Future of Science & Technology Q&A

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 »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (September 29, 2023) »

1 hour 9 minutes

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What can you say about the future of physics? Something practical: do you think pens and pencils still have room for improvement, or has writing technology been perfected? Should we prioritize adding new senses to ourselves (a magnetic north sense with some device, for example) to discover more physics as pockets of computational reducibility? What possible senses? When will it become the mainstream view that mathematics is merely a branch/form of computational discipline, and as such a physical science, free of Platonistic misconceptions? I like the thought that there are kids now playing four-dimensional multiplayer games. The next generations won't even be able to understand the "trivial" stuff we were thinking about. How do you envision mathematics (research to application) being practiced in the long-term future? I think World of Warcraft may have helped me understand calculus better. You have a goal with a particular group setup, so what is the optimal scenario for victory given one's resources? Which area of tech is advancing the fastest? Will this change in the future? Will you ever invent a new language again? Is there anything you have recently changed your mind on? If so, what is it and what might the implications be for the future of science and technology? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (September 15, 2023) »

1 hour 31 minutes

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Would an alien intelligence experiencing a different slice of the ruliad (a "ruster") close to ours likely experience black holes in a similar way? Is rulial space bigger than branchial space? Maybe it's a Gaussian distribution around a point in rulial space that makes human minds? What do you think about NASA's recently released plans to build a Moon-based radio telescope? How would the signal get back to Earth from the dark side of the Moon? Why would so many nations be interested in the Moon? Suppose we've just gotten lucky and developed our current level of technology during a period of unusual solar calm. How do we adapt if we expect solar storms to cause havoc with our electronics, say, every few decades? Fiber optics have reduced our vulnerability from the days when landlines were all copper. Only the power grid remains. What does the future look like for computational language? Will it be adopted on a larger scale? How do you anticipate biotechnology shaping the future of biomaterials and tissue engineering? How do you see the future of information consumption? Will it all be digital? Will physical books still be relevant? Will it even be reading, or simply data chips that are inserted into the brain? Will we ever get to a point of other mammals evolving to the intelligence level of humans? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (August 18, 2023) »

1 hour 20 minutes

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Do you think houses are going to change much in the future? Will we reach the age of true "smart houses"? Within the next 20 years, will "artificial intelligent" image recognition and/or image segmentation systems equal the accuracy of expert humans? For example, will an AI pathologist or radiologist equal the performance of a human pathologist or radiologist? How long do you estimate before AI can do creative mathematics? How will this technology be similar to or different from GPT? Do you think smartphones will replace desktop computing? Does it make sense to pursue a math degree in the age of AI? Will different advanced AGIs try to compete with each other for resources? Which is more of an existential threat: AI or quants? Are we now stuck with COBOL running most of the world economy for the rest of our lives? In your opinion, is the concept of Maxwell's demon theoretically possible, and does it have the potential to violate the second law of thermodynamics? Furthermore, could you shed light on how computational limits may affect physical phenomena and our understanding thereof? And what about time: how are the second law of thermodynamics, computation and time connected? Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae made some strikingly accurate predictions about technology development back in the 1960s. What is your perspective on Lem's predictive prowess? Do you find it remarkable that such accurate foresight of the distant future is possible? I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on the predictive power and limitations of technological forecasting. Were there ideas to put 10 months in a year? Can AI be used to create better prompts, or is that dependent on human consciousness? Which will history judge as the biggest letdown: 2023's AI mania and panics, "VR is the inevitable near future" from the 2010s or the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence from 2001? Will AI-based tutors replace most human tutors in the next five years? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A: Live from the Wolfram Summer School (July 7, 2023) »

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Can you comment on the future of LLMs being run in the cloud vs. being run on one's local machine? Does the NANOGrav discovery spark ideas for experimental validation of the Physics Project? Can you discuss the next evolution for AI models? So far we have: language models, image > text (classifiers), text > image (generators), etc. What can be said for training multimodal AI models? Do you think that we have reached a point of singularity such that any child born from today onward will never be able to surpass AI at any intellectual task, i.e. are we the last "useful" generation? Is VR the future of UIs? Given the two contrasting scenarios of a "Pink Plasma Heaven," where artificial general intelligence optimally solves problems for all sentient life, and a "Matrix Hell," where AI exploits humans as energy sources, how can we establish a guiding framework to navigate between these extremes? To what degree do you think LLMs provide us with insights on the internal workings of our brain? Do you think there will be more lessons to learn from the structure of the human brain when designing the next generation of LLMs? Does the spread of LLMs incentivize scientists (and humans in general) to become more deeply specialized (to "out-compete" LLMs in a narrow domain) or to become more broadly spread (in order to creatively generate connections between apparently remote domains)? Will it be possible to use LLMs to achieve world peace? Or if world peace isn't big enough, can we beam LLM chats into outer space to try and get universal peace? What do you think of power laws? What do you think are some good entry points for explaining the principles behind power laws? What do you think of the future of AI in video games? They can be used to control the actions and dialog of NPCs, the design of the game's world and even the design of assets on the fly using little data. Video game assets can take up a lot of data, and if we could use AI to generate assets on the fly using a smaller amount of data, we could cut down on the download size of games as well as the effort needed to make assets. How will we be able, in the future, to tell what we're seeing on screen isn't AI generated? Anything we could do today? (I think you might be a bot.) Thinking in terms of inter-concept space, do you think there is an approach to using technology to develop a way in which we may better understand or gain experience to bridge the gap of inter-concept space between what we know and what we don't know? When will this statement, "I think you might be a bot", be a compliment, rather than a criticism or an insult? View Less »

Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (June 16, 2023) »

1 hour 1 minute

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What's there to say about the future of neural nets? Neural nets could evolve to be able to be trainers. What are the limits? It seems like every decade I've been alive, scientists keep saying, "We just realized that brains/DNA are actually a lot more complicated than we realized, but now we're close to understanding them." Do you anticipate this continuing? The dynamics behind crowdsourcing have interested me for a long time. We can start seeing the potential it has when using the same principles in neural networking. How do you anticipate biotechnology shaping the future of biomaterials and tissue engineering? What are your thoughts on the accessibility and affordability of biotechnology advancements, and how can we ensure equitable distribution of benefits? It may be better to prompt the body to regenerate its own organs instead of 3D printing them (again, given Michael Levin's work). Is burrowing into an asteroid the logical way to shield people and equipment on voyages to, say, Mars or even out of the solar system? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (32 videos)