Future of Science & Technology Q&A

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: Aside from faster processing speeds, what are some other ways computers may be improved in the future? - Will we still use books in 5-10 years, or will they be replaced by chatting with an AI? - It's moving toward narrative-driven, AI-powered, procedural generated VR environments with metahuman characters interacting with AI speech and whisper.... Create me a film experience.... - Yeah, I can't read books on the computer beyond like two hundred pages–too much eye strain. - Are we close to imitating senses of smell and touch in VR? - I lost my sense of smell due to a brain injury in 2016. Is there any realistic way this could ever be fixed? - How much of biology is untapped? I'm in the biology/biotech/genetics/metabolics field and it feels like most researchers never leave the lab. - Do you think deep neural nets etc. can help us build models of the human perceptual systems with vision and audio? How do we solve the problem of getting accurate training data for subjective experiences? - Technology and science mean nothing until we can chat with our dogs and cats. Will this ever be possible? - Do you think it will be possible to transition a real, living person into VR or code? Or it will be just a "JPG of a person"? - Isn't it too early to assume that we can replace all parts of the brain with digital tech?

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (May 19, 2023)

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 latest electric car is worth buying these days? What is the future of cars? - With technology integration, would we be able to do away with having to sleep in the future? - As far as human evolution, do you believe the human race is still evolving or have we peaked as a species? What's next in the stage of human evolution? - Will we ever have technology that will allow us to learn while we sleep? - Noise seems to be almost inevitable when it comes to flying, do you think there's a way to solve it? - How do you optimize the sky for regular air travel to accommodate flying cars? It doesn't seem feasible to build roads and traffic lights in the sky. - What about the future of tunnels? We've got 2 options for 3-D travel space! - About flying cars... Flying is dangerous and requires more training and skill and safety than ground cars. - Flying cars would take up an incredible amount of energy. Do you think it's even feasible that they would replace ground transportation? - What kind of architecture would we need in order to build an AI that is as good at math as LLMs are at language? Do you think this will be a fundamentally different architecture than a neural network? If so, how do humans do math in any self-consistent way at all? - Does AI being an interface to books mean there will be more subject matter experts, or fewer of them? - Will technology carry us away from the human condition, or allow it to flourish? - What does the future of libraries look like? - Lots of libraries have eBook checkouts now. - The future of the library is the anti-library, more books collected than read. - Even with modern internet mass information available, I still greatly value my personal physical library, several thousand technical reference books, documentation and circuit diagrams for all manner of things. Much of which cannot be found online yet.

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (June 2, 2023)

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's there to say about the future of neural nets? - Neural nets could evolve to be able to be trainers? What are the limits? - It seems like every decade I've been alive scientists keep saying "We just realized that brains/DNA are actually a lot more complicated than we realized, but now we're close to understanding them." Do you anticipate this continuing? - The dynamics behind crowdsourcing have interested me for a long time. We can start seeing the potential it has when using the same principles in neural networking. - How do you anticipate biotechnology shaping the future of biomaterials and tissue engineering? What are your thoughts on the accessibility and affordability of biotechnology advancements, and how can we ensure equitable distribution of benefits? - It may be better to prompt the body to regenerate its own organs instead of 3D printing them (again, given Michael Levin's work). - Is burrowing into an asteroid the logical way to shield people and equipment on voyages to, say, Mars or even out of the solar system?

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (June 16, 2023)

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 you comment on the future of LLMs being running in the cloud vs. being run on one's local machine? - Does the NANOGrav discovery spark ideas for experimental validation of the Physics Project? - Can you discuss the next evolution for AI models? So far we have: language models, image – text (classifiers), text – image (generators), etc. - What can be said for training multimodal AI models? - Do you think that we have reached a point of singularity such that any child born from today onward will never be able to surpass AI at any intellectual task, i.e. are we the last "useful" generation? - Is VR the future of UIs? - Given the two contrasting scenarios of a "Pink Plasma Heaven," where artificial general intelligence optimally solves problems for all sentient life, and a "Matrix Hell," where AI exploits humans as energy sources, how can we establish a guiding framework to navigate between these extremes? - To what degree do you think LLMs provide us with insights on the internal workings of our brain? Do you think there will be more lessons to learn from the structure of the human brain when designing the next generation of LLMs? - Does the spread of LLMs incentivize scientists (and humans in general) to become more deeply specialized (to "out-compete" LLMs in a narrow domain) or to become more broadly spread (in order to creatively generate connections between apparently remote domains)? - Will it be possible to use LLMs to achieve world peace? Or if world peace isn't big enough, can we beam LLM chats into outer space to try and get universal peace? - What do you think of power laws? What do you think are some good entry points for explaining the principles behind power laws? - What do you think of the future of AI in video games? They can be used to control the actions and dialog of NPCs, the design of the game's world and even the design of assets on the fly using little data. Video game assets can take up a lot of data, and if we could use AI to generate assets on the fly using a smaller amount of data, we could cut down on the download size of games as well as the effort needed to make assets. - How will we be able, in the future, to tell what we're seeing on screen isn't AI generated? Anything we could do today? (I think you might be a bot.) - Thinking in terms of inter-concept space, do you think there is an approach to using technology to develop a way in which we may better understand or gain experience to bridge the gap of inter-concept space between what we know and what we don't know? - When will this statement, "I think you might be a bot", be a compliment, rather than a criticism or an insult?

Future of Science and Technology Q&A: Live from the Wolfram Summer School (July 7, 2023)

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 houses are going to change much in the future? Will we reach the age of true "smart houses"? - Within the next 20 years, will "artificial intelligent" image recognition and/or image segmentation systems equal the accuracy of expert humans? For example, will an AI pathologist or radiologist equal the performance of a human pathologist or radiologist? - How long do you estimate before AI can do creative mathematics? How will this technology be similar to or different from GPT? - Do you think smartphones will replace desktop computing? - Does it make sense to pursue a math degree in the age of AI? - ​Will different advanced AGIs try to compete with each other for resources? - ​Which is more of an existential threat: AI or quants? - ​Are we now stuck with COBOL running most of the world economy for the rest of our lives? - In your opinion, is the concept of Maxwell's demon theoretically possible, and does it have the potential to violate the second law of thermodynamics? Furthermore, could you shed light on how computational limits may affect physical phenomena and our understanding thereof? And what about time: how are the second law of thermodynamics, computation and time connected? - Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae made some strikingly accurate predictions about technology development back in the 1960s. What is your perspective on Lem's predictive prowess? Do you find it remarkable that such accurate foresight of the distant future is possible? I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on the predictive power and limitations of technological forecasting. - Were there ideas to put 10 months in a year? - Can AI be used to create better prompts, or is that dependent on human consciousness? - ​Which will history judge as the biggest letdown: 2023's AI mania and panics, "VR is the inevitable near future" from the 2010s or the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence from 2001? - Will AI-based tutors replace most human tutors in the next five years?

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (August 18, 2023)

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 can you say about the future of physics? - Something practical: do you think pens and pencils still have room for improvement, or has writing technology been perfected? - ​Should we prioritize adding new senses to ourselves (a magnetic north sense with some device, for example) to discover more physics as pockets of computational reducibility? What possible senses? - ​When will it become the mainstream view that mathematics is merely a branch/form of computational discipline, and as such a physical science, free of Platonistic misconceptions? - ​I like the thought that there are kids now playing four-dimensional multiplayer games. The next generations won't even be able to understand the "trivial" stuff we were thinking about. - How do you envision mathematics (research to application) being practiced in the long-term future? - ​I think World of Warcraft may have helped me understand calculus better. You have a goal with a particular group setup, so what is the optimal scenario for victory given one's resources? - Which area of tech is advancing the fastest? Will this change in the future? - Will you ever invent a new language again? - Is there anything you have recently changed your mind on? If so, what is it and what might the implications be for the future of science and technology?

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (September 29, 2023)

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.

On his podcast, Stephen discusses topics ranging from the history of science to the future of civilization and ethics of AI.

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (September 29, 2023)

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Related tracks