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

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 »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (January 25, 2023) »

1 hour 15 minutes

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Historically, what are some of the most prominent developments in the twentieth-century history of software design? I watched the recent NASA rocket launch and wondered what's new in the past 60 years. Why did American English develop common words for every third order of magnitude (million, billion, trillion)? Other languages seem to have different common words, like lakh in Hindi for 100,000. I remember a comment from an old programmer saying the first time they saw a screen used with a computer was in the movie 2001. Why is ChatGPT blowing up now when GPT-3 was known in 2020 and GPT-2 in 2019? How much do you think real science and technology are shaped by the ideas from science fiction? The thing about ChatGPT is that it uses the same architecture as GPT-3 with the same number of parameters. The fact that a fine tuning can create such a leap in capability suggests that we are in a hardware overhang. Has there been any technology in history that's been perfected (e.g. the wheel), or is there always room for improvement? Printers. Paper jammed 30 years ago, paper jams today. Let's not ask the AI to design a new type of paperclip. Paper jams happen today, but paper itself has become irrelevant. Such is the case with technology. Old technology doesn't get better, it gets replaced. When and why was dark energy hypothesized? Once we get 3D nano-replicators, we won't need roads; we can just teleport from place to place. View Less »

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (January 11, 2023) »

1 hour 22 minutes

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What could Aristotle have accomplished if he had a modern machine learning system? Could he have discovered logic? Didn't Noam Chomsky also do some work in the intersection between math/logic and language? I wondered if language models are based on that at all. Will the next generation of ChatGPT or VoiceGPT have any negative recourse, especially when it comes to impersonation? A similar Chomsky idea is "Can a submarine swim?" In English it can't, and in Japanese it can. Do you think AI presents an existential risk? If so, how could we mitigate it? How do you think Einstein or even Stephen Hawking would react to ChatGPT? Are there any figures in science who predicted this development? Given what we have learned from AI models, does learning from history allow us to better predict the future? Does modeling the past imply modeling the future? Ants are structured distinctly enough that it can lead to immediate conclusions on many levels. View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (93 videos)