Future of Science & Technology Q&A

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (March 22, 2024) »

1 hour 6 minutes

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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? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (March 8, 2024) »

1 hour 32 minutes

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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." View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (February 23, 2024) »

54 minutes

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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? View Less »

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 »

Stephen Wolfram

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Future of Science & Technology Q&A (34 videos)