Future of Science & Technology Q&A

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (February 2, 2024) »

1 hour 25 minutes

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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? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

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

1 hour 31 minutes

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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. View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (January 5, 2024) »

1 hour 19 minutes

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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? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (December 22, 2023) »

1 hour 13 minutes

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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? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (December 1, 2023) »

1 hour 7 minutes

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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? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (October 27, 2023) »

1 hour 27 minutes

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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. View Less »

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (19 videos)