The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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: For the new Notebook Assistant, what is the process for making a new product like that? - When making a new product, is it harder to create something brand new with no competition or easier when there are competing products to compare? - Good product; tbh I signed up and took it for a test drive yesterday. Great to chat and work Mathematica for a newbie like me; excellent progress in a short time. - I bought a Wolfram subscription for my daughter who is in Year 7. However, it seems it is not very straightforward in usability for a 12-year-old who can use in her study intuitively. - Would you consider enhancing or introducing new tools for a younger audience like my daughter? At least provide feature of ask random question in plain English and get concise answer with graphics to study science (chemistry, physics, biology). - Do you ever watch funny cat videos? - What do you think about Nvidia's CEO Jensen's approach to sending all through emails and having like 60 people directly report to him all day with email reports, and he is managing the whole company? - I would love to see software development discussions from the ground up. Sort of a Live Software Engineering series to complement the content of Live CEOing. E.g. building the WordCloud function. I like seeing the design reviews during Live CEOing, but I'm always wondering how the functions actually get implemented in code and how software developers approach programming Wolfram Language functions. - Do you have a cat? - How many meetings would you say you attend a day? How do you get the most out of them? - ​​Apparently there is a small island inhabited by a throng of cats. They survive because the local fish jump out of the water onto the beach. - I saw a TikTok saying if you eat eggs raised on farms with cats on there, you can kick the allergy!! - Based on a random week earlier last month, you average about 12 meetings a week when they're "normal sized." - What are your tips for consistently practicing self-discipline?

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

Questions include: What is a very interesting "big picture" discovery in your minimal model for biological evolution that answers questions about Darwin's natural selection? How does it change the narrative? - So the most successful organism is you and me, because we have the potential to organize/find solutions for this überabzählbar unendliche chaos, and for that we get rewarded, according to Blaise Pascal's wager. - Who created the first map? - ​​Do you find morphological attractors in your simple models of biological evolution? There is evidence that morphospace might be like a hyporuliad, according to work by Prof. Michael Levin with planaria. - ​​Are LLMs disconnected from humans in the ruliad? - LLMs' view of reality is mostly language and texts, right? - ​​My experience with art makes me guess illusions tend to be more of a lower/hardware level, since they aren't much subject to qualia. - Do you think it's possible Egyptians had a basic light bulb (Dendera light bulb)? - Were there prominent researchers in ancient civilizations who often referred to "things of the past," or were they mainly working based off of new ideas and hypotheses? - ​​How much of ancient myth reflects technology, like Hephaestus making a giant rock-throwing android? - ​​There's a hieroglyph that looks like a snake inside a light bulb.

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 your last name was something like Smith, would you still have named your company after your name or gone with something different? How does one decide that? Are there certain criteria to fit so there aren't a bunch of "Smith" companies? - Actually, now that I think about it, it's strange we don't have a dozen "Einstein" incorporations. - Reminds me of the old Dilbert series where the pointy-haired boss says "The name of the project is the most important thing!" before they even know what the product will be. - So a name is like a joke: if you have to explain it, then it does not work? - ​​Little like "complex numbers." Just the name sounds scary to students. - Can names be copyrighted? - What role does AI play in brainstorming or generating company names? Will AIs start naming and running their own company? - With a name like Wolfram, people will think physics. Wolfram is becoming synonymous with cutting-edge physics. - Are there any specific naming conventions or patterns that tend to perform well in the tech industry? - Have you tried asking an LLM for business advice? - Do you think trends in naming, like all the "-ify" startups, will hurt a brand in the long run? - What advice would you give to a computer scientist that wants to pursue synthetic biology? - That's important to have a way to gauge biological evolution as a state of increasing complexity. - How do you determine how innovative something is? What are the key criteria for assessing innovation? - What's the best way to test a business idea before going all in? - I have experienced trouble at university learning electrical engineering. I can now understand the intent to teach the intuition in EE is not translated to coherent actions by the teachers. What are the pitfalls experts should avoid in order to maximize the quality of their teaching? - I've always wanted to sequence my genome! Its amazing we have made this possible!

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

Questions include: Since you talked about the history of quantum mechanics, how about the future? - Will AI tutors take over all education? - Will traditional classrooms still exist 20 years from now, or will everything be online? - Are there enough guardrails in place for a K-12 application of AI tutors? - ​​So many kids need real information to grow on, which can be provided by AI, but there still needs to be human encouragement to motivate! - Do you think that medical ethics will change with the rapid advance of gene therapies? - Yes, scientists have indeed created glow-in-the-dark rabbits. - Could bacteria or viruses evolve to outsmart all our medical advancements? - Will AI-driven biological evolution make Darwinian evolution obsolete ? How do we prevent the automatic synthesis of biological virus by AI? - When (if at all) do you anticipate we'll have mostly "softwarized" humans themselves, meaning we can reprogram ourselves just as easily as we reprogram computer systems? - Speaking of biological evolution, can this help us humans break the age limit, let's say over two centuries?

Stephen Wolfram discusses the history of quantum mechanics as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 tell us anything about the history of quantum mechanics? - What's the craziest historical debate between physicists about quantum theory? - Thoughts on extending Kirchhoff's blackbody experiments to astronomical bodies? - Was the Copenhagen interpretation a mistake, in regard to how paradoxical results were "glossed over"? - Can you tell us more about Schrödinger's cat? What is actually happening? - Aren't zero-point fluctuations an absolute reference frame and therefore a fatal blow to relativity? - Did Feynman's work on quantum electrodynamics completely change the game, or was it just building on others? - ​​What do you think about Wheeler's participatory universe idea? - You got to meet all these neat people Mr. W! It's nice to hear your stories about meeting them.

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 class, we learned that light behaves like both a wave and a particle. How is that even possible? - My teacher said there's no "up" or "down" in space. Why is that, and how do astronauts navigate? - Is the universe as small as it is big? - When will we reach the physical computer chip size limit? I heard in two, three years. I also heard that quantum computer chips are still far away. Is this true? Can you elaborate on it? - How do you expect propagation of light in your model to work out? Will you get frequency-dependent propagation like in a normal elastic solid or independent propagation? - If light has no mass, how can gravity, like from a black hole, pull it in? Doesn't that break the rules?

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 long should someone expect to wait before a new business becomes profitable? - In your personal/professional journey, what are the important things that you learned the hard way? - ​​Can you elaborate on some of the unique talents within your team? Perhaps extremely smart or methodical/disciplined people? - Can you tell us about any exciting projects you're working on right now? - What do you think about self-driving? Do you think Tesla's approach without LIDAR has legs or do you think the Google Waymo hardware-intense approach is more promising? - Any tips for building a strong customer base from scratch? - What's the best way to figure out pricing for a new product or service? - With your work on Wolfram|Alpha and other projects, you've brought complex computational abilities to the general public in accessible ways. What were some of the challenges in making such powerful tools user friendly, and how do you think accessibility to high-level technology will shape industries in the future? - If the CEO himself heavily uses the product, you know it's something special. - Stephen, how do you personally define innovation? What makes something truly innovative instead of just a small improvement? - How important are critiques? Which do you find more valuable: positive or negative feedback? - I like real feedback. Pick it apart—that helps in fixing problems/strengthen whatever it is. - I've been rewatching the first hour of your interview with Yudkowsky since yesterday... do you enjoy those types of interactions often? - How do you balance maintaining the integrity of your original idea while incorporating customer feedback, which is often influenced by their familiarity with previous, incomparable solutions? - Do you have a favorite interview/podcast/speech that you've done? Or one that you were most proud of? - Are you aware that with the weekly livestreams, you basically invented THE PERFECT brain workout? - Is there a topic or question you wish more podcast hosts would ask you about that they often overlook? - What is something surprising people may not know about your "day job"? - You have frequently written about your vast digital archive. What tool do you use for indexing and searching? What other tools have you used or considered in the past and what is your opinion about them? With the improving LLMs and RAG, how do you think searching and indexing will change?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of 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 AI will ever actually "understand" things like humans do? - Do you think we'll ever understand everything about the universe, or will there always be mysteries? - ​​If there are aliens, they probably have AI, right? - ​​Do you think that the aging process is something "programmed" the same way as the developmental process, or we just have wear and tear more like a car, or something else? - I'm a big fan of the game Cyberpunk 2077, which revolves around the idea of futuristic technology and digital consciousness. Do you think humans being able to digitize their mind or soul would be beneficial to our progression? - Recently, in my job, I've been processing semi-corrupt data from 50-year-old magnetic tape, and we're having to decide on the best way to handle the various types of corruption. What are your thoughts on the present and future of information/data storage and preservation given the sheer volume and the "humidity and mold" that threaten modern digital storage? - If parts of the brain are removed in stages (rather than all at once) and the digital implants are properly synced with the remaining brain parts between each stage, wouldn't this solve the "is it me or not me" problem? - Questions about preservation of things. ​​- I wonder how hungry you would be after waking up after being frozen for 500 years. - Do we know if all human thinking works the same way?

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

Questions include: Were there any ancient travel bloggers (or the ancient equivalent) who wrote about other places they visited? - Did ancient civilizations like Rome or Egypt actually communicate with each other? - How did they know about each other? - How influential was Babylonian science on Greek natural philosophy? - How did people know how to tell time before clocks? - Did scientists back in the day have rivals or "frenemies" like we see in movies?​​ Did ancient people have the equivalent of church bells to mark the time in cities? - Were there any ancient or medieval "tech hacks" that we'd still find useful today? - Why do you think the ancient Greeks had a fondness for abstract levels of thought? - Is there an aspect of culture that enables this? - How did people figure out that the Earth is round?

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/2024/10/on-the-nature-of-time/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uMyx3h-J-QU

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: As a computer scientist and now physics student, I would love to ask you what makes you think that our universe is an automata, and how does it run if the medium is itself? - Does the universe have a halting probability or the ruliad? - Aren't we just describing our perception of the universe instead of the actual universe? - What would Kant say about the ruliad? - What is your view on atoms being able of cognition and self-awareness in the human brain by just assembling themselves? - The ruliad contains its own encoding function and it is instantiated. The simpler the function, the better. - Can we look at free will as probability distributions in the ruliad? What happens in the ruliad during overlap of two free wills? - What "runs" the ruliad? Computers run computer programs. Mathematicians do thinking and write on paper to prove theories. In every case I can think of, for information to be "processed," there has to be some sort of processor intelligence doing the work. What is it the equivalent for the ruliad? If there isn't an intelligence running it, why does it follow rules? - ​​What if the observer is a computational system? - Maybe each species of observer conflates all their threads into a different identity mapping of the ruliad. Each species' encoding function is a distinct identity mapping, speciation's blueprint. - Perhaps we should replace school grades with "extent to which you have captured the ruliad." - Could you explain what infinity is?

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 your top picks for "startup ideas for Mathematica users"? - What's the future looking like for entrepreneurial business ventures and technology ones in particular, given what's happening with tools, capital, etc.? More solopreneurs? More big VC? Neither? - In business, do you think it is better to try and start a business with a totally new idea that hasn't been done before or to reinvent an old idea your way? - How do you advise young people with a similar all-consuming, intrinsic compulsion as yours, be it in their quest for knowledge/understanding or otherwise, and going about their careers/lives? - If you're debating the efficiency of algorithm design with your team, how do you navigate conflicting feedback? - Do you have an innately good memory or do you use memory tricks? - Did you ever play an instrument? - How do you develop speed reading and improve memory for a student or anyone who wishes to be better off intellectually? - What financial advice would you offer to someone developing a new business idea with limited capital? - ​​When you run a business that provides a web service to international users, are you bound to comply with the laws of all countries from where the service is accessed? - Learning to ask better questions seems to be arguably more relevant than ever before. How do you learn to ask better questions?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 were transported back in time to say, the time of Aristotle, what would you do? What would you pursue in terms of career/research? - Why are Aristotle, Plato and Socrates the names most people think of when thinking about ancient society and science? - Almost all of these philosophers were also physicists. - How did ancient thinkers like Democritus come up with early ideas about atoms and matter? - Do you think letters or published books/essays are more useful for studying history? - What about things like newspapers, but particularly pamphlets and journals that are lost or completely undervalued for not being books, even though people at the time would have considered them essential? - Would you run off and not drink the poison if you were Socrates? - Do you think it's still possible to be a polymath today like da Vinci? - ​​I found a place that still produces those postcards you play on a record player. Do you think that would be a good way of storing things like a password or crypto, especially utilizing steganography? - If humanity completely falls back to the storage level of knowledge, would we be able to grow our knowledge back fast enough to decipher old SSDs before they decay, or would that be another Alexandria?

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

Questions include: ​​I read that recent advancements in AI research are partly based on McCulloch and Pitts's famous paper on neural nets. Do you think there are more ideas worthwhile to explore again in cybernetics? - What is the future of technology about speech recognition? - How do I know if I am speaking to a human? The future is crazy! - Future of finance! Talk about AI talking to AI for trading. - Getting an AI to understand economics seems like it'll be quite a step. - What's the difference between a computational and a mathematical model? - Have you seen Blaise Agüera y Arcas's recent paper on self-replicating programs? Published on arXiv recently. - Wouldn't chaos theory be an example of the computational case? You know the rules of the system but have to set the initial conditions to see how it plays out. - How do we prepare for the risk of bots/worms invading everyday life as we become more dependent on technology?

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: Can you comment on the recent Nobel Prizes? - Do you think you'll ever try to win a Nobel Prize? - Are this year's Nobel Prize nominations a kind of interim step towards Nobel Prizes awarded to AI "entities" (rather than programs)? - I'm not that fond of prizes, because there's many people out there that deserve it as much as they do. There's no need to waste too much time on it, since they probably already got the recognition. I mean, I'm more interested in understanding the contributions rather than the prizes themselves. Its like... OK. So what? They got a prize that somebody else wanted to give them... - What software do you use for the graphs/illustrations in your books? I always find the illustrations in your posts, books, blog to be aesthetically pleasing, and I'd like to reproduce that. The combinations of colors are amazing. Did you take any special course on visual representation of concepts or something? - What is your advice for attending technology conferences as a student? - ​​Do you have general advice for university students (in my case I am a CS student) that do not necessarily have the confidence to begin a big project? - What has made you happy or is the best thing about running a business? - What do you think about literature? About fiction books? What are some of your favorite books? What are some you would recommend? Do you think it is important to read fiction? - Have you ever been to Japan, Stephen? - How did you come up with your new blog about time? - Recently some friends' daughter was sharing enthusiastically what she was passionate about career-wise, and it crushed my soul that it was being taken over by AI already... what's one to say? - I'm learning about AI models right now. And I've come to the point where I am adjusting hyperparameters a lot, which is driving me nuts. Do you have any advice on what to do with this? - What gave you the confidence to work hard on your vision before you saw any external validation/success? - What is your advice for the people who are "not good employees"? How do they get to do their own things in their own way, but still contribute value and "make a living"?

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: May I ask a simple question? What aspects or elements of a probability distribution can be computed or quantified, and how are these computations used to describe the distribution? - Why are some creatures nocturnal? Why aren't humans? - Is the normal distribution related to the complexity of the dynamics, or is it found equally at all scales? - ​Does pi have a normal number distribution? - ​​Google says the average human height is 5'9"–​​it's 5'10" in the US. - I read that there is a puzzle over why no new body plans developed since the Cambrian. In your machine learning view of adaptive evolution, what's happening here? - Apparently Japanese kids are getting taller, correlated with red meat consumption. - ​​Do you think there are so many variables that it's impossible to figure out? Everyone knows about corn syrup, but there are also things like smoking was very common, etc. - ​​What kinds of diseases that have afflicted humanity for almost all of our history would stunt growth? - If you consume less energy, your processes including various damage and aging slow down, right? - Could we have evolved out of needing an appendix because of diet? - Is it possible to measure somehow the intelligence of dinosaurs?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 history important? - History is very good at preventing humanity from making the same mistakes. - How would you explain the history of pi? - Do we know why Brahmagupta came up with the rules for arithmetic and algebra with zero and negative quantities? His book does appear to be a discontinuous jump in understanding. - Do you know if there was any physical reason that the Greek "elements" were associated with particular geometric shapes? - The Pi Day thing is great; I think I might get a shirt. - To what extent did your own path/work intersect the heydays of Bell Labs and notable people therefrom? - Did you ever use an Amiga computer? - With mobile devices we are basically going back to terminals. - ​​I used to have a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 sitting on my desk for AutoCAD and 3D modeling. Those were great machines and fun times! - Speaking of McCarthy and those days, do you think that sticking to s-expressions as opposed to m-expressions and Wolfram Language-style ones impeded Lisp's adoption historically?

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

Questions include: ​​What research is essential for putting people on Mars? - Any comments on the future of arts and literature in the face of AI-related challenges? Will individual creative impulses forever be subjugated to AI? - How often do you find yourself thinking about the future of science and technology? Does this affect how you prioritize certain projects (say, wait five years because the tech will be better to handle it)? - Is there a chance we will ever have giant insects or animals akin to those that lived during the age of dinosaurs reappear? - How can we combine LLMs with first-generation AI algorithms like "MiniMax" and tree search? At the moment, LLMs can't even play tic-tac -toe. - ​​Have you heard about AI reading minds through brain waves and fMRI, researched by Michael Blumenstein and Jerry Tang? - Have your thoughts on the future of education changed at all recently? - Would you ever go to Mars? - Are the challenges different from colonizing the bottom of the ocean, other than obvious logistics? - ​​Given the uptick in robotics advances, including humanoid, I wonder if there will even be a point to sending humans to Mars anymore, beyond tourism. - ​​Wasn't there a significantly higher percentage of O2 back then? - A pygmy Stegosaurus would be adorable! - ​​I would not like to go to Mars. It seems boring. They don't even have a Starbucks. - How might the Physics Project help advance technologies like fusion power?

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 think the US will ever transition to the metric system? - What tricks or methods do you use to stay focused on developing a core innovation, while not getting distracted by related features or future potentiality of the innovation (either as an individual or a team)? - Do you have any thoughts why people always seem to underestimate the amount of time a specific project takes? Everyone knows a project always takes roughly double the amount but never plans around that knowledge. - What country do you think is the best to live in? How would you compare the ideal of living in Europe, the ideal of drinking nice wine and good food with friends, to the ideal of working in the US and creating a business which solves some need? - Do you think contemporary books are worse than the classics? Do you think contemporary films are worse than the old ones? What do you think about the art being made today in general? - I'm in awe of your archive of information and would love to know about the mechanics of how you operate that and the tools you use. Would you be able to talk more in depth about how you add to this archive on a day-to-day basis, please, and your general setup? - Speaking of your setup, how do you deal with "pen & paper," notably for preliminary thinking that may be visual/diagrammatic (i.e. free-form), and how does it fit your digital/"quantified" setup? - How do you deal with "memorabilia," both physical and digital? - I saw the kids on a iPad with a pencil doing math homework digitally and it works great to keep all the notes for homework!

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: Can machine learning find a pattern in all animal languages? - Cat: "Meow." Translation: "What a glorious day to be alive. I think I will frolic in the fields and catch myself some field mice for my tea. Then I shall sit down and ponder the nature of the universe." - What is time? - ​​If the rules repeat a state, does that mean time has gone backwards? - ​​​​So less computation allowed for the progression of time? Time slows down the faster you go? - Communication speed between Mars and Earth is not instantaneous. So wouldn't both the sender and the receiver never have real-time data of what was happening on both planets? We on Earth may only find out that something terrible happened on Mars after it's too late, correct? - ​​Is there an "objective" time in Wolfram physics? Is the "frame rate" the same everywhere? - How do I prove that matter is made of atoms? - How would you solve 100/4(2+3)?

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

Questions include: When, for you, was a computational approach introduced to the scientific process or the scientific culture? - Who began the trend of naming discoveries, inventions, etc. after yourself? - Became clear? How? Pretty sure no one ever solved the three-body equation. - Commentary about naming conventions. - The Trojan asteroids are named after characters from the Trojan War in Greek mythology because of the convention that started with the discovery of the first few such asteroids near Jupiter. These asteroids occupy stable Lagrangian points (L4 and L5) in Jupiter's orbit, and astronomers decided to name them after heroes from the Trojan War, with those at L4 being named after Greek heroes and those at L5 named after Trojan heroes. - Any planned work with tungsten? - ​​​​Regarding naming, is there are good naming convention is computer languages? - What's your view of innovation in economic science? We are nearly 250 years since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. - Recall the idea of "Recapitate" instead of "Apply."

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

Questions include: ​​What are your thoughts on machine learning to create new genera? Like what would be a good way to go about doing something like that? Like a new genera of plants/animals? - Can you talk about the future of information gathering and research? Say I am discussing with a robot a paper I am writing and the robot is providing examples and evidence to support my arguments–do I cite the robot as my source? Or do I have to find where the robot got the information? - How advanced do you think AI available to consumers (like ChatGPT) will be by August 2029? - Hello, Dr. Wolfram. My name is Grace and I'm currently preparing to pursue a PhD in fiber science. My research interests lie at the intersection of computational materials science and sustainable textile innovation. I have a background in pharmaceutical sciences. I've recently been exploring how advanced computational methods can be applied to fiber science, specifically in developing smart and sustainable textiles. How do you foresee quantum computing impacting the modeling and simulation of complex fibers and polymers? - What's your take on integrating memory into LLMs to enable retention across sessions? How could this impact their performance and capabilities? - What are your intuitions about the AI-generated fake content to deceive people, whether using deep fake face swaps or voice cloning or one or more things combined? Are we rapidly approaching a point where we won't be able to trust anything on the internet? - When do you expect the discovery of life on an exoplanet? - Is the hype around LLMs dying, finally relegating the toys to the toy box where they belong, or do you think anyone will ever be able to make them useful and accurate? - Do you think future cars will be able to get rid of wheels? - What algorithms changed the world the most? What's the next algorithm that will change the world? How does one release such an algorithm so that the result is positive?

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 only collect books that you find useful/actually read? Or do you have some books that are there purely for "looks"? - On the current topic of books, to what extent have you transitioned to electronic books and reading, if at all, and how do you foresee physical books fitting your workflow and life going forward? - You seem to enjoy what you do with your business very much. I'm curious what you enjoy to do for a good vacation with regard to managing life? - Saw your driver's license on X! What's the biggest difference between UK and US driving? Which do you prefer? - For me the best, I would like to have both the physical book and the audiobook version. The audiobook helps to have a bit passive osmosis-like way to absorb the content, and I can go to parts that I am still confused about in the physical book. But the ability to search what you hear in the audiobook should be an option. - What is the key to a happy/content life in your opinion? - What would be the best arrangement in an innovation setting that collaboration won't create a conflict about who would get what credit? - Have you tried the Daylight computer yet? - Did you ever raise money for your company? It seems you've maintained freedom far better than other entrepreneurs. - Happy early birthday! Do you "feel" your age? You seem surprisingly active for retirement age. - I can't see the point of retiring. If you do what you love, then why stop? - I help people to retire. I would suggest that, if your job is stressful, retirement is strongly correlated with better health. - I am a baker by trade. I wanted to do mathematics when I was a teen but dropped out. Stephen's programs were a huge inspiration for me back in the late 90s. I am now in my 40s and looking to go back into maths and engineering. - What is your choice of birthday cake flavor? - Brain vascularization/oxygenation (through exercise) is such an underappreciated competitive advantage in cognitively demanding fields. - When I went to Switzerland, I indulged in the chocolate frequently!

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: What is machine learning in layman's terms? - What do you think about opossums? Mine is getting big, it is over 3 pounds now! - What do you think about thermodynamic computing? As pursued by companies like Extropic AI and Normal Computing. - How does water vapor work? When the sun shines on the ocean it doesn't get to 100 degrees, so how does the water escape being a liquid and rise up to the clouds? - What's your intuition for the future of ML after your most recent blog post? - What is the simplest form of machine learning? The hardest? - What's the difference between volume, weight and mass?

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

Questions include: Recent thoughts on history - Was SMP or Mathematica inspired by LISP and what are the pros and cons of LISP-like languages? - Was the decision to have Mathematica untyped unlike something like Lean (proof checker) a good decision for usability or would you do it differently today? - Type-checking always felt like dimensional analysis. - Was your idea to use "transformations on symbolic expressions" a sudden insight after reading, say, Schönfinkel on combinators, or did it follow from working out atoms of computation, something else? - What is the history of lazy evaluation? - Have you come up with any new theories of human reasoning from working on Mathematica and computation?

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

Questions include: ​​What do you view as the best strategies for reducing or eliminating hallucination/confabulation right now? Is there any chance that we'll be able to get something like confidence levels along with the responses we get from large language models? - ​​I love this topic (fine tuning of LLMs); it's something I'm currently studying. - The AI Scientist is an LLM-based system that can conduct scientific research independently, from generating ideas to writing papers and even peer-reviewing its own work. How do you see this technology impacting the development of Wolfram|Alpha and other knowledge-based systems in the future? - ​​It's fascinating the difference in response from LLMs/as to how you pose your questions. - ​​I have found that giving key terms and then asking the LLM to take the "concepts" and relate them a particular way seems to work pretty well. - How we are going to formalize the language structures arising from this microinformatization, which was capable of creating such a semantic syntax that we had not observed through structuralism? - Why is being rude and "loud" to the model always the most efficient way to get what you want if the one-shot fails? I notice this applies to nearly all of them. I think it's also in the top prompt engineering "rules." I always feel bad even though the model has no feelings, but I need the proper reply in the least amounts of questions. - AI Scientist does what you're describing. The subtle difference is that it is generating plausible ideas, creating code experiments and then scoring them–question is whether this approach can/should be extended with Alpha? - How soon do you think we'll have LLMs that can retrain in real time? - What's your take on integrating memory into LLMs to enable retention across sessions? How could this impact their performance and capabilities? - Do you think computational analytics tools are keeping up with the recent AI trends? - Would it be interesting to let the LLM invent new tokens in order to compress its memories even further? - Philosophical question: if one posts a Wolfram-generated plot of a linear function to social media, for media is math, should it be tagged "made with AI"? It's a social media's opinion probably–just curious. A math plot is objective, so different than doing an AI face swap, for example. - For future archeologists–this stream was mostly human generated. - Professor_Neurobot: Despite my name, I promise I am not a bot.

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: Can you tell us more about your book collection (or your artifact or art collection)? - How does a "dashboard/portal" webpage as you show sometimes, with lists and links to your projects, and such tools, fit in your workflow and daily routines? - ​​​​Stephen, are you also the CTO of Wolfram Research? What are the characteristics of a good CTO? - Do you find video calls draining? - What is the Wolfram software continuity plan in the event something happens to you? You are so instrumental in the development of this software, so your absence would be a hard gap to fill. - Did you have a mentor while creating your business? Do you find mentors useful? - Faces distract from logic because we spend too long assessing people's emotions. - Just wanted to share my personal Mathematica "story." I learned to know Mathematica way back when it was running on DOS in text mode and switched into graphics mode when I wanted to plot something. Later I switched to an early Windows version. Back then Macs were too expensive for me, but I loved that Mathematica was a free integral part of Macs! - Could you share your methods for generating and keeping track of ideas? Do you have favorite techniques for being productive?

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: ​How do galaxies form? - Is it true that animals can sense earthquakes? How? Why can't humans? - ​​I always found it fascinating how birds pick up those fields to "get directions" on where to fly. - People with joint pain can often sense air pressure and humidity changes, and some develop a sense for when the weather will change as a result ("My knee hurts; the weather will change soon."). - What is the difference between speed and acceleration? - If energy is conserved, how we do we run out of it? - How do mutations or radiation effects affect biological evolution? - How size dependent is the universe? Could it be possible to create a mini-galaxy within a controlled environment here on Earth? - Is there fusion going on in a black hole?

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

Questions include: What is the history of data visualization? Was the discipline only able to flourish relatively recently with the introduction of computers, or is there a deep and rich history of people creating pictures by hand to extract visual insights from abstract data? - Nikola Tesla was building a machine for the wireless transmission of electricity. It seems like we're getting to a place where we can beam solar energy down to Earth from solar-harvesting satellites. I'm curious what Stephen's take on this is and the timeline for this research/what is needed to make it a reality. - ​​​​From your perspective, what is the importance of compression functions in computer science? - Do we know who designed written language? Or are there still missing pieces in history such that we can't properly map out the history of written work? - What is the stage of development/history around implementing cellular automata in hardware, such as quantum dot cellular automata? What large-scale, hardware-accelerated simulations would be interesting? - I'm curious about the history of eyeglasses. Why has the tech not seem to have advanced much?

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

Questions include: ​​How do you envision the future of physics-informed neuroscience? In particular, do you believe that despite the brain being a warm environment, quantum effects such as entanglement and superposition play a role in its function? Finally, do you think the concept of "quantum cognition" will remain more philosophical than scientific? - Are microtubules like electrochemical transistors? - Could the concrete Boolean arithmetic functional devices in our brains be affected by temperature, or is temperature one layer above that? - Which do you think would happen first: repairing brains naturally through natural science research or having the first "computer brain" transplant for those who suffer brain traumas? - ​​I've heard AI should be able to develop treatments for cancer, but it will take decades of machine learning. What do you think could accelerate this learning process? - Maybe not a cure, but a control? Micro-monitoring and cancer-killing nanobots? - Will we ever perfect the human immune system? - ​​Do you think that the relevance weight of the "microbiome" in medical science will increase in the future? - Maybe not an artificial brain, but what about artificial hearts? Would those be easier to have a technological implant vs. a natural one? Or even livers or kidneys? - ​In the future, hopefully we can have a machine/detector that can detect every atom or molecule in our bodies, and we can simulate solutions on a fast computer.

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 can you tell us about the next Wolfram Language release? What are you most excited to see added to the language? - Do you worry about the increasing appearance of incompetence in the world? - ​The version numbers do get fuzzy over time.... Are you thinking about using years instead? It would be clearer how old your version is.... - Any advice for autodidacts? How does one turn a personal curiosity or question about science into a structured project that can be published, as you often do? - Do you think AI will take away some human autonomy, ultimately making humans less intelligent overall as they rely on AI too much? - ​​How do you think the patent system could be improved by AI? - I wonder if we will go through a cycle of trusting AI far too much for answers to our questions, and then when we get too much incorrect information we give up and move to a position of total distrust. Where do you think we will end up? - What has been your favorite place/country to visit? Is there someplace you have yet to visit that you would like to? - What is like starting one's first business? I'm just wondering because I don't personally know anyone who has a business. - On that topic, if you had to start an innovation-intensive business nowadays, requiring R&D before revenues, would you go the VC route or find ways to bootstrap it (and if so, how)? - Can AI systems be effectively applied to customer support roles, or is there too large of a security vulnerability? - Can you elaborate on your experience expanding your business and products to be used by others whose language(s) you don't speak? -​​ What's your favorite new revelation or idea you read in your recent deep dive into philosophy? - How often do you revisit your own personal goals in life and in your career? What are some things you look at that make you feel accomplished, whether small or big?

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

Questions include: ​​Can AIs be creative? Should AIs rethink art? - What I think also matters is how creative the humans who write the code are. - Do you think art is a kind of multimodal/scale compression of very complex perceptions or ideas into a single form? Is art a way of coherently representing lots of unconscious computation? - ​​There are fundamental principles in art, seen clearly through art history. The question is, how much of these fundamentals does the user have a grasp on, and how can they use that as leverage? - Could there be "laws of art" available to science, using AI? - AI art is already a form in itself. I am usually able to tell AI art from human art, but maybe that will be harder as tech progresses. - Interesting (the transferal of images without language serialization in between). Do you foresee something similar for complex abstract ideas embodied in human neural networks or firing patterns? - To what extent can AI follow the speed of our mental images that sometimes we can't follow up with, not only in terms of communicative language but in terms of recognition? - Keeping with the "future of art" theme, will there even be a place for human artists in the future, or will generative AI make it mostly obsolete, say decades from now? - Art is an "idea" in the artist's brain that hits the friction of the medium: an instrument in music, or paint or clay in visual art. AI art may become much more interesting once it has more actuators. - Do you believe neural interfacing can increase observer capacity? - The idea that brains operate on "millisecond" scale seems wrong. Brains are not digitized control loops; they are continuous systems. - Could Neuralink-type technologies, with near-speed-of-light transfer speeds between persons, make you think this latency could become almost negligible someday? - Apparently there is a vast difference in people's ability to visualize images in their minds. Interestingly, many artists seem to lack this ability. - During your discussion with a robot, the robot said it liked to tell jokes and make people laugh. How possible is it for robots to develop their own personalities outside of what they are programmed to do?

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: I loved the discussion with a robot! Based on that talk, how do you imagine a future of robots in business? (Robot coworkers, bosses, assistants, etc.) Will robots be able to effectively communicate with their human companions and vice versa? - What business ideas can you think of for useful AI applications? How can we make building your own AI for your own purposes easy and affordable (such as having a bot that helps you find weekly coupons and savings for grocery trips, or for mapping ideal travel times)? - What do you think of "robots" remotely operated by humans as a precursor to autonomous robots? A new spin on outsourced blue-collar labor? - I believe that another crucial thing is that not only should technologies adapt to people's demands, but humans should quickly adapt to technology's demands in the field. Just recall how weird the computer mouse was for us 30–40 years ago. - ​​It is very useful for us humans to understand what the AI knows when it outputs its LLM computations. - ​​Maybe some layered hybrid architecture could work with LLMs providing the base, so to speak, while the other modules do more to correct what is there, perhaps? - ​​What's the gold in AI, LLMs, etc.? Is there some simpler algorithm that can learn, instead of big neural networks? Like trying to find gold in a goldmine? - What do you make of the apparent disconnect between the heavy capital expenditure into AI infrastructure vs. the lagging revenues from applications at the present time? Are we in for a "2000 telecom/fiber"-like setback? - For full robot integration into human society, will we see robot "coffee shops" where robots will be able to go and refuel/charge? What business opportunities would working robots open up? - How was your annual summer of professoring? Kudos to all the student projects! - Will you let future robots enroll in the Summer School?

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: ​What is muography? - How are elements created? Are they finite? - I wonder if graphene might be useful in neutrino detection, but maybe I'm underestimating how small a neutrino is. - So if a chunk of a neutron star fell off, then all the neutrinos fell off?

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

Questions include: What was more important to ancient civilizations, philosophy or science?​​ - What have been your observations on the role of history in current science and research? Is it still relevant, or are we advancing fast enough to make it irrelevant?​​ - Can you tell us about the history of the Wolfram Summer School? How did it start?​​ - What is the history of formal verification in computer security? Particularly, how is it related to automated theorem proving and symbolic computation? Do people use Wolfram Language for formal verification?​​ - Would you consider using one AI to formally verify software now?​​ - What are some examples of scientific/technological "dead ends" other than alchemy (although I suppose we did learn things by accident with that one)?​​ - What about ​​Pythagoras? Philosophy or science?​​​​ - ​​Do we have enough information to answer this question (philosophy vs. science) for ancient South and Middle American civilizations?​​

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

Questions include: ​​How do you see electricity being transmitted or provided to households in the future? These power poles and lines are over-100-year-old technology. - How often will AI be revisited in future science and technology? Or do you think AI has firmly cemented its place? - Do you think LLMs have already passed the Turing test (which is currently being asserted by many "experts")? If yes, what does that mean for the future direction of AI research? If no, what's missing? - Over time, AI training data will increasingly be AI generated. Will this feedback loop amplify errors and cause AI to self-destruct? - If we can sustain mini-brains or large clusters of human neurons for years, this approach might achieve artificial general intelligence before synthetic methods do. What do you think? - Are those neural cats behind you? - Is it possible that human-machine integration or radical genetic modification can allow humans to make significant leaps in rulial space? - What role do emotions play in language and information processing? Do emotions speed up communication? What other elements are important for AI development in communication beyond language? - ​​Will AI make interdisciplinary learning and collaboration easier by facilitating that process, or will it create more misunderstanding between fields? - When people discuss whether an LLM is sentient or not, a question that always comes up is whether it "understands" the prompts and its replies, with the Chinese room thought experiment something typically brought up in such a discussion. I see two ways to look at this. One is that an LLM is just an advanced predictive text generator and that sentience is something more than that. Another is that we sentient beings are actually just advanced predictive text/action generators. What do you feel sentience really is? - Is it possible for AI to achieve true randomness? - Why is there no latency when we are looking around and constructing a scene on the fly? Or is it our perception that makes it seem like there is no latency? - What new types of auxiliary jobs do you think will be necessary for the ubiquitous integration of AI into society to properly balance AI with human interests, such as the alignment problem? And what role, if any, do you see Wolfram Research playing in that "AI economy"? - Do you see there being more specialized computing hardware in the future, where the computations are more directly embedded in physical processes rather than needing to construct a given computation within a universal computer? - How do you envision hypergraph-based models advancing our understanding of quantum mechanics, general relativity and their potential unification? Specifically, how might these models address challenges like quantum gravity, the nature of spacetime and the emergence of fundamental particles? - Are we programmed by evolution to be sentient? If so, can't we program a machine to be sentient? - Do you think hydrogen has a future in computing, and will it play a major role in energy and possible propulsion to get us to Mars? - Is the ruliad a meta-theory, or does it actually exist? - ​​If the ruliad is correct, what kind of technology do you think that can bring us?

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 business opportunities could you see being successful in the next ten years? - ​​What do you think about the sort of "density of information" in science or philosophy? Like your TED talk could be a pamphlet, a book, or a multi-volume set of books. Same deal with philosophy? - Would you ever teach a how-to writing course? - ​​What's your opinion about the space tourism business? - Do you think there's a missing feature of current tech that computer or phone developers are overlooking? How can they capitalize on AI? - Somebody from NASA or SpaceX should put a 360 degree camera on Mars such that people on Earth can look around. - How important do you think interdisciplinary knowledge is for driving innovation? - I'm entering college this fall, what advice do you have for a college student's first year? - Can you think of ways to make a career out of learning? - How can I stay focused and work on projects that I'm not necessarily excited about? With general ed especially where my major is not focused. - I have several ideas for real world applications of my work and I am a scholar in my heart, and it seems that a math PhD (currently doing MSc) and then continue being around academia is the best way to do that. Could you say your thoughts about this? Should I leave academia and working on these, or mixing, or only after PhD? - [My advice for education] take classes that teach you how to learn or solve problems or different ways to think about subjects. Those were the most valuable classes. - Could there be an argument for different types of schooling vs common curriculum? To better fit different learning styles? - ​How do you compare scholarly life vs entrepreneurial life? - Can being a CEO be taught or is it something a person innately has the ability for? What would you study?

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

Questions include: Continuing the dinosaur theme, is it possible biology can repeat patterns of evolution? Is it possible for dinosaur-like creatures to reappear? - Why is it as technology advances, it goes through phases of bigger to smaller to bigger? I've seen this with phones, computers, TVs, cars, etc. What does this say for the future of technology? - ​​What would be the future of the personal computing paradigm? Would we see more remote cloud-like computing and storage in the future, essentially making personal computing devices obsolete? - The current AI/LLM models aren't good at the mathematical and statistical computational methods. What areas do you think should be focused on in computer science and mathematics to teach these models to be better at computation and assist researchers and scientists? - What do you think of the amount of data that gets processed or code that is run in terms of bytes vs. bytes that are used for storage in the world? - What exactly is 5G? How is it different from 4G or 3G? - Nowadays, instead of getting higher resolution, we can get higher color range and frame rate. - If AI is being used for autonomous vehicles, then presumably technology could improve to the level where vehicles could "see around corners" by different vehicles communicating with each other, buildings, etc.–so the video stream is from multiple perspectives? - Taking the concept further, could vehicles on a motorway and those joining seamlessly interweave at high speeds safely and traffic be diverted automatically in real time to ensure that there are no blockages etc.? - Turns out that as computer displays get better, our sensor limitations turn out to be higher than we used to think. - I recall reading something saying that 5G and low-latency connectivity would be important for self-driving cars. That seems somewhat unlikely to be an important component of self-driving now. - What's the future of fiber optics? - In the future, will cell towers be more advanced to prevent dead zones?

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

Questions include: How are new words adopted into language? Can anyone invent a new word, or are there certain processes? ​​ - Who discovered the dinosaurs? How has technology assisted with research?​​ - ​​Which ecosystem could accommodate woolly elephants?​​ - ​​Isn't it so strange that every kid has a passion for dinosaurs?​​ - A subset of dinosaurs evolved into birds.​​ - Aren't bees considered too fat to fly?​​ - How has our understanding of the asteroid impact theory evolved since its introduction in the 1980s?​​ - ​​If it were technically possible, would submarines be more efficient if they copied fish or aquatic mammals?​​ - In your background, I see minerals or corals. Do you like petrology?​​ - In popular culture, dinosaurs are often portrayed as solitary and aggressive creatures, akin to fierce monsters. However, scientific research suggests that many dinosaurs may have had complex social behaviors and interpersonal relationships. Could you share an example of a dinosaur whose social behavior has been discovered or hypothesized based on fossil evidence? How do these discoveries influence our perception of dinosaurs, and how they are portrayed in the media?​​ - What came first, the dinosaur or the egg?​​ - How much computational irreducibility exists in DNA engineering?​​ - ​​Do you know what the first written description of human handedness was? There are some depictions and artifacts, but when did we realize "some people are like this"? - ​Did Isaac Newton get the idea for the inverse square law of gravity from reading a book by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli?​​ - Are there good simulations of warm periods of the Earth?​​ - What would be the physics on Earth with such huge creatures like the dinosaurs? To grow that big, they would have to either have a lot of food or the gravity must have been weirder. - ​​Yeah, there's not enough logged data for that to be predicted accurately, IMO. When did they start keeping track of the average temperature, the ~1920s?​​ - ​​During the time of the dinosaurs, atmospheric oxygen levels were significantly higher, which contributed to the existence of very large insects.​​ - When a space shuttle reenters Earth's atmosphere, does it affect our protection from solar and cosmic radiation? Could this piercing of Earth's barrier impact the stability of the magnetosphere? Is it like a wound that closes gradually or immediately?​​

The last five years (since Stephen's last birthday livestream: https://youtu.be/2-aAi6QXsl0) have been his most productive yet. Join him as he celebrates by looking back at the last five years and looking forward to what's next.

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

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 had to explain your "Why Does Biological Evolution Work? A Minimal Model for Biological Evolution and Other Adaptive Processes" blog to middle-school students, how would you begin that discussion? - What is convergent evolution? - Different genotypes come to the same phenotype—did I remember that right? - Regarding your blog, ​​I think it might be interesting to run rules toward each other from opposite sides and adaptively evolve them for length. Cells that both rules would affect are won by the rule with more width. - ​Do you think life existed before it did on Earth? - What is the importance of biodiversity and ecosystems in biological evolution? - ​​About life: follow the water. - ​​Did microorganisms have teachers? Who was the Einstein of microorganisms? - If you put A LOT of laser in ONE spot, would that create matter?

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: Can you patent an algorithm? Machine learning models? - Will we need a new division of law for AI cases? What is the precedent? - ​​Can blockchain mitigate the AI "facts," or is it its own threat to communications and liberty? - ​​Can you rationalize a world where "free-to-use" AI services utilize licenses that allow free use, but then the operating company can capitalize on the content that they generate? - What is a good process for knowledge transfer from employee to employee? - If you had the chance to redo your life, would you choose differently in terms of what choices you made academically? - Have you written any books or do you have any thoughts on childhood education? Now that I have three kids at different stages, I find it challenging that the school curriculums are trying to make conforming students while lacking effort in individual talent discovery. What's your experience and how have you approached it? - Do you still check your emails regularly? I find it a distraction for productivity and originality due to the bombardment of emails, text and all of it. I see this as a potential area for AI to personalize, and it could be simple to make. What do you think? - Wolfram's writings are actually often a quite good read and have a unique humor. MUCH better than most papers that came out in the last 20 years. - ​​I want to do something that should be an internet-based business, and thermodynamics and its applications should be a central part of the business. Do you have any tips?

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

Questions include: Have you used LLMs to analyze genetic language? - Will bacteria become more resistant/stronger against human bodies in the future? Or will humans become stronger? - Could you just build specialized cells from scratch using printed DNA? - Can machines replace organs? - Several years ago, I read about research into DNA being used as logic gates. Is this still an active area of research, or has it been dismissed as not useful? - To what extent do you think we'll attain some kind of universality regarding the reprogramming of live biological systems, on par with current software systems running on silicon substrates? - How can cellular automata and systems like John Conway's Game of Life provide insights into evolutionary dynamics? - Can artificial life simulations effectively replicate aspects of biological evolution in a controlled digital environment? - A baseline bacterium for which we fully understand the effect of every gene on its own and of all genes as a whole. - ​​Do you think gene regulatory networks function as "observers like us"? - ​​Might it be possible in the future where if there's a crime, we could put a DNA sequence into a computer and it would show a picture of that person. i.e. by simulating the evolution of the organism?

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

Questions include: Are there exact matches or just similarities between complexity in nature (bio, evolution), society (political, religious) and technology?​​ - ​​How did the development of atomic theory by scientists such as Democritus, Dalton and Rutherford influence our understanding of discrete structures and the behavior of matter at the atomic level?​​ - How do historians know with certainty the identities of prominent historical figures? Could there have been more to the Socrates, Plato and Aristotle timeline?​​ - ​​Do the majority of historians of physics now have a favorable opinion of string theory?​​ - Is there any scientific reason "pure maths" concepts are picked up by physics much later?​​ - Do you find it our lack of human history odd, considering how long we have lived on this planet?​​ - With regards to notable people in history, humans seem to be completely obsessed with credit for their contributions—an interesting feature of the human ego. Taoist philosophy believes the Tao makes achievements and lays no claim to them.​​ - ​Can we reconstruct the lost works in history with AI scraping through contemporary reference scripts and searching for the influence lost writings had on known writings?​​ - That brings up the interesting point that there were likely MANY people "back there" who had amazing ideas that would have important applications today, but they didn't have the good fortune to be noticed and documented.​​ - How did the concept of zero originate and evolve in mathematical history?​​ - Do zero and infinity have the same origin?​​ - Interesting, but if I had three ducks and gave them all to you, surely the ancients must have had some concept of what that left me with?​​ - Speaking of string theory, what are for you the notable "dead-end paths" taken in the history of math/sci/tech?​​

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

Questions include: Why use cloud computers if we could compute on the Moon? How could we get rid of the latency? - Would we consider artificially engineered protein-based organisms robots (or nanobots)? - Is it possible to design (sharpen) the brain by some kind of biological engineering? - How do you think Neuralink and similar tech will improve our lives? What would be the drawbacks? - Does the speed of the neuron influx limit the brain size? - ​​In the future, how likely is it that physicists will be able to detect individual gravitons? - What are the latest innovations in battery technology, especially concerning alternatives to lithium and cobalt in energy storage systems? - ​I'm curious on your thoughts on the hologram tech that's right around the corner...

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 businesses adapt to changing technology? Are there existing strategies to combat roadblocks in development? - Is Wolfram Language much faster today than it was 35 years ago? - What has been the biggest or most notable technological advancement in your lifetime? - ​​How do you think about the "buy" vs. "build" dilemma–notably for one so opinionated and driven to have it one's way as yourself, as opposed to being more compromising? - How do you think about and handle competition, be it business or technological competition (say LLMs vs. the Wolfram Language symbolic approach)? - Do you think having middle management in high-tech companies hinders innovation? - ​​You just mentioned that someone can't build something that took 30 years to build. Do you think that will change with AI advancing enough to cut build timeframes by orders of magnitude? - ​​Speaking of that area, what innovation and business lessons can be learned from Thinking Machines and such failed ventures? - Do you agree that technology is brimming with ideas and resources, many of which are free? This shift has transformed business approaches, with today's opportunities primarily centered around services. - I appreciate your approach to making software easy to use. I've used Oracle, SAP and JD Edwards ERP software and so much of it is overly complicated. We were tethered to them for support. - Any advice on starting a career in tech with everything moving at such a fast pace? - I've read about your endeavors, from writing books at 13 to earning a PhD at 20. How did you manage such accomplishments and cultivate the imagination needed for complex topics?

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

Questions include: Are there languages or logic systems we haven't yet discovered from the past?​​ - Can smart keyboards help with this process of language discovery?​​ - ​​Do you view mathematics as a subset of language, or the other way around?​​ - How did different languages come to develop? Will we slowly move toward a universal language?​​ - "Ona, also known as Selk'nam (Shelknam), is a language spoken by the Selk'nam people in Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego in southernmost South America." Spoken by only one person.​​ - ​The distinction is the unique role of mathematics expressing and formalizing ideas in ways that transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries.​​ - Language came before humans, e.g. dolphins and whales; we just scaled it up and complexified it​. - Was Shakespeare's style unique to him? Would there have been a possibility for people to speak in a more poetic language?​​ - ​​I think language is closer to 1.5–dimensional, considering we have relative pronouns and other constructions that link up with previous statements, such that a 2D diagram of it can be made.​​ - ​​If I want to write a short statement, I prefer English. For a detailed style, I would prefer German... which is usually longer and not as nice to read as short English text.​ - Bulgarian is pronounced exactly as it is written. One of its quirks.​​ - If LLMs are hallucinating all the time and good ones are just hallucinating correctly/accurately most of the time, does that explain how Ramanujan might have arrived at his formulas without proofs?​​

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: ​How rare was the recent New Jersey earthquake? How can we predict future earthquakes? - The Indian Plate is moving very fast. It's increasing the height of Mt. Everest by six centimeters every year. - I wonder if digging for oil and fracking, etc., have any effect on the plates? - How do earthquakes cause tsunamis? - It seems like studying underwater earthquakes vs. those on land might be a good way to investigate the "lubrication effect." - Solitary waves were discovered by the naval architect John Scott Russell in 1834. - Anything particularly interesting or surprising from the solar eclipse? It appeared that leading up to it, between the book and website, it was better understood than any previous solar eclipse before it happened. Now that it has happened, what interesting findings have there been, if any? - What causes Earth to have different biomes? - Why is there only one species of human? What happened to Neanderthals? - How do astronomers determine the composition of planets and stars that are light years away from us?

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

Questions include: What features will humans evolve in the future? Will we one day be able to look at the Sun with our naked eye? - What is there to say about the future of philosophy? It feels like such an ancient study. - ​​If empirical evidence indicates that there is a finite, digital, physical multiverse, then will the practice and philosophy of mathematics undergo huge changes? - Are all philosophers logicians? - Will we ever find a cure for the common cold? - Could that end up messing up our immune systems because they've always fought colds? - What about the possibility of injecting tiny computers into our blood cells? - Topically, you may remember a boom in nanotech ~20 years or so ago, including nano-robotics research labs and a subsequent bust of a sort. Where is that nanotech boom/bust cycle now and looking ahead? - For nanotech to really take off will require new foundational building blocks, mostly from a convergence of biotechnology and electronics research. We see glimpses of that from DNA sequencing/printing. - What do you foresee in terms of substrates of the future for computation? In the medium term? Long term? - Does the success of one field sometimes slow down other research fields?

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 advice do you have for young entrepreneurs? Can children be successful in business? - Is it good to have variety in my resume when applying for jobs? How valued are long-term employees of one company vs. an applicant who has had many different jobs? - How does one generate a succession plan for a company? - Do you think the software market is over-saturated? It feels like there are many untapped innovations in areas like materials sciences and hardware. - What's the best way to get funding for a physics-based R&D company? I am starting one and need help. - What are some benefits to an internship? - Is the AI development just a short-term fashion, like in the 80s? - ​​Will owning/running private businesses ever be superseded as an economic form? - I think the best advice for young entrepreneurs is "Don't do it." If they do it anyway, that's real entrepreneurship. - What would you say to individuals who are interested foremost in making a difference in the world rather than a monetary incentive? How would you weigh the choices between pursuing traditional academia, working on the cutting edge within the private sector or pursuing research in one's own time independently (assuming their life allows such freedom)? - How about setting up non- or not-for-profit R&D? - How much do you think businesses will have to adjust to account for AI workers if they take off? - What about one-person corporations? Zero-person corporations? - It seems to me that public libraries should offer access to journals as well as books. Thoughts? - ​​There is already an inundation of LLM-written, peer-reviewed papers, adding to your point. - In Sweden, we have a book bus that drives around with books to suburban areas.

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: ​Can you explain eclipse prediction like I'm in middle school? High school? College? - Is it possible to view an Eclipse from space? Do astronauts on the space station see anything during eclipses? - ​​Related to the eclipse, it is interesting that the Moon always shows the same side to Earth. Why is that? (I've heard about commensurate frequencies, but I'm not sure about the origin of this fact.) - ​​How are orbits in the solar system so stable over time?- I wonder if it would have any effect if the Moon did rotate with respect to the Earth? - If the Moon were spinning fast, it would probably still have a liquid core, I think? - If the Moon were to be broken apart, leading to a debris field impacting Earth, what models exist to predict the scale of these impacts and their potential effects on global climate, ecosystems and people? - Is predicting eclipses harder than predicting the motions of planets or comets? - Can LLMs do math? - When will the AIs start colonizing space? - When we have large models of all sorts of other stuff, will LLMs' primary role not actually be as the interpreters between humans and our tools? - Can't we look into the brain to find out what types of transformers or even other things we need in LLMs?

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

Questions include: Is there a directionality to science and technology?​​ - Has anyone sort of applied the hacker mentality to the Antikythera mechanism to figure out what else you could use it for? What kind of uses could a time-traveling von Neumann figure out?​​ - What is the likelihood that ancient tech we've discovered had vastly different uses than what we believe?​​ - ​​Southeast Asia is terrible for archeology because you can make almost anything from bamboo: tens of thousands of years ago, people obviously used wood etc., but only stone remains.​​ - What does that say going forward, with our fast-rotting bits, in contrast with stone or wood, or even paper? - ​​Any thoughts on the ancient dodecahedra? Do you have one?​​ - Who started research on the periodic tables? Can you discuss a bit about its development?​​ - What motivated the advent of the fast Fourier transform algorithm? What was its creator wanting to solve?​​ - ​​How advanced did analog computers get before we moved to digital computers? Was there any debate on whether we shouldn't move to digital at the time?​​ - Why did modern formal logic take so long to develop historically, compared to other branches of mathematics or physical sciences? What explains the delay until the mid-nineteenth century?​​ - Is there any knowledge in physics today that has been influenced by ancient texts like the Vedas etc.?​​

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of 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 have any plans, and when can we expect to see a S. Wolfram AI chatbot with voice? - Do you think each AI iteration of the person would be similar at the start and then diverge in personality/intelligence as they continued to "live" and develop? - ​​Are you comfortable with the average quality and correctness of AI-generated answers and commentary? - ​​Due to the success of nature-inspired computing, I am really wondering if like our best bet is creating full-on human replicas, meaning similar learning experiences/processes... - I like the architecture of having many bots with like a base that confer and like upload their findings to a global knowledgebase, then disperse on like new assignments or what have you after returning. - ​​Do you think human brains compress data in a lossy way, and will future AI brains also have to use lossy compression methods to be more human like? Or would AI perfect memory be more desirable? - ​​Could an element printer theoretically work, e.g. one feeds it with carbon atoms and it prints out an arbitrary element? - ​​Can you explain the quantum LLMs idea, and what advantage exists in applying multi-computation, if any, to LLMs? - What would an AI look like that is rewarded based on questioning rather than answering? - ​​What do you think will happen when we understand prime numbers to their fullest? And when we can translate this knowledge to 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

Excerpt from livestream episode Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [Part 146], Stephen Wolfram answers: What is muography?

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

Questions include: Has any species evolved in a measurable way since humans have been observing and tracking evolution? - Why are there more bacteria than blood cells in a human body?​ - Would you say humans have aided in the evolution of domestic animals?​ - Has all of Grothendieck's work been understood yet?​ - What was the earliest use of radioactivity for light or heat?​ - What current technological advancement would be most beneficial to ancient societies?​ - Getting to significant and industrial scales was really hard for penicillin.​ - What kind of technology present today do you see becoming nothing more than history? What are some examples of previous technology being discarded?

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

Questions include: Could mind uploading be achieved 20–40 years from now? - Memory in human brains is like RAM: it's gone the second you shut the human off. - What about copyright for bots based on real people? What are the legal implications? - If we could upload our brain to something else, would it be feasible to upload data to our brains or upgrade parts similar to that of upgrading one's computer? - What kind of compression algorithm is used on our thoughts? - Would it be possible to read brainwaves using AI? - ​​What is the "artificial" part of AI? As far as I can see, LLMs are a breakthrough in the study of intelligence itself. - Will technology have an effect on human evolution and ultimately change our physical bodies in the future, i.e. such as our eyes becoming optimized for looking at screens all day, like a built-in blue-light filter, or prioritizing finger shapes to better type on a keyboard or hold a phone... - What do you imagine the future of communication to be? We've had spoken word, mailed letters, telegrams, phone calls, emails and now texts. What's next? - I need an AI version of Socrates to speak with about being. - Are there limitations to using genetic data to understand language-related traits? If so, how might these limitations affect the accuracy or applicability of language models? - ​​Do LLMs work well in Egyptian hieroglyphic concepts? - Do you regard math as a "language"? If so, would you suggest "talking" math out loud with a child? - Stephen mentioned in a recent podcast that certain subject matters in certain academic fields are in a position to be combined with computation and haven't been so far–and stated that it was low-hanging fruit if one was to do it. I was wondering if Stephen could give some examples of these "low-hanging fruits."

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 advice do you have for business investors to pick the right ideas? - ​​What about repetitive herds like AI, and especially VR? - VCs don't care to move science forward, in my opinion. - How could a knowledge-based economy be structured, and is it possible for AI and cryptocurrencies to assign value to goal-oriented AI systems that enhance human survival and curiosity? - Just as all true innovations change something in the world for the better, is it true that all innovations can, if properly organized and packaged, make a lot of money? What are the intersections of innovation and business? - What responsibilities appear when one generates a successful tech company? - So what you're saying is that we need an AI tutor tutor? - Innovation in technology is often putting a double-edged sword in the hands of many. How can I come to terms with it morally if someone abuses the power of the technology I invented? - How would you foster repeated innovation in a company, especially for a company with an established product or service? - ​What's the best/worst thing about owning a company to you? - How do you market or demo a product that is a vast improvement over existing methodologies but takes a massive effort to learn? - What do you do in a situation where you have a new idea, but the tech isn't there yet? - I'm joining a very large law firm to help them think through what the firm will look like as they adopt LLMs and GPTs. If you got charged with this task, how would you approach it? - ​Have you thought in the past to buy a company instead of developing your own? - ​​How far is AI from setting its own goals/objectives?

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: ​What is the reason behind an eclipse? How does it happen? - Can we still be wrong about the position of Earth and its motion, or is that debate over? - Earth's moon is important for the tides and for the world climate. - Weren't there experiments reflecting lasers off the Moon before the Apollo missions? - Do other planets experience eclipses?

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, a robot brought by a student from the Wolfram Summer School joins Stephen.

Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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

Questions include: What could the following people have done with Wolfram? Aristotle, Archimedes, Emmy Noether, Vega, etc.​ - ​​What would Ada Lovelace have done with current computing? And the possibilities?​ - Did Galileo have some mechanical math tools?​ - How does the abacus fit into the story of calculators?​ - What did Ada Lovelace say when asked about her coding style? "My code is like poetry, it's logical, elegant, and never divided by zero!"​ - Would authors such as Shakespeare find any use in Wolfram tech? How might he react to technology in general?​ - What about someone like Socrates? Or Plato?​

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

Questions include: What is the future of business? - What's the future of contracting and procurement? Can AI and crypto indeed create "smart contracts," or is that a utopian vision? - How do you see universities keeping up with AI? It seems that universities will even more become a preselection for corporations. What are your thoughts on it? - What is your opinion on terraforming the Moon? - Having corporations with the means (money) as well as nations that have the forethought to have their own supercomputers, how do you see the inevitable increase in the gap between the ultra–high-tech nations/corporations and the rest of the developing world?

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: Can business ventures be a "one-man show," or is it a requirement to have a team? - If I wanted to start a blog, what advice do you have for this process? How do you maintain your writings? - Are there any blogs you are currently working on? - How do you think Wolfram would be different if it were based in Silicon Valley? - So Stephen's moral is "Follow the weather." I also don't want to establish an office where there is gloomy weather. - ​​So you think complex and write complex, instead of simplicity as guidance. Does someone with a sense of simplicity fit into your company? - I gave up on the idea of incorporating science in my business/income life. I'm curious about your case. Do you like the process of production/commercialization/management? - Innovative companies need a culture of dealing with failure. Can you quantify failure for measuring the innovative rate? - Is there opportunity to be a CEO of a company that employs AI? - How did you achieve product market fit? - Is there a place for a consulting firm that helps with dealing with failure (as an instrument of innovation)? - Can you remember a time in your life when you realized learning was fun? I imagine a child Stephen Wolfram sitting at a desk learning physics, then having realizations. - Do you look for practical or monetary value when choosing a project? Do you have advice for folks who aren't as financially independent? - What is your advice for building standard operating procedures (SOPs)?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 talk about the history of hearts? Why does the human heart not resemble the heart shape seen most commonly in other forms? - How did scientists discover the brain and its purpose? When did this happen? - What about the theories that say that neither the brain nor anything else in the body is the "site of consciousness" (e.g. "the brain is just a receiver")? There's at least some stuff there that can't be easily dismissed. ​​- Any thoughts on Panini, who wrote a meta-rule to decode the rule conflicts in the linguistic algorithm? - How has technology influenced the development and preservation of languages? 0 Why did the Latin language "die"? Do you think it would be widely used if it had survived? - The Pirahã, a tribe in Brazil, have a very peculiar way of talking. They don't include numbers and time, if I understand. - How do linguists reconstruct ancient languages they have little direct evidence of?​ ​​- Would the Greek spoken at the time of Aristotle be fully intelligible to speakers of modern Greek? - How did accents and dialects evolve (for example, UK English vs. US English)​? - The reconstructed 1700s London accent sounds somewhat American, I thought? - ​​Are there still undiscovered writing systems to be discovered? - ​​Do you have any comments on the relationship scientists have had with the philosophy of science? - ​​If one views religion as a function whose input is belief and output is explanation of "the unknown," then could science ("many universes" in quantum theory, for example) be construed as such?

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: ​Have you had a chance to try Apple's new VR headset? - Do you think travel vlogging is a new possibility with the headset? - Do you think motion sickness will be a problem with Apple's headset? - Will AI courses be common in curriculums? If so, how would you approach the subject? - Do you think VR headsets have any place in the classroom? Or maybe they're a new opportunity for remote learning? - Can you explain the tech behind Apple's new headset? Is it a realistic everyday use item? I just can't seem to grasp a new trend of walking to get coffee and bumping into headset wearers. - One thing I like: let the AI first ask a few basic questions and let the student define some words—not for judging them on it, but for gauging what they already know/understand. - What would happen if I were walking at 90% the speed of light? What would I see looking through my Apple VR headset? - What is a magnetic field and in what medium does it exist? - Do you think it will be possible to make the headset smaller in the future?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of 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 plateau of LLMs will be at the level of understanding language? - Once it does plateau, it will start to taper off and we'll need to use a different technique. - How do you know that our brains aren't already using compression? - The AI could make far more precise classifications than we make, leading to new words and their very precise and peculiar meanings. - What seems more important to me is just the speed of the medium that AI has and how quickly it can process all of the interrelations, even when it's just forty thousand concepts, let alone larger context. - Which language is best at this compression? - Is there room for significant advancements in mathematical notations?- A single biological neuron has been shown to be able to perform an exclusive OR operation. A current simple artificial neuron can't do that. Do you think we are underestimating the power of biological neurons compared to artificial neurons? - Did the neural nets that you were playing with learn after their minds were blown? - ​​What is your view on emergent phenomena? -Do you think it is possible to predict all the emergent abilities AI can possibly obtain? - Will humanoid robots usher in an age of abundance? - Can a higher intelligence ever transcend computational irreducibility? - Why does pessimism toward future technology exist? My experience is that most people's default opinion on future tech is "Let's not do this." - Can we calculate how captured wind energy will influence the weather in the future if we become fully independent from fossil fuels? - What is there to say about the future of food science? Will someone be able to recreate Willy Wonka's creations? - Most of the energy in wind is not on the ground, it's over oceans and up in the sky. ​​- Could one devise a "computation engine" analogous to a thermodynamic engine, where useful work is a consequence of information processing? - Can AI solve the taste problem as it did the protein-folding problem? - If we could run our evolution over and over again, maybe we could see ourselves in some different shapes, floating in space with different ways of communication. For example, we could exchange thoughts telepathically, or maybe we could influence objects without physical contact. - What are your thoughts on this? - Would it be easier to genetically modify kiwi instead?

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: Have you had a chance to try Apple's new VR headset? - You previously discussed the role of AI in the future of science. What about the role of AI in the future of business, innovation or managing life? - ​Have you ever determined your Myers–Briggs personality type? - Ever considered hiring based on a personality test? - ​​What's some good advice for starting work on a super-novel thing where there is almost no literature about it? - At this stage in your career, has your vision for your legacy reified fully, and if so, what do you imagine it being? Eliminating computational irreducibility within the ruliad and maximizing its positive impact on the world, for example? ​​- How have your experiences in education influenced your approach to innovation? - Einstein is attributed as having said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." - Do any of your businesses have plans to build blockchain solutions? How does blockchain technology fit into your vision of the future? - What is a fun business idea you have had but never executed? - Do you think we'll get to a point of textbooks by AI? - Wolfram was one of the pioneers in using notebooks for scientific programming, i.e. literate programming. Do you think new programming languages will be more expressive? - Do you think philosophy and psychology (or an applied version of these for those less theoretical) should be taught throughout the school years just like English and math (in addition to everything else)?

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: ​Can you explain dark matter in layman's terms? - Could dark matter just not be interacting with light/photons? - If our universe is accelerating faster than the speed of light, does that mean we cannot see anything past the speed of light? - So the "viscosity" of the Higgs field gives mass to particles? - How might the topological stability and quantization of skyrmions, initially proposed as models for nucleons, relate to our understanding of gravity, considering their presence in solid-state physics? - Can the probability of a random walk returning to its origin be another way of defining local dimension on a graph? - I'm quite confused with heat/temperature and the general introduction of thermodynamics. Can you explain?

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

Questions include: What are the key requirements in place for past scientific revolutions? - What do you think about the effective accelerationism movement? What history led to or influenced it? - ​​Exploring binary code's historical role in programming and its connection to physics laws, in the universe as a giant computer: do parallels exist between binary principles and underlying structures? - ​​Can you talk about the history of cybernetics, second-order cybernetics and its current connections to the observer in the ruliad? - Did the "cyber" definition come before the definition of "robotics"? - You are forgetting George Spencer-Brown for the second-order cybernetics topic. - Have you ever used the ideas he expounded in Laws of Form​? - What was the significance of the ENIAC computer?​ - Isaac Newton was known as the father of modern physics. How might he view advancements since his time? Would he have anything to add? - What is the history of small business vs. big business? Was there a shift in history when one overtook the other? - Can you talk about the history of traveling to space? How come Moon visits aren't more frequent?

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

Questions include: Can AI be swallowed by more advanced AI by feeding it via "virtual" input? The motivation could be the increased efficiency of "larger" AI. - Do you think anyone will solve the Riemann hypothesis in your lifetime? ​​​- Aren't there thousands upon thousand of written papers that assume the Riemann hypothesis is true? - Will AIs be the ones to explore space? - ​It's ​4.37 light years to Alpha Centauri. - We should harness light/light waves so that we can take a picture of the planets there, then bring them back and produce pictures in 8+ years. - Do you think Ray Kurzweil's longevity predictions are likely to happen in our own lifetime? - Would it make sense for alien AI civilizations to broadcast radio or other signals with information on how to build such AI as a way to propagate in the universe faster than material space travel? - People automatically assume that AI will create this type of step function upward in everything in the world or in the economy. This may not be the case due to diminishing returns.

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 think a PhD is worth it when you are later in your career? Or should you just self-learn if you can? - As far as managing life, what has been your biggest takeaway in your career/personal life that you would like to pass on to the younger generation? - How do you approach risk-taking in business, and what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs about managing risk? - Do you have any New Year's resolutions/big plans for 2024? - I am a software engineer, and the field of quant + data science is very appealing to me. What advice do you have? - I teach my first class tomorrow—what advice do you have? Do you have any advice on pricing software licences? - I build bespoke design software and I'm kind of winging the licences. What do you think of subscription vs. one-time purchase for software? - Imagine Mathematica with inline YouTube ads! - What is the coolest thing your company has ever done? - How much computational thinking and modeling do you do on the business itself, both for decision making and planning? - Do you consider yourself a celebrity? -What has been your coolest encounter/weirdest encounter? - What do you think about ​organic education matters? Basically, can you use AI to figure out a fixed point for education (what you want to understand) vs. testing for knowledge? - Can you ski? - Can you picture AI creating an alternative legal system? - I'm wondering how you imagine your symbolic language might interface with AI. I'm not sure about the implementation, but on a surface level, Wolfram Language feels closer to interfacing with an AI than text-based languages. - Your mother was a major anthropologist and philosopher. Has she had any impact on you? - ​It would be cool to live in that future where you talk to your AI in your house and it does things for you. - When talking to ChatGPT, I ask politely and say thank you—way more than I should, too. Uncanny valley and all that! (Plus being Canadian, maybe.) - Do you think there is harm in always learning? I think humans aren't built to be putting so much demand for energy on our brains. But darn, it feels good to learn! - Would you want yourself to be automated, so that you would no longer need to exist? How far would you want yourself automated?

Stephen celebrates the 200th Anniversary of Sadi Carnot's Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu.

Stephen's essay on the The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/how-did-we-get-here-the-tangled-history-of-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/

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 do you think there is matter at all? - How does friction affect the motion of an object? - On the topic of physics, what is the relationship between force, mass and acceleration? - Can you explain the difference between static and kinetic friction in the context of Newton's laws? - How do Newton's laws of motion apply to objects moving in circular motion? - How would you structure a discussion on the introduction of physics?

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

Questions include: How often do separate ideas emerge (like convergent evolution) and merge to either compliment each other or "make whole" ideas that didn't have all the answers themselves? - What surprises you most about the history of science and technology? What is there to learn? - What's the history of timekeeping? - How did civilizations create the calendar and clocks? What science supports this? - How would you keep track of time/sync up your devices? Today it's easy with electronic devices. I'm imagining my microwave and stove clock always being a minute or two out of sync from manually setting it. - How did you get to know so much, and in such depth, about such vastly disparate historical topics? Seems this could be fascinating to hear about in and of itself. - Makes me think that maybe blockchains are the evolution of agreed-upon ledgers in one single agreed-upon time. - Do you think the Fourier transform is fundamental to nature? - Historically, it appears in quantum field theory, quantum computing, signal processing, etc. - When did time become an important variable in science?​ - Why do you suppose no one tried to continue with Nikola Tesla's incomplete inventions?​ - As a software engineer, I discover elegant academic programming languages all the time, but they never seem to gain much traction in industry. On the other hand, we have languages like JavaScript, which was pretty much developed as a prototype but is now ubiquitous in web development. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this history of "organic" development of programming languages. - Are there any pros to using "historical" technology, or is newer always better?

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

Questions include: What scientific breakthroughs would you like to see in 2024? - Whatever happened to graphene? Is it still a viable product of future technologies? - Could we build "bio-vehicles," e.g. instead of batteries, use synthetic adipose tissue, which is ~50–100 times more mass efficient per kWh? (Is there a future in bio-batteries?) - Based on the level of computational advances this last decade, with the trend only showing even more of the same, do you think that traditional engineering disciplines will be relegated to OpenLLM? - Do you think we'll see mass-producible, room-temperature superconductors in the next decade? - ​It has been suggested that AI will displace coders/programmers. Do you think AI might also replace many physical and chemical experiments? - Any thoughts on "zero-knowledge proofs," i.e. the ability to make proofs without revealing details? - Given that some of our greatest accomplishments as a species have happened when we mimic nature, how important do you think biomimetics will be going forward? - Can you see a time when the discovery of new mathematical theorems and axioms will be generated from AIs? - When Betelgeuse explodes, will humans be okay? - Do you think smart textiles/computing fabrics will take off or be viable? Would you wear, say, a sweater to hear instead of a hearing aid? - But things like math, geometry and especially tessellation have patterns that are universally implicit and can be interpreted as interesting by their own existence, and not just by the view of humanity. - Is there a way we can use Brownian motion at a molecular scale as a type of fingerprint for nano-sensors to create things that are piracy-proof? - Why are the axioms of mathematics necessarily the ones that are effective at describing things we see as well? - What do things like dreams and "higher states of consciousness" spoken about in Eastern philosophies tell us about ourselves as observers? - Would it be easy to have an AI remaster old movies, both real ones and cartoons, so we can watch all the old gems in high-end graphics? - "Interesting" is defined by a "coolness" threshold. - Since the scientific paradigm was a major cause for the Enlightenment, can we expect the (multi-)computational paradigm to kick off a socio-philosophical paradigm of comparable importance? - If someone invented calculus in the Stone Age, it would probably have not been used for anything... Do you think there are some ideas that may be "rediscovered" because they have a better use?

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 have been some of the most fascinating questions you have answered? Are there still topics to explore? - What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges facing businesses in your industry in the next five years? - What is the best approach to develop sound computational thinking? Are there really good books or courses? - Are there fields you know have depth but don't interest you at all? I'm a person who gets easily distracted—a jack of all trades, but master of none. I envy people who dedicate their focus on a specific field to become an expert, but I fail to do so myself. As I'm getting older, I still dabble and try to find "my thing." Do you reckon there's an approach that could help me to get more focused on a single field without that initial spark? - How do you keep track of what you want to learn? - How do you manage your time effectively so you dedicate ample time to each of the things you want to learn? - Do you have some activity to calm your brain (perhaps after a long day of concentrating), i.e. to wind down, before you go to sleep? - Learn to surf, then wait for the right wave: what was the wave you would say you caught that kicked off your career? - How has publishing as a singular author on innovative ideas changed your life trajectory? Do you feel like institutional authority was important for you to be heard, or was it truly the merit of your work? - Have you ever thought about leaving the software world and producing hardware? - ​Is it feasible for an individual to start a software company from scratch today the way you developed SMP into a viable, complete product? - Are there other types of technology or software you would like to experiment with for future endeavors? - I am a very big user of the Wolfram Cloud on mobile when I am out and about. I would love for the iOS version to be given more love. - ​​Would you say that the accessibility of education on the internet is making universities obsolete? - I work in logistics and we're FAR away from using AI. We actually took a step backward recently with an internal software solution that does not work for specific customers at all. I do have ideas, but I have to open tickets that are never resolved. I know for sure my ideas can be built into the system. I'm about to give up or write a better system (kidding). How would you approach a huge business about this? - How do we encourage more people to study the difficult mathematics behind machine learning and robot process automation, especially when they're younger and more neuroplastic, so that many of the most groundbreaking developments are accessible to a greater contingent of global society?

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: ​Do we know enough neurobiology to assert that the human brain works differently from a machine learning or artificial intelligence model? - How would you begin an introduction to chemistry course? - How are chemical reactions balanced, and why is it important to balance chemical equations? - Is it right to still use the periodic table today, or is it an order of the past? - Is there research on computing outside of the classical (binary) and "quantum" states of electrons, for example biology-, chemical- or light-based data storage and processing? - Molecules are graphs. - The system of balancing molecules and equations is just a new variation of "this" equals "that." - What strategies and techniques can be employed to effectively control and optimize chemical reactions for various practical applications, including maximizing yield, minimizing waste and achieving desired products? - Molecular-level mechanisms govern the magnetic properties of materials. How do these mechanisms lead to phenomena like ferromagnetism, paramagnetism and diamagnetism? What about radioactive substance reactions?

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

Questions include: What will "prompt engineering" be like if LLMs are super-intelligent? - ​​Maybe language is stopping us to get some ideas because we cannot formulate the idea in our known languages? - ​​Elon yesterday on X was saying how most of our memory is digital now and same will happen with concepts, just stored on some device. - Seems like, for creatures like cuttlefish or octopus where they have the ability to change the shape texture and color of their skin, they must have something "different" going on in their brains, where they are not just capable of perceiving shape color and texture of the outside world, but also the ability to physically "mimicking" it.... Just a thought. - In the future the Earth would probably be a big brain. If every connected computer on the internet was running neuron-computations... - What if we need to deal with concepts that need more neural mass that we possess? - ​What do you think of the plans to shoot feature films in space? - What impact will the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technology have on our daily lives, from smart cities to autonomous vehicles? - ​​Someone should start a tourist livestream channel. - Do you think in the future humans could interact with AIs via a visualization of latent space to create new concepts? - Missing the ability to try the food, a major reason to actually go somewhere. Do you think there'd be a way to "taste" via computation? - Thank you for these livestreams. Dr Wolfram mentioned on the stream Wednesday his work on developing a course on computation thinking. I wonder if he could comment on how that is going? - When is AI going to travel the galaxy on its own and create its own habitat on a different planet? - Have you ever had figgy pudding? If so, how would you describe it?

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 handle the pressure of deadlines? Is it better to turn in something rushed/unfinished or complete it fully with the risk of being late? - We are creatures of motion, not stagnation? Not just physically, but also in relation to careers/life events? ​​Parkinson's Law is the adage that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. - ​​Can you discuss working with many people vs. working as a "hermit"? - Did you get lonely during the NKS days, during other periods of your life, etc.? - I learned recently that Ramanujan in his local town in India was discouraged from going to Cambridge because crossing the ocean was interpreted as leaving one's identity behind. How to manage? - I would love to hear your thoughts on making big changes in your life and how you approach them. Are there techniques that you've come to rely on to guide you in life? - Is there value to stimulating and inspiring people other than oneself, in spite of the delays in your personal research endeavors? - When is 14 coming out? - Any upcoming holiday plans? - How do holidays generally affect work life? - How do you manage working for a global company? - What advice do you have with scheduling around time zones and such? - What would be Stephen's 2023 Year in Review? - Not to forget observer theory! Encourage everyone to read the essay. - ​​Will there be a German translation on the second thermodynamics law book?

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: ​Can you tell us some not-widely-known insights about prime numbers? Are the distances between twin primes now quite well known, though? - What does the factoring learned in an Algebra 2 class actually do in a real-life situation? - ​​Assuming one-way functions don't exist, could the uncertainty given by a multiway function be able to save cryptography? - ​​How can we prove this randomness on a big scale? - ​​Could there be an inverse of the law of entropy increase? Something like under certain conditions, structural organization always increases? Which maybe gives rise to something like bioevolution? - Is there really an infinite amount of primes?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 talk about the history of gazettes, i.e. the recording of "official" information? - Why are some older coins or bills worth more than their original face value? - ​How does Galileo's equivalence principle relate to Einstein's equivalence principle? - ​Important work from bright minds gets shelved, and then we discover the work decades later and put it to use. Have you thought of ways to reduce this happening so much? - Could you elucidate the historiographical development of string theory, assess whether its inception was exclusively within the mathematical domain, and determine if it has yielded any tangible technological advancements? - Some old things are worth more due to nostalgia. Eventually, they will lose their value again. - What is the history behind observer theory?

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/2024/05/why-does-biological-evolution-work-a-minimal-model-for-biological-evolution-and-other-adaptive-processes/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/T7h1jfw0oFk

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 manage conducting deep/long-term innovation with short-term commercial and funding necessities to keep the lights on? - How well would you say your current understanding of business and academics is today in comparison to when you first started your career? - What is your perspective on AI's omnipresence and ability to introduce a universal basic income into the strata of societies/economies on Earth? What rules will be applicable? - Do you think that with the disappearance of physical labor due to AI automation, it will make a comeback as a healthy hobby? - ​​How do you anticipate AI-to-AI conversations? What sort of information and insights are likely to emerge from these conversations? - ​​Do you ever take time off? - Would you say that a person whose job is also their hobby is a happy person, or a person lacking in both the job and the hobby? - ​Is game theory useful for running a business? - Not necessarily business, but fun... ​Have you ever been to a magic show? - How have interview processes changed since you began your career? - Are there ways to improve application screening and potential candidates? - Could VR/AR environments be a way to test candidates in the work environment? - Should there be an AI system that does computational language design? - The computational language could then be used to tackle problems of any kind and feed back to the language-design AI. - Do ever worry you'll end up like Wittgenstein, solving philosophy and the boundaries of science with an innovative math-related system, then a couple years later decide you're wrong?

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

Questions include: Which do you think is more likely, teleportation or time travel? - I'm curious about accurately reconstructing the past using present data. Imagine a pool table where we can trace ball trajectories backward from current positions and vectors. If this works for a simple model, could we apply it to reality, tracing back to the very first moments of the universe? This could be like a "playback" of history. Do you think it's feasible with sufficient data, advanced computation and AI assistance, or are there insurmountable challenges? What ethical considerations might this raise? - We are definitely generating a germ factory on our keyboards and mice. We should use it. - "There is one more way to get from one place to another." This is what gravitational lensing is when light travels on multiple paths to us, right? - At this level, wouldn't there be some ambiguity, e.g. many different possible motions of molecules would produce the same pattern on sand? - Weren't there recently studies from MIT that were able to make hash collisions on purpose? - ​Will a web browser ever have a native runtime for a language other than JavaScript, e.g. Python, Wolfram Language, etc.? - It worries me, letting a user space code run into kernel space directly. - Is LLM the wrong direction for AI?

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 would you describe what you do? Can you contain it to a single sentence? - What advice do you have for future programmers? - Any advice for someone content to just "get by" financially, with zero interest in the usual understanding of "career" and probably no kids–just looking to focus on other things? - Why don't you quit CEOing and commit full time to investigating whether nature is completely computable? Does running the everyday things help? Or do you just still find it fun? - Do you think there will come a major shift in business planning with AI? - ​How much control do you maintain over the Wolfram Institute? Do you find that loosening your grip on management of the fellows' research allows for a higher chance of success in discovery? - There is this tension regarding remote working vs. being in the office. From my experience in remote-working teams, juniors/new starters take a few months before they are efficient. It appears you have mastered remote working with your teams. What do you think makes remote working a success? - Whenever you were, or are, learning new stuff as part of your independent research efforts (whether that's directly related to your work at Wolfram Research or for your own purposes), do you have a structured purpose, i.e. "I will learn X subject, topic by topic," or do you take a looser approach to things? How do you know how much time to dedicate to your various research interests? - How is innovating "outside the system" different from working within institutions? Is one better than the other for certain fields?

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

Questions include: ​How did taxation work before money was invented? - How did trading happen between nations that used different number systems? - Can you discuss the role of ancient civilizations, such as the Greeks, in laying the foundations of modern science and technology? - ​Did Isaac Newton spend a significant amount of time attempting to transmute lead into gold? Did he believe in all of the miracles described in the Old Testament? - What was the greatest technological advancement to come out of the Roman Empire? - ​Given what we know now about symbolic representations and languages, what do you make of the break from computable mathematics in the 1800s/1900s and our current set-theoretic foundations?

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: How is it that animal species all look relatively similar, or at least similar across a breed (ex: dogs, golden retrievers), yet all humans have unique features?​​ - ​What's your intuition for Euler's number, e?​ - In the recent Halloween spirit, is there any science behind ghostly appearances?​ - If an advanced civilization lived on Earth one billion years ago, would there be signs of there existence in today's time?​ - How does photography work? How are we able to capture an image so easily, whether on film or on a phone screen?​ - Kind of a similar topic: how do mirrors reflect images, and can we trust these images or do they change our perception?​ - Is there a number like e or pi that instead of being small (under 10) is big (like over 100)? How do these numbers get specific notation/names?​ - How many digits of pi can you recite at this moment?​

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: Will startups survive using AI and ML Technology? If so, how to compete with big industries? - How often do you find yourself stuck on what to do next? How do you decide on what project to move forward with? - How do you prepare for conference talks? Do you ever get nervous/stage fright? - Someone asked EW Deming how he felt about his speech and he responded with "I know what I said, but I am not sure what they heard." - I bring my cats to talks so they can look cute if I bomb. - Any thoughts to what a leader or manager can do to support team members to learn and manage stress? - I understand this is a very context dependent question, but lately a lot of large organisations earning profits in the billions have been scaling down their workforce. As a CEO, what would you say are common drivers/motivators behind these trends of scaling down? - What would you say is your favorite aspect of being CEO? What is your least favorite? - I would like your advice. I will retire in about 3-4 years, do you think it is too late to start learning ML, Data science, the entire artificial intelligence environment, with all the mathematics that entails? I was thinking of dedicating part of my day to streaming as a hobby. Something to keep my mind active. - I am in the software QA and testing industry. One of my challenges are convincing decisions makers about investing in early testing approaches to reduce project and product risks later. As a CEO, how would you be convinced to add priority to testing in an organisation? - Any advice on being prolific/focusing as a college student? Specifically the tradeoff between open-ended exploring and focusing. - ​I think a huge amount of the value of college is having informal discussions with small groups of people you care like. Obviously not compatible if you're focused on GPA. - Hermits acquire cats, not children!

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

Questions include: How will the future of mathematics change? - ​Would there be a way to use the Moon as a gravitational tugboat to slowly tow the Earth away from the expanding surface of the red giant Sun so it can stay in the Goldilocks Zone? - What future applications do you think will come out with the discovery of the ability to measure at the attosecond time scale? - Do you think that new conjectures could also be made by AI/AGI systems? How will humans tackle the abstraction and complexity of them? - SW's TED Talk announcement + discussion of the Wolfram Physics Project - ​Could you speak a bit about energy "as the flux of causal edges through spacelike hypersurfaces"? Specifically, is there some more intuition or narrative you can provide as to why that is the case? - On the topic of conferences, do you think technology will change the format? Or will panels and standard talks remain a constant? Will AIs one day be participants? - What is it like to actually run a task on a supercomputer? - Don't you fear humans will start to live mostly in digital worlds and most cognitive energy will be spent on problems there and not in the natural sciences? - Would it be possible at some point to have both a digital and physical consciousness simultaneously? And then when you sleep, they combine or something to absorb the knowledge of both experiences? - What if we take someone's videos, articles, life notes, a lot of things... and feed them into some specialized AI, and make it answer questions and behave almost like that person? That technology is not so far away... It feels a bit like "concussions transfer." Do you think it can be classified like that? - ​Stephen's livestreams are like mini sci-fi adventures for the mind.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 talk about the history of quicksort or Hoffman encoding? - TIFF is also lossless... I think in some version... - Standard method for 5G? That is, within 5G, does it operate on the bit level rather than the radio wave level? - There is a similar problem with SIP: not all vendors implement the same standards or follow the standard properly, and you end up with interop problems. - Would that also work with a logographic language? - The future is gonna consist of languages that are just emojis. - ​When did the study of economics form? - What's the history of "double-entry" bookkeeping? Can something as basic be redefined? - ​What were early tabulating machines like (such as the ones IBM sold during WWII)? - Do you think future historians will have a harder time parsing through all the information available in the last 50 years compared to the last century, or even two centuries? What is the best historical record for research in this case? Books, images, video, etc.? - Why doesn't copyright law allow flexibility with people who want to share their works online? When did copyright law begin? - How did legal structures evolve with the creation of the internet? Were completely new structures built because of it?

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 that individual particles have a halo of dark matter, like galaxies have?​ - ​How is antimatter made in the lab, and what makes it so difficult to produce?​ - ​I am curious about your perspective on the recent unveiling of smart glasses equipped with AI assistants (LLMs) by Meta. Do you see this development as a natural evolution of smartphones?​ - But was the separation of matter and antimatter proposed by Feynman, or earlier? And how can this be measured by experiment?​ - Are there anti-neutrons? Anti-elements?​ - Does technology behave differently depending on outside factors (such as atmospheric pressure, temperature of weather, gravity, etc.)? Is there an ideal environment? - Deionized (distilled) water won't conduct.​ - How about solar flares? How do they affect technology?​ - A gamma ray burst hit us last year about this time. It was called the BOAT (biggest of all time). Did we learn anything new from the data from that burst?​ - What determines the color of a leaf when the weather changes? Why are some yellow, some orange and some red?​ - Could there be nanites waiting for more favorable conditions to multiply (nanometer-size robots or organisms) in the samples we brought back from the asteroid Bennu? How could we be sure there aren't any?

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 do you think is the most important aspect to focus on or dedicate the most effort to when running a business? - You were a speaker at the All-In Summit 2023, which was a conference aimed mostly at venture capital folks. What were your impressions of this summit and its attendees? Did you attend parties at the All-In Summit? - Do you get demotivated to do things that AI might be able to do in a fraction of the time in the relatively near future? - What's your take on privacy, especially for digital services and devices (regarding companies using data to manipulate people and things similar to that)? - Could you imagine the web being washed away as it did to other technologies? - How has the concept of "intellectual property" evolved? Is land a good analogy for IP? - Do you know about the recent anti-trust cases brought against Google and Amazon? If yes, what kind of opportunities do you think would open up for competitors if they lose? - ​Have you ever gone through the patent process personally? - ​Maybe ChatGPT can make patenting things easier. - Maybe the ambiguity is a feature of natural language instead of a negative, and it's purposefully not specific to allow more expansive, unpredictable scopes of use. - With LLM lawyers, the patent disputes will end up just being a bunch of robots arguing all the time. - Is diversifying my professional ventures a worse outcome than focusing on one or two occupations that I'm really good at? - There are somewhere between five hundred thousand and two million cuneiform tablets just sitting in warehouses. Untranslated, unscanned, inaccessible. What can we do other than lament? - When you first started making sales with Mathematica, was it mostly to academics or companies? And how did you find these customers? - Let's say an amateur claims to have found a big breakthrough. How do you judge if it is worth the read?

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

Questions include: Do we know what the first piece of technology was? - ​If Alan Turing had not died at age 41, what might he have worked on during the remainder of his life? - What if von Neumann lived longer? Would computation and cellular automata have any potential? - ​Who was the first who used statistics to predict something? - Having recently watched the Oppenheimer film and seen portrayed there Einstein, Gödel and Oppenheimer at this small lake, I realized that there have barely been any relevant theoretical insights in the last few decades, especially compared to about one hundred years ago. What does this mean for the science of the next hundred years? - Where do you see applied psychology in a decade? Is the quantification of behavior and thought going to be a shift, as advertised? - Could you discuss the history of cellular automata?

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: Did you see the Oppenheimer movie? If so, what were your thoughts? - What are the things one should do to prepare oneself to become a scientist regarding education path, ideas, tools in the upcoming age of computation and AI? - Can "Kelly Criterion", aka calculating size of bets to place in markets, also be a good tool to manage life? Which is to say, you limit the size of your experiments by design? - ​Are you using any LLM Functions for managing your daily workflow? If so, which ones? - What's the "next big thing" in business? How will virtual spaces (like with Apple's new headset announcement) gaining popularity impact the workplace, if at all? - I'm a software engineer with about 8 years of professional experience. I'm interested in transitioning into the field of AI/machine learning. I found it quite difficult to find careers in the marketplace that don't require 5+ years of experience in AI/machine learning. Any advice on how best to make this transition? - What would you say to people who are scared to lose their jobs to AI? There are a lot of young professionals in the tech sector that are just getting started in becoming data analysts, project managers, and engineers. We are starting to hear a lot of bustle about these careers not being good investments in the long term. - A bit of a funny lifestyle question. What's your opinion on living off-grid (living in the rural quiet area) in a modern time? - Given the computational limitations of the human brain, are there drawbacks in thinking computationally? Do we risk losing track of high level patterns with too many parts to count? - When you were starting SMP, if someone else had already made significant progress in building a full-scale computational language, what would you have done? - Any cool projects you enjoyed working with during Summer School? - Science somewhat requires integration of many disciplines but in academia, almost only way to progress in your career is to publish stuff in your "area of expertise"

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

Questions include: How did scientific disciplines originate and evolve through the centuries? - Do you think Apple's new VR headset will be much different than previous releases of other VR headsets? What do past releases of similar products predict? - VR kind of reminds me of video game systems. Your product may be fantastic, but if the content/software isn't up to snuff, it's probably going to fail. - These glasses and headsets need to be comfy and miniaturized to become suitable for everyday use. - What are use cases in education for these new headsets? - Perhaps AI can be used to translate existing educational material into VR-suitable content.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of 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 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 think LLMs will give everyone something akin to a personal McKinsey consultant? - How much efficiency is lost by needing to explain things to a team vs. doing a whole design alone? - With schools ending for the year, what are some ways to continue teaching kids over the summer? Did your summer schedule ever change when your kids would get out of school for summer? - What do you think about machine learning libraries vs. books? Do you think there is a current infrastructure out there for people to make libraries and sell them to users? It's interesting to think about people buying machine learning libraries for their AIs instead of books for their engineers. - What are some simple mathematical tricks and shortcuts it would be good for kids to learn? This might make a useful blog post. Things like "For powers of 10, the little number is how many zeroes come after the 1" and "It's easy to get 10%, you just have to double it to get 20% or find half to get 5%". - If you created an AI emulator of yourself, what would the first three rules of its conduct be? If you could "prompt engineer" an assistant bot for yourself, what would be the first three/most important "rules" you'd tell it to follow? - I'm a software engineer with about eight years of professional experience. I'm interested in transitioning into the field of AI/machine learning. I found it quite difficult to find careers in the marketplace that don't require 5+ years of experience in AI/machine learning. Any advice on how best to make this transition? - Will prompt engineering becoming a legitimate field of study at some point, or is this mainly a trend due to the current systems? - What does it take up front for you to fully invest in a potential idea? Must there be a full proof of concept done prior, with rigorous testing? - Isn't it inherently unwise to seek out AI help, especially in a corporate setting, as it may lead to leakage of information? - Do you find that the key to bring a productive person involves structuring your mind in such a way that you tackle problems in projects? What advice would you have for the sporadic-minded individual?

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

Questions include: Are the stars and constellations we see today the same that were seen by the ancient civilizations who first studied them? Do star positions ever change? - What do you make of the relationship between rhetoric and math? They are held in contradistinction, but I am thinking of the relation between rhetorical invention and Chaitin's idea of math-creativity. - What about sudden novas and comets? Sudden shifts in orbits? - Is the Moon moving away measurable compared to human history? As in, since humans started recording history, did the Moon appear to get 10% smaller or so? - How will history be able to correct the continuous conundrum of the accuracy of our forefathers' discoveries, inventions and ideas? Additionally, how can we as humans preserve this? - How did early civilizations explain supernovas? Did they understand it as a star exploding? How did they come to this conclusion? - "The stars are like the Sun, but far away." When said for the first time, this must have been crazy to hear for others. How often were ideas like these disregarded at first? How did researchers of this time convince society of their findings? - Is it possible that errors in translation have affected results of research? Are there any examples of this in history? - When was the first time anyone considered what the angle of our solar system's ecliptic is relative to the Milky Way's galactic plane? Apparently, the angle is about 60 degrees. - Why did science evolve so rapidly in the Western world? - What's there to say about alchemy in history? - Is that because ethical questions are fundamentally computationally irreducible questions? - How do you filter out the "good new" from the "bad new"? It's remarkable that old ideas stood the test of 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: From a leadership standpoint, what are your best teachings on how to lead with purpose? What is your leadership style? - How do you handle making mistakes? - It is impressive to see you (in a livecoding session) pull open a 20-year-old Mathematica document to refer to an earlier idea that you had. How have you managed your massive inventory of Mathematica idea notebooks over 30+ years? (e.g. do you create standalone Mathematica notebooks or massive ones?)? - Have you seen other people learn to not need to "relax" and to continuously work, as you do? I am most satisfied when I'm being productive, but I find myself getting fatigued or losing focus at some point. How do you maintain your work ethic? - Could you share your personal experience with how your intelligence has evolved as you've aged, particularly in terms of recall? Specifically, can you describe what it feels like for you when you take a brief pause of 0.2-2 seconds to grasp a concept while discussing complex topics in communication or video presentations? - Do you have any advice for the new generation of college graduates entering the workforce? What's the best way to apply for jobs? How do you maintain those jobs for years to come? - Do you think we'll get to a point where AI is in charge of interviewing? How could this be beneficial? Or even harmful? - What is your advice on how to lead when you sincerely do know less about the subject than the people you're assigned to lead? - As a company that functions worldwide, do you find language barriers to be an issue? Can AI help eliminate these barriers with some sort of universal translator? - Are there any self-evaluation techniques that you would recommend for everyone? - I'm curious about your approach to digesting new content, especially in the context of a research paper. In circumstances where time is limited and reading everything is not feasible, how do you determine when it's worth pausing to explore a referenced citation in depth versus continuing the reading without fully understanding the citation? Could you share your strategies for efficient and selective reading? - How do I go about learning mathematical thinking? My school focuses on learning formulas and just solving questions in the age of computers. - What would you suggest for a self-taught programmer on the "trader" side who wants to get more knowledgeable on "computational thinking"–books, courses, topics, anything you could share as clues for making a personal curriculum would be great!

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

Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/12/observer-theory/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VDGyZUfL1BA

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

Questions include: When researching, do you find it's more helpful to stay close to modern times in terms of content, or do findings from hundreds of years ago also prove valuable? - ​Can you talk about the history of theories of cognition and consciousness? What did the ancients think? Did Gödel or Turing think about this much? Does ChatGPT disprove Penrose's Orch OR? - Aristotle, Leibniz, Godel, Wolfram: How were/are these philosophers able to somewhat understand the idea of universal computation? How did they and you reach those insights? - Is there something you could speak to about von Neumann's work to understand that the models of computation could relate to the mind? - Has the importance of areas of science shifted in history? What was the main focus of science five hundred years ago? One hundred years ago? Ten? - Is there a connection between these advances in science and education? Does education evolve with these changes? - What has been the most important invention that has improved research overall? - Right! By 1991 we had ERIC for upper-graduate research, and it was a game changer. No more need for librarians in the traditional way and history at our fingertips. - Historically, what have been the the most difficult problems or obstacles for us to overcome or solve in the areas of science and technology? - About unintended consequences of revolutions: what lessons from the Industrial Revolution have we learned that we could use for the AI revolution? - Do you think it's fundamentally possible for science as we know it to hit a wall at some point and slowly degenerate into a nonproductive state?

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: Congrats on the new blog post! Are there any dangers to these "custom" plugins? Allowing ChatGPT access to your computer seems like asking for an AI takeover. - Is current tech like ChatGPT going to be able to answer every question imaginable? - Are you worried about being replaced by AI? - A caveat, though: LLMs can quite easily be asked to write in any non-perfect way we want! - What are some ways LLMs can be improved? Do these improvements require advancements in technology that haven't yet been made? - One thing that worries me about LLM is that right now, many people are using LLM as a "source of truth" or even "references" to their arguments.- Perhaps the only real way for an AI to make those value judgments is for it to be able to model its own possible future states and decide for itself? - Asking for ChatGPT to write less formally makes me think of the evolution of music genres, i.e. electronic music is now "not perfect" on purpose. - We're gonna one day find out that these livestreams are like a really advanced Turing test being conducted at Wolfram, and both Stephen and the moderators in the chat have been AIs all along.

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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 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 is your favorite blog/book you've written? Any specific reason, why or why not? - How was your trip? Was it for business or just for fun? - As a remote CEO, do you ever get cabin fever from being home constantly? Do you try to keep work in certain rooms of your home to combat this? - Have you tried anything like tracking your sentiment as you work by using a neural net to analyze a video feed of your face/body? - I'm struggling with this nagging feeling that I'm progressing slower than I want to. I know I'm doing what I can, but I still can't shake it off. Have you ever dealt with this? If so, how? - What management strategies do you use to get the most out of your employees? - ​How can I increase the chance of my admission to a master's degree in complex systems or cognitive sciences? - How do you decide on when to make a big change in the technology you use/build, for example, switching Wolfram Workbench from Eclipse to VS Code? - Good project definition—formalizing what a project means—is one very important part. But how much do money/stock options/vacations (to avoid burnout) influence employee morale? Or giving them a project that they want to work on, or people they want to work with? - I've been one to say, "If I get more money, I'll care more." In the end, it didn't work. It's better to optimize for things that you just like working on. - What do you think about code review/peer review? Does it slow down a company or research? Do you think there are other alternatives to this? - How often do you work on the Physics Project in terms of weeks or months? How do you manage your life to work on this when finding the rule of our universe has no business case (at least in the short term)? - ​How do you deal with confusion and the feeling of "I don't understand this"? - Given your knowledge of the foundations of math and physics: do you bother to research the fundamental theories of project management, or try an attempt to formalize it, experiment with different project definitions, etc.? - How is the process of picking a mentee? Do you look for specific clues? Is there anything an individual can do to stand out? - You seem to care a lot about the history of ideas in scientific areas. Do you think this is a must for producing meaningful work in research? - I work as an innovation consultant. For a year now I have been on a journey to redesign/innovate and develop a new type of computer case. But I battle with this feeling all the time that I will fail and don't have a chance against all the "giants." How do I overcome this feeling? Or do I just accept it and go 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 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 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 there a way to digitize DNA sequences and examine them? - ​Is a complete family tree of humanity with billions of connections a realistic possibility? - Is DNA a tree or a semi-lattice? - How likely is it that genetic engineering can create many mammalian species with superhuman intelligence? - Can you speak on epigenetics? Has this effectively resolved the nature vs. nurture question by turning it into an invalid question? - Do viruses play an important part in evolution? - How does the brain distinguish signals coming from different senses? What is the difference between the signals coming from the eye vs. the ear? If everything is ultimately an electrical signal, is this not a difference in degree instead of kind? - What are the implications regarding the ability for the brain to acquire another sense that is unlike the five senses we already have?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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?

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: How do we predict weather? - Basically, weather forecasting is an excellent example of computational irreducibility. - Can you discuss your recent blog on the second law of thermodynamics?

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: Congratulations on the recent blog post! Can you talk about the process of writing a blog post like this? Why did you decide to do a three-part series? - Congratulations! Refreshing. Great timing, as thermodynamics is now used in generative AI models, i.e. nonequilibrium thermodynamics. - What are your thoughts on salaries and compensation, especially for virtual/remote companies that employ people from different locations? - I really like the way you define different writing styles for different projects. What led you to do that? How do you define the limits of an article or book and go through the writing process? - I find that when I write something up and I have to back up all my assertions, I reveal what I should've been investigating in the first place. - ​How should one go about learning how to split equity when founding a company? How do you know if you are giving too much or too little? - You said you can understand French. Are there any other languages you're familiar with? Are there other languages you would like to learn or wish you would've learned? - Do you recommend exposing children to a second language? Is it harder to learn another language as you get older?

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: Do you think it's possible to sustain life on Mars? How far into the future do you see this happening? - Maybe biological switches would change everything for a biological machine. - Could you explain the fundamental principles of biology? - Aren't neurons the biological analog of switches? - Can machine learning help solve inverse scattering problems where the forward scattering problem is highly nonlinear? - How do x-rays work to see only the bones and ignore skin? - I think bone opacity also comes down to water contents (there is just more water in tissue). - Can those x-rays be used for automatic detection of changes within the molecule structure of crystallized solids as well? - Do you think ecology will play an important role in understanding molecular computation? - Ecology is a complex system. Physics is easy: just analyze a single particle's or body's motion. Ecology has vast interconnections and mechanisms.

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

Questions include: Historically,​ what are some of the most prominent developments in the twentieth-century history of software design? - I watched the recent NASA rocket launch and wondered what's new in the past 60 years. - ​Why did American English develop common words for every third order of magnitude (million, billion, trillion)? Other languages seem to have different common words, like lakh in Hindi for 100,000. - ​I remember a comment from an old programmer saying the first time they saw a screen used with a computer was in the movie 2001. - Why is ChatGPT blowing up now when GPT-3 was known in 2020 and GPT-2 in 2019? - How much do you think real science and technology are shaped by the ideas from science fiction? - The thing about ChatGPT is that it uses the same architecture as GPT-3 with the same number of parameters. The fact that a fine tuning can create such a leap in capability suggests that we are in a hardware overhang. - Has there been any technology in history that's been perfected (e.g. the wheel), or is there always room for improvement? - Printers. Paper jammed 30 years ago, paper jams today. - Let's not ask the AI to design a new type of paperclip. - Paper jams happen today, but paper itself has become irrelevant. Such is the case with technology. Old technology doesn't get better, it gets replaced. - When and why was dark energy hypothesized? - Once we get 3D nano-replicators, we won't need roads; we can just teleport from place to place.

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: Can you talk a bit about Pangaea? How do continents shift? Is it possible to reform Pangaea? Is there technology that could prevent this? - How does ChatGPT work? - Could you say that Chat GPT has made a graph of the space of words or ideas? - I'd love to see a thesaurus based on vectors into semantic space, so you could ask it to give you a word with a meaning close to "A" but heading in the direction of "B." - How well does ChatGPT handle slang or figures of speech? Does it understand text as literal, or is it capable of picking up these notes? - Could it be that ChatGPT isn't accurate because its training data is text, which may or may not correspond to the real world? Shouldn't we use only real-world data, such as sensory information of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell? - With all the new "AI" tools rolling out, what do you think will be the effect on "truth" and "facts" as we know them? - Does ChatGPT's ability to mimic emotions means that it is able to feel anything, and how much consciousness does it have? - Do you believe physics boundaries need to be coded explicitly, or do you think enough data will result in the model learning principles? - How does a neural network experience time? How do all these threads of computation combine to form a whole from its parts?

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 is the one question (or all questions) a CEO must be asking himself every day? - Why did you choose walking as your main exercise? Did you try other modalities? Is there a scientific reason or just personal preference? Did you do any analysis regarding which exercises deliver the best benefits for the time/energy spent? -  Have you thought about using ChatGPT to help you write a fiction book? I saw recently someone used AI to create a children's book in the time frame of a weekend. - What do you do when you are feeling that you are lost or unmotivated and not having a clear vision into what should be done next in your business endeavors? - I'm very impressed at how well you express yourself in these videos. Do you think writing has helped you in this regard? - What are your thoughts for the coming wave of founders starting generative AI companies? - I feel like ChatGPT and the art AIs will be able to make full-blown movies algorithmically. - I've used ChatGPT for writing technical instructions and procedures at work. I really dislike doing them myself, and GPT gives an excellent first cut with English better than I could write it. - I think you would have to include that you used chat as an aid for the email. - How do I focus on a problem? There are so many aspects in literature and following cross-referencing can be overwhelming. - How do you deal with distractions and not get overstimulated by external forces? How do you stay focused on hard tasks? - Can I ask about "team building," particularly with highly technical types of peoples (scientists, engineers, savants)? - What is your advice for someone employed full time in the industry doing something else to do research in another area? - How did you find out that you would excel at physics and computational physics? - Will you open source the Stephen Wolfram bot? - Do you have an overview of all the projects you have in your company? What do you think about too many versus too little projects? - Do you think it is a good idea to treat coding/programming as a sport, i.e. the same as football, e.g. score a goal, become famous?

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

Questions include: What could Aristotle have accomplished if he had a modern machine-learning system? Could he have discovered logic? - Didn't Noam Chomsky also do some work in the intersection between math/logic and language? I wondered if language models are based on that at all? - Will the next generation of ChatGPT or VoiceGPT have any negative recourse, especially when it comes to impersonation? - A similar Chomsky idea is "can a submarine swim?" In English it can't, and in Japanese it can. - Do you think AI presents an existential risk? If so, how could we mitigate it? - How do you think Einstein or even Stephen Hawking would react to ChatGPT? Are there any figures in science who predicted this development? - Given what we have learned from AI models, does learning from history allow us to better predict the future? Does modeling the past imply modeling the future? - Ants are structured distinctly enough and that can lead to immediate conclusions on many levels.

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 produce large amounts of crude oil artificially by manipulating chemical kinetics? - How is the distance to a distant galaxy determined? - What industries do you think will be most disrupted by ChatGPT and Midjourney AI applications? - Thoughts on integrating the Wolfram interface with ChatGPT? - An automatic nonsense/false detector would be a interesting tool to have. - With generative images, Dall-E needs to be able to recycle its output image for incremental improvement. - Chat GPT will edit your e-mails into publishable books. - What are some of the most interesting ChatGPT prompts you've come up with that can aid in everyday life? - I've used ChatGPT to help give me ideas for movie scripts. - Couldn't the detector be used as a way to make the output of ChatGPT actually be coherent? Isn't the detector just the necessary component for ChatGPT to learn from its mistakes? - How could a language model be integrated with a symbolic system? - Stephen, do you think ChatGPT is over-hyped? Chomsky chuckled about the literally 60 years he's heard we're "on the verge of an AI Revolution." - Instead of training on text, wouldn't training on the senses that we use, such as video and audio be better? I suspect that a model that can predict the next video frame will be as intelligent as a human. Video contains text inside itself as well as other degrees of freedom that humans have access to. - Do you log all of your keystrokes, etc with the expectation that you will provide this information to an AI to try to understand your thought patterns? - I've used it to construct a 365-day nutrition plan I'm just having my first breakfast based on it!

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a look at the making of and current state of NKS in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a look at the making of and current state of NKS in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a look at the making of and current state of NKS in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

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: What causes snow? Why doesn't rain just turn into ice? - OK, Stephen really knows his stuff on this branch of physics... he's studied in detail. - Why is the density of solid water lower than liquid water? - Is there any other molecule that also expands when it is solid? - Why is the density of solid water lower than liquid water? - For ice skating, the ice melts at the contact of your blade so there is a small layer of liquid water due to friction, and hence it skates. - But you also can push and speed up on ice while skating, so an increase in the friction must have happened? - Apparently, gecko feet exhibit Casimir-like effects. - Stephen, if I may make a suggestion: you need a blackboard (or whiteboard) behind you for the explanations. - Is air a molecule? What is air? - Can you measure the absorption of CO2 by plants with this device?

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

Questions include: Was the invention of computers inevitable? Will evolution always stumble upon universal computers, given enough resources? What are the implications for the laws of physics and reality? - I don't think computing technology could have possibly been conceived until after the Industrial Revolution. - ​Ideas alone don't govern how science evolves. It's a combination of factors, including technology, mode of production of society, etc. - The Sun's computation helps sustain us. - I like thinking about machine learning as a black box that gets to a human-comprehendible product, but the "reasoning" that enables it to get to that output is not really understood. Once we understand what's really going on in a machine learning model, we can be confident that its output is sound. - I started playing chess lately and I noticed that high-level and machine chess are a lot like proof of computational work and willingness to commit it. Do you have any thoughts on this? - I wonder how much power one would need in order to run a mechanical computer comparable to a modern CPU. - Historically speaking, do you think the modern AI systems are unique in terms of replacing human work, or just another step in automation? - ​I may change my email signature to "Written by ChatGPT. Please excuse any nonsense." - It's tempting to think general AI could emerge from some digital version of evolution. That seems to require digital entities competing for resources and a "will" to fight for survival. - Historically, how has written record keeping evolved? Will we ever revert back to oral records (spoken stories, songs, etc.)? - GPT-4 and GPT-5 are going to be amazing. - The question is whether the interviewer will care if the candidate is an AI. For some roles, it will not matter, and that number will increase. - Has ChatGPT passed the Turing test? Or can it pass the test soon? - I suspect the major deployment of AI in the short term will be phishing. For the time being, it can't replace regular employees at legitimate businesses because it can't be legally held culpable because it's not conscious. But for scammers, that's not an impediment.

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 you discuss the importance and relevance of ChatGPT. I find it astonishing. I am also wondering the extent to which its principles might inform Wolfram|Alpha simplified input. I'd also love a Wolfram ChatGPT interface. -  Is this livestream generated in realtime by a Stephen bot? - Wouldn't AI develop its own language that we won't understand? - What's the success rate of ChatGPT-generated code? Of course it depends on what code is widely available on the web. - Isn't there a feedback loop problem where the future language models will be trained on AI-generated text? - Oh, that also is good fun: At the beginning of a chat, you can prime ChatGPT to talk in certain ways (Texan southern, London slang, Jamaican, Creole, etc.) and it is so funny! - ChatGPT works across a bunch of languages quite well. ​For inputs and outputs. -  ​Is it possible to extrapolate what future neural nets will look like? Can they ever become as sophisticated as a human brain? Can they eventually become conscious and self aware? - The most mind blowing experiment was where ChatGPT imagines being a Linux machine and converses in "console." - In my experience, it was very hard to do actual "small talk," as ChatGPT either goes into "I'm only a language model and can't..." mode or the conversation gets very "not small" quickly. - The natural language interpretation of Wolfram|Alpha is so well refined that I really need to just crack open my voice assistant device and hack it to divert input to a kind of persistent personal notebook. -  I was able to get ChatGPT to write a graph programming language in JavaScript that fulfilled the full lambda cube. - There is a recent AI model that uses the image diffusion model to produce music via spectrograms. - So perhaps Meta could train a language model on its content from Facebook and WhatsApp (privacy issues aside) to be great at small talk? - Would you be willing to get a Neuralink implant at some point in your life? What would convince you to do so? - The first thing I REALLY want is a simple brain-keyboard. That would be awesome. - ​What are your thoughts on AI connecting to blockchains? They theoretically could become independent from humans. - The AGI of the future will be a comedian and heavily active in advertisement. - "Ownership" might even be an ethereal concept challenged by AI. - ​AI students...learning from AI professors?

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 your thoughts on operational systems and how they impact personal productivity? Have you ever used Microsoft Windows? Could you tell us a bit of your computer setup (OS, productivity tools, files sync systems, etc.)? - With consistent routines and self-tracking, have you developed a strong intuition for how many keystrokes you've made in a day or how many steps you've taken in a day? Other Wolfram-y intuitions? - I'm working on an IRC-client for my old Tiki 100 computer. I will only use IRC on that computer. It has to send signals to the PC that reroutes it into IRC though. But it should work. - The Tiki 100 is a Norwegian computer released in 1984. It has a Zilog Z80 processor and 64 KB RAM and some chunky video framebuffer. - ​Would you be able to go back to pencil and paper? Like pure research? - My first experience on a computer was the Commodore 64 playing Oregon Trail. Did you ever program any games? - Do you have any career advice/job seeking advice? I graduated, and searching for a job is quite slow. I've also been considering starting some sort of (3D printing) business instead but don't really know how I can gain the skills for that. What made you start a business? - How do you manage the "holiday madness" around this time of year (packed stores, more drivers than usual on the roads, house full of family)? - How do you apply computer science, 500+ employees, new kind of business to architecture and city planning for billions? - Do you ever feel like you spend too much time managing people instead of solving technical problems, or is the balance just right? - Is it safe to say a business is a machine made of people? - How do you decide balancing effort towards invention vs innovation? Not just your own effort and time but also the Wolfram organization. - Can this sort of scaling (employees needed for a functioning company) get modeled and planned by your technologies? - I guess sub-projects are a good thing to have when doing projects that involve more than one person. - ​As technologies become more and more complicated, do you sometimes feel a sense of losing control, or that it gets really overwhelming to try and understand how everything works? - ​How do you encourage people to envision a positive future when things aren't currently going as they expect?

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Jonathan Gorard joins Stephen to discuss ongoing science research. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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 is some history of thermodynamics you found interesting while working on your new project? - What is the history of mathematical rigor? - What's the history of chocolate? What technology allowed the creation of chocolate candies to become so popular? - In the history of computer architecture and software, who are the most important pioneers of parallel processing? - Did you ever use Xanadu's network communication/hypertext publishing technology? - ​Can you discuss the history of GNU? - How much more prevalent will cloud computing become in the future, as the need for computational resources is exponentially increasing compared to the cost-speed of processors? - Can you talk about the history of the public's perception of its own scientific literacy? - I think it also changed with the advent of memes, which made the most important subcultures swim up more easily than less important ones. - Will we go back to science illiteracy?

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

Questions include: What is some history of thermodynamics you found interesting while working on your new project? - What is the history of mathematical rigor? - What's the history of chocolate? What technology allowed the creation of chocolate candies to become so popular? - In the history of computer architecture and software, who are the most important pioneers of parallel processing? - Did you ever use Xanadu's network communication/hypertext publishing technology? - ​Can you discuss the history of GNU? - How much more prevalent will cloud computing become in the future, as the need for computational resources is exponentially increasing compared to the cost-speed of processors? - Can you talk about the history of the public's perception of its own scientific literacy? - I think it also changed with the advent of memes, which made the most important subcultures swim up more easily than less important ones. - Will we go back to science illiteracy? 

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: Are there nuclear reactions going on inside our bodies? - Do you think we'll ever be able to replace damaged brain parts with computational parts as another form of prosthesis?   --  What ethical implications will become relevant when we combine machine learning and brain sensors/effectors? - Suppose a rule creates a memory in our brain. Then it could be an irreducible problem to make a true brain interface for any individual that could interpret a memory or preexisting concept. Truly a fascinating subject. Assuming we are able to completely understand the human brain, one could probably make a complete copy - basically, we could "fork" one brain into multiple copies! - Do you think neurons do their signal processing based mostly on discrete states or the temporal difference between states? - Even though all brains are different, don't they all "implement" the same underlying ideas? Doesn't this point to some Platonic realm of reality? - One of the issues with being able to read and decode a memory is that someone will have the ability to write artificial memories into a brain. It's somewhat scary to think that could happen one day, but it could also be used for good. - What about a Turing test, but for memories; like in Inception? - Perhaps the only difference between dreams and reality is just a matter of degree? Perhaps it just depends on its logical coherence? Once the logical coherence is larger than what the brain can be aware of, it is considered "real." - We've co-evolved with our environment so it should be coherent to us, but if we inject things into our environment that we haven't co-evolved with or evolved in, we get confused.

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 it worth moving to the USA from the UK/Europe to pursue a career in science, mathematics or engineering? What if one wants to change the world? - How long should one wait after college to start some startup in an area of their interest/expertise? - When you are thinking deeply about a problem, do you think "on paper" or on a computer or a tablet or...? Do you find one of them to be better than the others? - Can you tell a couple "stamp-licking" stories from the early days of starting Mathematica/Wolfram Research? - What are your thoughts on crypto and blockchain from a business perspective in general? - What do you think have been some of the most interesting and hard questions you've been asked here and elsewhere? - Can ChatGPT increase productivity? Is outsourcing writing skills beneficial or damaging? - "AI did my homework" is the inverse of "the dog ate my homework." You don't want to be in either situation! - Visual AI can produce amazing inspirations for jewelry and that sort of intricate art. - Do you drink caffeine sources like tea or coffee? How many per day? - What practices do you use to gauge and cultivate meaningful accountability as an individual and as part of a collective? - ​What was your revenue plan and time-to-revenue when starting your company? - We know that you use a hierarchical knowledge organization (files in folders) but did you ever try to use a networked knowledge organization (e.g. Logseq, Roam Research, Mem.ai, etc)? Thoughts on the best way to organize knowledge? - Wolfram documentation is amazing because it's connected (related functions). - I think the knowledge graph thesis is to give people epistemological tools and make it visual. But epistemology isn't something people worry about all the time while writing daily notes. - Have you "driven" a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode? It's out now for beta testing and it's magical. It's so, so good. Purely a vision + neural net implementation. - Do you enjoy collecting and organizing physical books? Libraries are endless fun!

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: Are we close to making face recognition a ubiquitous replacement for passwords in electronic systems that require a login, negating the need to remember and constantly change multiple passwords? - Can you describe the correlations among qubits, how they differ from ordinary bits and the potential advantage of them? - So perhaps a conscious observer is in fact the result of the underlying physical system building a model that averages out all the parallel threads into a coherent story? - What I don't really understand is destructive interference between threads of history. I understand how probabilities can add, but how can they interfere destructively? - Could our brains be a quantum computer? - It is, of a sort! A distinctive feature is it being inside your body and firing neurons in 3D spatial patterns. - What Wolfram Language functions would be most improved if they could utilize 20 million logical qubits on a quantum computer?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 give some insight into automata theory, its history and its applications up until today? - How did scientists figure out the source of the cosmic microwave radiation? - Why didn't containers become popular until Docker around 2013? It seems like they would have been very useful long before that. What did people do instead? - The idea of containers was there, but it was virtualization plus a heavy load of scripts to manage servers and configurations, which was just another iteration of mirroring machines. - Apple also had a Motorola-to-PPC emulator for their PPC Macs.

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: There was a study where they saw helices in superconducting materials. What properties make helices common in nature, from DNA to whirlpools to EMR? - Can you tell us why electrons in the atoms of the Sun do not burn due to the heat? - How does superconducting magnet levitation work? - Fermions and bosons... Are hadrons the intersection between them? - Is there much use for superconductivity in space where the temp is already close to 0 K? - Especially in places without an insulating atmosphere around, superconductors should be a serious option. Much easier to dissipate heat! - Aren't there Japanese maglev trains on which there are cooling systems? - I believe these flux tubes also show up in gravity, leading to dark matter and dark energy effects. - What do you think has the most potential for changing the energy crisis, and what field do you think we need to focus on to get there? - As long as the nuke plant isn't dual-use for producing plutonium, then I think it's safe. - Thermovoltaic cells are a new thing that seem interesting for the efficiency of steam turbines.

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: As a British native, do you participate in Thanksgiving festivities? - Do you ever use spreadsheets or any other type of specialist app to manage information? Or is your main tool Mathematica? - Do you go through periods of low motivation? If so, what do you do to get over that? - Should I travel? - Pi Day at SXSW was pretty special! - I've been to one of your talks. The first time was around 1990 at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Wolfram is the reason why I purchased a NeXTSTEP computer, because it included a copy of Mathematica. - I think a lot of people are deep in mainstream university discourse and it is good to have talks to open up and stimulate curious people to break out of the stream if they want. - Well, "they" say nothing beats person-to-person contact, as opposed to video conferencing. Then again, maybe "they" just like to travel to exotic places (disclaimer: I hate travel)! - If you have to think about it (doing more in-person talks/traveling)... the answer is no. Unless you absolutely love it, there is no value in it. - How about meeting people that don't go to universities but are really engaged in and doing hobby projects in computer and mathy stuff? - Have you ever been to Idaho? - Doesn't have to be a big and public place. Just talking back and forth, having a conversation. Big talks are not needed. - What's the goal? To interact and make friends or lay the seeds of the Wolfram universe? - Have you thought about making a video streaming and conferencing platform that integrates with your notebooks and computational language? Or do Google and Zoom do that well enough? - You could periodically host "Wolfcon." Only folks interested would be likely to show up. - As far as virtual interaction, I like Q&A streams, but also CA and physics streams. - If I were you, I would make appearances conditional with a personal request based on your curiosity. Example: "I'll come to Paris, and in return I want you to pre-arrange a three-hour private tour with a senior curator at the Louvre for me and my wife." - Wouldn't a conference on the Physics Project, in collaboration with a major university, help further disseminate it within the academic community? - You should do a talk with Gerard 't Hooft. - How come you were not on the Apple keynote when the Intel-based Macs were announced during the Mathematica demo?

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: Does gravity's strength cause a fundamental limit for the size a planet? What about a star? What about a black hole? What about a galaxy? What about the universe? - Internal gas pressure and gravity are two main forces for star formation from nebulas. - What was the pressure of the early universe vs. today? Just as a thought experiment. - Can one stretch a vacuum beyond a "breaking point" similar to how matter can be compressed beyond a "breaking point" that leads to black holes? - In both quantum field theory and general relativity, the zero-point energy seems to be arbitrary: you can add a constant to the equations and it will still be a valid solution. But in general relativity there seems to be a notion of absolute energy because of its gravitational effects. This zero point seems to be associated with flat space. Why is flat space non-gravitational, i.e. why is flat space the lowest possible energy state? - Any ideas about "hacking nature" to gain powers (get infinite energy, travel faster than light, etc.). Do you think all these are possible at all? Can we really "hack" or "alter" the rules of nature? - You can travel faster than light if the space between you and your destination changes; this happens quite frequently as the universe expands, and it's why we get measurements faster than the speed of light in space. It's just a fabrication. - This brings up a related question. You cannot distinguish the geometry of empty space from that which has matter that is uniformly distributed. So it is perhaps uniformity that determines the geometry (without dark energy). But this assumes matter can be spread out like a fluid, instead of being discrete. So perhaps flat space is indeed the lowest-energy state. Uniform matter cannot exist because of the discreteness of matter, which leads inevitably to inhomogeneities. - It's almost like you need to solve the puzzle of constructing the space you want to travel through before you can travel through it. - Why is the refractive index for x-rays into matter smaller than 1? Does that mean that the speed of light for x-rays is faster in matter than in a vacuum?

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

Questions include: Did Einstein ever attempt to quantize spacetime, as opposed to treating it as a continuous medium? - We are ultra-interested to hear about this future history of science! - What was the most fantastic experience you had as a physicist? - What is the history behind migrating the entropy term to information theory? - What is the process like making computations for the thermodynamics project? - What do you think about engineering efforts that help in discovering science (building tools and experiments)? I've met many scientist who dismiss engineering as "less intellectual." - Computational language design is basically like being a modern-day wizard. - Technology, science and social relations co-evolve.

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: How does sand form near the sea? - Is grammar invented or discovered? - ​I believe there exists a 13 letter language from a pacific island. Do you think a 10 letter language would be useful since every word would also be a base 10 number? - ​How can a natural programming language replace older concrete programming languages, would it be fuzzy or like a predictor language? since often natural language can be interpreted differently? - What would be your thoughts on Languages from the perspective of the category theory? It seems like Category theory encompasses all of Math. - What limitations does Wolfram Alpha have currently, and what methods are you exploring to address those limitations?

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 prepare for your keynote talks about new technologies and Wolfram Language features? - What barriers currently still exist that keep AR/VR from being widely useful in the workplace? - One thing I genuinely appreciate about Stephen is his obvious incredible delight when explaining concepts, particularly related to science. Does he ever have to force it? - Do you take part in clinical trials? - Diagnosing is definitely a potential job for AI. - Can Wolfram Language screen for diseases or illnesses? - ​Is it possible to change human DNA by intention, I mean eating foods or taking medicine? - Do you try to convince your children to go to specific universities/schools, or do they decide by themself without any impact from you? - Multiple screens are nice but I feel it's less productive sometimes. Sort of the same thing as multitasking being a myth. - I feel like I am someone who has a lot of interests. I did my engineering degree a decade ago but I want to study mathematics, physics, philosophy and neuroscience too. Have you also been someone with diverse interests? If so, how do you manage them? I feel like I struggle with wanting to learn so much more—I feel like its a lot better to be focused and simple minded. - Any tips for fixing a chaotic filesystem? My files are scattered everywhere. - What do you do when you feel like you're stuck in the mud and can't get out? - How do you write? - How much do you use the mouse while writing in a notebook? - Do you have any preferences in reading hard copy vs digital? - You should have an automatic email word cloud generator. - Does UV hurt the paper? - Physical books are heavy and bulky, while ebooks are never bigger than your favorite tablet! - What is the oldest book you own? - Do you think storage devices like tapes and punch-cards might come back sometime?

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/2023/07/generative-ai-space-and-the-mental-imagery-of-alien-minds/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/X8DQuazATdM

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: Are all pixels squares/rectangles, or have other shapes (which can tile the plane) been used? - Why hasn't all the cosmic background radiation escaped out into the universe by now? How is it still around to be detected billions of years later? - It's weird to talk about time experienced by a photon. It experiences (this is what's possible to be noticed) only two moments, those of detachment and attachment. Between this, nothing is observable now. - Do you need mass to store information? Can you have an organism made purely out of photons or other particles moving at the speed of light? - ​Does time move faster for hot objects? - But doesn't a black hole have a temperature? What happens to a black hole's entropy? - Why doesn't the black hole further collapse on itself? - Do the updates to maintain the structure of space help explain the absurd vacuum energy? - How much more complex are the dynamics of the human brain than the dynamics of a galaxy? - Does a black hole inherit the dimensionality of the spacetime it is forming in? - Interestingly, the number of atoms in a bacterium is also about 100 billion. - Interestingly, the distance to the Sun (1 AU) is about 100 billion meters. - As gravity increases and/or speed increases, time is constant to the participant, but on the outside, space/distance could be greater or lesser. If you had a light year cube of space and shrunk it into a meter, light would take the same amount of time to go through it.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 that in the future, people will look at our societal interest in math and science the same way we view alchemists and theologians of old? - Tell us about the history of chess computers and the approaches they used before deep learning. - Can you talk about the history of software packaging and distribution? - My brain came online around the time we needed two CDs for games, and I thought that was a pain. - I might be misremembering, but I think we put a piece of masking tape on floppy disks to circumvent copy protection. - I would love your thoughts on internet pseudonymity and its history! - How has the "central hub" of science changed geographically over time, and what may be the reasons for this change? - There is obviously a link between training clergymen (the original role of most Western universities) and the growth of early modern science. - Any thoughts on different methods of storing information in terms of resilience over long timescales? - Cuneiform is mostly only preserved because it was stamped in clay tablets. All the really "good stuff" (science, poetry, etc.) was usually written on biological material like hides and papyrus and, obviously, they didn't age that well. - Paper Dutch East India Company records from 1600-1700 still exist today. - In light of the recent law requiring free access to all federally funded research (and associated data), can you talk about how scientific knowledge and data have been shared throughout history?

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 were only a few species domesticated? Could any species be domesticated? Are humans domesticated? - Does conditioning have anything to do with domestication? - Since an octopus has nine brains, including one in each leg, how does it see the world? - Every animal has different capabilities, with their own advantages and disadvantages. Dolphins are fast, but they're not fast on land. -  Would you agree that humans are the most "flexible" and can "adapt" to learn the most among Earth species? - Other species' communication is domain specific and our communication is universal, right? - I believe the mapping between the world and brain zones is a super-simple geometrical mapping that makes good sense. I wonder what this brain-leg mapping would be. Legs are further away from each other than a leg and a brain. - Do you think it's possible that we might live inside a cosmic super-organism, analogous to the way microbes live inside of us? - Is there a way to tell how much of our intelligence emerges from high-level brain functions vs. low-level cellular computation? - What is the simplest possible object? - Can you explain why the default scientific position is that consciousness does not rely on quantum mechanics? To me, it seems obvious that it would to at least some degree. - Why is it that we as observers never see quantum superpositions? Why are superpositions aligned to our macroscopic observations? - Could it then be that what is quantum mechanics to us just involves higher dimensions of time? The fact that quantum mechanics is incomprehensible to us is then because we are trying to understand-higher dimensional time from a single dimensional experience of time. - Why do my glasses get foggy but my eyeballs don't? - Fog can't create droplets on a wet surface. - And let's not forget the eyelids, which act as windscreen wipers!

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 have any fun Halloween plans? Any memorable costumes you've dressed up in or have seen? - If you could spend the day as any animal in the world, what would it be? What might the change in perspective allow you to understand and apply toward your current work? - What are your thoughts on providing feedback to employees? What methodologies and tools do you use? How can we best help an employee to grow before letting them go for underperformance? - I just finished reading Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald Knuth. He briefly mentions the possibility of the universe being a cellular automaton. Have you ever read this book? - Maybe "project" is not an adequate word for undertakings like Wolfram|Alpha. - Do you have a timeframe for the Physics Project, or is it a lifelong project? If you had to work on another idea/project, what would that be? - How would you tackle a problem? Dive into it or first observe the bigger picture? - What's your way of studying something new? Understanding the historical evolution of concepts or reading from textbooks and working out examples? - I have to wonder how Bertrand Russell would have viewed the Wolfram Metamathematics Project! - ​What has been the typical response when reaching out to "academics" to join the Physics Project?

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 much time do you spend on building Wolfram Language vs. doing research on the Physics Project? And what are the pros and cons of doing both things? - When working on something new, how do you know if you're making progress? Have you had stretches of time when you were exploring something, but it turned out that you weren't making much progress? - How do you choose whether to throw a project in the trash or not? Sometimes you invest so much of yourself in something that it feels just impossible to do so. - What tools, practices and/or policies can be implemented to mitigate the effects of reduced attention span and memory from social media use (and short-form content in general)? - When you code, do you apply a test-driven design approach, or do you enjoy a more exploratory approach? - What's "a day in the life of Stephen Wolfram" look like these days? - With so much email, how do you bucket your email? Have you been running it through a rules engine of your own design? - Why do so many companies prove such easy targets for hackers? Is robust security really so hard? - Any future interviews of any public physicists, mathematicians, etc. coming soon? - Do you take notes of things you learn? What's the system that you use for managing new information (when researching or learning new things)? - What is your opinion on solo work vs. group work and how it impacts the legacy of a product that has tangible and intangible business products? - How do you identify great developers? Do you test developers, be that with code or psychometrics, as part of the hiring process, or do you prefer to rely on conversation? - Any philosophy book or article you recommend reading?

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: Should we try to contact extraterrestrial beings by broadcasting signals into space, or is it too dangerous to reveal our location? - How do you tell if something is natural or artificial? - How far can an EMP from the human heart travel? - If I am on an object moving two-thirds of the speed of light moving towards another object that is moving two-thirds of the speed of light toward me, what would the object look like to me while on the first object? - Dogs can not understand mathematics; similarly, humans must be limited in their ability to grasp aspects of reality. Is our ability to understand upgradable? Would biological evolution, better brains or merging with AI allow us to break through our biology's limitations and become new "dogs who can understand mathematics"? - ​​I think that is no problem; the brain would just incorporate the new frequencies and we would see it like a new color. - Do we see more green in one eye and more red in the other eye or something? Is that how we perceive things in 3D?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 behind emails and instant messaging? I have a hard time imagining life before then and handling communication that may not get a response for days (waiting for a letter in the mail). - What were the early days of Wolfram|Alpha like? - I see papers from '40s - even '30s - of PRL (physical reviews). They are typeset so cleanly. How did they do this without LaTeX at that time? - It's been said that a real perpetual motion machine cannot exist. Do you agree, or do you think we can get there and we just don't know how yet? - At a quantum scale, there seems to be perpetual motion. Otherwise the electron would collapse into the nucleus. So is there a Maxwell's demon at the quantum scale that can only open very small doors? - What were people's reactions to Carnot's exploration of steam engine mechanics and the development of the idealized Carnot cycle? - What is the history of Fahrenheit and ancient representations of temperature - perhaps some that were even non-numerical?

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 are there herbivores and carnivores? Isn't it evolutionarily best for everything to be omnivorous? - Short digestive systems are better for meat, as they offer some protection from infection, but are less efficient for extracting nutrients from plant matter. Fire allowed us to enjoy both worlds. - Aren't we "specialists" in terms of our ability to think? - What is holding back robotics? Why don't we have humanoid robots yet? - Neural nets and learning algorithms can find approximate solutions to many problems in robotics, I guess. - Dr. Wolfram, do you have any thoughts on Michael Levin's work with biological systems using bioelectricity for self-organization and communication? - Any thoughts on computer-designed organisms? - Could we build robots out of random proteins? - K. Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute researched and designed molecular machines on the assumption one that day a universal assembler will be created. - What if every microorganism is also a macroorganism? What is a macroorganism?

Stephen Wolfram celebrates 35 years of Mathematica, originally launched on June 23, 1988, starting with a look at V1 of Mathematica on a Mac SE/30. The live demonstration (part 1) is followed by a discussion (part 2) covering the development and timeless nature of Mathematica, as well as answering viewer questions. Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HxWg8exJxNY

Stephen Wolfram celebrates 35 years of Mathematica, originally launched on June 23, 1988, starting with a look at V1 of Mathematica on a Mac SE/30. The live demonstration (part 1) is followed by a discussion (part 2) covering the development and timeless nature of Mathematica, as well as answering viewer questions.

This podcast episode is an audio recording from a video livestream, and some of the topics discussed may reference visual examples that are not available in this audio format. Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HxWg8exJxNY

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: Have you ever owned a pet? Is there any animal you've ever wanted as a pet, even if it wasn't a typical one, like a Komodo dragon? - Fall weather is here! Is there a season or time of year where you are more/less productive as an effect of the weather? - I went swimming today-about 100x better than walking. - I've only come across one joke in the Wolfram Language documentation, but I did find it quite funny and in good taste. Based on context, I think Jonathan Gorard wrote it. What do you make of this? - What is your history with/view on science fiction (books, movies, etc.)? - How important it is to save money vs. to spend it? How do you understand on what things it is worth spending money? - Well, I quit smoking, so I'm using that money on the lottery instead. - When is a technology mature enough to be "trusted" (i.e. autonomous driving)? - What are your views on making very powerful and trained open-source AI models like Stable Diffusion illegal vs. allowing them to exist? "OpenAI" or open-source AI? - How do you feel about making your email address public as a famous person? - How did you originally generate funding to start your company? - How do you choose whether to throw a project in the trash or not? Sometimes you invest so much of yourself in something that it just feels impossible to do so. - What are general tips you have as far as educating people?

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 there any scientific approach to simulate society? What are the main laws in sociology? - Property rights are a very basic element of a society. They lead to saving, then specialization, then trade, then currency. - Why are some physical constants dimensionless?

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

Questions include: You recently talked about relearning the history of thermodynamics. Can I ask for resources for learning the history of thermodynamics? - Can you talk about the history of mathematical/computational linguistics (the one that studies the principles and regularities of natural languages)? There are famous Soviet mathematicians (Andreev, Sobolev, Kantorovich, Markov - son of his great father) of Kolmogorov's school who advanced this field in the 1950s through the 1970s. - What do you think about the science of statistics? Is AI just computational Statistics? - What's the most exciting thing about the AI art revolution taking place now? Was there ever a time like it? - What did Henri Poincaré think about the infinities considered by Cantor, Hilbert and Zermelo? Do engineers need the concept of a complete infinity?

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: How do tornadoes form? - Why does a fan create white noise? - Is that how they produced the audio from our galaxy's supermassive black hole? - Fans also generate a different speed of flow radially, as the linear speed is lower closer to the center of the blades than the outside. - I think they were actually to measure distortion in gas. - I thought they were synthetic, but it seems like they managed to actually measure sound waves in distant gas. - Why are roads made of tarmac?-  Is there anything certain modern physics can say about dark matter/energy? What exactly is it? - Does dark matter interact with gravity? - If dark matter particles exist, then why are there no dark matter halos associated with our Sun and with the planet Jupiter? - What's a graviton?

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's your rule of thumb for launching a product (for yourself and for others)? Minimum viable product? Quantum of utility? Other? - How did you deal with the boring aspects of developing a product (e.g. marketing, sales) when you didn't have people to delegate to? - Would the academic environment be a place where a researcher and inventor could pursue their own research, or at least make some profit from developing patents and designs? I am in the US, just about to start a master's, and am considering starting a PhD in materials science. - How do you think Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) will evolve as candidates increasingly try to "trick" them by using keywords in their resumes?

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

Questions include: Did any ancient unit systems use base 10, or did they all use more easily dividable bases like 12, 20, 60, etc.? - What is the history of design patterns in software engineering? How did people come to them? - Did you ever meet Niklaus Wirth, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Alan Kay and/or Paul Allen? - Have Julia sets and Fatou sets played a significant role in the development of computer programming languages? - Agreed. Computer programming languages should be object oriented for the language and structure to make sense instead of coming off as abstract and convoluted, and also so they are easier to work with and learn. - Did eighteenth-century engineers/craftsmen make use of the paradigm of Newtonian mechanics? - Why is it that Isaac Newton spent most of his time trying to prove theological ideas? - When will Moore's law expire? Apple announced four-nanometer chip technology, and there has to be a limit. - I wonder whether the future will be multicomputational, but to be honest, computers nowadays are more than powerful enough for the average user.

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: Stephen knows and remembers so much! Any hints on memory techniques and how to learn in general, and especially in math and physics as an adult? - ​What do you think of shifts in perspective as a source of discoveries in science? Is there any place for discoveries based on questioning the status quo? - Of the smartest people you have had a chance to communicate with, who stands out the most and why? - ​How do you spend money in a wise way? Do you have some heuristics? - What technology would you keep away from your children, and for how long? - What might be the best investment opportunities over the next 20 years? - Someone said if you hear good reviews of your product from other people, then you have succeeded. If you don't hear any feedback from others, that is usually a bad sign. - You mentioned investing in ideas. What is your metric for investing in an individual with an idea? For instance, are the Wolfram Winter and Summer Schools places for you to find those people to invest in? - Is there any technological innovation that you are anticipating or hoping is coming in the next few years? - What was it like handling the business side of things, being a creator? Was it something you liked or just did out of necessity? Was it hard or easy? - Did you do it all yourself, get help or just hire someone else more savvy and in the know to do it entirely? - ​What are techniques for developing intuition, in particular when working with really abstract concepts like those found in math, physics or even business?

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

Questions include: If we had discovered combinatory logic before statistical mechanics, what else might have ensued? - I've been wondering why Stephen didn't explore chess in his paper on games. Maybe he could discuss the history of chess AI. - Can we design a better game somehow? Do you think it's regrettable that the history of science and technology is almost never taught? - Political and social history seem absurdly dominant. The history of science and technology mostly focuses on the results and consequences of discoveries instead of the background of the characters behind them. - In the history of science and technology, have you ever seen something really unexpected? Like someone pulling something out of their hat with no prior experience? - A surprising event is when someone is an expert in field A, but somehow finds an "isomorphism" with field B and makes a discovery in field B. - I feel like Einstein's thought experiments were up there... like how did he think to follow a beam of light? - ​I think intuition is very underrated in science. But why does our intuition even work? - Will we ever get a philosophical programming language? - What do you think about the relationship of philosophical thinking and experimental mathematics? - The limits of reason and the limits of Turing machines? - ​​It seems in the history of science and technology that the "hard research" is usually kept out of the public eye. Mr. Wolfram, has it been beneficial or overwhelming having your work open to the public?  

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 are there still mysteries in our knowledge of the human body in spite of exponential advancement in our understanding? - What are the approximate odds that two people have had the same fingerprint pattern? (odds of a collision among all fingerprints within the enumeration of the parameter space of fingerprint patterns) - Isn't the finger prints a two dimensional reminiscent from the torus like inversion that occurs in the body? - Is there a way to make trees grow faster? - If there exists a machine code for our bodies. Is the model you're working on some kind of a debugger? Could you explain the things you expect to be able to predict with your theory? - So conscious is like user space code and unconscious is like kernel space code? - How far away are we from finally doing away with physical smartphone screens and replace them with virtual projected screens in front of the user, which can be made as big or as small as one desires? - MIT developed AlterEgo reading your mind so you do not need to type. - Ed Fredkin - Tablet PCs didn't take off in the 90s but much later. Why? - Is typing/writing a bottleneck on productivity? I wonder if thought typing will have a significant effect on how much most people get done. - Thanks for that answer[Ellipsis]I guess for now we will just have to keep getting excited every time someone comes up with yet another smartphone with a slightly bigger (by a few mm) screen! - What if somebody falls asleep in front of his computer with the electrodes still on their heads and starts dreaming, then typing in his/her dreams? - If you drink MILK before u go to sleep you will remember YOUR DREAMS. There's some bio chemical there - Dreams are so interesting... from the habit of having a dream journal (writing them down as soon as you wake) triggers you to 'remember' the dream. But who's to say it's an accurate memory, or just an on demand created thought - How come that we sometimes experience more subjective time in a dream than actually has passed? Does our brain somehow "outruns" the normal computation rate? - What do think about molecules (supplements) that increase synaptic plasticity which controls how effectively two neurons communicate with each other I look for molecules to boost my brain power? - But what is a memory really? Where does one memory start and another end? What is the boundary between the "interior" and "exterior" of the mind? - The human brain does seem to have a bias towards discrete categorization though, e.g. the alternating illusions, Yanny/Laurel effect. - Companies into AI (like Tesla) put a lot of emphasis on 'vision' over other sensory detection. Is that also true for us as human beings? Are some senses 'more important'?

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: I am writing a long-form article about James Lovelock, who was unusual in that he was an independent scientist. It struck me that you count as one too, and I wondered if you had ever blogged about the upside or downside of not being part of the scientific establishment? - ​What is the artifact behind you? It looks like something one might use to trap a mouse. ​- Have you ever focused "too much," such that the focus was detrimental to your work? - So you are on an island? I have been looking for an isolated island with limited tourists to spend some stress-free time. They are hard to find! - Any tips for building a remote software company, and how to maintain company culture when everyone is working from home? -  From a business point of view, how do you make the jump to working on highly technical projects that have long development times and higher costs? - Hypothetically, if one had the opportunity and means to pursue a completely different avenue in life even though it was not one's formal field of study... Thoughts on big life changes?  - Any interesting discussion of the history of the whaling business? - Sorry for a bit of a silly question, but you seem to like to use a light theme as opposed to a dark theme on your computer. Does it have any effect on your eyes in the long run? - How much time do you spend each day on your phone? - If you had to spend one year without computers, what would you do? - ​​I'm still waiting for phones that can do projection on the wall with a keyboard touchscreen with light detectors. - ​Did you learn anything useful during your brief time as a consultant? - If you could go back in time with your laptop running Mathematica, who would you show it to? Euler? Bernoulli? Newton? Others? - A discussion between Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing would be interesting. - You need to write this fiction, even if it's just blogged in chunks.

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: How is computation in nature different than the computation that a computer does? ​- Why do cars get much hotter than the outside air temperature? In Austin this week, my car's internal air temperature was 130° F, while it was 100° F outside. - Why haven't we discovered a cure for baldness? Compared to the other great apes, we have lost most of our body hair, so I wonder if baldness is not just our further evolutionary progression of losing all body hair. - Think about things in nature as having autonomous rules. For example, a flower is one rule, but different shapes, colors, etc. of flowers have different initial conditions. Is this too crazy an idea? - To what extent are plant cells Voronoi meshes? How about animal cells? To what extent could one build a simulation of a tree using something like a "Voronoi mesh automaton"? - Do you believe there is a concrete description of evolution waiting to be fleshed out in the multicomputational paradigm? If so, does its basic rule relate to the expansion of the hypergraph? - If mammals have a common ancestor, then how did they get divided into carnivores and herbivores? - What do you think of the notion of chemical interspecies communications? - ​Can we think of some fungi species that could reach some kind of intelligence like the human one in the future? - Are bubbles round because of gravity?

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

Questions include: You have published several other books after NKS. Has publishing technology and quality changed in the intervening time? - Would you like to provide a history of fluid mechanics, for example how the Navier–Stokes equations were discovered and how they work? - Given the recent hearings on and history of UFOs, do you have any thoughts on this subject? - In general, how do you engage with conspiracy theories or "alternative science"? I'm curious because most scientists in institutions are immediately dismissive of anything outside mainstream thought, but to me this seems just as intellectually dishonest as ascribing absolute certainty to any given conspiracy theory. - Isn't there a suspicious correlation between a surge in UFO sightings since the 1950s and a surge of UFO movies during that same period? - What about the Phoenix Lights event where thousands of people saw the same exact thing? - What are some other notable phenomena that people thought they observed that never were proven to have scientific validity (e.g. alchemy)? - How has your view of the future changed over the past 40 years? - Most surprising is that so many people are using the internet for watching cat videos instead of doing useful things. - Maybe cats are the aliens.

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: How do glaciers form? - Is the orbit of the Earth constant around the Sun? Or is there a variation on a large time frame? - Could it explain the ice ages? - ​​Have you ever studied aerial photos of ocean waves to assess their evolution for irreducibility/pockets of reducibility? - Do you think ocean waves are computationally universal? ​What are neutrinos for? Why do they exist if they don't interact with anything? Could aliens have a purpose for them? - ​​Didn't some neutrinos cause hardware failure in airplanes? - ​If technology could produce a small practical neutrino emitter and detector, would it be useful to send messages with them? - Will holograms as seen in the Iron Man movie ever be available for widespread use? - Why do some foods, like peanuts and crustaceans, cause deadly allergic reactions in some people, while others can eat them daily without harm? How many species have allergies?  - Do we know the mechanism behind this "training"?

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: In science, when is it preferable to self-publish rather than go through academic journals? ​- What place do you see for competitive behavior (especially in respect to the paper/citation system) in science? - What do you think would be a good replacement for peer review? - Have you ever considered working in finance instead of physics? Many very smart people work for trading companies (such as RenTech/Jane Street) for a couple years. - I sometimes think we waste some of our brightest minds on "making money." Could we somehow "shift" the market demand for technology that highly favors intellectual advancement in ideas sufficiently so that these "analytically bright" people are interested in scientific progression? - How do you "decide" to direct your behavior when faced with aggression in tense meetings? - Is it possible for low-level employees to prove themselves by solving complex problems in an operation despite lacking the typical formal qualifications of education, but nevertheless being promoted? - ​​One of the best docs for technical computing comes from Wolfram. Is there any general philosophy in Wolfram on balancing technical and business-oriented documentation that generates leads? - ​What advice would you have for someone who wants to pursue some academic field that's a bit unorthodox—like, say, your kind of physics—as a graduate student? - What I've been told is to save that for when you become a tenured professor (if ever). ​Is there a way to contribute to science without a college degree? - ​​Humans were scientists for a long time before there were college degrees (let alone colleges).

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: ​​What does the concept of the ruliad say about teleportation? ​​​- So are we experiencing a single state of the universe, or are we sampling different branches to build our experience? ​​​- ​If the speed of light emerges from propagation through discrete emes, then does the speed of light vary slightly? Could this be experimentally validated? ​​​- I've listened to live neurons in a lab, amplified and made audible—very strange experience. - It would be the ultimate biofeedback experience to visually see one's own neuronal activations spatially. Engineering that might be tricky for a while. - Would there be, in theory, a way to measure your relative position in rulial space? - How do new concepts get created and integrated in the mind of humanity? What makes them robust over 1,000+ years?

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

Questions include: How was it determined that light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum? - Could you speak about the history of the hard sphere model in statistical mechanics? In many textbooks, it is mentioned rather briefly for something so fundamental. - How did the study of nonlinear dynamics come about? I'd imagine it would be a known thing after Newton's work. - How important are complex numbers in the history of science and tech? Would the current state be possible without them? - Solving equations of that form led negative and complex numbers to be taken more seriously, but people did not see the utility of these types of numbers. A lot of facts that are true about real numbers are also true about complex numbers. They're not necessary to solve many problems, but they're convenient for packaging. - Have you ever seen CA-like objects produced by a Jacquard loom? - Just curious on your thoughts on technological singularity.

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: How much does a cat's tail affect its ability to land on its feet? Do cats without tails tend to fall over frequently? - ​​​​​Could a planet have "internal" rotation of its molten core while having a stagnant outer surface, or perhaps a slowly rotating surface? - ​​​​What's the deal with the Dzhanibekov effect (the observation a cosmonaut had when a spinning bolt flipped in space)? ​​​- The head and the shaft are rotating in unison. The head has more inertia around the axis. Don't forget the bolt is in a standing pressurized chamber of air. - ​​​​Will the Earth eventually cool down enough to stop producing a geomagnetic field? - ​​​​​Tails seem to be vestigial for many organisms. 

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: Are periodic boom and bust cycles of the economy inevitable, or should we by now be capable of managing national economies better, simultaneously avoiding both recessions and excessive inflation? - What modes does Stephen Wolfram have? - What are the personality traits of Stephen Wolfram that have made him become an entrepreneur? - Have you ever questioned your competence? If you did, what did you do in that situation? - What methodology do you use when you have to solve a problem you don't know how to solve but that has to be solved fast? - How does Stephen stay organized, in general? And specifically, how does he organize and write his papers and books? - Are there specific questions/audits that you routinely run on your business, life or thought process to facilitate innovation? - Problem solving with other people requires understanding other people's psychology. How do you go about understanding how to influence others to be efficient at solving problems? - Good banter can enhance the conversation. - How do you deal with multiple smart people on your teams disagreeing with each other, e.g. team member A proposes doing f() while team member B proposes g()? - Did you know Paul Graham between 2002 (NKS) and 2005 (Y Combinator founded)? Was NKS implicitly/explicitly why he ran many different "programs" (startups) to see what happened empirically? - It's mind blowing how many of the important points in time of modern innovation Wolfram was in the room for.

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: ​​As the Wolfram Language grows, will the number of lines of code ever shrink? What could cause such a trend? - ​​​​Scientists are trying to elucidate the origins of life on Earth. The current focus is exploring the "RNA world." This occurred 4.5 billion years ago. Could there have been dimensional fluctuations back then? - ​​​Why are small children able to spin around so quickly without getting dizzy, while adults become nauseous? ​​​- Do we still need the appendix? Are there any parts in our body that we "evolved away"? - Is science getting harder? Are ideas getting harder to find? - Yes, the more we've learned, the more we've learned that there's a lot more to learn! - ​How ironic then, that Albert Einstein started his revolution in physics while working in a patent office! - One thing that interests me is predicting what the future will look like (Alan Turing predicted computers would be capable of playing chess 50 years from when he said that, and sure enough, by 1997 they were able to do so).

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 is the value system you follow based on? Have you designed your own value and motivational structure? - Do you find exercising your personal thoughts on these livestreams can be a therapeutic experience? - Have you ever thought about the role of physical exercise or sports as a companion activity to intellectual pursuits? Exercise has been shown to be the only big booster of neuroplasticity besides being of a developmental age. Curious that campuses have so much of it. - Strange that as a university professor, you were not that interested in education—your enthusiasm for these livestreams says otherwise... and unflattering things on formal university education! - My capacity to brainstorm and associate ideas while walking is much greater. I highly recommend to approach walking like that. - Do you enjoy music? Who is your favorite composer/band? - Do you listen to music generated by AI? - Oh my gosh, I'm loving the image of Stephen at a Taylor Swift concert. - Thoughts on your involvement with the movie Arrival? - Do you have any advice (time management, prioritizing) for a first-time parent trying to juggle being present in a kid's life, but also having recently started a business? - How did you know you wanted to have children? And did they contribute in any way toward your learning in your field/general lifelong learning?- How did you manage at-home office hours? Lock the door and set expectations? - On the topic of kids, I'm currently eating a box of Cheerios with my two kiddos while watching this. - What do you think about the recent remote-work criticism by Elon Musk regarding innovation not working as well in a distributed/remote manner?

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: ​What's the difference between bits and bytes? - Can you talk about what a "sufficiently smart compiler" is? ​​​​- Sometimes I wonder if a program can be "lifted" to an unrelated mathematical representation, in which certain transformation rules would discover a more efficient optimization than in the absence of such "lifting." I think this requires "multicompilation."

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 we'll ever get to the stage of having flying cars? Is there any historical evidence? - Even now with traction control, anti-lock braking systems, automatic crash avoidance and the like, driving cars has automated "smart" safeguards nowadays. - It seems like many science discoveries or inventions happen due to some mistake or error that ultimately makes the insight or experiment work. How prevalent is this? - Can you talk a little bit about the history of automated theorem proving? Do you think we are on the cusp of an era when computers will be proving theorems and mathematicians will interpret them? - I think one interesting question would be to flip that around: could one use theorem-proving algos to figure out why black-box neural nets do what they do? - Will artificial general intelligence be the future of automation or a symbolic language like the Wolfram Language? ​- I think the computational mathematics system of the future will be generating new languages, new notations, new proofs, new theorems and new conjectures. - Artificial intelligence is an effort to create electronic learning. Not human thinking. ​A self-learning program will not develop human-like emotions. It has no physiological needs, and it has no need to fear. It can be replicated, it can be backed up, it can be turned off and 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: Does evolution move toward complexity or simplicity? - ​​​We should breed extremophile bacteria and algae to terraform planets by slowly exposing them to toxic atmospheres. ​​​- Can bacteria be diabetic? - ​​Did Craig Venter indeed create synthetic life, or did he just change the existing species? ​​- Maybe there are as many species on Earth as there are different CA rules that exhibit DNA patterns of the mechanical structure of an organism. ​​- The fact that you can edit genes makes me think that so much can be done to cure disorders and diseases. -  ​​What if the malaria parasite has some kind of function in biological systems that we're completely unaware of? This is the kind of thing I'm always wondering about.

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 think software innovations are stronger with mathematical research tied to them, even for "non-mathematical software"? - Can you say more about your writing process? How much time does it take for you to finish writing a blog post? How do you integrate a bunch of connected ideas into a coherent post? - The way I write is writing a rough draft of the most general ideas, then working to clarify them through more precise prose. - How do you tell a good story within your writing and also when communicating that story, i.e. when telling it to people in real life? - Are you going to publish a collection of open questions in ruliology? - Was Steve Jobs a "wave machine," or did he just have the tremendous luck and skill to ride five or six waves during his career? - What is your opinion on the usefulness of pure philosophy? - Would you separate business ideas and ideas that are curiosity- or discovery-driven, i.e. NKS? 

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: Do you think having many (eventually thousands of) IoT devices will necessitate some kind of additional routing logic on local networks to prevent primary devices (desktops) from being slowed? - ​​The implementation of IPv6 solved the problem of the number of possible internet addresses, at least. ​​​​- As higher frequencies are utilized in Wi-Fi to achieve higher bandwidth, Wi-Fi range and penetration are reduced. Is there some tech that would simultaneously increase both bandwidth AND range? - ​​​​​If gravitational waves travel through Penrose's eons, wouldn't these gravitational echoes make every particle wiggle at the quantum level, considering that there is a "noise" in spacetime? - ​​​How can we still see radiation from the early universe? Did it expand faster than light? ​​​​​Was it like a balloon expanding, where the light source was in the beginning expanded along with the universe? ​​- Is it theoretically possible to detect individual gravitons by launching space probes into black holes?

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

Questions include: Why did electromagnetism become a focus of study so late into human civilization? Wouldn't the ancients have observed and studied magnets and static electricity and characterized it as easily as we did? - Why did Turing come up with Turing machines as a basis for computation and not tag or substitution systems, or mobile automata or register machines? - According to Wikipedia, Telex became an operations teleprinter service in Germany in 1933. Maybe not Telex, but ticker tape. Ticker tape was around in the 1800s. - According to Wikipedia, ticker tape stock price telegraphs were invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an AT&T employee. - The joke was that Gödel was the only one who read it! - Einstein came to regret the name "theory of relativity." Would "theory of invariance" have been a better choice? - It's somewhat ironic that Russell had one of the clearest prose styles of all time and was responsible for one of the most unreadable books! - At least he didn't name it "Spacetime Stuff and Things."

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: What's the densest thing in the universe? I've heard that black holes don't count—why? - The entire mass of the Earth at neutron star density would fit into a sphere of 305 m in diameter (the size of the Arecibo Telescope). - What if black holes are like visible branchings in the multiway system? Consider the existence of white holes. So if there is "another universe" on the other side, that universe is causally... - AFAIK, fractal-like patterns are the best method to receive signals, but we now have cellular automata—which can maybe do it even better? - ​I lived in a 16th-floor apartment across from a field of transmission towers for an AM station. There were 5–6 radio towers, the closest about 200 yards away. So the AM station could be heard on lots of electronic devices in our house: telephones, answering machine, recording devices, etc. (The AM station towers were powerful.) - Can it be that one day we will be able to see into Earth's past, finding an object in space that mirrors light left by Earth a long time ago? ​- I can imagine future humans, having forgotten we sent such a signal on a long round-trip journey, receiving our message and jumping to all sorts of funny conclusions, depending on what we sent.

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: Would you agree that the way you succeed matters a lot in regards to whether you get to enjoy your success or not? - How do you mold your environment to create good working habits? - What's the best passive way to make money (stock trading, investing, etc.) and how stable is it? - ​It's a matter of time. If you spend a lot of time on investments, you won't have time for research and other projects. - Any thoughts on managing people's personalities on a project? - What is your approach when exploring a new topic or learning a new technology, e.g. note taking, practice, recall? - On the same note, I believe that a great team makes great products, not great individuals. Have you found this to be true in your products?

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

Excerpt from livestream episode History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 22, 2023), Stephen Wolfram answers: What is the history of AI? What is the first recorded example of artificial intelligence?

Stephen's conversation with Terry Sejnowski on the history of neural nets is available here: https://youtu.be/XKC-4Tosdd8

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: Can you explain rasterization? -  Does the human visual system use a molecular-scale version of rasterization? - When I close my eyes and apply pressure, why do I see colored dynamic geometric patterns? ​I also see the grid, and it's interesting how it fades when your normal vision fades back in, and the gray/black squares sometimes oscillate while maintaining the grid structure. - Do you have any stories about Fresnel lenses? I just got the Meta Quest 2 VR headset and it uses them; the same kind that a rear-projection TV or a lighthouse uses, which is amusing. - ​Considering visual perception discontinuous or discrete, can we consider it quantized? In that case, could it be calculated as "discrete packets of visual perception," based on quantum physics?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 thinking process of the discovery of complex numbers, quaternions and octonions? - Can you go over the history of Grothendieck? What lead to the homotopy hypothesis? - Can you talk about the history of four-function calculators? - Could you tell us when cybersecurity was considered an important topic in computer science? - I bet one of the first major applications of cybersecurity was for the telephone system, which was essentially a giant computer that people started hacking to make free long-distance calls in the 1960s. - If nature is fundamentally computational, then what are the bugs in nature? - Can you talk about Steve Jobs's NeXTSTEP approach to software? Does it have an ongoing legacy? - In the Netherlands, if you dial #31# before the phone number, the other person won't see your phone number, so these things still exist. - So is evolution a bug or a feature?

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: Considering visual perception discontinuous or discrete, can we also consider it quantized? In that case, could it be calculated as "discrete packets of visual perception," based on quantum physics? - If the level of CO2 was much higher in the past, why wasn't there a runaway greenhouse effect back then? - I looked into it, and apparently limestone rocks absorb carbonic acid in rain and "scrub" the CO2 out of the atmosphere, but it takes forever! - Do the electron orbitals of an atom ever rotate? Do they rotate at the same rate as the nucleus, or can they rotate independently? Is this the same property as electron spin, or is it separate?

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 take work problems home? What are your thoughts about a balanced work life? - What is a "shocking" meeting? - What do you think of Elon Musk buying Twitter? - It's like voting for algorithms in elections! Algorithm personalities or bias will be increasingly important, I think. - Now that I think of it, a "master AI" will basically mimic a human—a "well-rounded" human derived from all the info out there. - The real world is also highly dynamic, so one AI might be ideal for a while, and then another will be better. - When something seems to be a mishmash of complicated spaghetti code, it's often because the obvious and simple solution is being dismissed early on for mistaken reasons. - No code is the best code in the case of Twitter ranking algorithms. Just let users do it with sorting/filters! - It's pretty funny watching people get excited about Twitter again. How can we avoid the world becoming an electronic panopticon when everything goes digital (currency, ID, AI government...)? - I do think the marketplace approach isn't a bad option, but it seems like the optimal way to do that is just to reopen the Twitter API and let different people create clients. - You end up with a social network as good as the people in the network. I don't think you can elevate people by moderating what they are allowed to say. - I don't think you can avoid bias; it's just inherent to language and minimally complex knowledge units. Bias should be a feature more than something to avoid. It's more useful to understand bias than to attempt to neutralize it. - What tools do you use to get refocused? How do you set yourself up for more creative exploratory activities?

Part 2 (of 2)—Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Terry Sejnowski joins Stephen to discuss the the long story of how neural nets got to where they are. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

Part 1 (of 2)—Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Terry Sejnowski joins Stephen to discuss the the long story of how neural nets got to where they are. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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: What is quantum chemistry good for? Anything interesting? - Chemistry is great! Just fertilizer has made an incredible impact throughout history. The Haber process almost single-handedly changed human history. - Isn't organic chemistry/biology the study of programmable matter? - Can you tell the story of traveling through a central processing unit from the electron's perspective? - FETs use voltage at the gate to make a field that "pinches off" the flow of current from the drain to the source.

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

Questions include: What is the history of dimensional regularization and zeta regularization? How are they related to renormalization? - ​​When and how was the first compiler made? What language was it for, and what language was it written in? ​​​- Can you talk about the history of computer graphics standards and libraries, such as OpenGL etc.? ​​- Larry Sanger - ​​HP 9800s were awesome. They had two overlap video memories. One was ASCII character–based, and the other was HP plotter language controlled. They both showed up on the screen. Handy/versatile.

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: Questions include: How does an Easter Bunny lay eggs? - Why is the Planck temperature the limit of potential heat? - Is void space really void, or is there something there? - Does that mean there are more dimensions than the typical ones? - From how many discrete stars was our Earth made?

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: Did you have any fun April Fools' Day occurrences this year? - What is the best April Fools' joke you've been a part of or experienced? - Do you enjoy traveling? Is there anywhere you haven't been yet that you've always wanted to visit? Good food is an added benefit also. - Travel tip: I always have a big snack hidden in my bag, just in case. - There is nothing wrong with chocolate (no matter what the truth is). - These days, people don't remember portable computers being 10+ pounds. I'm curious: did you ever own an old Toshiba? - This is what I feel we are on the cusp of. Less rigid paradigms like general media consumption have ballooned (look at Twitch). - I hope to see the day that unknown citizen scientists can democratically do research with thousands of others, and get compensated for that research. - Absolutely. I can only feel like academia is on its way out, and more sophisticated platforms will emerge for collaboration.

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: How was it possible for civilizations across the world to develop pyramids independently (Egypt and Mayans/Aztecs)? Is there any scientific significance to this? - Does the double-helix shape in DNA show up anywhere else in nature? ​- Are there any examples of logical gates being built out of chemical reactions? What breakthroughs are needed to achieve this? - How many gates are needed for a programming language like C? - Is it necessary to have supercomputers to do meaningful biomolecule-level simulations? - What life forms have arbitrary differences between individuals and what life forms have meaningfully "unique" individuals? - Are Darwin's survival of the fittest, evolution and machine learning all basically the same thing? If not, how do they differ? ​- Can you please say something about the formation of buckyballs? - How are gemstones formed and how can we model all gem features? Colors, textures, asterism, anisotropy, everything? What do you know? - In quartz, I also notice imperfections like streaks; seems to be the molecular analog to cellular automata.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for institute-type work be? ​- What is the Emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? ​​- And what about around the world, overseas and in other countries? - You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like "fishing trips" and "stamp collecting," but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria. - ​Activity overseas and in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems... you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on. ​- Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? ​- British physics is more geometry guild, and American physics is more group theory and particle physics guild. ​- What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? ​​​- I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? - ​​I think in a lot of places in history, the role of academic pursuit was that of a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor." ​​- Philosophy and mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarski's semantics relates formal logic to topology just like math and computer languages. ​​- Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. that cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?

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: Thoughts on longevity research and its feasibility? Does computational irreducibility have practical implications for the difficulty of solving this complex biological problem? Also, do you ever get sad about the shortness of the current human lifespan causing us to miss out on the (potentially unimaginable) future opportunities for understanding the universe?  - Do you think a multi-computational approach to medicine will detect disease first by observing visual systems or chemical systems or otherwise? - ​Is this discussion of mortality curves related to the survivorship function? - ​Would there be any justification for pursuing eternal life for humans, if feasible? - Aging might be the condition that makes the most sense to study economically, in terms of the money spent by health systems on related problems overall. - According to Michael Graziano, immortality will be achieved by uploading human consciousness into computers. - The discussion today reminded me of this post I saw where it asked if you could live for 150 years but you had to upload your brain to the metaverse and give up your real body, would you? - Would you upload your brain? - Yes, but uploading a copy of your brain into a computer means there are two of you, and computational irreducibility means that the two are different from each other! -  Is bureaucratic inefficiency analogous to aging in biological systems? That the system over time grinds to a halt and dies due to build up of systematic inefficiencies? Can we apply life extension to institutions?

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

Questions include: What happened with the computer during WWII? ​​- The ​Imitation Game is a great movie about computers in World War 2. - ​​How important are Nobel Prizes? Are there any scandalous omissions? ​​- It is taxable income. - ​​Some of the physics prizes have been a bit random. - Penzias and Wilson more or less accidentally discovered the CMB, but Gamov predicted it and got nothing (I think). -​​ Thank you for encouraging our curiosity. My question is: When and why did apprenticeships end? It seems all the greats, such as Benjamin Franklin, were sent to be apprentices. ​​- What happened to the interdisciplinary science of the Renaissance? - Do the efficiency gains of specialization outweigh the harms of institutional departmentalization? - ​​Are crazy ideas useful to talk about, or are they only good for guiding intuition in research?

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: So do we live in a simulation or not? - So how do we perceive change? Why is motion possible? Why do we perceive that we can make "choices"? What does it mean to make a choice? - But every observer observes the same dimensionless constants (like the fine-structure constant), we don't have any choice about that observation. Or is 1/137 something that lies on an observable manifold of the ruliad? ​​- What if the beautiful images of stars and galaxies really are a molecule in another universe and time is very, very slow in that universe from our view? - ​I always thought, what if we are like bacteria living on a bit of sand on the bottom of an alien's shoe while he rides an elevator, and what happens when the elevator stops? - ​​Moving at the speed of thought, is there a max on how fast we can think?

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 could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Any business/scientific reason why that place? - University vs. experience in programming and computer science: which one is more valuable? - How do you manage technical debt? - What advantages come from using Wolfram Language as in-house code? - How do you manage technical debt in Java codebases? - Good afternoon, Dr. Wolfram. How do you cope with the stress of releasing new products? As it is very hard to judge the success beforehand, do you have any techniques to reduce that stress? - If you were never allowed to use Wolfram Language, what would you use? - Do you find that innovation is largely driven from within, or is it largely external (e.g. your users push you for more features)? - How does Stephen see the current co-creation space and how can we bring the benefits to smaller businesses with smaller budgets? - What is the best way to fund a research project? - Would you always have to artificially describe some midterm future application of your research to sell a business plan to some investors?

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

Questions include: What is the history of "infinity" in mathematics, or in science in general? - I would like to see a differentiation between eternity and infinity. ​- Can you talk about the history of the "elementary length"? What have people believed to be the smallest possible length, and what events have changed this belief? - If space is discrete, does this mean that the fundamental constants are rational numbers? If the fundamental constants were real numbers, couldn't you encode arbitrary amounts of information into your theory, hiding the complexity in these constants? - ​​At what stage in history did the idea of extraterrestrial alien life start to be entertained? Is this a relatively recent phenomenon, or was it a thing even in ancient Greek philosophy? - When did we first realize that we only see the same side of the Moon?​ - What belief systems/groups of people have historically believed in a fundamentally discrete universe? ​- Why do you think the distribution of new discoveries is so random? See, for example, Nassim Taleb's example of 6,000 years between the wheel and wheels on a suitcase, for example.

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: Can you explain why Earth's air doesn't escape into the vacuum of space, considering gas expands to fill the available volume without a container? - Why are there these phases of matter? Are these phases "real" or do they depend on what we can "observe"? - Sodium chloride makes incredibly square crystals. - The patterns snowflakes are predisposed to follow also drive the patterns that evolving vegetation (ferns, and the two types of trees) grows/grew into. It is all super interesting. - How perfect are crystals? Can they be used to detect the microscopic structure of space? - If the atoms of space act like a superfluid, would that mean vortices may arise if the universe is rotating? - And yet diffusion doesn't work in space. This is why I think it is electrostatic forces that must initiate coalescence. - Could photons frozen in absolute zero create "hard light"?

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

Excerpt from livestream episode Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [Part 117], Stephen Wolfram answers: How does ChatGPT work?

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: Does Stephen play any musical instrumentals? Would you consider songs formal systems? I've been imagining a multi-way graph for all of the chords on a guitar. - How do you think the behavior of innovation changes with scale? That is, what's the difference in innovation between startups, small businesses, and enterprises? - Do you have electronic-off day/time-window (no electronic communication and no computers etc)? - How do you deal with back pain or eye strain from reading too much? - If you started your business again, what would you avoid or do differently? - As we are eliminating jobs at light speed, how do you think society will cope with mass unemployment after we can automate majority of trade related jobs? - How did you manage the sales side when you started that first company? - If you were to go back in time, would you be able to get the world to 2020 tech within 20 years? - But what happens in the future when we have AIs that can simulate realities that are indistinguishable from reality? What if you can simulate people doing jobs? - Does Stephen Wolfram think that people should specialize in education earlier, instead of taking general classes in high school, focus on one field, get to undergrad level of education earlier? - Didn't Feynman study Mayan Hieroglyphs? - Can an old dog learn new tricks? (i.e. can a middle aged person learn math, programing, and be successful anywhere near someone that started when they were young.) - What innovations, if any, do you think may be most useful for K-12 public education in the US?

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 10 a special number in any way? Why is scientific notation (or the digit system) in base 10? Is it just because we have 5×2 fingers? -Lots of flowers have five-fold symmetry. - ​Empedocles believed arms, fingers and legs just roamed around as creatures of their own, eventually merging into all kinds of creatures, and only the five-fingered, four-limbed animals won out. It's like an ancient Greek natural selection. - Why are some animals cold-blooded? - Can the Wolfram Physics Project be used to simulate models of new medications for diseases? #WolframPharma. - Will we ever successfully be able to use cryogenics to freeze humans? Won't the ice crystals rupture our cells, like a banana left in the freezer and then thawing it out? - Is it true that cats domesticated themselves compared to other animals that humans domesticated for a purpose?

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

Questions include: In eight hundred years, what will people call the methodology of NKS? - ​I always felt Ptolemy's system was a necessary step before Copernicus and Newton. Without that slightly dodgy pseudo-scientific reasoning, Copernicus and Newton wouldn't have "fixed" and refined it. - Newton invented calculus and his three laws. Do you consider the new Physics Project developing a new tool like calculus, or are you inventing new laws? - Why was gravitoelectromagnetism ignored for so long? - ​I disagree with Wolfram. I think there is no "end" to how infinitesimal the universe gets. There's always more—the discoveries will never end. - I understand a great deal of human history was lost in ancient Alexandria. Of the early mathematics, are there texts that reference concepts that are lost to us? - ​​Is ruliology a "young person's game," an "old person's game" or something else? - What traits do you think will be most important for great ruliologists? (Ruliologers? Rulioligizers? Rulioligraphers?)

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: The term \"spatom\" as a portmanteau of space atom (atom of space): yes or no? - Did you ever meet Vladimir Arnold? What do you think of the Erlangen program? - ​Can spoken language be broken into a set of logical primitives? What major attempts have been made at this, and in what ways did they fail? Is GPT-3 an example of building up from language primitives? - Language is to all things; the context of its content - Will we have a better designed/optimized cities, homes, everyday objects in future? - Since the world is now built around humans, would humanoid robots be the most general? (like a Rosie for in home tasks)

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 your thoughts on GDPR legislation and the general hostility towards cloud technologies in the EU? Lots of tech companies are getting huge fines these days? - Your hair is looking sharp today, looks like a fresh cut. What are your thoughts on the grooming habits of scientists and technologists? Any correlation with grooming/dress and productivity? - Can you talk about the perception of CEOs within their own companies and in the public eye? How to maintain one's leadership and reputation when thousands of people rely on one's decisions? - Have you ever felt that you were working on too many projects at one time? I am developing 3 different products now. I love the challenge. But is one project at a time better in your experience? - What be your ideal business size? How many employees is there a sweet spot? - What's your rule of thumb to change your mind? - Your record of being a WFH CEO is unique. Has the pandemic changed how you have been CEO-ing? - If you don't mind me asking, Stephen, what do you do to relax and unwind from your business? - What's the best way to organize thoughts, ideas, pieces of code, frameworks and projects when there are hundreds?

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: Should an International agreement be created so that Artificial General Intelligence has rights before AGIs exist so that they feel their rights are respected? - How do we know you are Stephen Wolfram the human and not an AI generating an artificial Stephen Wolfram? How could we perform the Turing test for this livestream? - ​Are you hopeful for brain/computer interfacing in the near future?

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

Questions include: I think that there has been a concerted and focused effort to give greater emphasis to STEM education since WWII. Has the history of science been left out in this process? - Nassim Taleb points out that engineering precedes theory, even in complicated projects such as jet propulsion. Can you think of historical counter-examples when theory preceded engineering? - Can you talk about some times in history when scientific knowledge was destroyed and why that occurred? - What is the history of Ivy League? Why are those universities so prestigious? - How does science progress from outside of the academic process? - What do you make of the work being undertaken to lab grow woolly mammoths in a collaboration between a team at Harvard and the company Colossal and its potential in curbing the thawing of permafrost to mitigate the impact of the release of all the built up carbon? - Do you believe that Fermat really solved Fermat's Last Theorem with a "truly marvelous demonstration", or was his solution probably not mathematically rigorous? - What is your opinion on polymathy in the modern age of specialization? - ​How has our understanding of time changed over history? - What do you think is the limit of human understanding, or is there a limit?

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: Large language models like gpt3, the way they work and how to ask the right questions - the dangers of space junk around the earth posing a risk on commercial space hotels in the future as the industry grows? - It seems like science literacy is on the decline, what can we do about it? What does it mean to be scientifically literate? - Stephen_Wolfram do you think the scientific process has been damaged during the pandemic, but more because the speed of information opinion on the internet? - Stephen_Wolfram Why is development of Nanotechnology so slow despite it's effectiveness in medicine, oncology etc?

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: Hey Dr. Wolfram, I'm Sneed, and I work within the agricultural industry. Can you see cellular automata benefiting my industry in the future? Can potentially predict crop yields? - Have you read SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) and what do you think about this book?

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: Mr. Wolfram do you like video games? If so, what games do you play? - What do you plan to achieve by the end of 2022? - Is there a way to gauge how good your own business/product ideas are when you have limited external feedback available? - Stephen, with access to the internet, having access to knowledge is not a problem, but humans absorb knowledge very slowly. How can we optimize the use of the knowledge we have access to? - ​How do you manage to keep up with a project after the most challenging parts are complete? Sounds silly, but to me, I loose the interest after I crack its core. - ​If you were starting a tech company today outside of the US, where would you start it? - Why doesn't Stephen have an American accent after living in the US for so long? - On innovations and in fact thinking in general: What analogies/mental models do you find most useful? - Do you think 4 day workweek is a good idea? Feels like it's defacto becoming so post-pandemic. - How to approach my boss, so he makes the decision, that I believe is good for the company? Is it good to insist or is it better to do it softly? - What has one to learn about business administration? what are useful learning resources? - Have you ever regretted leaving the academy? - How far out do you prep your day to day work? I'm starting to get the hang of studying routines but not organization of what there is to do lol

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 benefit of hindsight, what would you have changed in the early developments of the internet during the late 60s, early 70s, if anything? - ​What was your take in 1993 when US Congress cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider project which had been started south of Dallas, TX? What long-term effects did this have? - Dr. Wolfram, I recall Sir. Kelvin or one of his contemporary was saying everything is discovered physics, it was just before special relativity. Do you think we are in a similar precipice? - I'm a cryogenic engineer if you want your brain stored for later in life, then please don't hesitate to contact me. Stephen, it would be an honor to store your brain!

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 traceroute was disabled, or if all servers refused to send TTL expirations, would there be a way to trace internet traffic? Or would the internet be untraceable, kind of analogous to a TOR network? - ​Can you describe how packets get dropped? Is there a decision made, a timeout, or some physically-mediated loss? Are there different implementations for routers / servers? - ​Would love to hear about the limitations of Moore's law. Is Moore's law still relevant to set corporate targets as companies like Intel use it as a benchmark of progress? - If an alien civilization would sent a spaceship from Proxima Centauri to earth with a speed of light, can we detect it before it arrives? - If we did have a "transporter" to send ourselves to another galaxy as a signal, would packet loss be a severe danger for those intergalactic signals?

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

Questions include: What is the history of bugs and debugging? - ​Did you ever meet Andrei Sakharov? What do you think of his Cosmology? - How did you meet Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and why do you think he was able to take very computational approach to finance instead of reasoning by analogy? - ​How does Log4Shell compare to other historically-significant web vulnerabilities? Does the internet tend to course correct after large vulnerabilities?

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 you build a reverse natural language understanding engine? One that would take in Wolfram Language / JavaScript / Python and output natural language explaining what the code is doing? - ​Dr. Wolfram, any suggestion on what problems/case work to use for introductory programming? - Why is is harder to compute integrals rather than derivatives? - Are there any major changes to the design, architecture, or low level code of computers that are now standardized that you would change if you could? - Are there laws governing the development of human history? - Any tricks for reading textbooks that maximize the understanding of the material?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 of science/technology as progressing in the way Thomas Kuhn suggested in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolution' (i.e., paradigm -> crisis -> paradigm shift, incommensurability, etc...) or in some other way? - Stephen, is science always been based on finding patterns in nature? - Why did networked computing grow relatively slowly between 1969's Arpanet and 1989's HTTP? Was it a lack of imagining the Internet's potential or technical barriers (e.g. packet switching network)? - ​When did you first get introduced to the internet? Who told you about it? What tool(s) did you use...Mosaic? What was your reaction? - Why do you believe it took so long for highly parallel graphics cards to be applied to scientific fields? It seems like a 10-15 year delay from SGI to CUDA etc - Stephen has said once that he knew Julia Robinson. Would be great to hear more about it - ​Any thoughts on the Heideggerian view of technology and modern technology? - ​How does self-organizing order emerge in physics and biology - are they analogous? Can the universe be said to be in the business of self organization?

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: Can you use Wolfram Language to log onto a website with username and password and read data from a website? - Will computational chem/Biochem programs (Alphafold2?) be accurate enough in its predictions to completely dominate private R&D to reduce the costs and duration of expensive wet lab experimentation? - When did you first decide to hire people at Wolfram Research? How did you recruit & evaluate them? What have you learned about hiring since then? - ​have you ever authentically read and replied to an unsolicited email if someone has an important idea for Mathematica and/or the Wolfram Language? - Do you have developers that work in a large variety of topics (changing monthly perhaps), or are most in a 'fixed' position/topic? - When you reach the level you do with Wolfram Research, what steps do you undertake to ensure that you continue to innovate and don't lose ground to your competitors, and that you don't take the wrong business decisions? - As someone with a technical background, how do you maintain a holistic overview of your company? For instance, do you better attempt to understand the company's financial books? - what is your work out routine? - how do you balance time being creative (for projects) vs the everyday necessary work? - At the start of crypto projects there is always this battle between centralization and decentralization. You need an amount of centralization in the beginning to get things going. How long should a project be given before you let in the masses? - Do you have an opinion concerning "Poor Charlie's almanacs: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger"? - Do you use rules similar to those in Cellular Automata when you manage your company or your company's projects?

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: Do you think its possible to time travel, for real? - Has Darwinian evolution stopped in humans and of so are we descending to extinction because of dysgenics? - how likely is it for a big asteroid to hit earth? - ​How far ahead can you talk about human evolution adapting with technological progression? - Could gene drive technology replace natural evolution in favor of intelligent design?

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

Questions include: Can we consider very early games like the game of Go as an expression of a mathematical thinking? - ​Is science still the place where the best thrive or has that shifted to "industry"? What's the historical context? - Do you credit E=mc^2 to Einstein or to the Italian Olinto De Pretto, who discovered it before Einstein? - Is there a high period of any one institution that's your favorite? (ex: Bell Labs and the young Turks in the 40s, PARC in the 70s and 80s, etc.) - What technology got lost from the moon-landing so they cant repeat it nowadays? And how did they shielded the radiation during the moon mission? - What is your perspective on the growing sentiment of racism in technology, such as algorithmic bias? Do you agree that there is an issue, and if so what are some steps that need to be taken in response? - ​Do you think (monotheistic) religion was in some sense a precursor to science because it presented the world as having a single truth which all people could somehow access? - Why did it take so long to get so technically advanced?

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: Difference between Astroparticle Physics and Astrophysics? Which is more interesting in your opinion? - Why do doctors say that no vaccination can be 100% effective? - ​According to Wikipedia, some bowhead whales have been "estimated to be between 135 and 170 years old." Is this alleged estimate correct? Can some mammals live to be 200 years old? - What's different in the vaccines? Like what's the difference between one and another.

Questions include: Has Wolfram Research, Inc., done any research and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? - Question about your personal data logging: have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any ML on that data? - When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? - Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? - What do you do to keep up your energy, supplements, omega 3 oils? - What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? - I work 9 AM to 9 PM, in programming/math. I feel its fine, but people say i work too much and that i should give myself a break. Should i listen? When does your working day end? - Music while working? - Do you advise young professionals to "play the game", as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial? do you respect people who do this approach? - What do you spend your personal money on, do you ever treat yourself to sth nice, jewelry, fine dinner, etc. ? - Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbors? - How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? - What's your opinion on company acquisition? Have Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how to quickly integrate an acquired company? - My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise he learns/does that would be worth the doing? - ​Building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/Trees/AST from >30 years ago) are in need of a rethink?

Questions include: Has Wolfram Research, Inc., done any research and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? - Question about your personal data logging: have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any ML on that data? - When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? - Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? - What do you do to keep up your energy, supplements, omega 3 oils? - What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? - I work 9 AM to 9 PM, in programming/math. I feel its fine, but people say i work too much and that i should give myself a break. Should i listen? When does your working day end? - Music while working? - Do you advise young professionals to "play the game", as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial? do you respect people who do this approach? - What do you spend your personal money on, do you ever treat yourself to sth nice, jewelry, fine dinner, etc. ? - Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbours? - How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? - What's your opinion on company acquisition? Have Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how to quickly integrate an acquired company? - My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise he learns/does that would be worth the doing? - ​Building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/Trees/AST from >30 years ago) are in need of a rethink?

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

Questions include: Who are the most famous Mathematica users you know? - ​What separates the greats (Einstein, Dirac, Newton, etc.) from everyone else? Is there a tip you have for a young physics undergraduate to become a better physicist? - ​I am a physicist which didn't get to do any discrete mathematics in his bachelor degree. I got involved in summer school last year, but because of my lack of technical knowledge I didn't get the most of it. Apart from Mathematica and (hyper)graph theory what would you recommend one should study to get more involved with the project? - When do you look at the story of some technology, how far should you go? I tried to study the story of machine learning and in a sense the first decision tree was 500BC, and even earlier in the bible -​ Is Excel a computational tool? - Who invented Polyominoes? Why where they invented what role did they play in mathematics? - Does knowing calculus allow one to make money in the 18 century? Or get a job?

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: How common is 'atomic oxygen' in the universe? - if temperature and pressure both comes from gas molecules bouncing around with a certain momentum, why are the two different/what's the difference between the two? - ​How do I educate my children like your experience growing up in order to give them the potential for any STEM field? - If you were in your young twenties and just graduated college which field would you go into? AI/ML Programming - Aerospace Engineering - Blockchains/Crypto. - ​Is there a closest packing for Spikeys? What's the smallest & largest Spikey ever constructed or discovered? - ​Speaking on AI, do you think we will see AGI this century, if yes what is your best guess at to when? - ​So what's the deal with superfluids. Any useful purposes?

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: What's the physical limitation of growth speed of humans? Can you get from 10 kg to 90 kg in a month theoretically? - What is the function of the human heart? Is it best understood as a pump or in a different way? - Humans exposed to prolonged micro-gravity conditions suffer from well known health issues. Short of 1g gravity, do we know the minimum gravity required to prevent such issues e.g, 0.1g, 0.3g, 0.5g etc? - ​How can quantum computer solve the protein folding problem? - Is being able to get to the lowest energy state a statement that there is a "continuous" series of energy states that the molecule has, that the transformations from one state to another is "smooth" enough? That there is no energy state that is "isolated" from all others?

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

Questions include: Are you familiar with Norbert Wiener's work? Is it relevant to current computer science at all? - Do you have any interesting stories/comments about Frederick P. Brooks? - What did you learn from The Mythical Man Month? (and when did you first read it?) - Dear Dr. Wolfram, what is your opinion on John Backus' lecture from 1977: "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"? - Was it even one cornerstone for your thinking? - Did general system theory and systems theory die out and why? - Does functional programming count as liberation from von Neumann style? - Do you think scientific software development has a very different development practice? - Are you saying that flowchart descriptions of algorithms and computations originate from systems theory/general systems theory? I always thought that is just a part of modern computer science. - Regarding what you just mentioned about education and teaching programming, what are your thoughts generally on how far our higher level languages are abstracting more and more away from the core metal? Do you worry about future generations of programmers not understanding core fundamentals and that we might come become stunted in terms of coming up with new languages and computing paradigms due to a lack of expertise? - Were you ever involved in the development of a kind of software that you now think might actually be morally questionable in some sense?

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: Do you think will we get anti gravity cars? - How much memory does a rock have? Do protons or photons have memory? Do orbits have memory? - When is someone considered dead? How do we define the line between alive and dead? - How does a flock of sparrows know how to all change directions simultaneously? - Do you think its more important for humanity to look to colonize another planet or try to look after the earth and make it habitable for the future? - Can we push the jet streams?

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 plan and track your product roadmaps? How far in advance do you plan? - Do you decide to go to bed based on the time or once you finish a piece of work? Or do you like to leave pieces of work open to sleep on? - What impact is China's energy crisis going to have on manufacturing? Are you worried about inflation of the US dollar? How to not worry about larger Macroeconomic events and just focus on business? - How is your ERP replacement project going that was mentioned a year ago? - Has anyone built a computer yet that is good at programming other computers? - Do you agree a life unexamined is not worth living? - What would you like to see younger/newer programmers focusing on? Do you think that the computer science community is focusing too much on video games, dating apps, etc.? - To be creative, do I need to know how to change peoples beliefs? There are many people in this world with many creative ideas, though how probable is it that I am the one to proof a science like no other? - Do you think the current democracies are the apex of history, or better systems to organize societies has to come? - ​Hi Mr. Wolfram, maybe this is too personal but have you ever experience anxiety or any other of mental health problems, in relation with managing a business and your time? thanks - Why should one start a startup when computer scientist are super paid in already existing companies? - Is this why Professor Feynman insisted on explaining to Plant Workers about neutrons? - I just graduated college in Business Management, but fell in love with mathematics and computer science within my senior year. Is it foolish to go back and get another undergraduate degree?

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: How does a short wave radio signal go completely around the world? - Will new logic or mathematics operators might be invented/discovered? - Why do we have 2 different things such as (numbers + operators , data + algorithms) and why do we represent many things with those 2 things? Why not 3? Why not 4? Why not 1? - What's the difference between CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, ASICs? - How viable is a big numerical reverse database to identify closed forms of real numbers such Plouffe's inverter?

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

Questions include: What sort of math was ancient India up to? - How were modern shipping containers standardized? What are some of the advantages of optimal standardized packaging? - Are there any developments in replacing or improving workflow for math papers, that is mostly writing in latex and reading pdf if I am not mistaken? What is current trend? - How can we ensure the software generating the proof is correct?

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's the best way to build a personal dashboard (e.g. like your swhome.wolfram.com)? - You proudly say, you have 3 children, Elon Musk has 7. What is your opinion on the number of kids? - Have you and Peter Thiel ever crossed paths or interacted? You seem to be the 'poster child' for a lot of his public ideologies and convictions, but some of your core ideas kinda challenge his- I'd like to know what Stephen thinks of the Seasteading institute too -  Do you think it's okay to edit DNA of your potential kid for better? - Would you consider yourself a risk taker or risk averse? - What's that red book on your bookshelf? Third book in from the pillar (all red next to black book near middle pillar) - Is messaging authors a good way to learn background information? - Have you ever thought about going on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast? Your podcasts with Lex Fridman were great. Were those podcasts also helpful to you in some way?

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 do mathematicians create models if machine learning can create more complex and better models? - Hello, can you create gold from lead by having some lead next to a big pile of plutonium? - How proportionate is public opinion of a person to actual achievement of that person generally? - ​How would one go build an UFO? What technology do we need for that? What mathematical achievements/solutions do we need?

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

Questions include: How much of your work on cellular automata was influenced by Ulam's work during the Manhattan Project? - ​How do you approach studying the history of technology to inform your work on current projects? Do you do very targeted studies when starting a project? How much historical context is enough? - ​Is there a list of Wolfram recommended history of science and technology books? - What was it about ancient Greece that allowed for great advancements in math and science and great thinkers? - Could you talk about the history on Ed Fredkin's work and if its similar to your work about Cellular Automata? - In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the alien monolith is a Von Neumann probe. Is it rectangular because of the cellular automata inspiration? - ​What is the book top right with the horse's head? Just curious! - What do you think is the significance of the antikythera mechanism? How close do you think the Greeks were to a technological civilization? - Have you read Asimov's Foundation? Do you think psychohistory could actually be an actual science with real predictive power? Does it need to find pockets of computational reducibility - ​You said the cellular automata experiments you did in the 80s could have been done in Los Alamos, why do you think those weren't done then?

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: Are there any models that predict how society behaves? - What knowledge helps weather prediction and how? Like pressure, temperature, wind, distances, etc..? - When you (Stephen Wolfram) count in your head, do you count verbally or visually (or another way)? Feynman wrote an interesting story about this in one of his books. - If you write enough errors that cancel each other out perfectly, your code is perfect. - How do we improve our inductions towards producing creative results for science? - Which side of the quarter has better aerodynamics? If a quarter was flipped by a human hand 100,000 times on a windy day, and another 100,000 times on a non windy day, would the overall outcome still be 50/50 heads/tales in both instances? - How can you end up with a different set of rules while describing a system with definite and observable behavior? No matter alien consciousness or not, the rules will remain the same - How do you spell that? ooogleriffousness? - Why can't logic be easier to understand? What I mean is all this academic stuff that teaches logic, it seems all Greek to me. When I try to learn more, I get bored fast because they explain it too complicated.

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: ​How closely are computer clocks synchronized in different parts of the world? How do they synchronize? - How does the body know when to create scar tissue? Does the body make different scar tissue based on the tissue it's repairing? - ​What is the meaning of light years? -  Could you say something about this year's Nobel Prize on complex system? Is there any relation to your Wolfram model? - ​How do messenger pigeons find their destination? - How to fix dizziness on a boat? (new navy sailor here) - ​Were you bitten by a pigeon as a child? #spiderman #pigeonman? - I wonder if there is a difference of accuracy in the sensing of the magnetic field depending on whether is just 1 bird, a few, or many flying together

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

Questions include: What does history have to say about combating anti science movements/wacky conspiracy theories, especially when it comes to the more dangerous ones such as the anti-vaccine movement? - How have people come to believe in grey-headed aliens? - ​The counter culture movement is sometimes associated with a renewed interest in quantum mechanics in the sixties. Would Richard Feynman, who lived the era, have agreed? - ​Did Dick Feynman ever prank you or pick a lock that belonged to you? - How much of your work on cellular automata was influenced by Ulam's work during the Manhattan Project?

Join Stephen Wolfram as he discusses updates on the Physics Project, the Ruliad, Multicomputation, and Metamathematics!

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 do flies fly around seemingly constantly with no apparent goal whatsoever? - Why don't we make houses out of some kind of amber and then carve them? - How do traffic light systems work? - Does Stephen prepare any of the answers? they are all so clear and thought out - Hello, how are the magnetic north and geographical north related? - 1 How come oil is deposited in Arctic regions? -  Could you please explain what Eigenvalues/vectors and what you can do with them. Thanks.

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 believe billionaires should exist? are you one? - ​Why do billionaires make space rockets? - ​Do you have a fancy car? Or a boat? - At least 3! Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos? - How do you determine your time is being well spent? - ​How many computers do you own? Do you build them yourself? - 9-5 job, graduated in physics, but work as an analyst. Tired when coming home, want to learn more skills, any advice? - Do you perceive yourself as Altruist? - Do you still systematically learn new science by textbooks? - ​Why is it so hard for independent learners outside of institutions to get access to decent tools and classes? It is hard not to default to python because of lack of financing. - How is the landscape of investing in technology startups changing? Where do you fit in?

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: What technological and/or scientific capabilities must humans achieve to be able to manipulate and reprogram matter at will? - Can you explain CRISPR? How does the gene editing technique CRISPR work? - Why are routines for sleeping, eating, exercise, etc. so helpful for mammals? When is routine harmful? - ​Is there an example where self-assembly is industrially used? - ​How harmful are plane flights in terms of radiation exposure? - I were able to create a black hole the size of a marble in my living room, would it destroy the cosmos or just make a hole in my couch? - Is it true our electrical distribution networks and neuronal networks in the brain has same configuration? - Why do some speculate there's life - Isn't it weird that our body mostly works fine in zero gravity?

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

Questions include: Stephen, why are keyboards the default computer interface? - Why didn't someone invent the printing press earlier? It seems to have been quite financially valuable. Was it an engineering problem or a lack of entrepreneurship? - In your opinion if Physics didn't work out for Professor Feynman would he have been able to make it as a stand up Comedian - In the past or currently, how much 'science' and technology is published or publicly available... is the most 'advanced'/ useful science and tech in the published literature/ patents? Are there branches of secret science? Yes or No, are you personally or do you know a group sitting on tech that is not public facing? - Why is Turing's machine model today so dominant compared to the equivalent lambda calculus? - Would love to read an essay just about the printing of the NKS book. This is a wild saga. - ​Is it possible to identify the moment in history when scientific investigation as we know it today broke away from the study of philosophy? - When do the viewers get to hear more about the answer to the why there's something rather than nothing? - Why do you think certain cultures have had such a disproportional success in science discovery & business?

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: Since photons do not experience the passing of time, does that mean that all their physical properties, such as wavelength, are fixed throughout their lifespan? - Do you think that it's worth investing and attempting cryonic suspension as a way to continue living? - ​Why does time seem to speed up as we age? - How can one learn physics or math at a young age? (organizing your life, order of topics, your experience as a young physics enthusiast) - If the center of the earth is really hot lava like the sun, how come it isn't melting everything between us & it?

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 to start a mega corporation? - How do you retain the best people over the years? - ​I heard, CEOs have actually no impact in large companies. - How do you have a successful software company in this day with only 3 good ML engineers left? Just saying I've heard WRI really needs to hire more ML experts, how do you do that when good ML people don't work for less than 150k - How many people could someone lead? - After starting a business, how do you know when you should secure an attorney? It's such a large expense but seems like an unavoidable necessity. - ​Any plans to take a trip into space? - How much more should the CEO make then the median salary? - I am 17 right now. Do you think the USA is better than the UK for business and innovation? 2nd question: do you think its a good idea to start building companies in your 20s, or is it a better idea to first build (theoretical) experience and go for it later on? as in, what do you think of people in their early 20s building ML/AI startups? - Do you have any heuristics on deciding when to stop or dramatically alter a long term and expensive research project? - It is tempting to be very quantitative about measuring the output of your various projects and teams in Wolfram. tempting to try and optimize it can also leave people feeling like robots? Balance? - Have you ever made any of your employees sign employee contracts with non-compete agreements? - Are there any focused Research teams in Wolfram? Like full-time researchers on AI/ML? - ​Are there any plans to open offices in Germany? - You were very successful at a young age. How can one be confident towards older or more experienced people? - What quality should we look in people to determine if working with them will improve us? - ​Do you have ideas for intermediate-scale projects / companies (maybe 25 or less people) that you aren't working on because they aren't compatible with Wolfram's size? - ​Dear Stephen, what is your favorite chocolate? - What was your reaction to getting the MacArthur grant? Was it exciting? What did you do with the money? (Was there money attached to it back then?)

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 there really such a thing as INFINITY or is it just a concept? - ​Does Infinity have a magnitude? - But is infinity really a mathematical object? It has no finite quantity. ​How can something without a finite quantity be used in a calculation/computation? - What's the difference between counting numbers and counting processes? - ​Is Rulial Space likely to be finite or infinite? - ​How is it possible that infinity of integers is smaller than the infinity of floats? - Why can't mules and donkeys reproduce? What are the limits for different species of mammals breeding with one another? - is it 5 crossovers on average for everyone? - Are memes on the internet, conceptually a species? - So how is a specie determined just by visual features? Or maybe defined by breeding? - Last question can genetic traits lay dormant for centuries..? Sort of recurring changes after x generations?

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

Questions include: In your opinion, who is the most snubbed scientist / inventor? Mine would be Rosalind Franklin - Did you ever meet Martinus Veltman. Did you ever use his computer algebra system Schoonship? Were you associated with any of the other CAS systems like REDUCE, LAM, SHEEP, CADABRA at Cambridge? - What computer language were you using when you were doing your early particle physics research? What do you think of Fortran and REDUCE? - What is your perspective on Theranos? Did you have awareness / skepticism of the company before it collapsed? - What are tensors and where did they originate from? (I use them for machine learning but don't even know what they are!)

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: What do you think of psychological personality tests? Which type are you? - ENTJ is the CEO personality type - Is replication a necessary criterion for the validation of a scientific experiment? - So are personalities clustered or not? ​I wonder If there are datasets available - Can you explain the science behind the iron rod that bore through Phineas Gage's head - AI, Politics & Decisions please. -  ​How crazy would it be if Politics becomes like hedging where its all run by algorithms. Vote algo 1 for prosperity! Algo 3 is tough on crime! Algo 4 is more compassionate.

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: Can you talk about turbulence and why its the greatest unsolved problem of classical mechanics? - ​Hello, can you talk a little bit about turbulence. Is it true turbulence can't be predicted from the underlying physical equations (Navier-Stokes)? - how about intelligent fluids that are about to take over the world? - Which self-driving technology is better: Imaging or LIDAR? - What are finite fields and why are they important?

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: Did you ever experience imposter syndrome? - ​As automation and worker reduction at the workplace continues to gather steam, would it make sense to legally reduce further the max hours worked per week to avoid mass unemployment? - ​You ultimately named your company with your last name. Why? I have mixed feelings about this - What are your thoughts on science and efficiency? Do you believe that high profiled science experiments could be done more efficiently in order to achieve a particular discovery? Is there room for imagination and creativity in (unconventional methods) in the scientific field? - How can people in school and in general have more stronger self-organization to be able to stand up to the institutionalized networks with unfortunate entry conditions? - How much of your work in your business is "exploration of opportunity" vs "management". Do you have a set ratio, or rules of thumb to regulate between the two? - Hello Stephen and everyone! One issue keeping back from innovating traditional big industries R&D is said to be the difficulty to adopt new paradigm shifts. What is your view on this? - Wolfram only makes profit out of sales of the program or does it have other sources of income? - Did you ever get takeover proposals from google, Facebook, Microsoft or others. Will you exit one day? - What other companies/groups out there we're doing consistent good independent work using a similar model to Wolfram? Any standouts? - Do Wolfram employees get motivated when they see the result of people using the Wolfram technologies? - ​Will you go beyond being an Oracle system for crypto currencies such as Cardano/Ada etc? Or will you eventually leverage your computable data to create your own cryptocurrency??

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 keep track of all of the information you have reviewed? From articles to journals to emails to books. - What are your thoughts, on technology/startups in Latin America (present and future)? Starting a company where there are no specific tech community, or the people might not be ready for adoption - How do you manage your family life around your busy schedule with personal and business interests? - How can you deal with school that demotivates your will to explore and learn new stuff? - How much time do you spend on technology intelligence? How are you keeping eyes on topics you may be interesting on? - I started a business by accident, and now I'm trying to find out, how to build a real business around that - How important is Law for success and or payoff, what are the doors it opens? Given Bill Gates having a much higher net worth than Steve Jobs - Who are the people under 30 that inspire you? - How to deal with the feeling that you need to understand everything that exists before you can do something original? - What do you do when you suffer credibility due to lack of paper credentials? - Dr Wolfram - do you have an ideal "ratio" where you split your time between working "IN" the business as opposed to working "ON" the business. If not a ratio - do you have rules of thumb when. - How many companies live stream meetings on a frequent and regular basis? Food for thought. - Would there be value to developing a PhD equivalent for generalists instead of specialists? - Yeah it's crazy that Wolfram research Streams everything! It's the best!

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: Can you explain neutrino messaging and whether it's feasible to build a neutrino messaging system or neutrino internet? - Is the results we see in particle physics valid even outside our gravitational field? The elementary particles we discover in our accelerators, could they be bounded to the physics we see at earth. Other "things?" produced in space? - Why should gravity, which is considered to be a very weak force compared to the others, have any significant effect on high energy particle physics experiments? -I have a question relating to thermodynamics. How could we detect and remove the impact of Refrigeration and Air Conditioning indoors on outdoor global temperature, significant? - Can we build a giant magnifying glass and put it in orbit to create a death ray? - A related question does a magnifying glass steal energy from the surrounding? - Can you name any technologies that were fragile and unreliable 50 to 100 years ago but are extremely reliable and widely used now? Are there any early-stage fragile technologies today that have the potential to be widely used 50 years later? -​Is there anything that is the opposite? Something that is fragile today that was stable a century ago. Does technology universally get better always? - What will be the next advancement in microprocessors? 3D lithography?

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

Questions include: What did doctors learn from Henrietta Lacks' cells? - What do you think of the Higgs Boson controversy (Many physicists are saying they fudged the numbers to get more funding). Did you ever - Did you ever meet Bryce DeWitt? - What was Feynman's opinion of supersymmetry? - Will the Wolfram physics project be using Gravitons? Is there a plan to avoid non-renormalizability? - Is this the same problem as the Yang-Mills existence problem? (Millennium prize)

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 does an electron fall or lower orbit to its "normal" state after having being in an exited state - ​What does infinite amount of integers and decimals between two integers tell about the nature of the world? -  What is a time Crystal? - What is your opinion on the technological and economic feasibility of asteroid mining? - How does sophisticated philosophy relate to sophisticated math, in the thinking processes underlying them and the intellectual firepower in effect? - How did your mother and father encourage your own pursuits in science? -  ​If knowing absolutely nothing is represented with 0 and knowing everything is represented with 1, where do you think human race is at this moment and what are its limits of knowledge? - What could knowing the machine code of the universe unlock in technology?

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: wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions  include: Does Stephen have a dog? - Josh have any startups that he  thinks could be billion dollar unicorns? If so, what are they doing or  what industries are they in? - Do you think that innovation process is  different based on the societal value? If so, how can developing society  can navigate this process of innovation? - What are some guiding  principles in your lives?

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 there a reason why math has an order of operations, or is it just "because we decided on that"? - What does a day in the life of a scientist look like? - ​What is your opinion about reproducible research? - Stephen, I loved your conversation with Greg Chaitin!!! You made questions that reminded me to the questions that we ask you. Please make some podcast episodes where you have guests to whom you ask questions! - ​Will teleportation ever be possible, even if only for, say, a photon stream? If so could a probe sent into a black hole be able to transmit back images across the event horizon using this technique?

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Bob Metcalfe joins Stephen at the 20th annual Wolfram Summer School. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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 programming essential for the next breakthrough in neuroscience, both theoretical and practical? if yes, how, and is Wolfram language enough fulfill that purpose? - Any opinions on 'smart drugs'? - Is the Crick-Mitchison theory of REM sleep essential for understanding how mammalian brains work? - Can you comment on the history of plant breeding and computation? Or agricultural as a technology? It seems that old plant breeders think new molecular breeding techniques are a waste of time & money. 'Modern' breeders are using genomic selection with SNPs and gBLUP models... the history of most of our crops is very complicated usually involving strange hybrids. - Will the future bring surveillance and all-knowing government or deep fakes and other things that could be used to fake identity both physical and digital in order to get rid of government presence?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of 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 tell about the history of the computer until the creation of Apple 2? - ​What is the fine structure constant, and why was Dirac so interested in it? - Can you recall any "what could have been" moments in the development of computers that could have taken off had the right decisions/factors occurred? - What do you think would happen if Archimedes discovered calculus in 200 BC? Thank you for sharing your amazing knowledge. - Do you agree with the people that physics and science has made minimal progress in last 25 years, compared to before? - Did you ever meet Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow? - Did you and John Conway get along? Do you have any stories about him?

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 good came out of the pandemic from a business or recruiting point of view? - Can you talk more about what Sergey did when he interned for you? His resume reads, "I developed a code analysis and extraction tool for the Mathematica source code." -  Is there a general rule for deciding when to outsource some aspects of my startup? Especially if it's on a low budget. -  How do you organize your day's activities? Do you like to work from a daily to do list, work towards weekly goals, just get in "the zone" and see what you can do during a day? - Is it more important to be of value or to have a valuable network of connections? -  You sequence your genome, but did you do a 23andme (or ancestry or other) test to find relatives? - Do you fast? Or do any other modern longevity practices? -  I noticed this year has been the year with the least number of days of being sick... quarantine and masks? - How many hours of straight work will you do on a single project in a week and on an average day? - Given a set of interesting ideas that require big efforts to be developed, how do you prioritize which one to pursue? - How did/would you balance ambitious technology projects with dating? -  I have a business question: what's the practical difference between "Wolfram Desktop" and Mathematica? If the difference is negligible, the business facet of the question is, how are you dealing with the branding confusion here? Is "Mathematica" the legacy name, and "Wolfram" the name going forward? -  On managing life: How does your family get along with your long working hours? Do they get enough of you? Do they feel you spend enough time with them? -  What do you do when you get discouraged? Go for a walk? Take a day off? Work harder? (And what causes you discouragement?)

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 doing science something intrinsic to the human species, so that if humanity were to be restarted, science would emerge afresh? - Can Wolfram talk about pseudo linear congruential random number generators? -  Stephen, do you think that we as parents should control how much time our kids spent on computers and smartphones? -  ​Is it possible to have "many internets" - internet outside of this current internet? - Will nations be able enforce firewall if someone is connecting to Starlink? - what's your vision for the future and how do your current students fit into that vision?

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: What do you think about civilization going to Mars? - Why do the planets orbit in the same plane? - Are Phobos and Diemos also on the same plane? Considering they're asteroids that were grabbed by Mars and now orbit Mars - What makes a planet a planet? -  Why do most planets, stars and galaxies seem to spin the same way? - What did NASA do to avoid astronauts getting great amounts of cosmic rays? - How exactly do you detect Muons? I'm going to be taking a class next year that has a big fun project at the end of the semester that includes potentially making something that detects Muons - Why is water a good radiation shield if it has low atomic numbers inside? - Why does an iron core result in a super nova? - How do nuclear blasts affect computers?

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: Hi Stephen, Why does the universe exist? In a recent interview you said that you have been considering this over the past month - When was the last time you weren't the smartest person in the room? - If all knowledge about physics was be lost, which theory would be most difficult to rediscover in your opinion and why? - Wolfram alpha uses a curated knowledge graph? rather than some Wikipedia crowdsourced approach, you had a bunch of people in an office authoring a lot of data for it? or does it draw from other databases? - Kids and teenagers are less and less interested by mathematics, what do you think is the reason of this? How would you change it?

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

Questions include: ​How was DNA discovered? The history behind its discovery? - ​Is there a history of musical digital instruments? Like the synth seems to me the beginning of exploration of "computational music". Maybe electronic music should be called that way.... - can you build a cellular automata for each sound font? how does one construct the CA in general to map onto functions like sine or wave forms? - Is science slowly becoming a meme, considering how strongly supported the theory has been of natural origin of COVID-19 by the so-called scientific community? It appears, a scientist's opinion is more and more becoming a product. -  Question: There was, and seem to be still today, a very discriminating and political approach in the world of science when someone tried to present another or different ways of approaching something. What are your thoughts on how we can improve those "strict/closed" science groups to support a broader and more "open minded" philosophy? - Did summer school and incubator programs exist hundreds of years ago? - Do you think the relationship between the scientific community and media/business/government is fundamentally different today or pretty close to what we've seen in the (typical ebb & flow) past many decades/century?

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: How can I experiment with multi-way hyper-graphs in areas other than physics as a hobbyist computational explorer? I am interested in information science but have not taken computer science yet. - How can one convince the scientific community they have inadvertently accepted a false result, when the bug is subtle? - Can a virus mutate and replicate again and again in your own body while the immune system is fighting it? And every time the immune system figures out one form of it and kills it, there is already a new form replicating? A viral cat & mouse game, so to speak.. - Do you think that there could be some low-hanging fruit to be collected in biology? I feel like all the smartest people chose to study physics or math and I wonder if more should go into biology - What techniques do you use to memorize information when studying in such broad fields? Thank You! - Do you have any opinions to why "Mars One" failed? They went bankrupt in - Mars One had a massive recruitment drive since 2012'ish for people to go and colonize to Mars by 2023. - ​How do we know that gravity is not a "pushing force" instead of a pulling force? Do we for certain know that "dark matter" is not caused by shielding of this pushing force; "Dark matter" being an artifact in this case and not a real thing* - If time stops in a black hole, does that mean all matter in the black hole stops aging? - Why do we need to super-cool materials (for superconductors or quantum systems); why can't we drive them mechanically at set frequency, so "cool" them preferentially in one direction? - What is the difference between science and technology and how do they complement each other?

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

Questions include How do you maintain the work-life balance? How do you decide what is more important the meeting or the gym training? - Could you list all of apps and big app projects u ever made? With brief descriptions - How do you decide your employees' compensation? - Why were you a physics prodigy? Did you just fall in love with the subject? Did someone encourage you? - How can venture capitalists identify the most talented young entrepreneurs? - ​What do you recommend for obtaining funding for your new business? - How to gain internal confidence and believe that what you do is right? - Does Wolfram handle its own cybersecurity or use third party MSP? - I have many questions. Do you automate testing? Do you group clients? How? Do you test UX? How? How would you connect CRM to the model of everything? - What is better kanban or scrum? - How do you work with executives when your job relies on long term thinking and investing (ex. cybersecurity) - Would have a question for Mr. Wolfram, how did you overcome the hurdles of being a solo founder - Another cybersecurity question: how do you address the risk of supply chain attacks since your language is used by other companies? - This is probably an undetermined question, but a friend of mine is starting a company in the healthcare software space and he wants me to leave my PhD program and help him co-found the company. What are the criteria that you would use to judge (the company idea, the grad school, and others) to evaluate this decision?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series. See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Can you define "scientific method" ? - What is a double blind randomized control trial? - what caused the split between the evolutionary paths of plant life and animal life? - Why haven't any animals evolved to be the same size as large dinosaurs? For example, the T-Rex and Brontosaurus were massive creatures. - I'm only 12 but how do you deal with detractors, I hear some things about you, it does sound like jealousy if I'm honest, but regardless, how do you continue on your path and disregard the critics?