Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 126] »

1 hour 30 minutes

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If you ask the AI the exact same question several times, will it give the same answer or will it change it based on some random function? Or do the neurons change during self-learning and change the answer? Do you think at any point we will create an AI factory? Like specialized AI algorithms that create other AIs (which can do very well one specific task)? Any thoughts on using physics simulations vs. the real world to teach robots? Is it computer power then that speeds real progress? What do you think about sources of energy now and in the future for developed and developing countries? What will happen when oil runs out? Will there be a shift to "clean" energy well before this happens? For nuclear energy, do the dangers pose a problem? Or do the pros outweigh the cons in this situation? Apparently the death rate for nuclear energy is around 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour, which is similar to wind and solar. Nuclear is safer than coal, because people are more cautious when the stakes are higher. What do you think of small modular reactors? What is the connection between computational irreducibility and extracting usable energy? Can energy be "mined" with computation? Nuclear is not going to be a good thing until we have some way of dealing with the waste products. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 125] »

1 hour 23 minutes

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I've been hearing of AI and LLMs in context of an "arms race" between countries. What do LLMs look like scaled up in that manner (vs. like a global LLM)? What about model interoperability? Where are we at on the research for that? Do we need to develop new and more sophisticated mathematics to begin to understand these black box models? Do you think in time we will be able to do casual inference with them? Do you agree with Yann LeCunn and Andrew Ng that recent affirmation that AGI is still decades away and cannot be achieved with the current transformer architectures, regardless of parameter and token count? Where is the line then between a program with an inner experience and one without? So with unlimited intelligence, maybe everything can be predicted with accuracy. When will an AI write a work worth feeding into another AI? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 124] »

1 hour 10 minutes

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With the rise of AI, what will happen to the world of education? Will we able to provide basic things to everyone with the use of only machines (specifically food, water and shelter)? At that point, will jobs be obsolete or not? Are we about to reach a post-truth world due to AI-enabled misinformation? How do we combat this? Since ChatGPT can currently only reproduce written human reasoning, will it even be possible for ChatGPT to be better than humans one day? How can AI, through the lens of computational irreducibility, navigate the vast landscape of possible rule sets and achieve true intelligence, mirroring the complexity of our universe? Do you think we will see more of this phenomenon where AI contributes to the fundamentals of science? What do you think about AI alignment and the existential risk of AI? What's it like to be an LLM? By extension, what's it like to be a computer? Once AI can start programming, use those programs to solve problems and debug, will programmers become obsolete? What are your suggestions for a high-school student who is interested in both AI and physics? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 123] »

1 hour 18 minutes

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If ChatGPT's transformer model stores the averaging of the text that regular people produced on the internet plus millions of books, is it fair to say that it's going to produce mediocre output? What if we train a model with text produced by geniuses ONLY, like Euler, Gauss, Newton, Benjamin Franklin, etc.? Would it be superior? What are you most excited to see from AI? Is AI guaranteed to be 100% accurate? Or does it behave in a way similar to humans, where mistakes are possible and there should be some sort of quality assurance, either built in or separate, that requires human labor? Does Elon Musk's call for halting AI development make any sense? Wouldn't people elsewhere do it anyway? Would this just hurt Western development at the cost of others pursuing it elsewhere? Do you think if AI is given control of some trivial systems that it could inadvertently snowball into gaining control of other systems and become a hazard to humans? A recent study has linearly mapped the activation of an LLM to activations in the brain. Do you think that might be a hint that we may be on the right path? Do you think an artificially generated intelligence (AGI) could achieve an economic equilibrium for humans? The interesting difference of ChatGPT to actual intelligence is you can fool it easily with crafted input. Is there going to be a spread of misinformation due to AI (deep fakes, etc.)? As someone with allergies, being able to adopt an AI robot dog would be kind of cool! Human wants are not a fixed set of things. They evolve as society evolves. Do you think AI might just be a part of evolution like farming, the usage of electricity and smartphones (in the "extension of man" sense), and that we actually don't really have a say in it? With a powerful tool like AI, how does the education system need to be changed to meet the needs of future generations? How do teaching methods in schools need to be revamped? The question is, will the dog have the IQ to understand us deeply? That's the problem with AI: we might be like dogs in terms of our understanding of AI. We might not understand it, and that's the scary part.. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 122] »

1 hour 19 minutes

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Suppose I wanted to store digital data in a way that would be accessible to archeologists 10,000 years in the future. How could I achieve this? The best I can come up with is the awkward thin aluminum or titanium punch cards. Obviously, there would also be sheets of metal with plain writing on them including very clear and detailed explanations of how to build a card reader. I wonder how vinyl would hold up? Could Earth ever get a second moon? What kind of effects could this have on Earth? What should we do today to help survivors reboot civilization after a cataclysmic event? I always liked the idea of putting all of Wikipedia and other literature in glass and sending it on a 1,000-year orbit for future generations. Is the fact that the Moon exactly covers the Sun during an eclipse just a coincidence? Detecting the signatures of technology of other civilizations will be very difficult/impossible if they don't want them to be seen easily. Stealth/camouflage is a survival tactic in the wild. The topic of consciousness should be explored further. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 121] »

1 hour 31 minutes

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Could every exoplanet have a habitable zone if one could get just far enough away from the star? What makes a planet habitable? Why do we measure sound using decibels? What advances in synthetic biology do you think will happen in the short term, the long term and the very long term? Have you visited Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston? AI-designed proteins that do biocomputation These processes, in the case of life, exist in a coevolved physiochemical balance. That would be hard to reproduce. How do you think space travel will change/improve as technology advances? Will it become a regular form of transportation sometime in the future? When helicopters were first developed, people thought they would transform cities and be our new taxis. But they're too expensive. On the subject of shorter travel times, I remember Heinlein suggesting in his books using suborbital rockets to travel between destinations. Would such an idea be too expensive for companies to run? Or would such an idea be feasible to cut travel time? I think the cost and safety risks associated with space and underwater ocean tourism will keep them from ever being commonplace. Now your perspective on what's possible for travel is different than the younger generations'. In relation to what you are saying about air travel, cellphones and computers, all of those technologies went through a long period (10+ years) of being luxury goods that only the richest people on Earth could use. The same will probably be true for space travel. Do you think that problem will get better or worse over time? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others (144 videos)