The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, a robot brought by a student from the Wolfram Summer School joins Stephen. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What could the following people have done with Wolfram? Aristotle, Archimedes, Emmy Noether, Vega, etc.​ - ​​What would Ada Lovelace have done with current computing? And the possibilities?​ - Did Galileo have some mechanical math tools?​ - How does the abacus fit into the story of calculators?​ - What did Ada Lovelace say when asked about her coding style? "My code is like poetry, it's logical, elegant, and never divided by zero!"​ - Would authors such as Shakespeare find any use in Wolfram tech? How might he react to technology in general?​ - What about someone like Socrates? Or Plato?​

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What is the future of business? - What's the future of contracting and procurement? Can AI and crypto indeed create "smart contracts," or is that a utopian vision? - How do you see universities keeping up with AI? It seems that universities will even more become a preselection for corporations. What are your thoughts on it? - What is your opinion on terraforming the Moon? - Having corporations with the means (money) as well as nations that have the forethought to have their own supercomputers, how do you see the inevitable increase in the gap between the ultra–high-tech nations/corporations and the rest of the developing world?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Can business ventures be a "one-man show," or is it a requirement to have a team? - If I wanted to start a blog, what advice do you have for this process? How do you maintain your writings? - Are there any blogs you are currently working on? - How do you think Wolfram would be different if it were based in Silicon Valley? - So Stephen's moral is "Follow the weather." I also don't want to establish an office where there is gloomy weather. - ​​So you think complex and write complex, instead of simplicity as guidance. Does someone with a sense of simplicity fit into your company? - I gave up on the idea of incorporating science in my business/income life. I'm curious about your case. Do you like the process of production/commercialization/management? - Innovative companies need a culture of dealing with failure. Can you quantify failure for measuring the innovative rate? - Is there opportunity to be a CEO of a company that employs AI? - How did you achieve product market fit? - Is there a place for a consulting firm that helps with dealing with failure (as an instrument of innovation)? - Can you remember a time in your life when you realized learning was fun? I imagine a child Stephen Wolfram sitting at a desk learning physics, then having realizations. - Do you look for practical or monetary value when choosing a project? Do you have advice for folks who aren't as financially independent? - What is your advice for building standard operating procedures (SOPs)?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Can you talk about the history of hearts? Why does the human heart not resemble the heart shape seen most commonly in other forms? - How did scientists discover the brain and its purpose? When did this happen? - What about the theories that say that neither the brain nor anything else in the body is the "site of consciousness" (e.g. "the brain is just a receiver")? There's at least some stuff there that can't be easily dismissed. ​​- Any thoughts on Panini, who wrote a meta-rule to decode the rule conflicts in the linguistic algorithm? - How has technology influenced the development and preservation of languages? 0 Why did the Latin language "die"? Do you think it would be widely used if it had survived? - The Pirahã, a tribe in Brazil, have a very peculiar way of talking. They don't include numbers and time, if I understand. - How do linguists reconstruct ancient languages they have little direct evidence of?​ ​​- Would the Greek spoken at the time of Aristotle be fully intelligible to speakers of modern Greek? - How did accents and dialects evolve (for example, UK English vs. US English)​? - The reconstructed 1700s London accent sounds somewhat American, I thought? - ​​Are there still undiscovered writing systems to be discovered? - ​​Do you have any comments on the relationship scientists have had with the philosophy of science? - ​​If one views religion as a function whose input is belief and output is explanation of "the unknown," then could science ("many universes" in quantum theory, for example) be construed as such?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: ​Have you had a chance to try Apple's new VR headset? - Do you think travel vlogging is a new possibility with the headset? - Do you think motion sickness will be a problem with Apple's headset? - Will AI courses be common in curriculums? If so, how would you approach the subject? - Do you think VR headsets have any place in the classroom? Or maybe they're a new opportunity for remote learning? - Can you explain the tech behind Apple's new headset? Is it a realistic everyday use item? I just can't seem to grasp a new trend of walking to get coffee and bumping into headset wearers. - One thing I like: let the AI first ask a few basic questions and let the student define some words—not for judging them on it, but for gauging what they already know/understand. - What would happen if I were walking at 90% the speed of light? What would I see looking through my Apple VR headset? - What is a magnetic field and in what medium does it exist? - Do you think it will be possible to make the headset smaller in the future?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Do you think the plateau of LLMs will be at the level of understanding language? - Once it does plateau, it will start to taper off and we'll need to use a different technique. - How do you know that our brains aren't already using compression? - The AI could make far more precise classifications than we make, leading to new words and their very precise and peculiar meanings. - What seems more important to me is just the speed of the medium that AI has and how quickly it can process all of the interrelations, even when it's just forty thousand concepts, let alone larger context. - Which language is best at this compression? - Is there room for significant advancements in mathematical notations?- A single biological neuron has been shown to be able to perform an exclusive OR operation. A current simple artificial neuron can't do that. Do you think we are underestimating the power of biological neurons compared to artificial neurons? - Did the neural nets that you were playing with learn after their minds were blown? - ​​What is your view on emergent phenomena? -Do you think it is possible to predict all the emergent abilities AI can possibly obtain? - Will humanoid robots usher in an age of abundance? - Can a higher intelligence ever transcend computational irreducibility? - Why does pessimism toward future technology exist? My experience is that most people's default opinion on future tech is "Let's not do this." - Can we calculate how captured wind energy will influence the weather in the future if we become fully independent from fossil fuels? - What is there to say about the future of food science? Will someone be able to recreate Willy Wonka's creations? - Most of the energy in wind is not on the ground, it's over oceans and up in the sky. ​​- Could one devise a "computation engine" analogous to a thermodynamic engine, where useful work is a consequence of information processing? - Can AI solve the taste problem as it did the protein-folding problem? - If we could run our evolution over and over again, maybe we could see ourselves in some different shapes, floating in space with different ways of communication. For example, we could exchange thoughts telepathically, or maybe we could influence objects without physical contact. - What are your thoughts on this? - Would it be easier to genetically modify kiwi instead?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Have you had a chance to try Apple's new VR headset? - You previously discussed the role of AI in the future of science. What about the role of AI in the future of business, innovation or managing life? - ​Have you ever determined your Myers–Briggs personality type? - Ever considered hiring based on a personality test? - ​​What's some good advice for starting work on a super-novel thing where there is almost no literature about it? - At this stage in your career, has your vision for your legacy reified fully, and if so, what do you imagine it being? Eliminating computational irreducibility within the ruliad and maximizing its positive impact on the world, for example? ​​- How have your experiences in education influenced your approach to innovation? - Einstein is attributed as having said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." - Do any of your businesses have plans to build blockchain solutions? How does blockchain technology fit into your vision of the future? - What is a fun business idea you have had but never executed? - Do you think we'll get to a point of textbooks by AI? - Wolfram was one of the pioneers in using notebooks for scientific programming, i.e. literate programming. Do you think new programming languages will be more expressive? - Do you think philosophy and psychology (or an applied version of these for those less theoretical) should be taught throughout the school years just like English and math (in addition to everything else)?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: ​Can you explain dark matter in layman's terms? - Could dark matter just not be interacting with light/photons? - If our universe is accelerating faster than the speed of light, does that mean we cannot see anything past the speed of light? - So the "viscosity" of the Higgs field gives mass to particles? - How might the topological stability and quantization of skyrmions, initially proposed as models for nucleons, relate to our understanding of gravity, considering their presence in solid-state physics? - Can the probability of a random walk returning to its origin be another way of defining local dimension on a graph? - I'm quite confused with heat/temperature and the general introduction of thermodynamics. Can you explain?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What are the key requirements in place for past scientific revolutions? - What do you think about the effective accelerationism movement? What history led to or influenced it? - ​​Exploring binary code's historical role in programming and its connection to physics laws, in the universe as a giant computer: do parallels exist between binary principles and underlying structures? - ​​Can you talk about the history of cybernetics, second-order cybernetics and its current connections to the observer in the ruliad? - Did the "cyber" definition come before the definition of "robotics"? - You are forgetting George Spencer-Brown for the second-order cybernetics topic. - Have you ever used the ideas he expounded in Laws of Form​? - What was the significance of the ENIAC computer?​ - Isaac Newton was known as the father of modern physics. How might he view advancements since his time? Would he have anything to add? - What is the history of small business vs. big business? Was there a shift in history when one overtook the other? - Can you talk about the history of traveling to space? How come Moon visits aren't more frequent?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Can AI be swallowed by more advanced AI by feeding it via "virtual" input? The motivation could be the increased efficiency of "larger" AI. - Do you think anyone will solve the Riemann hypothesis in your lifetime? ​​​- Aren't there thousands upon thousand of written papers that assume the Riemann hypothesis is true? - Will AIs be the ones to explore space? - ​It's ​4.37 light years to Alpha Centauri. - We should harness light/light waves so that we can take a picture of the planets there, then bring them back and produce pictures in 8+ years. - Do you think Ray Kurzweil's longevity predictions are likely to happen in our own lifetime? - Would it make sense for alien AI civilizations to broadcast radio or other signals with information on how to build such AI as a way to propagate in the universe faster than material space travel? - People automatically assume that AI will create this type of step function upward in everything in the world or in the economy. This may not be the case due to diminishing returns.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Do you think a PhD is worth it when you are later in your career? Or should you just self-learn if you can? - As far as managing life, what has been your biggest takeaway in your career/personal life that you would like to pass on to the younger generation? - How do you approach risk-taking in business, and what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs about managing risk? - Do you have any New Year's resolutions/big plans for 2024? - I am a software engineer, and the field of quant + data science is very appealing to me. What advice do you have? - I teach my first class tomorrow—what advice do you have? Do you have any advice on pricing software licences? - I build bespoke design software and I'm kind of winging the licences. What do you think of subscription vs. one-time purchase for software? - Imagine Mathematica with inline YouTube ads! - What is the coolest thing your company has ever done? - How much computational thinking and modeling do you do on the business itself, both for decision making and planning? - Do you consider yourself a celebrity? -What has been your coolest encounter/weirdest encounter? - What do you think about ​organic education matters? Basically, can you use AI to figure out a fixed point for education (what you want to understand) vs. testing for knowledge? - Can you ski? - Can you picture AI creating an alternative legal system? - I'm wondering how you imagine your symbolic language might interface with AI. I'm not sure about the implementation, but on a surface level, Wolfram Language feels closer to interfacing with an AI than text-based languages. - Your mother was a major anthropologist and philosopher. Has she had any impact on you? - ​It would be cool to live in that future where you talk to your AI in your house and it does things for you. - When talking to ChatGPT, I ask politely and say thank you—way more than I should, too. Uncanny valley and all that! (Plus being Canadian, maybe.) - Do you think there is harm in always learning? I think humans aren't built to be putting so much demand for energy on our brains. But darn, it feels good to learn! - Would you want yourself to be automated, so that you would no longer need to exist? How far would you want yourself automated?

Stephen celebrates the 200th Anniversary of Sadi Carnot's Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu. Stephen's essay on the The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/how-did-we-get-here-the-tangled-history-of-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: ​Why do you think there is matter at all? - How does friction affect the motion of an object? - On the topic of physics, what is the relationship between force, mass and acceleration? - Can you explain the difference between static and kinetic friction in the context of Newton's laws? - How do Newton's laws of motion apply to objects moving in circular motion? - How would you structure a discussion on the introduction of physics?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: How often do separate ideas emerge (like convergent evolution) and merge to either compliment each other or "make whole" ideas that didn't have all the answers themselves? - What surprises you most about the history of science and technology? What is there to learn? - What's the history of timekeeping? - How did civilizations create the calendar and clocks? What science supports this? - How would you keep track of time/sync up your devices? Today it's easy with electronic devices. I'm imagining my microwave and stove clock always being a minute or two out of sync from manually setting it. - How did you get to know so much, and in such depth, about such vastly disparate historical topics? Seems this could be fascinating to hear about in and of itself. - Makes me think that maybe blockchains are the evolution of agreed-upon ledgers in one single agreed-upon time. - Do you think the Fourier transform is fundamental to nature? - Historically, it appears in quantum field theory, quantum computing, signal processing, etc. - When did time become an important variable in science?​ - Why do you suppose no one tried to continue with Nikola Tesla's incomplete inventions?​ - As a software engineer, I discover elegant academic programming languages all the time, but they never seem to gain much traction in industry. On the other hand, we have languages like JavaScript, which was pretty much developed as a prototype but is now ubiquitous in web development. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this history of "organic" development of programming languages. - Are there any pros to using "historical" technology, or is newer always better?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What scientific breakthroughs would you like to see in 2024? - Whatever happened to graphene? Is it still a viable product of future technologies? - Could we build "bio-vehicles," e.g. instead of batteries, use synthetic adipose tissue, which is ~50–100 times more mass efficient per kWh? (Is there a future in bio-batteries?) - Based on the level of computational advances this last decade, with the trend only showing even more of the same, do you think that traditional engineering disciplines will be relegated to OpenLLM? - Do you think we'll see mass-producible, room-temperature superconductors in the next decade? - ​It has been suggested that AI will displace coders/programmers. Do you think AI might also replace many physical and chemical experiments? - Any thoughts on "zero-knowledge proofs," i.e. the ability to make proofs without revealing details? - Given that some of our greatest accomplishments as a species have happened when we mimic nature, how important do you think biomimetics will be going forward? - Can you see a time when the discovery of new mathematical theorems and axioms will be generated from AIs? - When Betelgeuse explodes, will humans be okay? - Do you think smart textiles/computing fabrics will take off or be viable? Would you wear, say, a sweater to hear instead of a hearing aid? - But things like math, geometry and especially tessellation have patterns that are universally implicit and can be interpreted as interesting by their own existence, and not just by the view of humanity. - Is there a way we can use Brownian motion at a molecular scale as a type of fingerprint for nano-sensors to create things that are piracy-proof? - Why are the axioms of mathematics necessarily the ones that are effective at describing things we see as well? - What do things like dreams and "higher states of consciousness" spoken about in Eastern philosophies tell us about ourselves as observers? - Would it be easy to have an AI remaster old movies, both real ones and cartoons, so we can watch all the old gems in high-end graphics? - "Interesting" is defined by a "coolness" threshold. - Since the scientific paradigm was a major cause for the Enlightenment, can we expect the (multi-)computational paradigm to kick off a socio-philosophical paradigm of comparable importance? - If someone invented calculus in the Stone Age, it would probably have not been used for anything... Do you think there are some ideas that may be "rediscovered" because they have a better use?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: What have been some of the most fascinating questions you have answered? Are there still topics to explore? - What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges facing businesses in your industry in the next five years? - What is the best approach to develop sound computational thinking? Are there really good books or courses? - Are there fields you know have depth but don't interest you at all? I'm a person who gets easily distracted—a jack of all trades, but master of none. I envy people who dedicate their focus on a specific field to become an expert, but I fail to do so myself. As I'm getting older, I still dabble and try to find "my thing." Do you reckon there's an approach that could help me to get more focused on a single field without that initial spark? - How do you keep track of what you want to learn? - How do you manage your time effectively so you dedicate ample time to each of the things you want to learn? - Do you have some activity to calm your brain (perhaps after a long day of concentrating), i.e. to wind down, before you go to sleep? - Learn to surf, then wait for the right wave: what was the wave you would say you caught that kicked off your career? - How has publishing as a singular author on innovative ideas changed your life trajectory? Do you feel like institutional authority was important for you to be heard, or was it truly the merit of your work? - Have you ever thought about leaving the software world and producing hardware? - ​Is it feasible for an individual to start a software company from scratch today the way you developed SMP into a viable, complete product? - Are there other types of technology or software you would like to experiment with for future endeavors? - I am a very big user of the Wolfram Cloud on mobile when I am out and about. I would love for the iOS version to be given more love. - ​​Would you say that the accessibility of education on the internet is making universities obsolete? - I work in logistics and we're FAR away from using AI. We actually took a step backward recently with an internal software solution that does not work for specific customers at all. I do have ideas, but I have to open tickets that are never resolved. I know for sure my ideas can be built into the system. I'm about to give up or write a better system (kidding). How would you approach a huge business about this? - How do we encourage more people to study the difficult mathematics behind machine learning and robot process automation, especially when they're younger and more neuroplastic, so that many of the most groundbreaking developments are accessible to a greater contingent of global society?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: ​Do we know enough neurobiology to assert that the human brain works differently from a machine learning or artificial intelligence model? - How would you begin an introduction to chemistry course? - How are chemical reactions balanced, and why is it important to balance chemical equations? - Is it right to still use the periodic table today, or is it an order of the past? - Is there research on computing outside of the classical (binary) and "quantum" states of electrons, for example biology-, chemical- or light-based data storage and processing? - Molecules are graphs. - The system of balancing molecules and equations is just a new variation of "this" equals "that." - What strategies and techniques can be employed to effectively control and optimize chemical reactions for various practical applications, including maximizing yield, minimizing waste and achieving desired products? - Molecular-level mechanisms govern the magnetic properties of materials. How do these mechanisms lead to phenomena like ferromagnetism, paramagnetism and diamagnetism? What about radioactive substance reactions?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What will "prompt engineering" be like if LLMs are super-intelligent? - ​​Maybe language is stopping us to get some ideas because we cannot formulate the idea in our known languages? - ​​Elon yesterday on X was saying how most of our memory is digital now and same will happen with concepts, just stored on some device. - Seems like, for creatures like cuttlefish or octopus where they have the ability to change the shape texture and color of their skin, they must have something "different" going on in their brains, where they are not just capable of perceiving shape color and texture of the outside world, but also the ability to physically "mimicking" it.... Just a thought. - In the future the Earth would probably be a big brain. If every connected computer on the internet was running neuron-computations... - What if we need to deal with concepts that need more neural mass that we possess? - ​What do you think of the plans to shoot feature films in space? - What impact will the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technology have on our daily lives, from smart cities to autonomous vehicles? - ​​Someone should start a tourist livestream channel. - Do you think in the future humans could interact with AIs via a visualization of latent space to create new concepts? - Missing the ability to try the food, a major reason to actually go somewhere. Do you think there'd be a way to "taste" via computation? - Thank you for these livestreams. Dr Wolfram mentioned on the stream Wednesday his work on developing a course on computation thinking. I wonder if he could comment on how that is going? - When is AI going to travel the galaxy on its own and create its own habitat on a different planet? - Have you ever had figgy pudding? If so, how would you describe it?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: How do you handle the pressure of deadlines? Is it better to turn in something rushed/unfinished or complete it fully with the risk of being late? - We are creatures of motion, not stagnation? Not just physically, but also in relation to careers/life events? ​​Parkinson's Law is the adage that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. - ​​Can you discuss working with many people vs. working as a "hermit"? - Did you get lonely during the NKS days, during other periods of your life, etc.? - I learned recently that Ramanujan in his local town in India was discouraged from going to Cambridge because crossing the ocean was interpreted as leaving one's identity behind. How to manage? - I would love to hear your thoughts on making big changes in your life and how you approach them. Are there techniques that you've come to rely on to guide you in life? - Is there value to stimulating and inspiring people other than oneself, in spite of the delays in your personal research endeavors? - When is 14 coming out? - Any upcoming holiday plans? - How do holidays generally affect work life? - How do you manage working for a global company? - What advice do you have with scheduling around time zones and such? - What would be Stephen's 2023 Year in Review? - Not to forget observer theory! Encourage everyone to read the essay. - ​​Will there be a German translation on the second thermodynamics law book?