Future of Science & Technology Q&A

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (March 14, 2025) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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What, exactly, is an "AI agent"? "Agentic"? It seems like nobody knows what those words actually mean today. Can you tell us about the future of media/information consumption? Will we become a society of "AI summaries" as our main form of information gathering? Before AI summaries, there were encyclopedias and textbooks and CliffsNotes and such, and while they were useful and convenient, they never became de facto. When will we get the first AI/robot news reporter? I see these being useful in cases of dangerous live broadcasting like hurricanes, to keep people up to date. How far are we from LLMs generating a Stephen Wolfram–style long-form post, with similar elucidations, based on a short prompt of the key insight or topic? When you say the teaching is delegated to the machine, are you saying that the machine is telling the student what to think about instead of just answering questions? Can a sentient AI "understand" how humans learn? If we would delegate to them the teaching of human kids, would that be compatible with a biological point of view? Have you ever considered entering the robotics space? A Wolfram Robotics, so to speak? But if people delegate all calculations to the machines, then might it not happen that the machine actually learns to ask better questions than the humans can, since the machines have the experience built from the calculations and the humans don't? What will AI not be able to do? Do you believe that something like that exists? Tiny humans care about those questions about clouds and trees. Robotic trade shows sound interesting. The company Boston Dynamics shows a lot of progress in the humanoid department. Anything to say about the future of pi? (Happy Pi Day!) Do you expect LLM development to hit significant diminishing returns within the next 2–3 years? Automated theorem proving is so interesting. I'm trying to figure out how to make a theorem prover that demonstrably collapses a/the wavefunction. Like Stephen said; quantum LLMs. View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (February 14, 2025) »

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In the spirit of Valentine's Day, what is the future of bionic hearts? Would this be a way to make humans more efficient? How would you think about a world in which all of the work is done by robots and AI? Architects using computerized/AI tools will result in less demand for architects overall, thus less people getting to do architecture. Do you think the current methods of training and using AI/LLM are here to stay for a while, or is there a real possibility of an alternative machine learning approach appearing and being superior and more efficient? What would you think about spiking neural nets with a new non-differentiable learning algorithm? Is it the path to smarter AI? I read from an expert that correcting the errors in a later prompt results in more errors. It's better to go back to the original prompt. Do you or your team actively work on the alignment issues with AI and are you worried about the next 10 years with regard to that? Do you see a danger in the trend toward anthropomorphic AI and providing AI systems with human-like attributes? I wonder what will happen when future AI models are trained on material that shows them the actual results of their past actions. What are some near- and medium-term breakthroughs that could potentially make the creator a trillionaire? Off the top of my head, fusion power, far more efficient batteries or novel propulsion systems. View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (January 31, 2025) »

1 hour 19 minutes

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Do you imagine humanity exploring "inner space" (i.e. virtual worlds ) more than "outer space"? Could the spin of electrons lead to a communications system? How would we evolve to live in space? Would we even evolve, without going into space? Why is it you always wear the same checked shirt with the right-side collar slightly flattened?...almost AI-like... Do you think that the rules of human biology are computationally reducible, so that we eventually will be able to understand the aging of our cells? The latest LLMs are doing very advanced mathematics. Do you think we can get AI to the point that it is solving open problems and creating new mathematics? What is the next step for LLMs to advance? Do a conversation with Joscha Bach please—it'll be amazing! Have any of these LLM agents been trained on NKS? Thoughts on this new "external reasoning" paradigm or more generally, reinforcement learning + LLMs? How many years away do you think we are from grey goo (self-replicating nanomachines), if ever? Are people considering (re-)training LLMs completely on scientific high-quality peer-reviewed papers? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (January 17, 2025) »

1 hour 19 minutes

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How would you think about approaching science in the future? Should we accept AI's role in future science or still pursue science without the help of AI? What do you think the future of software development will be in the next decade or so? I hear very conflicting POVs from friends. Thoughts on LLM use in academic writing (including student theses and dissertations)? How many new languages do we see a year these days? It wasn't long ago when I was hearing about new languages every now and then... I'm using an LLM to help me through a book on thermodynamics right now. Nice to just throw misunderstandings at it. LLMs can learn languages in a few hours. How would you think about making humans able to learn as fast? Hypothetically speaking, if an AI system has access to all the images, cameras of the world, can it think through images, videos as if there is no language? Can it surpass human intelligence like that? Interestingly, current AI models are very good at creating natural images of people, but it totally fails for electronic circuits. How would you think about copyright, trademarks and other intellectual properties in the age of AI? How do we know this is actually Stephen Wolfram? It could just be another Oracle trained in long answers. View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (January 3, 2025) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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What is your view on LLMs with regard to computational irreducibility—i.e. will they hit a computational irreducibility wall anytime soon? Do you think there's any low-hanging fruit in computational psychology? I'm not seeing how intuition is much different than LLMs. It's hard to identify what exact elements created an intuition. They have made the LLM be so nice to keep one engaged. It feels real when talking to advanced voice mode until it becomes repetitive, then at that point I feel inclined to program it to act more realistic. I prefer the skeptical collaborator LLM personality. Would creating consciousness in a machine and then conducting mind experiments on it be immoral? I feel like it's an autonomous entity at that point. As AI becomes a dominant tool for information dissemination, how do we ensure that it supports critical thinking rather than passive consumption? What role should education play in preparing individuals to critically engage with AI-generated content? Does the use of bots and LLMs in sensitive areas—education, healthcare or governance—risk dehumanizing these vital sectors? Are LLMs changing how people do physics now, especially on the frontier areas, say in coming up with a unified theory? Instead of risking massive amounts of capital on projects that might fail, can we use LLMs to scope out the interesting pockets of reducibility so that greater percentages of our investments succeed? Can you speak to how NOAA is using cellular automata to simulate weather patterns? The way you ask LLMs questions is an art. Asking it the same thing using different words has brought back interesting results. It would be an interesting question to know if the conceptualization of concepts by LLMs is limited by language, as scientists say the LLMs create an intermediate conceptualization. Assuming merging human with digital AI would be possible, what do you think would be the effects in terms of "observing" reality? Notebook Assistant IS revolutionary! Thank you, I look forward to the next iterations. View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (December 20, 2024) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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Do you foresee Notebook Assistant breaking out of the notebook in the future? It could be a great general voice assistant which knows about me personally and works like Iron Man's Jarvis. Men on Mars by 2030? Can you talk about the future of your Physics Project? What's the future of an observer? In many models of the universe, there are always small variations that lead to a division by zero, which leads the programmer to put in a fix. Could black holes be that fix in our universe? What is your prediction for the future of science and technology in 2025? What is an area physics might leak into that will be unexpected in the future? Will you ever write another book like A New Kind of Science? Dr. Wolfram could choose a dozen of his blog posts and publish them as a book and it would make a terrific book. How might LLMs enhance future scientific development? What direction do you envision for tools like Mathematica, given that LLMs can interact with humans without requiring them to know how to program? What is your opinion on ethical frameworks being applied to AI tools? What sort of ethics do you think should be applied when considering machine learning/AI tool research? View Less »

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Future of Science & Technology Q&A (36 videos)