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 were only a few species domesticated? Could any species be domesticated? Are humans domesticated? - Does conditioning have anything to do with domestication? - Since an octopus has nine brains, including one in each leg, how does it see the world? - Every animal has different capabilities, with their own advantages and disadvantages. Dolphins are fast, but they're not fast on land. -  Would you agree that humans are the most "flexible" and can "adapt" to learn the most among Earth species? - Other species' communication is domain specific and our communication is universal, right? - I believe the mapping between the world and brain zones is a super-simple geometrical mapping that makes good sense. I wonder what this brain-leg mapping would be. Legs are further away from each other than a leg and a brain. - Do you think it's possible that we might live inside a cosmic super-organism, analogous to the way microbes live inside of us? - Is there a way to tell how much of our intelligence emerges from high-level brain functions vs. low-level cellular computation? - What is the simplest possible object? - Can you explain why the default scientific position is that consciousness does not rely on quantum mechanics? To me, it seems obvious that it would to at least some degree. - Why is it that we as observers never see quantum superpositions? Why are superpositions aligned to our macroscopic observations? - Could it then be that what is quantum mechanics to us just involves higher dimensions of time? The fact that quantum mechanics is incomprehensible to us is then because we are trying to understand-higher dimensional time from a single dimensional experience of time. - Why do my glasses get foggy but my eyeballs don't? - Fog can't create droplets on a wet surface. - And let's not forget the eyelids, which act as windscreen wipers!

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [October 28, 2022]

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: 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 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.

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [October 28, 2022]

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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