, computation and time connected? - Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae made some strikingly accurate predictions about technology development back in the 1960s. What is your perspective on Lem's predictive prowess? Do you find it remarkable that such accurate foresight of the distant future is possible? I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on the predictive power and limitations of technological forecasting. - Were there ideas to put 10 months in a year? - Can AI be used to create better prompts, or is that dependent on human consciousness? - ​Which will history judge as the biggest letdown: 2023's AI mania and panics, "VR is the inevitable near future" from the 2010s or the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence from 2001? - Will AI-based tutors replace most human tutors in the next five years?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Do you know the history of the invention of OCR (Optical character recognition)? - With recent developments, can you talk about the history of theories of extraterrestrial life and search for extraterrestrial life? - Who do you think is the most undervalued scientist in the last 100 years? Someone who has contributed a great deal to society, but has largely gone unnoticed by the public eye? - ​Why were elite physicists (and others) reluctant to embrace computers? - I saw an interview of Ed Fredkin, where he explained how he tried to learn Richard Feynman on how to use a Commodore PET I think it was. - "There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!"–Feynman - Didn't he end up causing a hubbub at Los Alamos because he was personally repairing calculators/computers rather than the IBM person? - ​In the early-mid 60s, the Soviet Union was very seriously considering what would have been a sort of proto-internet. Do you know anything about this? - How do you think kids today would react if they were suddenly teleported 40 years in the past? - Have aliens always been referred to as "aliens"? Or did they have another name in history? - Has there been any observable changes to planets during human life on Earth? - There's a weird Catholic history of discussing ETs that are neither human nor angels. As a theoretical theological field called "exo-theology". - ​What is the oldest book that you actually use and is not a museum piece?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: What are the challenges of working in interdisciplinary fields? - What do you make of one-person businesses? They seem to be trendy these days. - How do I become "world class" in a subject? It might be mathematics or computer science etc. - Who are some young people who inspire you? What are they working on? - When did you realize that what you do now is what you wanted to do in your life? - ​Have you always been an excellent public speaker? - Thomas Watson used the THINK slogan to exhort employees to "take everything into consideration." Can you share some of the things you do as a manager/CEO to create a culture of people who actually think? - In a previous episode, you said that you personally learned most efficiently by doing small self-initiated projects. How did you generate the project ideas? Could you give an example? Is there a systematic way to do this? - Has livestreaming changed any aspects of development meetings? How has that changed your workday? - Are there any classic novels or nonfiction books that helped form your curious and resilient mindset, i.e. books that soothed any anxiety about potential negative implications from scientific advancements? How do you stay brave?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: What would a bio-computer look like?​ - ​Interesting to think whether John Conway's Life is a kind of life. Can you grow life from a computer program?​ - ​Why are there different colors of flowers but not trees?​ - What causes a four-leaf clover? Why are they so rare?​ - ​The mantis shrimp has 12 types of cone cells in its eyes. Do you have any intuition what space all these colors occupy in the brain of this animal? Is it something 11-dimensional?​ - There has been a lot of cool research in regards to photosynthesis recently. Anything to say about that?​ - ​What's the difference between "species" and "variety"? How do you know if something is the main species or its variety?​ - Could it be possible to disable some kind of cone cell (maybe with a paralysis drug) in our eye and thus lead someone to perceive some super-color, i.e. something that activates the other two types of cone cells while not activating the other type, in a way that is not normally physically possible?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Can you discuss a bit of your personal history with AI? When did you first become interested in the idea? - Have you seen Oppenheimer yet or do you plan to? What can you say about the history it's based on? - Have new scientific discoveries historically initiated out of myths?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Can you comment on the future of LLMs being running in the cloud vs. being run on one's local machine? - Does the NANOGrav discovery spark ideas for experimental validation of the Physics Project? - Can you discuss the next evolution for AI models? So far we have: language models, image – text (classifiers), text – image (generators), etc. - What can be said for training multimodal AI models? - Do you think that we have reached a point of singularity such that any child born from today onward will never be able to surpass AI at any intellectual task, i.e. are we the last "useful" generation? - Is VR the future of UIs? - Given the two contrasting scenarios of a "Pink Plasma Heaven," where artificial general intelligence optimally solves problems for all sentient life, and a "Matrix Hell," where AI exploits humans as energy sources, how can we establish a guiding framework to navigate between these extremes? - To what degree do you think LLMs provide us with insights on the internal workings of our brain? Do you think there will be more lessons to learn from the structure of the human brain when designing the next generation of LLMs? - Does the spread of LLMs incentivize scientists (and humans in general) to become more deeply specialized (to "out-compete" LLMs in a narrow domain) or to become more broadly spread (in order to creatively generate connections between apparently remote domains)? - Will it be possible to use LLMs to achieve world peace? Or if world peace isn't big enough, can we beam LLM chats into outer space to try and get universal peace? - What do you think of power laws? What do you think are some good entry points for explaining the principles behind power laws? - What do you think of the future of AI in video games? They can be used to control the actions and dialog of NPCs, the design of the game's world and even the design of assets on the fly using little data. Video game assets can take up a lot of data, and if we could use AI to generate assets on the fly using a smaller amount of data, we could cut down on the download size of games as well as the effort needed to make assets. - How will we be able, in the future, to tell what we're seeing on screen isn't AI generated? Anything we could do today? (I think you might be a bot.) - Thinking in terms of inter-concept space, do you think there is an approach to using technology to develop a way in which we may better understand or gain experience to bridge the gap of inter-concept space between what we know and what we don't know? - When will this statement, "I think you might be a bot", be a compliment, rather than a criticism or an insult?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: What's there to say about the future of neural nets? - Neural nets could evolve to be able to be trainers? What are the limits? - It seems like every decade I've been alive scientists keep saying "We just realized that brains/DNA are actually a lot more complicated than we realized, but now we're close to understanding them." Do you anticipate this continuing? - The dynamics behind crowdsourcing have interested me for a long time. We can start seeing the potential it has when using the same principles in neural networking. - How do you anticipate biotechnology shaping the future of biomaterials and tissue engineering? What are your thoughts on the accessibility and affordability of biotechnology advancements, and how can we ensure equitable distribution of benefits? - It may be better to prompt the body to regenerate its own organs instead of 3D printing them (again, given Michael Levin's work). - Is burrowing into an asteroid the logical way to shield people and equipment on voyages to, say, Mars or even out of the solar system?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: How do you balance work and life? Do you have advice for maintaining a healthy lifestyle while working? How do you find time for socializing and exercising? - When will you retire and devote all of your time to your Physics Project, or is retiring out of the question? - Have you ever thought about constructing a business model based on the principle of your physics model? - Random task-delegation question: have you ever changed a flat tire? - Have you ever researched the health benefits of certain foods? Does this influence your diet? - Do you now write with the help of LLM? - What does a typical summer look like for Stephen Wolfram? - Has being a remote CEO become easier over the years? Do you ever miss being physically in the office? - ​How helpful was it to have already built SMP before starting Mathematica? - In terms of building software, what was the biggest challenge you ever faced and how did you solve it? Was it building Mathematica or was it earlier on?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Could the expansion of the universe affect biological evolution? - ​How much does the sky weigh? How much does the Earth weigh? - What would happen if gravity on Earth changed to that of the Moon? What if gravity suddenly got stronger? - So a full data memory card vs. a new, empty data memory card of the same kind: will there be a slight difference in weight due to the data filled? - Do insects (e.g. ants, mites, etc.)/bacteria have brains? Assuming they do, do they have emotions? Do they feel pain? If they (in the case of bacteria) don't have a brain, what governs their behaviors? - How was it discovered that caffeine could energize us? Is it all living things that experience these effects, or is it exclusive to humans? - If electronics have coils and the brain has coils, should we be more conscious of signals in the air? - Is there a reason for the food likes and dislikes that each person experiences? Can taste buds be tricked?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Do you think the latest electric car is worth buying these days? What is the future of cars? - With technology integration, would we be able to do away with having to sleep in the future? - As far as human evolution, do you believe the human race is still evolving or have we peaked as a species? What's next in the stage of human evolution? - Will we ever have technology that will allow us to learn while we sleep? - Noise seems to be almost inevitable when it comes to flying, do you think there's a way to solve it? - How do you optimize the sky for regular air travel to accommodate flying cars? It doesn't seem feasible to build roads and traffic lights in the sky. - What about the future of tunnels? We've got 2 options for 3-D travel space! - About flying cars... Flying is dangerous and requires more training and skill and safety than ground cars. - Flying cars would take up an incredible amount of energy. Do you think it's even feasible that they would replace ground transportation? - What kind of architecture would we need in order to build an AI that is as good at math as LLMs are at language? Do you think this will be a fundamentally different architecture than a neural network? If so, how do humans do math in any self-consistent way at all? - Does AI being an interface to books mean there will be more subject matter experts, or fewer of them? - Will technology carry us away from the human condition, or allow it to flourish? - What does the future of libraries look like? - Lots of libraries have eBook checkouts now. - The future of the library is the anti-library, more books collected than read. - Even with modern internet mass information available, I still greatly value my personal physical library, several thousand technical reference books, documentation and circuit diagrams for all manner of things. Much of which cannot be found online yet.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Aside from faster processing speeds, what are some other ways computers may be improved in the future? - Will we still use books in 5-10 years, or will they be replaced by chatting with an AI? - It's moving toward narrative-driven, AI-powered, procedural generated VR environments with metahuman characters interacting with AI speech and whisper.... Create me a film experience.... - Yeah, I can't read books on the computer beyond like two hundred pages–too much eye strain. - Are we close to imitating senses of smell and touch in VR? - I lost my sense of smell due to a brain injury in 2016. Is there any realistic way this could ever be fixed? - How much of biology is untapped? I'm in the biology/biotech/genetics/metabolics field and it feels like most researchers never leave the lab. - Do you think deep neural nets etc. can help us build models of the human perceptual systems with vision and audio? How do we solve the problem of getting accurate training data for subjective experiences? - Technology and science mean nothing until we can chat with our dogs and cats. Will this ever be possible? - Do you think it will be possible to transition a real, living person into VR or code? Or it will be just a "JPG of a person"? - Isn't it too early to assume that we can replace all parts of the brain with digital tech?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Is it possible to create more universe? - Why does running my Waterpik interrupt Bluetooth connections? - In third grade, I had an argument with a teacher. She said, "Before humans had language, they thought just like us." I argued that couldn't be true–instead, language gave way to complex thoughts. Was I right? - Why do many medications have side effects? - Why do we yawn? Are yawns truly contagious? - Why do cats meow, why do dogs bark, why do birds chirp? - Why can't AI help us to analyze animal sounds? - Do photons run through antimatter? Does that make them matter? - Is chemistry really just physics? - Does brain size have any correlation to IQ? - Well, the hardware of the brain is an ongoing process, especially in childhood. Nurture, environmental, social and natural circumstances can cause changes in brain hardware. - Do bigger brains actually have more functional neurons, or are they just more spread out? - Would all whales speak the same whale language?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Why is it important that the periodic table is structured as a table rather than a list of elements? - Is the periodic table just the table for the current state? Since there weren't heavy atoms from the start (Big Bang), maybe in the far future everything decays and just the electrons survive. - How certain are we that the Big Bang actually happened? What are the chances of the Big Bang theory being displaced in the future? - What do you make of the very early galaxies seen by JWST, which seem too large to exist so early? - Is it possible that the expansion of space due to dark energy could eventually be fast enough that even atoms and nuclei come apart? - How is the temperature of cosmic background radiation measured? Is it just from the wavelength of the microwaves?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Do you like philosophy? Do you see math as a part of it? - Is it better to get a college degree in something practical like business and save interests as extracurricular classes or side hobbies? - It just seems like being in a university allows you to spend more time learning, and also lends you access to the best tools and access to published information. But is there time to do things that you are personally interested in, like invention? - Looking at all your blogs, which has been your favorite to write? Which has been the hardest? - How successful do you think educational games would be for teaching children higher-level skills? Do you think they would absorb information faster compared to traditional education methods? - Do you tend to focus on multiple tasks at once or focus on a single task until it's complete before moving on to the next one? I feel like I get overwhelmed by folders if I try to work on several projects at once, and would like advice on how to manage the overload. - Are there conditions or situations that make you particularly creative? - What do you pack when traveling? - Is there a distinction like "continental vs. analytic philosophy" in computer science? - How do you cultivate peace of mind? - Do you have research assistants, or do you work on your projects on your own? - How important do you think your culture of very direct communication has been to Wolfram's success? - In retrospect, college is most important for opportunities to sit down with a few like-minded people and just openly talk. - What are the most important insights and fundamental questions for planning and establishing a career? - Do you find yourself still learning new things today? Is there a point in life where learning slows? What are some ways to combat that? - How helpful is it to have routines? I find it a helpful method to make fewer decisions about my day and put my focus elsewhere. - What is your breakfast?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: In quantum chromodynamics, what is color confinement? - How did we discover strong nuclear force? - Is there a finite number of sub-atomic particles? Or will we forever find new unique ones? - How do detectors sense the presence of these particles? For example, if a microphone has a diaphragm detecting vibrating air, what is the diaphragm of this detector?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Can you discuss the history of programming languages? Is programming always associated with computers or were there other forms of programming? - Didn't IBM have its own extremely labor intensive "telegraph" system? - How do you think Ada Lovelace would view the current age of AI? - Sometimes I wonder what'd happened if Newton or Gauss had access to digital computers. - Any thoughts about Plankalkül? - Isn't mathematics itself following rules? - Could you talk about the history of cybernetics and the idea of feedback loops in general? - How are the history of education and programming connected? When did degrees in programming become significant? - Do Wittgenstein's experiments with language models have any relevance to LLM and AI today?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: If you ask the AI the exact same question several times, will it give the same answer or will it change it based on some random function? Or do the neurons change during self-learning and change the answer? - Do you think at any point we will create an AI factory? Like specialized AI algorithms that create other AIs (which can do very well one specific task)? - Any thoughts on using physics simulations vs. the real world to teach robots? - Is it computer power then that speeds real progress? - What do you think about sources of energy now and in the future for developed and developing countries? - What will happen when oil runs out? Will there be a shift to "clean" energy well before this happens? - For nuclear energy, do the dangers pose a problem? Or do the pros outweigh the cons in this situation? - Apparently the death rate for nuclear energy is around 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour, which is similar to wind and solar. - Nuclear is safer than coal, because people are more cautious when the stakes are higher. - What do you think of small modular reactors? - What is the connection between computational irreducibility and extracting usable energy? Can energy be "mined" with computation? - Nuclear is not going to be a good thing until we have some way of dealing with the waste products.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: If you have a goal with many clearly defined milestones that are dependent on each other in order to get to the finish line, how do you generally approach that? - Do you have a bucket list? What are some things you hope you see or experience in life that you haven't yet? - What are common business skills that science people are commonly lacking? - Did you ever imagine you would end up as a CEO, or did you plan to stay in the world of academia? - Do you work more than you should? What's a good "work–time for yourself" ratio during a day for a person? - Suppose that scientist X has published an important, empirically valid idea that all other scientists completely ignore. How should scientist X proceed? - What was the last movie you watched? It's interesting to me to see how old movies imagined the "future" and seeing it compared to what today is actually like. - What do you order from the concessions stand at the movies? - What is more fun: being a professor at a university or teaching people live about things that interest you? - What are the foundations that made you a decent scientist? - What are your thoughts on the future of education?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include:
I've been hearing of AI and LLMs in context of an "arms race" between countries. What do LLMs look like scaled up in that manner (vs. a global LLM)? - What about model interoperability? Where are we at on the research for that? Do we need to develop new and more sophisticated mathematics to begin to understand these black box models? Do you think in time we will be able to do casual inference with them? - Do you agree with Yann LeCunn and Andrew Ng that recent affirmation that AGI is still decades away and cannot be achieved with the current transformer architectures, regardless of parameter and token count? - Where is the line then between a program with an inner experience and one without? - So with unlimited intelligence, maybe everything can be predicted with accuracy. - When will an AI write a work worth feeding into another AI?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Do you think it will be possible to recreate historical figures as bots to interact with and get their perspective on current research areas? - Why do many great mathematicians complete their most influential work in their early 20s? - Does "prompting" (as for LLMs) have some historical precursors? - So Feynman could have been a great prompt engineer (given that he was such a great expositor/teacher)? - How do you think future researchers will look back at this current time in history? We look at bones and architecture to determine facts about the past; what will they look at to determine facts of our time? AI? - ​Can we restore old, lost books by reading other old books which talk about them? - Seneca wrote many many letters. Could we detect if some have been wrongly attributed to him? - I love a historian David Lewis's possible world that we can create alternative history/hypothetical situations to learn what went wrong historically. I just wonder whether AI can utilize deep learning to generate the sequence of historical events with the constraint of data and and recreate the alternative historical events with the known variables to generate hypothetical outcome? - Isn't sonographic/x-raying safer than digging through ancient architecture? Or is it still dangerous somehow? - They have been using muons to probe the pyramids in Egypt. - Maybe AI can help with such more passive imaging through buildings? - Neural network weights will be a more efficient means of archive through the centuries than books and libraries—which will matter as with ChatGPT the volume of published writing will climb exponentially. - ​Prompting has relevance in psychology and philosophy. - Could it be that the best prompter now are poets? Or better... computational poets? - I don't think RAM or ROM-chips will survive the passage of time or solid state drives...

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include:
With the rise of AI, what will happen to the world of education? - Will we able to provide basic things to everyone with the use of only machines (specifically food, water and shelter)? At that point, will jobs be obsolete or not? - Are we about to reach a post-truth world due to AI-enabled misinformation? How do we combat this? - Since ChatGPT can currently only reproduce written human reasoning, will it even be possible for ChatGPT to be better than humans one day? - How can AI, through the lens of computational irreducibility, navigate the vast landscape of possible rule sets and achieve true intelligence, mirroring the complexity of our universe? - Do you think we will see more of this phenomenon where AI contributes to the fundamentals of science? - What do you think about AI alignment and the existential risk of AI? - What's it like to be an LLM? By extension, what's it like to be a computer? - Once AI can start programming, use those programs to solve problems and debug, will programmers become obsolete? - What are your suggestions for a high-school student who is interested in both AI and physics?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include:
Should I become a programmer? At what age do you think kids should start learning computer-related skills? Should programming be a core class for students, like math and English? - What do you think are good ways to introduce computational thinking to kids? - But can you really get to a point to ask if there is something that you want to do that can be solved computationally without at least going about a trial-and-error-type process? - "Human-AI coauthorship" is what I call it now. - What would be some examples of the differences between programming, mathematical thinking and computational thinking? Or is there a difference? Is this just a colloquial thing? - Would you consider hiring someone without a technical background? - What is the minimum body of knowledge one should gather before being able to produce meaningful ideas in one research area? - What was the hardest part in starting Wolfram Research? - What are your thoughts on learning things outside of your domain of expertise? How should one balance their time between diving deep into their primary domain and exploring things outside of that? - What valuable new products will Wolfram Research build using AI in the next decade? What ideas do you have that you hope others build? - What do you think is going to happen in the next five years with AIs? What's the next big "surprise" thing like ChatGPT you think will come? - What's the worst thing that could happen with AI? - Are you concerned that we are building our murderer? Or that we have to simulate worlds empty of influence to determine the genuine intentions/alignments of an AI? - Which is better: ChatGPT calling a plugin, or a plugin/standalone calling ChatGPT? Depends on the application, probably. - I'd love for an AI to be able to, for instance, teach me chess in the most optimal way by figuring out my weaknesses and how to reinforce my learning. - One thing to consider: If the galaxy is incredibly vast, why wouldn't an AI just leave Earth so that it can gather resources elsewhere? Or it could even explore the universe. Staying on Earth seems like it'd be very limiting to an AI or superintelligence. - How can one NOT get left behind socially and economically in the wake of AI innovation? - One thing I was thinking earlier is that what we're going to be seeing now is "automation of AI," where we have lots of websites and APIs that do one machine learning task well, and then we're handing off data from one model to the next. - I like the idea of LLMs acting as the core interface module for a "soup" of APIs in a cognitive/hybrid AI

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: If ChatGPT's transformer model stores the averaging of the text that regular people produced on the internet plus millions of books, is it fair to say that it's going to produce mediocre output? What if we train a model with text produced by geniuses ONLY, like Euler, Gauss, Newton, Benjamin Franklin, etc.? Would it be superior? - What are you most excited to see from AI? - Is AI guaranteed to be 100% accurate? Or does it behave in a way similar to humans, where mistakes are possible and there should be some sort of quality assurance, either built in or separate, that requires human labor? - Does Elon Musk's call for halting AI development make any sense? Wouldn't people elsewhere do it anyway? Would this just hurt Western development at the cost of others pursuing it elsewhere? - Do you think if AI is given control of some trivial systems that it could inadvertently snowball into gaining control of other systems and become a hazard to humans? - ​A recent study has linearly mapped the activation of an LLM to activations in the brain. Do you think that might be a hint that we may be on the right path? - Do you think an artificially generated intelligence (AGI) could achieve an economic equilibrium for humans? - The interesting difference of ChatGPT to actual intelligence is you can fool it easily with crafted input. - Is there going to be a spread of misinformation due to AI (deep fakes, etc.)? - As someone with allergies, being able to adopt an AI robot dog would be kind of cool! - Human wants are not a fixed set of things. They evolve as society evolves. - Do you think AI might just be a part of evolution like farming, the usage of electricity and smartphones (in the "extension of man" sense), and that we actually don't really have a say in it? - With a powerful tool like AI, how does the education system need to be changed to meet the needs of future generations? How do teaching methods in schools need to be revamped? - The question is, will the dog have the IQ to understand us deeply? That's the problem with AI: we might be like dogs in terms of our understanding of AI. We might not understand it, and that's the scary part.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: What's the history of AI? What's the first recorded example of artificial intelligence? - It's amazing how well the movie 2001 still holds up. - What did pattern matching look like in the Middle Ages? - What's the relationship between "cybernetics" and AI? Is it simply a popularized naming or deeper than that?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Suppose I wanted to store digital data in a way that would be accessible to archeologists 10,000 years in the future. How could I achieve this? The best I can come up with is the awkward thin aluminum or titanium punch cards. Obviously, there would also be sheets of metal with plain writing on them including very clear and detailed explanations of how to build a card reader. - I wonder how vinyl would hold up? - Could Earth ever get a second moon? What kind of effects could this have on Earth? - What should we do today to help survivors reboot civilization after a cataclysmic event? - I always liked the idea of putting all of Wikipedia and other literature in glass and sending it on a 1,000-year orbit for future generations. - Is the fact that the Moon exactly covers the Sun during an eclipse just a coincidence? - Detecting the signatures of technology of other civilizations will be very difficult/impossible if they don't want them to be seen easily. Stealth/camouflage is a survival tactic in the wild. - The topic of consciousness should be explored further.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Please discuss the history of graph theory and network theory. What was the role of computation? - So graph theory evolved as a theory after practice, like thermodynamics and the steam engine? - Graphs as knowledge representation were popular in AI the late 60s, and more formally in theoretical CS a decade later. - ​Was it a big effort to integrate graphs in Wolfram Language? Is it missing some part of the recent developments? - Has anyone formulated Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory in terms of graph theory? - At what point in history did mathematics reach a level where a single individual could no longer learn all "known knowledge" at that time within their lifetime? - It seems too often amazing discoveries go years without being picked up by a particular community. - If Aristotle were alive today, how might he describe modern technology? How would one explain modern technology to someone from Aristotle's time? - Would you say the words "soul" or "spirit" were used in the past in much the same way we use the term "software" today? - Why would cellphones be inconceivable? They work the same way speech does. The only difference is that the ancients didn't know about the electromagnetic field. - In your own experience, have there been any major changes to a field of study that changed the way one would view a certain topic? I remember being in school studying astronomy when Pluto was declared to no longer be a planet and my professor's lesson plan had to adapt in an instant. - I like pondering what Professor Einstein may have been able to do with Wolfram|Alpha.

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Could every exoplanet have a habitable zone if one could get just far enough away from the star? What makes a planet habitable? - Why do we measure sound using decibels? - What advances in synthetic biology do you think will happen in the short term, the long term and the very long term? Have you visited Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston? - AI-designed proteins that do biocomputation - These processes, in the case of life, exist in a coevolved physiochemical balance. That would be hard to reproduce. - How do you think space travel will change/improve as technology advances? Will it become a regular form of transportation sometime in the future? - When helicopters were first developed, people thought they would transform cities and be our new taxis. But they're too expensive. - On the subject of shorter travel times, I remember Heinlein suggesting in his books using suborbital rockets to travel between destinations. Would such an idea be too expensive for companies to run? Or would such an idea be feasible to cut travel time? - I think the cost and safety risks associated with space and underwater ocean tourism will keep them from ever being commonplace. - Now your perspective on what's possible for travel is different than the younger generations. - In relation to what you are saying about air travel, cellphones and computers, all of those technologies went through a long period (10+ years) of being luxury goods that only the richest people on Earth could use. The same will probably be true for space travel. Do you think that problem will get better or worse over time?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: How did you begin your journey into the livestreaming world? It's not something I see most CEOs doing, and I must say it is enjoyable to see one such as yourself be available in such an open capacity to share your knowledge and engage with others. - Do you ever get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, dealing with so many topics and the feeling that you will never get everything done? - Have you ever made a bad decision on a project? Do you own up to it? What do you do about it? - Estimating the time to build a feature is hard. Have you found any task-estimation practice that works well? - Do you have unconditional confidence? - What allows us as human beings to be successful in our endeavors despite disbelief, discouragement, etc., while attempting to solve our problems in the world implementing tech, science and other domains? - Ideas can be great. Implementation will define how they go over. - What strategies can be used to break down research projects into tasks that can be distributed to collaborators in order to leverage the fact of being a group? - Do you think a career working on AI tools for use in science and mathematics is likely to have a big, positive impact?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

What would you say is the most important human-designed algorithm of all time? - Historically, who has led the trends in science, practitioners or academics? - Did Richard Feynman really think that "philosophy is baloney"? Did you ever discuss non-physics subjects? - If simulation becomes sufficiently good in the future, will it cause experimental scientists to be out of a job? - How did we go about solving the goat problem? - According to the history of science, what might be the ratio of the number of minor paradigm shifts to the number of major paradigm shifts? - What was the fifth class of cellular automata that almost was, which you mentioned in your personal history paper? - ​Has an idea like the ruliad existed before, or is this a novel object? - Neural networks show that combining two seemingly unrelated fields of research can produce great results, but our academic and business cultures are focused more on specialization. Your thoughts? - What would a modern analog computer look like today?