Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (February 21, 2024) »

1 hour 18 minutes

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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)? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (January 31, 2024) »

1 hour 24 minutes

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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)? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (January 17, 2024) »

1 hour 35 minutes

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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? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (January 3, 2024) »

1 hour 24 minutes

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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? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 20, 2023) »

1 hour 22 minutes

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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 timezones 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? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 6, 2023) »

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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? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (76 videos)