In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is counting down to the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a chapter retrospective in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

What We've Learned from NKS Chapter 1: The Foundations of a New Kind of Science

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Excerpt from livestream episode History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 22, 2023), Stephen Wolfram answers: What is the history of AI? What is the first recorded example of artificial intelligence?

Stephen's conversation with Terry Sejnowski on the history of neural nets is available here: https://youtu.be/XKC-4Tosdd8

History of AI (March 22, 2023)

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Jonathan Gorard joins Stephen to discuss ongoing science research. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

A Conversation Between Jonathan Gorard and Stephen Wolfram (September 1, 2023)

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: Congrats on the new blog post! Are there any dangers to these "custom" plugins? Allowing ChatGPT access to your computer seems like asking for an AI takeover. - Is current tech like ChatGPT going to be able to answer every question imaginable? - Are you worried about being replaced by AI? - A caveat, though: LLMs can quite easily be asked to write in any non-perfect way we want! - What are some ways LLMs can be improved? Do these improvements require advancements in technology that haven't yet been made? - One thing that worries me about LLM is that right now, many people are using LLM as a "source of truth" or even "references" to their arguments.- Perhaps the only real way for an AI to make those value judgments is for it to be able to model its own possible future states and decide for itself? - Asking for ChatGPT to write less formally makes me think of the evolution of music genres, i.e. electronic music is now "not perfect" on purpose. - We're gonna one day find out that these livestreams are like a really advanced Turing test being conducted at Wolfram, and both Stephen and the moderators in the chat have been AIs all along.

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [May 5, 2023]

Stephen reads a blog from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com and then answers questions live from his viewers.

Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/12/observer-theory/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VDGyZUfL1BA

Stephen Wolfram on Observer Theory

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 is it important that the periodic table is structured as a table rather than a list of elements? - Is the periodic table just the table for the current state? Since there weren't heavy atoms from the start (Big Bang), maybe in the far future everything decays and just the electrons survive. - How certain are we that the Big Bang actually happened? What are the chances of the Big Bang theory being displaced in the future? - What do you make of the very early galaxies seen by JWST, which seem too large to exist so early? - Is it possible that the expansion of space due to dark energy could eventually be fast enough that even atoms and nuclei come apart? - How is the temperature of cosmic background radiation measured? Is it just from the wavelength of the microwaves?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [May 12, 2023]

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 LLMs will give everyone something akin to a personal McKinsey consultant? - How much efficiency is lost by needing to explain things to a team vs. doing a whole design alone? - With schools ending for the year, what are some ways to continue teaching kids over the summer? Did your summer schedule ever change when your kids would get out of school for summer? - What do you think about machine learning libraries vs. books? Do you think there is a current infrastructure out there for people to make libraries and sell them to users? It's interesting to think about people buying machine learning libraries for their AIs instead of books for their engineers. - What are some simple mathematical tricks and shortcuts it would be good for kids to learn? This might make a useful blog post. Things like "For powers of 10, the little number is how many zeroes come after the 1" and "It's easy to get 10%, you just have to double it to get 20% or find half to get 5%". - If you created an AI emulator of yourself, what would the first three rules of its conduct be? If you could "prompt engineer" an assistant bot for yourself, what would be the first three/most important "rules" you'd tell it to follow? - I'm a software engineer with about eight years of professional experience. I'm interested in transitioning into the field of AI/machine learning. I found it quite difficult to find careers in the marketplace that don't require 5+ years of experience in AI/machine learning. Any advice on how best to make this transition? - Will prompt engineering becoming a legitimate field of study at some point, or is this mainly a trend due to the current systems? - What does it take up front for you to fully invest in a potential idea? Must there be a full proof of concept done prior, with rigorous testing? - Isn't it inherently unwise to seek out AI help, especially in a corporate setting, as it may lead to leakage of information? - Do you find that the key to bring a productive person involves structuring your mind in such a way that you tackle problems in projects? What advice would you have for the sporadic-minded individual?

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (May 31, 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 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 did scientific disciplines originate and evolve through the centuries? - Do you think Apple's new VR headset will be much different than previous releases of other VR headsets? What do past releases of similar products predict? - VR kind of reminds me of video game systems. Your product may be fantastic, but if the content/software isn't up to snuff, it's probably going to fail. - These glasses and headsets need to be comfy and miniaturized to become suitable for everyday use. - What are use cases in education for these new headsets? - Perhaps AI can be used to translate existing educational material into VR-suitable content.

History of Science & Technology Q&A (June 7, 2023)

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: Could the expansion of the universe affect biological evolution? - ​How much does the sky weigh? How much does the Earth weigh? - What would happen if gravity on Earth changed to that of the Moon? What if gravity suddenly got stronger? - So a full data memory card vs. a new, empty data memory card of the same kind: will there be a slight difference in weight due to the data filled? - Do insects (e.g. ants, mites, etc.)/bacteria have brains? Assuming they do, do they have emotions? Do they feel pain? If they (in the case of bacteria) don't have a brain, what governs their behaviors? - How was it discovered that caffeine could energize us? Is it all living things that experience these effects, or is it exclusive to humans? - If electronics have coils and the brain has coils, should we be more conscious of signals in the air? - Is there a reason for the food likes and dislikes that each person experiences? Can taste buds be tricked?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [June 9, 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 reads a recent blog from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com and then answers questions live from his viewers.

Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/03/can-ai-solve-science/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/goYaSkxG8LA

Stephen Wolfram Readings: Can AI Solve Science?

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: Is writing the same as thinking? - After reviewing your Wikipedia page, I noticed that you left undergraduate/postgraduate study before graduation for whatever reason. My question pertains to how you found the application process and background study for being accepted into a PhD program. If you could give some background into how much studying you had completed by that point and how you demonstrated your ability to be accepted, I would be very grateful. - ​Great piece about Doug Lenat and CYC. Any further thoughts about such intrinsically driven, lifelong research pursuits–including your own–be it their significance, their risks or anything in between? - ​I'm finishing my PhD. There are so many industries/groups! Much more than I know, for sure... How can one find "the one" in the ocean? - What made you and Jonathan decide to go on a livestream? Was it planned, or do you just randomly decide to do a livestream if the discussion is interesting enough? - ​How do you determine whether a decision should be decided short term or long term? - How did you allocate your time across strategy, product development, operations, etc., during the early stages of Wolfram Research, and how has that evolved as the company has grown? - If you could create and design a school, how would you structure the curriculum? Would it be different for elementary, middle and high school vs. college? - Do you have a favorite of your livestream series? Are there other types you'd be interested in? - ​Would you suggest working for a startup that is building on an idea from a renowned research institution, or working directly at that institution? - That's basically what they teach you when learning to ride a motorcycle. You trend toward where you're looking. - Along these lines, is it better to say "This is going to be difficult" or "Don't worry, it's not complicated"? - Do you have any advice for people who want to be independent researchers?

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (September 6, 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: Would an alien intelligence experiencing a different slice of the ruliad (a "ruster") close to ours likely experience black holes in a similar way? - ​Is rulial space bigger than branchial space? - Maybe it's a Gaussian distribution around a point in rulial space that makes human minds? - What do you think about NASA's recently released plans to build a Moon-based radio telescope? - ​How would the signal get back to Earth from the dark side of the Moon? - Why would so many nations be interested in the Moon? - Suppose we've just gotten lucky and developed our current level of technology during a period of unusual solar calm. How do we adapt if we expect solar storms to cause havoc with our electronics, say, every few decades? - Fiber optics have reduced our vulnerability from the days when landlines were all copper. Only the power grid remains. - What does the future look like for computational language? Will it be adopted on a larger scale? - How do you anticipate biotechnology shaping the future of biomaterials and tissue engineering? - How do you see the future of information consumption? Will it all be digital? Will physical books still be relevant? Will it even be reading, or simply data chips that are inserted into the brain? - Will we ever get to a point of other mammals evolving to the intelligence level of humans?

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (September 15, 2023)

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: ​Were the 70s truly the golden age of electronics? - What's the history of hacking? When did security risks become a prominent issue? - ​Did you get to know Carver Mead at Caltech? - What progress did the antigravity research movement gain in the 50s–60s, and why did research eventually stop?

History of Science & Technology Q&A (September 20, 2023)

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: If human reaction speed were faster, would that be helpful? How much faster could it be? Is the limiting factor the nerve signal relays or brain processing time?​ - Do you find it weird that on Earth, animals with bigger brains are considered the more intelligent species, but in technology, the smarter computer chips seem to always be smaller?​ - ​Could these (neuron connections) "prove" precognitions with "impossible" results from certain people?​ - Do you think the brain can be trained (or not) like a muscle?​ - ​How will brains change through Neuralink connecting to AI?​ - ​I think some parts of our brains adapted to modern (laggy) typing, so we don't really perceive it anymore.​ - By the way, they have done the same thing to brains of whales etc. and found that those whales actually have fewer neurons than humans. It's just that the size of those neurons is very big.​ - ​I'd say societies/groups are our larger-scale developing "brains." - Would bigger brains run into heating/cooling issues?​ - ​I get the feeling we'll realize nature is so much more efficient than what we hope to do with electronics that we'll soon be relying on cells for major computation.

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [September 22, 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 reads a recent blog from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com and then answers questions live from his viewers.

Read the blog along with Stephen: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/03/when-exactly-will-the-eclipse-happen-a-multimillennium-tale-of-computation/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7Eqhd34ytoc

When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation

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 do you think is the most important aspect to focus on or dedicate the most effort to when running a business? - You were a speaker at the All-In Summit 2023, which was a conference aimed mostly at venture capital folks. What were your impressions of this summit and its attendees? Did you attend parties at the All-In Summit? - Do you get demotivated to do things that AI might be able to do in a fraction of the time in the relatively near future? - What's your take on privacy, especially for digital services and devices (regarding companies using data to manipulate people and things similar to that)? - Could you imagine the web being washed away as it did to other technologies? - How has the concept of "intellectual property" evolved? Is land a good analogy for IP? - Do you know about the recent anti-trust cases brought against Google and Amazon? If yes, what kind of opportunities do you think would open up for competitors if they lose? - ​Have you ever gone through the patent process personally? - ​Maybe ChatGPT can make patenting things easier. - Maybe the ambiguity is a feature of natural language instead of a negative, and it's purposefully not specific to allow more expansive, unpredictable scopes of use. - With LLM lawyers, the patent disputes will end up just being a bunch of robots arguing all the time. - Is diversifying my professional ventures a worse outcome than focusing on one or two occupations that I'm really good at? - There are somewhere between five hundred thousand and two million cuneiform tablets just sitting in warehouses. Untranslated, unscanned, inaccessible. What can we do other than lament? - When you first started making sales with Mathematica, was it mostly to academics or companies? And how did you find these customers? - Let's say an amateur claims to have found a big breakthrough. How do you judge if it is worth the read?

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (October 4, 2023)

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: Is it possible that individual particles have a halo of dark matter, like galaxies have?​ - ​How is antimatter made in the lab, and what makes it so difficult to produce?​ - ​I am curious about your perspective on the recent unveiling of smart glasses equipped with AI assistants (LLMs) by Meta. Do you see this development as a natural evolution of smartphones?​ - But was the separation of matter and antimatter proposed by Feynman, or earlier? And how can this be measured by experiment?​ - Are there anti-neutrons? Anti-elements?​ - Does technology behave differently depending on outside factors (such as atmospheric pressure, temperature of weather, gravity, etc.)? Is there an ideal environment? - Deionized (distilled) water won't conduct.​ - How about solar flares? How do they affect technology?​ - A gamma ray burst hit us last year about this time. It was called the BOAT (biggest of all time). Did we learn anything new from the data from that burst?​ - What determines the color of a leaf when the weather changes? Why are some yellow, some orange and some red?​ - Could there be nanites waiting for more favorable conditions to multiply (nanometer-size robots or organisms) in the samples we brought back from the asteroid Bennu? How could we be sure there aren't any?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [October 20, 2023]

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 quicksort or Hoffman encoding? - TIFF is also lossless... I think in some version... - Standard method for 5G? That is, within 5G, does it operate on the bit level rather than the radio wave level? - There is a similar problem with SIP: not all vendors implement the same standards or follow the standard properly, and you end up with interop problems. - Would that also work with a logographic language? - The future is gonna consist of languages that are just emojis. - ​When did the study of economics form? - What's the history of "double-entry" bookkeeping? Can something as basic be redefined? - ​What were early tabulating machines like (such as the ones IBM sold during WWII)? - Do you think future historians will have a harder time parsing through all the information available in the last 50 years compared to the last century, or even two centuries? What is the best historical record for research in this case? Books, images, video, etc.? - Why doesn't copyright law allow flexibility with people who want to share their works online? When did copyright law begin? - How did legal structures evolve with the creation of the internet? Were completely new structures built because of it?

History of Science & Technology Q&A (October 25, 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: How will the future of mathematics change? - ​Would there be a way to use the Moon as a gravitational tugboat to slowly tow the Earth away from the expanding surface of the red giant Sun so it can stay in the Goldilocks Zone? - What future applications do you think will come out with the discovery of the ability to measure at the attosecond time scale? - Do you think that new conjectures could also be made by AI/AGI systems? How will humans tackle the abstraction and complexity of them? - SW's TED Talk announcement + discussion of the Wolfram Physics Project - ​Could you speak a bit about energy "as the flux of causal edges through spacelike hypersurfaces"? Specifically, is there some more intuition or narrative you can provide as to why that is the case? - On the topic of conferences, do you think technology will change the format? Or will panels and standard talks remain a constant? Will AIs one day be participants? - What is it like to actually run a task on a supercomputer? - Don't you fear humans will start to live mostly in digital worlds and most cognitive energy will be spent on problems there and not in the natural sciences? - Would it be possible at some point to have both a digital and physical consciousness simultaneously? And then when you sleep, they combine or something to absorb the knowledge of both experiences? - What if we take someone's videos, articles, life notes, a lot of things... and feed them into some specialized AI, and make it answer questions and behave almost like that person? That technology is not so far away... It feels a bit like "concussions transfer." Do you think it can be classified like that? - ​Stephen's livestreams are like mini sci-fi adventures for the mind.

Future of Science & Technology Q&A (October 27, 2023)

In this first episode in a four-part series on the history of science recorded at the Wolfram Summer School, Stephen Wolfram traces the roots of science to ancient Babylon and discussed scientific advancements all the way to John Locke.

A Brief History of Science with Stephen Wolfram—Part 1

In this first episode of a four-part series, Stephen Wolfram revisits an essay in his book Idea Makers and blog post titled "Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace." Ada Lovelace is a figure known for her pioneering contributions in the history of computing, and Stephen sets the stage of Ada's life and times in Victorian England, her burgeoning interest in mathematics, and the central figures in her life. Read the blog post here: https://wolfr.am/ada

Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace—Part 1

What happens if you take four of today’s most popular buzzwords and string them together? Does the result mean anything? Stephen Wolfram explores his blog post "Buzzword Convergence: Making Sense of Quantum Neural Blockchain AI." Read the post here: https://wolfr.am/buzzword-convergence

Buzzword Convergence: Making Sense of Quantum Neural Blockchain AI

Stephen Wolfram revisits the film '2001: A Space Odyssey' fifty years since its release. Stephen takes a look at what the movie got right about technology, space travel, and AI based on his blog post "Learning about the Future from '2001: A Space Odyssey,' Fifty Years Later." Read the post here: wolfr.am/tBgxwAPq

Learning about the Future from '2001: A Space Odyssey,' Fifty Years Later

Stephen Wolfram remembers his time spent with Richard Feynman on what would have been his 100th birthday. Based on a chapter in his book 'Idea Makers,' Stephen recalls personal interactions, anecdotes and correspondence with Feynman. You can read Stephen's blog post about it here: https://wolfr.am/ux6o86m5

Remembering Richard Feynman

In this two-part podcast, join Stephen Wolfram as he revisits his magnum opus A New Kind of Science—examining its implications for modern machine learning, neural networks, the fundamental theory of physics, and mining the computational universe. Learn more at https://wolframscience.com

Revisiting a New Kind of Science—Part 2

Revisiting A New Kind of Science—Part 1

Stephen Wolfram details the tech infrastructure he has created to make himself a productive scientist, CEO, and language designer. Read more here: https://wolfr.am/BVcUHXdF

Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

A version of a recent talk Stephen Wolfram gave at a blockchain conference, where he said he'd talk about "What will the world be like when computational intelligence and computational contracts are ubiquitous?" Read the written version: https://wolfr.am/DgM8rMy8

A World Run with Code

Stephen Wolfram reads a recent essay, "What We've Built Is a Computational Language (and That's Very Important!)" and explains how he's built the Wolfram Language as a way to communicate computational ideas. Read the essay: https://wolfr.am/Drl0JCmF

What We've Built Is a Computational Language (and That's Very Important!)

Join a lecture with Stephen Wolfram as he gives a thumbnail sketch of the history of mathematics live from the Wolfram Summer School 2019.

A Very Brief History of Mathematics

In this third episode in a 3-part series, Stephen Wolfram details the backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project.

How We Got Here: The Backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project-Part 3

In this second episode in a 3-part series, Stephen Wolfram details the backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project.

How We Got Here: The Backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project-Part 2

In this first episode in a 3-part series, Stephen Wolfram details the backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project.

How We Got Here: The Backstory of the Wolfram Physics Project-Part 1

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the 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.

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