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 120] »

1 hour 19 minutes

✕ close

Is there a way to digitize DNA sequences and examine them? Is a complete family tree of humanity with billions of connections a realistic possibility? Is DNA a tree or a semi-lattice? How likely is it that genetic engineering can create many mammalian species with superhuman intelligence? Can you speak on epigenetics? Has this effectively resolved the nature vs. nurture question by turning it into an invalid question? Do viruses play an important part in evolution? How does the brain distinguish signals coming from different senses? What is the difference between the signals coming from the eye vs. the ear? If everything is ultimately an electrical signal, is this not a difference in degree instead of kind? What are the implications regarding the ability for the brain to acquire another sense that is unlike the five senses we already have? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 119] »

1 hour 13 minutes

✕ close

How do we predict weather? Basically, weather forecasting is an excellent example of computational irreducibility. Can you discuss your recent blog on the second law of thermodynamics? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 118] »

1 hour 14 minutes

✕ close

Do you think it's possible to sustain life on Mars? How far into the future do you see this happening? Maybe biological switches would change everything for a biological machine. Could you explain the fundamental principles of biology? Aren't neurons the biological analog of switches? Can machine learning help solve inverse scattering problems where the forward scattering problem is highly nonlinear? How do x-rays work to see only the bones and ignore skin? I think bone opacity also comes down to water contents (there is just more water in tissue). Can those x-rays be used for automatic detection of changes within the molecule structure of crystallized solids as well? Do you think ecology will play an important role in understanding molecular computation? Ecology is a complex system. Physics is easy: just analyze a single particle's or body's motion. Ecology has vast interconnections and mechanisms. View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 117] »

1 hour 39 minutes

✕ close

Can you talk a bit about Pangaea? How do continents shift? Is it possible to reform Pangaea? Is there technology that could prevent this? How does ChatGPT work? Could you say that Chat GPT has made a graph of the space of words or ideas? I'd love to see a thesaurus based on vectors into semantic space, so you could ask it to give you a word with a meaning close to "A" but heading in the direction of "B." How well does ChatGPT handle slang or figures of speech? Does it understand text as literal, or is it capable of picking up these notes? Could it be that ChatGPT isn't accurate because its training data is text, which may or may not correspond to the real world? Shouldn't we use only real-world data, such as sensory information of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell? With all the new "AI" tools rolling out, what do you think will be the effect on "truth" and "facts" as we know them? Does ChatGPT's ability to mimic emotions means that it is able to feel anything, and how much consciousness does it have? Do you believe physics boundaries need to be coded explicitly, or do you think enough data will result in the model learning principles? How does a neural network experience time? How do all these threads of computation combine to form a whole from its parts? View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 116] »

1 hour 30 minutes

✕ close

Is it possible to produce large amounts of crude oil artificially by manipulating chemical kinetics? How is the distance to a distant galaxy determined? What industries do you think will be most disrupted by ChatGPT and Midjourney AI applications? Thoughts on integrating the Wolfram interface with ChatGPT? An automatic nonsense/falsity detector would be an interesting tool to have. With generative images, Dall-E needs to be able to recycle its output image for incremental improvement. ChatGPT will edit your emails into publishable books. What are some of the most interesting ChatGPT prompts you've come up with that can aid in everyday life? I've used ChatGPT to help give me ideas for movie scripts. Couldn't the falsity detector be used as a way to actually make the output of ChatGPT coherent? Isn't the detector just the necessary component for ChatGPT to learn from its mistakes? How could a language model be integrated with a symbolic system? Do you think ChatGPT is overhyped? Chomsky chuckled about the literally 60 years he's heard we're "on the verge of an AI revolution." Instead of training on text, wouldn't training on the senses that we use, such as video and audio, be better? I suspect that a model that can predict the next video frame will be as intelligent as a human. Video contains text inside itself as well as other degrees of freedom that humans have access to. Do you log all of your keystrokes etc. with the expectation that you will provide this information to an AI to try to understand your thought patterns? I've used it to construct a 365-day nutrition plan; I'm just having my first breakfast based on it! View Less »

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 115] »

43 minutes 41 seconds

✕ close

What causes snow? Why doesn't rain just turn into ice? OK, Stephen really knows his stuff on this branch of physics... he's studied in detail. Why is the density of solid water lower than liquid water? Is there any other molecule that also expands when it is solid? Why can you ice skate or ski? What happens at the surface of the ice? For ice skating, the ice melts at the contact of your blade so there is a small layer of liquid water due to friction, and hence it skates. But you also can push and speed up on ice while skating, so an increase in the friction must have happened? Apparently, gecko feet exhibit Casimir-like effects. Stephen, if I may make a suggestion: you need a blackboard (or whiteboard) behind you for the explanations. Is air a molecule? What is air? Can you measure the absorption of CO₂ by plants with this device? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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