Stephen Wolfram Livestreams


Future of Science & Technology Q&A (40 videos)

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

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New episode streaming Friday, June 13, 2025 at 3:30pm ET. Submit your questions

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
​​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:
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 & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science & Technology Q&A:
Future of Science & Technology Q&A: