Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (23 videos)

Biweekly ask-me-anything about the future of science & technology

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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science and Technology Q&A (July 19, 2024) »

1 hour 22 minutes

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Can AIs be creative? Should AIs rethink art? Good topic. 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? View Less »
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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science and Technology Q&A: Live from the Wolfram Summer School (July 3, 2024) »

1 hour 53 minutes

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​​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? View Less »
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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science and Technology Q&A (May 24, 2024) »

1 hour 15 minutes

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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? View Less »
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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science and Technology Q&A (May 10, 2024) »

1 hour 3 minutes

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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? View Less »
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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science and Technology Q&A (April 26, 2024) »

1 hour 1 minute

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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... View Less »
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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science and Technology Q&A (April 12, 2024) »

1 hour 21 minutes

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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? View Less »
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