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

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 28, 2022) »

1 hour 15 minutes

✕ close

Was the invention of computers inevitable? Will evolution always stumble upon universal computers, given enough resources? What are the implications for the laws of physics and reality? I don't think computing technology could have possibly been conceived until after the Industrial Revolution. Ideas alone don't govern how science evolves. It's a combination of factors, including technology, mode of production of society, etc. The Sun's computation helps sustain us. I like thinking about machine learning as a black box that gets to a human-comprehendable product, but the "reasoning" that enables it to get to that output is not really understood. Once we understand what's really going on in a machine learning model, we can be confident that its output is sound. I started playing chess lately and I noticed that high-level and machine chess are a lot like proof of computational work and willingness to commit it. Do you have any thoughts on this? I wonder how much power one would need in order to run a mechanical computer comparable to a modern CPU. Historically speaking, do you think the modern AI systems are unique in terms of replacing human work, or just another step in automation? I may change my email signature to "Written by ChatGPT. Please excuse any nonsense." It's tempting to think general AI could emerge from some digital version of evolution. That seems to require digital entities competing for resources and a "will" to fight for survival. Historically, how has written record keeping evolved? Will we ever revert back to oral records (spoken stories, songs, etc.)? GPT-4 and GPT-5 are going to be amazing. The question is whether the interviewer will care if the candidate is an AI. For some roles, it will not matter, and that number will increase. Has ChatGPT passed the Turing test? Or can it pass the test soon? I suspect the major deployment of AI in the short term will be phishing. For the time being, it can't replace regular employees at legitimate businesses because it can't be legally held culpable because it's not conscious. But for scammers, that's not an impediment. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 14, 2022) »

1 hour 24 minutes

✕ close

What is some history of thermodynamics you found interesting while working on your new project? What is the history of mathematical rigor? What's the history of chocolate? What technology allowed the creation of chocolate candies to become so popular? In the history of computer architecture and software, who are the most important pioneers of parallel processing? Did you ever use Xanadu's network communication/hypertext publishing technology? Can you discuss the history of GNU? How much more prevalent will cloud computing become in the future, as the need for computational resources is exponentially increasing compared to the cost-speed of processors? Can you talk about the history of the public's perception of its own scientific literacy? I think it also changed with the advent of memes, which made the most important subcultures swim up more easily than less important ones. Will we go back to science illiteracy? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 30, 2022) »

1 hour 14 minutes

✕ close

Can you give some insight into automata theory, its history and its applications up until today? How did scientists figure out the source of the cosmic microwave radiation? Why didn't containers become popular until Docker around 2013? It seems like they would have been very useful long before that. What did people do instead? The idea of containers was there, but it was virtualization plus a heavy load of scripts to manage servers and configurations, which was just another iteration of mirroring machines. Apple also had a Motorola-to-PPC emulator for their PPC Macs. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 16, 2022) »

1 hour 25 minutes

✕ close

Did Einstein ever attempt to quantize spacetime, as opposed to treating it as a continuous medium? We are ultra-interested to hear about this future history of science! What was the most fantastic experience you had as a physicist? What is the history behind migrating the entropy term to information theory? What is the process like making computations for the thermodynamics project? What do you think about engineering efforts that help in discovering science (building tools and experiments)? I've met many scientist who dismiss engineering as "less intellectual." Computational language design is basically like being a modern-day wizard. Technology, science and social relations co-evolve. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (November 2, 2022) »

1 hour 41 minutes

✕ close

Do you think that in the future, people will look at our societal interest in math and science the same way we view alchemists and theologians of old? Tell us about the history of chess computers and the approaches they used before deep learning. Can you talk about the history of software packaging and distribution? My brain came online around the time we needed two CDs for games, and I thought that was a pain. I might be misremembering, but I think we put a piece of masking tape on floppy disks to circumvent copy protection. I would love your thoughts on internet pseudonymity and its history! How has the "central hub" of science changed geographically over time, and what may be the reasons for this change? There is obviously a link between training clergymen (the original role of most Western universities) and the growth of early modern science. Any thoughts on different methods of storing information in terms of resilience over long timescales? Cuneiform is mostly only preserved because it was stamped in clay tablets. All the really "good stuff" (science, poetry, etc.) was usually written on biological material like hides and papyrus and, obviously, they didn't age that well. Paper Dutch East India Company records from 1600–1700 still exist today. In light of the recent law requiring free access to all federally funded research (and associated data), can you talk about how scientific knowledge and data have been shared throughout history? View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (October 5, 2022) »

1 hour 41 minutes

✕ close

What's the history behind emails and instant messaging? I have a hard time imagining life before then and handling communication that may not get a response for days (waiting for a letter in the mail). What were the early days of Wolfram|Alpha like? I see papers from '40s—even '30s—of PRL (physical reviews). They are typeset so cleanly. How did they do this without LaTeX at that time? It's been said that a real perpetual motion machine cannot exist. Do you agree, or do you think we can get there and we just don't know how yet? At a quantum scale, there seems to be perpetual motion. Otherwise the electron would collapse into the nucleus. So is there a Maxwell's demon at the quantum scale that can only open very small doors? What were people's reactions to Carnot's exploration of steam engine mechanics and the development of the idealized Carnot cycle? What is the history of Fahrenheit and ancient representations of temperature—perhaps some that were even non-numerical? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (81 videos)