History of Science & Technology Q&A: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 10, 2023) »

1 hour 28 minutes

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When researching, do you find it's more helpful to stay close to modern times in terms of content, or do findings from hundreds of years ago also prove valuable? Can you talk about the history of theories of cognition and consciousness? What did the ancients think? Did Gödel or Turing think about this much? Does ChatGPT disprove Penrose's Orch OR? Aristotle, Leibniz, Godel, Wolfram: How were/are these philosophers able to somewhat understand the idea of universal computation? How did they and you reach those insights? Is there something you could speak to about von Neumann's work to understand that the models of computation could relate to the mind? Has the importance of areas of science shifted in history? What was the main focus of science five hundred years ago? One hundred years ago? Ten? Is there a connection between these advances in science and education? Does education evolve with these changes? What has been the most important invention that has improved research overall? Right! By 1991 we had ERIC for upper-graduate research, and it was a game changer. No more need for librarians in the traditional way and history at our fingertips. Historically, what have been the the most difficult problems or obstacles for us to overcome or solve in the areas of science and technology? About unintended consequences of revolutions: what lessons from the Industrial Revolution have we learned that we could use for the AI revolution? Do you think it's fundamentally possible for science as we know it to hit a wall at some point and slowly degenerate into a nonproductive state? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (April 26, 2023) »

1 hour 40 minutes

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Can you discuss the history of programming languages? Is programming always associated with computers or were there other forms of programming? Didn't IBM have its own extremely labor-intensive "telegraph" system? How do you think Ada Lovelace would view the current age of AI? Sometimes I wonder what'd happened if Newton or Gauss had access to digital computers. Any thoughts about Plankalkül? Isn't mathematics itself following rules? Could you talk about the history of cybernetics and the idea of feedback loops in general? How are the history of education and programming connected? When did degrees in programming become significant? Do Wittgenstein's experiments with language models have any relevance to LLM and AI today? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (April 12, 2023) »

1 hour 6 minutes

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Do you think it will be possible to recreate historical figures as bots to interact with and get their perspective on current research areas? Why do many great mathematicians complete their most influential work in their early 20s? Does "prompting" (as for LLMs) have some historical precursors? So Feynman could have been a great prompt engineer (given that he was such a great expositor/teacher)? How do you think future researchers will look back at this current time in history? We look at bones and architecture to determine facts about the past; what will they look at to determine facts of our time? AI? Can we restore old, lost books by reading other old books which talk about them? Seneca wrote many many letters. Could we detect if some have been wrongly attributed to him? I love a historian David Lewis's possible world that we can create alternative history/hypothetical situations to learn what went wrong historically. I just wonder whether AI can utilize deep learning to generate the sequence of historical events with the constraint of data and and recreate the alternative historical events with the known variables to generate hypothetical outcome? Isn't sonographic/x-raying safer than digging through ancient architecture? Or is it still dangerous somehow? They have been using muons to probe the pyramids in Egypt. Maybe AI can help with such more passive imaging through buildings? Neural network weights will be a more efficient means of archive through the centuries than books and libraries—which will matter as with ChatGPT the volume of published writing will climb exponentially. Prompting has relevance in psychology and philosophy. Could it be that the best prompter now are poets? Or better... computational poets? I don't think RAM or ROM-chips will survive the passage of time or solid state drives... View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 22, 2023) »

1 hour 13 minutes

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What's the history of AI? What's the first recorded example of artificial intelligence? It's amazing how well the movie 2001 still holds up. What did pattern matching look like in the Middle Ages? What's the relationship between "cybernetics" and AI? Is it simply a popularized naming, or is it deeper than that? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 8, 2023) »

1 hour 22 minutes

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Please discuss the history of graph theory and network theory. What was the role of computation? So graph theory evolved as a theory after practice, like thermodynamics and the steam engine? Graphs as knowledge representation were popular in AI the late 60s, and more formally in theoretical CS a decade later. Was it a big effort to integrate graphs in Wolfram Language? Is it missing some part of the recent developments? Has anyone formulated Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory in terms of graph theory? At what point in history did mathematics reach a level where a single individual could no longer learn all "known knowledge" at that time within their lifetime? It seems too often amazing discoveries go years without being picked up by a particular community. If Aristotle were alive today, how might he describe modern technology? How would one explain modern technology to someone from Aristotle's time? Would you say the words "soul" or "spirit" were used in the past in much the same way we use the term "software" today? Why would cellphones be inconceivable? They work the same way speech does. The only difference is that the ancients didn't know about the electromagnetic field. In your own experience, have there been any major changes to a field of study that changed the way one would view a certain topic? I remember being in school studying astronomy when Pluto was declared to no longer be a planet and my professor's lesson plan had to adapt in an instant. I like pondering what Professor Einstein may have been able to do with Wolfram|Alpha. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (February 8, 2023) »

1 hour 18 minutes

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What would you say is the most important human-designed algorithm of all time? Historically, who has led the trends in science, practitioners or academics? Did Richard Feynman really think that "philosophy is baloney"? Did you ever discuss non-physics subjects? If simulation becomes sufficiently good in the future, will it cause experimental scientists to be out of a job? How did we go about solving the goat problem? According to the history of science, what might be the ratio of the number of minor paradigm shifts to the number of major paradigm shifts? What was the fifth class of cellular automata that almost was, which you mentioned in your personal history paper? Has an idea like the ruliad existed before, or is this a novel object? Neural networks show that combining two seemingly unrelated fields of research can produce great results, but our academic and business cultures are focused more on specialization. Your thoughts? What would a modern analog computer look like today? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (83 videos)