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

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (June 7, 2023) »

1 hour 9 minutes

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How did scientific disciplines originate and evolve through the centuries? Do you think Apple's new VR headset will be much different than previous releases of other VR headsets? What do past releases of similar products predict? VR kinda reminds me of video game systems. Your product may be fantastic, but if the content/software isn't up to snuff, it's probably going to fail. These glasses and headsets need to be comfy and miniaturized to become suitable for everyday use. What are use cases in education for these new headsets? Perhaps AI can be used to translate existing educational material into VR-suitable content. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 24, 2023) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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Are the stars and constellations we see today the same that were seen by the ancient civilizations who first studied them? Do star positions ever change? What do you make of the relationship between rhetoric and math? They are held in contradistinction, but I am thinking of the relation between rhetorical invention and Chaitin's idea of math-creativity. What about sudden novas and comets? Sudden shifts in orbits? Is the Moon moving away measurable compared to human history? As in, since humans started recording history, did the Moon appear to get 10% smaller or so? How will history be able to correct the continuous conundrum of the accuracy of our forefathers' discoveries, inventions and ideas? Additionally, how can we as humans preserve this? How did early civilizations explain supernovas? Did they understand it as a star exploding? How did they come to this conclusion? "The stars are like the Sun, but far away." When said for the first time, this must have been crazy to hear for others. How often were ideas like these disregarded at first? How did researchers of this time convince society of their findings? Is it possible that errors in translation have affected results of research? Are there any examples of this in history? When was the first time anyone considered what the angle of our solar system's ecliptic is relative to the Milky Way's galactic plane? Apparently, the angle is about 60 degrees. Why did science evolve so rapidly in the Western world? What's there to say about alchemy in history? Is that because ethical questions are fundamentally computationally irreducible questions? How do you filter out the "good new" from the "bad new"? It's remarkable that old ideas stood the test of time. View Less »

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 »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (91 videos)