Future of Science & Technology Q&A

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 »

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 »

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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