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: Continuing the dinosaur theme, is it possible biology can repeat patterns of evolution? Is it possible for dinosaur-like creatures to reappear? - Why is it as technology advances, it goes through phases of bigger to smaller to bigger? I've seen this with phones, computers, TVs, cars, etc. What does this say for the future of technology? - ​​What would be the future of the personal computing paradigm? Would we see more remote cloud-like computing and storage in the future, essentially making personal computing devices obsolete? - The current AI/LLM models aren't good at the mathematical and statistical computational methods. What areas do you think should be focused on in computer science and mathematics to teach these models to be better at computation and assist researchers and scientists? - What do you think of the amount of data that gets processed or code that is run in terms of bytes vs. bytes that are used for storage in the world? - What exactly is 5G? How is it different from 4G or 3G? - Nowadays, instead of getting higher resolution, we can get higher color range and frame rate. - If AI is being used for autonomous vehicles, then presumably technology could improve to the level where vehicles could "see around corners" by different vehicles communicating with each other, buildings, etc.–so the video stream is from multiple perspectives? - Taking the concept further, could vehicles on a motorway and those joining seamlessly interweave at high speeds safely and traffic be diverted automatically in real time to ensure that there are no blockages etc.? - Turns out that as computer displays get better, our sensor limitations turn out to be higher than we used to think. - I recall reading something saying that 5G and low-latency connectivity would be important for self-driving cars. That seems somewhat unlikely to be an important component of self-driving now. - What's the future of fiber optics? - In the future, will cell towers be more advanced to prevent dead zones?

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 are new words adopted into language? Can anyone invent a new word, or are there certain processes? ​​ - Who discovered the dinosaurs? How has technology assisted with research?​​ - ​​Which ecosystem could accommodate woolly elephants?​​ - ​​Isn't it so strange that every kid has a passion for dinosaurs?​​ - A subset of dinosaurs evolved into birds.​​ - Aren't bees considered too fat to fly?​​ - How has our understanding of the asteroid impact theory evolved since its introduction in the 1980s?​​ - ​​If it were technically possible, would submarines be more efficient if they copied fish or aquatic mammals?​​ - In your background, I see minerals or corals. Do you like petrology?​​ - In popular culture, dinosaurs are often portrayed as solitary and aggressive creatures, akin to fierce monsters. However, scientific research suggests that many dinosaurs may have had complex social behaviors and interpersonal relationships. Could you share an example of a dinosaur whose social behavior has been discovered or hypothesized based on fossil evidence? How do these discoveries influence our perception of dinosaurs, and how they are portrayed in the media?​​ - What came first, the dinosaur or the egg?​​ - How much computational irreducibility exists in DNA engineering?​​ - ​​Do you know what the first written description of human handedness was? There are some depictions and artifacts, but when did we realize "some people are like this"? - ​Did Isaac Newton get the idea for the inverse square law of gravity from reading a book by Giovanni Alfonso Borelli?​​ - Are there good simulations of warm periods of the Earth?​​ - What would be the physics on Earth with such huge creatures like the dinosaurs? To grow that big, they would have to either have a lot of food or the gravity must have been weirder. - ​​Yeah, there's not enough logged data for that to be predicted accurately, IMO. When did they start keeping track of the average temperature, the ~1920s?​​ - ​​During the time of the dinosaurs, atmospheric oxygen levels were significantly higher, which contributed to the existence of very large insects.​​ - When a space shuttle reenters Earth's atmosphere, does it affect our protection from solar and cosmic radiation? Could this piercing of Earth's barrier impact the stability of the magnetosphere? Is it like a wound that closes gradually or immediately?​​

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: ​How rare was the recent New Jersey earthquake? How can we predict future earthquakes? - The Indian Plate is moving very fast. It's increasing the height of Mt. Everest by six centimeters every year. - I wonder if digging for oil and fracking, etc., have any effect on the plates? - How do earthquakes cause tsunamis? - It seems like studying underwater earthquakes vs. those on land might be a good way to investigate the "lubrication effect." - Solitary waves were discovered by the naval architect John Scott Russell in 1834. - Anything particularly interesting or surprising from the solar eclipse? It appeared that leading up to it, between the book and website, it was better understood than any previous solar eclipse before it happened. Now that it has happened, what interesting findings have there been, if any? - What causes Earth to have different biomes? - Why is there only one species of human? What happened to Neanderthals? - How do astronomers determine the composition of planets and stars that are light years away from us?

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 every exoplanet have a habitable zone if one could get just far enough away from the star? What makes a planet habitable? - Why do we measure sound using decibels? - What advances in synthetic biology do you think will happen in the short term, the long term and the very long term? Have you visited Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston? - AI-designed proteins that do biocomputation - These processes, in the case of life, exist in a coevolved physiochemical balance. That would be hard to reproduce. - How do you think space travel will change/improve as technology advances? Will it become a regular form of transportation sometime in the future? - When helicopters were first developed, people thought they would transform cities and be our new taxis. But they're too expensive. - On the subject of shorter travel times, I remember Heinlein suggesting in his books using suborbital rockets to travel between destinations. Would such an idea be too expensive for companies to run? Or would such an idea be feasible to cut travel time? - I think the cost and safety risks associated with space and underwater ocean tourism will keep them from ever being commonplace. - Now your perspective on what's possible for travel is different than the younger generations. - In relation to what you are saying about air travel, cellphones and computers, all of those technologies went through a long period (10+ years) of being luxury goods that only the richest people on Earth could use. The same will probably be true for space travel. Do you think that problem will get better or worse over time?

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 did you begin your journey into the livestreaming world? It's not something I see most CEOs doing, and I must say it is enjoyable to see one such as yourself be available in such an open capacity to share your knowledge and engage with others. - Do you ever get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, dealing with so many topics and the feeling that you will never get everything done? - Have you ever made a bad decision on a project? Do you own up to it? What do you do about it? - Estimating the time to build a feature is hard. Have you found any task-estimation practice that works well? - Do you have unconditional confidence? - What allows us as human beings to be successful in our endeavors despite disbelief, discouragement, etc., while attempting to solve our problems in the world implementing tech, science and other domains? - Ideas can be great. Implementation will define how they go over. - What strategies can be used to break down research projects into tasks that can be distributed to collaborators in order to leverage the fact of being a group? - Do you think a career working on AI tools for use in science and mathematics is likely to have a big, positive impact?

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 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?

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

What would you say is the most important human-designed algorithm of all time? - Historically, who has led the trends in science, practitioners or academics? - Did Richard Feynman really think that "philosophy is baloney"? Did you ever discuss non-physics subjects? - If simulation becomes sufficiently good in the future, will it cause experimental scientists to be out of a job? - How did we go about solving the goat problem? - According to the history of science, what might be the ratio of the number of minor paradigm shifts to the number of major paradigm shifts? - What was the fifth class of cellular automata that almost was, which you mentioned in your personal history paper? - ​Has an idea like the ruliad existed before, or is this a novel object? - Neural networks show that combining two seemingly unrelated fields of research can produce great results, but our academic and business cultures are focused more on specialization. Your thoughts? - What would a modern analog computer look like today?

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: 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?

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: Congratulations on the recent blog post! Can you talk about the process of writing a blog post like this? Why did you decide to do a three-part series? - Congratulations! Refreshing. Great timing, as thermodynamics is now used in generative AI models, i.e. nonequilibrium thermodynamics. - What are your thoughts on salaries and compensation, especially for virtual/remote companies that employ people from different locations? - I really like the way you define different writing styles for different projects. What led you to do that? How do you define the limits of an article or book and go through the writing process? - I find that when I write something up and I have to back up all my assertions, I reveal what I should've been investigating in the first place. - ​How should one go about learning how to split equity when founding a company? How do you know if you are giving too much or too little? - You said you can understand French. Are there any other languages you're familiar with? Are there other languages you would like to learn or wish you would've learned? - Do you recommend exposing children to a second language? Is it harder to learn another language as you get older?

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 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.

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: Historically,​ what are some of the most prominent developments in the twentieth-century history of software design? - I watched the recent NASA rocket launch and wondered what's new in the past 60 years. - ​Why did American English develop common words for every third order of magnitude (million, billion, trillion)? Other languages seem to have different common words, like lakh in Hindi for 100,000. - ​I remember a comment from an old programmer saying the first time they saw a screen used with a computer was in the movie 2001. - Why is ChatGPT blowing up now when GPT-3 was known in 2020 and GPT-2 in 2019? - How much do you think real science and technology are shaped by the ideas from science fiction? - The thing about ChatGPT is that it uses the same architecture as GPT-3 with the same number of parameters. The fact that a fine tuning can create such a leap in capability suggests that we are in a hardware overhang. - Has there been any technology in history that's been perfected (e.g. the wheel), or is there always room for improvement? - Printers. Paper jammed 30 years ago, paper jams today. - Let's not ask the AI to design a new type of paperclip. - Paper jams happen today, but paper itself has become irrelevant. Such is the case with technology. Old technology doesn't get better, it gets replaced. - When and why was dark energy hypothesized? - Once we get 3D nano-replicators, we won't need roads; we can just teleport from place to place.

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 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?

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 is the one question (or all questions) a CEO must be asking himself every day? - Why did you choose walking as your main exercise? Did you try other modalities? Is there a scientific reason or just personal preference? Did you do any analysis regarding which exercises deliver the best benefits for the time/energy spent? -  Have you thought about using ChatGPT to help you write a fiction book? I saw recently someone used AI to create a children's book in the time frame of a weekend. - What do you do when you are feeling that you are lost or unmotivated and not having a clear vision into what should be done next in your business endeavors? - I'm very impressed at how well you express yourself in these videos. Do you think writing has helped you in this regard? - What are your thoughts for the coming wave of founders starting generative AI companies? - I feel like ChatGPT and the art AIs will be able to make full-blown movies algorithmically. - I've used ChatGPT for writing technical instructions and procedures at work. I really dislike doing them myself, and GPT gives an excellent first cut with English better than I could write it. - I think you would have to include that you used chat as an aid for the email. - How do I focus on a problem? There are so many aspects in literature and following cross-referencing can be overwhelming. - How do you deal with distractions and not get overstimulated by external forces? How do you stay focused on hard tasks? - Can I ask about "team building," particularly with highly technical types of peoples (scientists, engineers, savants)? - What is your advice for someone employed full time in the industry doing something else to do research in another area? - How did you find out that you would excel at physics and computational physics? - Will you open source the Stephen Wolfram bot? - Do you have an overview of all the projects you have in your company? What do you think about too many versus too little projects? - Do you think it is a good idea to treat coding/programming as a sport, i.e. the same as football, e.g. score a goal, become famous?

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 features will humans evolve in the future? Will we one day be able to look at the Sun with our naked eye? - What is there to say about the future of philosophy? It feels like such an ancient study. - ​​If empirical evidence indicates that there is a finite, digital, physical multiverse, then will the practice and philosophy of mathematics undergo huge changes? - Are all philosophers logicians? - Will we ever find a cure for the common cold? - Could that end up messing up our immune systems because they've always fought colds? - What about the possibility of injecting tiny computers into our blood cells? - Topically, you may remember a boom in nanotech ~20 years or so ago, including nano-robotics research labs and a subsequent bust of a sort. Where is that nanotech boom/bust cycle now and looking ahead? - For nanotech to really take off will require new foundational building blocks, mostly from a convergence of biotechnology and electronics research. We see glimpses of that from DNA sequencing/printing. - What do you foresee in terms of substrates of the future for computation? In the medium term? Long term? - Does the success of one field sometimes slow down other research fields?

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 Aristotle have accomplished if he had a modern machine-learning system? Could he have discovered logic? - Didn't Noam Chomsky also do some work in the intersection between math/logic and language? I wondered if language models are based on that at all? - Will the next generation of ChatGPT or VoiceGPT have any negative recourse, especially when it comes to impersonation? - A similar Chomsky idea is "can a submarine swim?" In English it can't, and in Japanese it can. - Do you think AI presents an existential risk? If so, how could we mitigate it? - How do you think Einstein or even Stephen Hawking would react to ChatGPT? Are there any figures in science who predicted this development? - Given what we have learned from AI models, does learning from history allow us to better predict the future? Does modeling the past imply modeling the future? - Ants are structured distinctly enough and that can lead to immediate conclusions on many levels.

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 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/false detector would be a interesting tool to have. - With generative images, Dall-E needs to be able to recycle its output image for incremental improvement. - Chat GPT will edit your e-mails 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 detector be used as a way to make the output of ChatGPT actually be 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? - Stephen, do you think ChatGPT is over-hyped? 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!

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a look at the making of and current state of NKS in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a look at the making of and current state of NKS in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a look at the making of and current state of NKS in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

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: 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 is the density of solid water lower than liquid water? - 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?

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: Was the invention of computers inevitable? Will evolution always stumble upon universal computers, given enough resources? What are the implications for the laws of physics and reality? - I don't think computing technology could have possibly been conceived until after the Industrial Revolution. - ​Ideas alone don't govern how science evolves. It's a combination of factors, including technology, mode of production of society, etc. - The Sun's computation helps sustain us. - I like thinking about machine learning as a black box that gets to a human-comprehendible product, but the "reasoning" that enables it to get to that output is not really understood. Once we understand what's really going on in a machine learning model, we can be confident that its output is sound. - I started playing chess lately and I noticed that high-level and machine chess are a lot like proof of computational work and willingness to commit it. Do you have any thoughts on this? - I wonder how much power one would need in order to run a mechanical computer comparable to a modern CPU. - Historically speaking, do you think the modern AI systems are unique in terms of replacing human work, or just another step in automation? - ​I may change my email signature to "Written by ChatGPT. Please excuse any nonsense." - It's tempting to think general AI could emerge from some digital version of evolution. That seems to require digital entities competing for resources and a "will" to fight for survival. - Historically, how has written record keeping evolved? Will we ever revert back to oral records (spoken stories, songs, etc.)? - GPT-4 and GPT-5 are going to be amazing. - The question is whether the interviewer will care if the candidate is an AI. For some roles, it will not matter, and that number will increase. - Has ChatGPT passed the Turing test? Or can it pass the test soon? - I suspect the major deployment of AI in the short term will be phishing. For the time being, it can't replace regular employees at legitimate businesses because it can't be legally held culpable because it's not conscious. But for scammers, that's not an impediment.

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 you discuss the importance and relevance of ChatGPT. I find it astonishing. I am also wondering the extent to which its principles might inform Wolfram|Alpha simplified input. I'd also love a Wolfram ChatGPT interface. -  Is this livestream generated in realtime by a Stephen bot? - Wouldn't AI develop its own language that we won't understand? - What's the success rate of ChatGPT-generated code? Of course it depends on what code is widely available on the web. - Isn't there a feedback loop problem where the future language models will be trained on AI-generated text? - Oh, that also is good fun: At the beginning of a chat, you can prime ChatGPT to talk in certain ways (Texan southern, London slang, Jamaican, Creole, etc.) and it is so funny! - ChatGPT works across a bunch of languages quite well. ​For inputs and outputs. -  ​Is it possible to extrapolate what future neural nets will look like? Can they ever become as sophisticated as a human brain? Can they eventually become conscious and self aware? - The most mind blowing experiment was where ChatGPT imagines being a Linux machine and converses in "console." - In my experience, it was very hard to do actual "small talk," as ChatGPT either goes into "I'm only a language model and can't..." mode or the conversation gets very "not small" quickly. - The natural language interpretation of Wolfram|Alpha is so well refined that I really need to just crack open my voice assistant device and hack it to divert input to a kind of persistent personal notebook. -  I was able to get ChatGPT to write a graph programming language in JavaScript that fulfilled the full lambda cube. - There is a recent AI model that uses the image diffusion model to produce music via spectrograms. - So perhaps Meta could train a language model on its content from Facebook and WhatsApp (privacy issues aside) to be great at small talk? - Would you be willing to get a Neuralink implant at some point in your life? What would convince you to do so? - The first thing I REALLY want is a simple brain-keyboard. That would be awesome. - ​What are your thoughts on AI connecting to blockchains? They theoretically could become independent from humans. - The AGI of the future will be a comedian and heavily active in advertisement. - "Ownership" might even be an ethereal concept challenged by AI. - ​AI students...learning from AI professors?

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 are your thoughts on operational systems and how they impact personal productivity? Have you ever used Microsoft Windows? Could you tell us a bit of your computer setup (OS, productivity tools, files sync systems, etc.)? - With consistent routines and self-tracking, have you developed a strong intuition for how many keystrokes you've made in a day or how many steps you've taken in a day? Other Wolfram-y intuitions? - I'm working on an IRC-client for my old Tiki 100 computer. I will only use IRC on that computer. It has to send signals to the PC that reroutes it into IRC though. But it should work. - The Tiki 100 is a Norwegian computer released in 1984. It has a Zilog Z80 processor and 64 KB RAM and some chunky video framebuffer. - ​Would you be able to go back to pencil and paper? Like pure research? - My first experience on a computer was the Commodore 64 playing Oregon Trail. Did you ever program any games? - Do you have any career advice/job seeking advice? I graduated, and searching for a job is quite slow. I've also been considering starting some sort of (3D printing) business instead but don't really know how I can gain the skills for that. What made you start a business? - How do you manage the "holiday madness" around this time of year (packed stores, more drivers than usual on the roads, house full of family)? - How do you apply computer science, 500+ employees, new kind of business to architecture and city planning for billions? - Do you ever feel like you spend too much time managing people instead of solving technical problems, or is the balance just right? - Is it safe to say a business is a machine made of people? - How do you decide balancing effort towards invention vs innovation? Not just your own effort and time but also the Wolfram organization. - Can this sort of scaling (employees needed for a functioning company) get modeled and planned by your technologies? - I guess sub-projects are a good thing to have when doing projects that involve more than one person. - ​As technologies become more and more complicated, do you sometimes feel a sense of losing control, or that it gets really overwhelming to try and understand how everything works? - ​How do you encourage people to envision a positive future when things aren't currently going as they expect?

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

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 advice do you have for young entrepreneurs? Can children be successful in business? - Is it good to have variety in my resume when applying for jobs? How valued are long-term employees of one company vs. an applicant who has had many different jobs? - How does one generate a succession plan for a company? - Do you think the software market is over-saturated? It feels like there are many untapped innovations in areas like materials sciences and hardware. - What's the best way to get funding for a physics-based R&D company? I am starting one and need help. - What are some benefits to an internship? - Is the AI development just a short-term fashion, like in the 80s? - ​​Will owning/running private businesses ever be superseded as an economic form? - I think the best advice for young entrepreneurs is "Don't do it." If they do it anyway, that's real entrepreneurship. - What would you say to individuals who are interested foremost in making a difference in the world rather than a monetary incentive? How would you weigh the choices between pursuing traditional academia, working on the cutting edge within the private sector or pursuing research in one's own time independently (assuming their life allows such freedom)? - How about setting up non- or not-for-profit R&D? - How much do you think businesses will have to adjust to account for AI workers if they take off? - What about one-person corporations? Zero-person corporations? - It seems to me that public libraries should offer access to journals as well as books. Thoughts? - ​​There is already an inundation of LLM-written, peer-reviewed papers, adding to your point. - In Sweden, we have a book bus that drives around with books to suburban areas.

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

Questions include: What is some history of thermodynamics you found interesting while working on your new project? - What is the history of mathematical rigor? - What's the history of chocolate? What technology allowed the creation of chocolate candies to become so popular? - In the history of computer architecture and software, who are the most important pioneers of parallel processing? - Did you ever use Xanadu's network communication/hypertext publishing technology? - ​Can you discuss the history of GNU? - How much more prevalent will cloud computing become in the future, as the need for computational resources is exponentially increasing compared to the cost-speed of processors? - Can you talk about the history of the public's perception of its own scientific literacy? - I think it also changed with the advent of memes, which made the most important subcultures swim up more easily than less important ones. - Will we go back to science illiteracy?

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 is some history of thermodynamics you found interesting while working on your new project? - What is the history of mathematical rigor? - What's the history of chocolate? What technology allowed the creation of chocolate candies to become so popular? - In the history of computer architecture and software, who are the most important pioneers of parallel processing? - Did you ever use Xanadu's network communication/hypertext publishing technology? - ​Can you discuss the history of GNU? - How much more prevalent will cloud computing become in the future, as the need for computational resources is exponentially increasing compared to the cost-speed of processors? - Can you talk about the history of the public's perception of its own scientific literacy? - I think it also changed with the advent of memes, which made the most important subcultures swim up more easily than less important ones. - Will we go back to science illiteracy? 

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: Are there nuclear reactions going on inside our bodies? - Do you think we'll ever be able to replace damaged brain parts with computational parts as another form of prosthesis?   --  What ethical implications will become relevant when we combine machine learning and brain sensors/effectors? - Suppose a rule creates a memory in our brain. Then it could be an irreducible problem to make a true brain interface for any individual that could interpret a memory or preexisting concept. Truly a fascinating subject. Assuming we are able to completely understand the human brain, one could probably make a complete copy - basically, we could "fork" one brain into multiple copies! - Do you think neurons do their signal processing based mostly on discrete states or the temporal difference between states? - Even though all brains are different, don't they all "implement" the same underlying ideas? Doesn't this point to some Platonic realm of reality? - One of the issues with being able to read and decode a memory is that someone will have the ability to write artificial memories into a brain. It's somewhat scary to think that could happen one day, but it could also be used for good. - What about a Turing test, but for memories; like in Inception? - Perhaps the only difference between dreams and reality is just a matter of degree? Perhaps it just depends on its logical coherence? Once the logical coherence is larger than what the brain can be aware of, it is considered "real." - We've co-evolved with our environment so it should be coherent to us, but if we inject things into our environment that we haven't co-evolved with or evolved in, we get confused.

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 it worth moving to the USA from the UK/Europe to pursue a career in science, mathematics or engineering? What if one wants to change the world? - How long should one wait after college to start some startup in an area of their interest/expertise? - When you are thinking deeply about a problem, do you think "on paper" or on a computer or a tablet or...? Do you find one of them to be better than the others? - Can you tell a couple "stamp-licking" stories from the early days of starting Mathematica/Wolfram Research? - What are your thoughts on crypto and blockchain from a business perspective in general? - What do you think have been some of the most interesting and hard questions you've been asked here and elsewhere? - Can ChatGPT increase productivity? Is outsourcing writing skills beneficial or damaging? - "AI did my homework" is the inverse of "the dog ate my homework." You don't want to be in either situation! - Visual AI can produce amazing inspirations for jewelry and that sort of intricate art. - Do you drink caffeine sources like tea or coffee? How many per day? - What practices do you use to gauge and cultivate meaningful accountability as an individual and as part of a collective? - ​What was your revenue plan and time-to-revenue when starting your company? - We know that you use a hierarchical knowledge organization (files in folders) but did you ever try to use a networked knowledge organization (e.g. Logseq, Roam Research, Mem.ai, etc)? Thoughts on the best way to organize knowledge? - Wolfram documentation is amazing because it's connected (related functions). - I think the knowledge graph thesis is to give people epistemological tools and make it visual. But epistemology isn't something people worry about all the time while writing daily notes. - Have you "driven" a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode? It's out now for beta testing and it's magical. It's so, so good. Purely a vision + neural net implementation. - Do you enjoy collecting and organizing physical books? Libraries are endless fun!

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: Are we close to making face recognition a ubiquitous replacement for passwords in electronic systems that require a login, negating the need to remember and constantly change multiple passwords? - Can you describe the correlations among qubits, how they differ from ordinary bits and the potential advantage of them? - So perhaps a conscious observer is in fact the result of the underlying physical system building a model that averages out all the parallel threads into a coherent story? - What I don't really understand is destructive interference between threads of history. I understand how probabilities can add, but how can they interfere destructively? - Could our brains be a quantum computer? - It is, of a sort! A distinctive feature is it being inside your body and firing neurons in 3D spatial patterns. - What Wolfram Language functions would be most improved if they could utilize 20 million logical qubits on a quantum computer?

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 give some insight into automata theory, its history and its applications up until today? - How did scientists figure out the source of the cosmic microwave radiation? - Why didn't containers become popular until Docker around 2013? It seems like they would have been very useful long before that. What did people do instead? - The idea of containers was there, but it was virtualization plus a heavy load of scripts to manage servers and configurations, which was just another iteration of mirroring machines. - Apple also had a Motorola-to-PPC emulator for their PPC Macs.

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: There was a study where they saw helices in superconducting materials. What properties make helices common in nature, from DNA to whirlpools to EMR? - Can you tell us why electrons in the atoms of the Sun do not burn due to the heat? - How does superconducting magnet levitation work? - Fermions and bosons... Are hadrons the intersection between them? - Is there much use for superconductivity in space where the temp is already close to 0 K? - Especially in places without an insulating atmosphere around, superconductors should be a serious option. Much easier to dissipate heat! - Aren't there Japanese maglev trains on which there are cooling systems? - I believe these flux tubes also show up in gravity, leading to dark matter and dark energy effects. - What do you think has the most potential for changing the energy crisis, and what field do you think we need to focus on to get there? - As long as the nuke plant isn't dual-use for producing plutonium, then I think it's safe. - Thermovoltaic cells are a new thing that seem interesting for the efficiency of steam turbines.

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: As a British native, do you participate in Thanksgiving festivities? - Do you ever use spreadsheets or any other type of specialist app to manage information? Or is your main tool Mathematica? - Do you go through periods of low motivation? If so, what do you do to get over that? - Should I travel? - Pi Day at SXSW was pretty special! - I've been to one of your talks. The first time was around 1990 at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Wolfram is the reason why I purchased a NeXTSTEP computer, because it included a copy of Mathematica. - I think a lot of people are deep in mainstream university discourse and it is good to have talks to open up and stimulate curious people to break out of the stream if they want. - Well, "they" say nothing beats person-to-person contact, as opposed to video conferencing. Then again, maybe "they" just like to travel to exotic places (disclaimer: I hate travel)! - If you have to think about it (doing more in-person talks/traveling)... the answer is no. Unless you absolutely love it, there is no value in it. - How about meeting people that don't go to universities but are really engaged in and doing hobby projects in computer and mathy stuff? - Have you ever been to Idaho? - Doesn't have to be a big and public place. Just talking back and forth, having a conversation. Big talks are not needed. - What's the goal? To interact and make friends or lay the seeds of the Wolfram universe? - Have you thought about making a video streaming and conferencing platform that integrates with your notebooks and computational language? Or do Google and Zoom do that well enough? - You could periodically host "Wolfcon." Only folks interested would be likely to show up. - As far as virtual interaction, I like Q&A streams, but also CA and physics streams. - If I were you, I would make appearances conditional with a personal request based on your curiosity. Example: "I'll come to Paris, and in return I want you to pre-arrange a three-hour private tour with a senior curator at the Louvre for me and my wife." - Wouldn't a conference on the Physics Project, in collaboration with a major university, help further disseminate it within the academic community? - You should do a talk with Gerard 't Hooft. - How come you were not on the Apple keynote when the Intel-based Macs were announced during the Mathematica demo?

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: Does gravity's strength cause a fundamental limit for the size a planet? What about a star? What about a black hole? What about a galaxy? What about the universe? - Internal gas pressure and gravity are two main forces for star formation from nebulas. - What was the pressure of the early universe vs. today? Just as a thought experiment. - Can one stretch a vacuum beyond a "breaking point" similar to how matter can be compressed beyond a "breaking point" that leads to black holes? - In both quantum field theory and general relativity, the zero-point energy seems to be arbitrary: you can add a constant to the equations and it will still be a valid solution. But in general relativity there seems to be a notion of absolute energy because of its gravitational effects. This zero point seems to be associated with flat space. Why is flat space non-gravitational, i.e. why is flat space the lowest possible energy state? - Any ideas about "hacking nature" to gain powers (get infinite energy, travel faster than light, etc.). Do you think all these are possible at all? Can we really "hack" or "alter" the rules of nature? - You can travel faster than light if the space between you and your destination changes; this happens quite frequently as the universe expands, and it's why we get measurements faster than the speed of light in space. It's just a fabrication. - This brings up a related question. You cannot distinguish the geometry of empty space from that which has matter that is uniformly distributed. So it is perhaps uniformity that determines the geometry (without dark energy). But this assumes matter can be spread out like a fluid, instead of being discrete. So perhaps flat space is indeed the lowest-energy state. Uniform matter cannot exist because of the discreteness of matter, which leads inevitably to inhomogeneities. - It's almost like you need to solve the puzzle of constructing the space you want to travel through before you can travel through it. - Why is the refractive index for x-rays into matter smaller than 1? Does that mean that the speed of light for x-rays is faster in matter than in a vacuum?

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: Did Einstein ever attempt to quantize spacetime, as opposed to treating it as a continuous medium? - We are ultra-interested to hear about this future history of science! - What was the most fantastic experience you had as a physicist? - What is the history behind migrating the entropy term to information theory? - What is the process like making computations for the thermodynamics project? - What do you think about engineering efforts that help in discovering science (building tools and experiments)? I've met many scientist who dismiss engineering as "less intellectual." - Computational language design is basically like being a modern-day wizard. - Technology, science and social relations co-evolve.

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 eclipse prediction like I'm in middle school? High school? College? - Is it possible to view an Eclipse from space? Do astronauts on the space station see anything during eclipses? - ​​Related to the eclipse, it is interesting that the Moon always shows the same side to Earth. Why is that? (I've heard about commensurate frequencies, but I'm not sure about the origin of this fact.) - ​​How are orbits in the solar system so stable over time?- I wonder if it would have any effect if the Moon did rotate with respect to the Earth? - If the Moon were spinning fast, it would probably still have a liquid core, I think? - If the Moon were to be broken apart, leading to a debris field impacting Earth, what models exist to predict the scale of these impacts and their potential effects on global climate, ecosystems and people? - Is predicting eclipses harder than predicting the motions of planets or comets? - Can LLMs do math? - When will the AIs start colonizing space? - When we have large models of all sorts of other stuff, will LLMs' primary role not actually be as the interpreters between humans and our tools? - Can't we look into the brain to find out what types of transformers or even other things we need in LLMs?

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: How does sand form near the sea? - Is grammar invented or discovered? - ​I believe there exists a 13 letter language from a pacific island. Do you think a 10 letter language would be useful since every word would also be a base 10 number? - ​How can a natural programming language replace older concrete programming languages, would it be fuzzy or like a predictor language? since often natural language can be interpreted differently? - What would be your thoughts on Languages from the perspective of the category theory? It seems like Category theory encompasses all of Math. - What limitations does Wolfram Alpha have currently, and what methods are you exploring to address those limitations?

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 prepare for your keynote talks about new technologies and Wolfram Language features? - What barriers currently still exist that keep AR/VR from being widely useful in the workplace? - One thing I genuinely appreciate about Stephen is his obvious incredible delight when explaining concepts, particularly related to science. Does he ever have to force it? - Do you take part in clinical trials? - Diagnosing is definitely a potential job for AI. - Can Wolfram Language screen for diseases or illnesses? - ​Is it possible to change human DNA by intention, I mean eating foods or taking medicine? - Do you try to convince your children to go to specific universities/schools, or do they decide by themself without any impact from you? - Multiple screens are nice but I feel it's less productive sometimes. Sort of the same thing as multitasking being a myth. - I feel like I am someone who has a lot of interests. I did my engineering degree a decade ago but I want to study mathematics, physics, philosophy and neuroscience too. Have you also been someone with diverse interests? If so, how do you manage them? I feel like I struggle with wanting to learn so much more—I feel like its a lot better to be focused and simple minded. - Any tips for fixing a chaotic filesystem? My files are scattered everywhere. - What do you do when you feel like you're stuck in the mud and can't get out? - How do you write? - How much do you use the mouse while writing in a notebook? - Do you have any preferences in reading hard copy vs digital? - You should have an automatic email word cloud generator. - Does UV hurt the paper? - Physical books are heavy and bulky, while ebooks are never bigger than your favorite tablet! - What is the oldest book you own? - Do you think storage devices like tapes and punch-cards might come back sometime?

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/2023/07/generative-ai-space-and-the-mental-imagery-of-alien-minds/

Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/X8DQuazATdM

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: Are all pixels squares/rectangles, or have other shapes (which can tile the plane) been used? - Why hasn't all the cosmic background radiation escaped out into the universe by now? How is it still around to be detected billions of years later? - It's weird to talk about time experienced by a photon. It experiences (this is what's possible to be noticed) only two moments, those of detachment and attachment. Between this, nothing is observable now. - Do you need mass to store information? Can you have an organism made purely out of photons or other particles moving at the speed of light? - ​Does time move faster for hot objects? - But doesn't a black hole have a temperature? What happens to a black hole's entropy? - Why doesn't the black hole further collapse on itself? - Do the updates to maintain the structure of space help explain the absurd vacuum energy? - How much more complex are the dynamics of the human brain than the dynamics of a galaxy? - Does a black hole inherit the dimensionality of the spacetime it is forming in? - Interestingly, the number of atoms in a bacterium is also about 100 billion. - Interestingly, the distance to the Sun (1 AU) is about 100 billion meters. - As gravity increases and/or speed increases, time is constant to the participant, but on the outside, space/distance could be greater or lesser. If you had a light year cube of space and shrunk it into a meter, light would take the same amount of time to go through it.

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: Do you think that in the future, people will look at our societal interest in math and science the same way we view alchemists and theologians of old? - Tell us about the history of chess computers and the approaches they used before deep learning. - Can you talk about the history of software packaging and distribution? - My brain came online around the time we needed two CDs for games, and I thought that was a pain. - I might be misremembering, but I think we put a piece of masking tape on floppy disks to circumvent copy protection. - I would love your thoughts on internet pseudonymity and its history! - How has the "central hub" of science changed geographically over time, and what may be the reasons for this change? - There is obviously a link between training clergymen (the original role of most Western universities) and the growth of early modern science. - Any thoughts on different methods of storing information in terms of resilience over long timescales? - Cuneiform is mostly only preserved because it was stamped in clay tablets. All the really "good stuff" (science, poetry, etc.) was usually written on biological material like hides and papyrus and, obviously, they didn't age that well. - Paper Dutch East India Company records from 1600-1700 still exist today. - In light of the recent law requiring free access to all federally funded research (and associated data), can you talk about how scientific knowledge and data have been shared throughout history?

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!

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 have any fun Halloween plans? Any memorable costumes you've dressed up in or have seen? - If you could spend the day as any animal in the world, what would it be? What might the change in perspective allow you to understand and apply toward your current work? - What are your thoughts on providing feedback to employees? What methodologies and tools do you use? How can we best help an employee to grow before letting them go for underperformance? - I just finished reading Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald Knuth. He briefly mentions the possibility of the universe being a cellular automaton. Have you ever read this book? - Maybe "project" is not an adequate word for undertakings like Wolfram|Alpha. - Do you have a timeframe for the Physics Project, or is it a lifelong project? If you had to work on another idea/project, what would that be? - How would you tackle a problem? Dive into it or first observe the bigger picture? - What's your way of studying something new? Understanding the historical evolution of concepts or reading from textbooks and working out examples? - I have to wonder how Bertrand Russell would have viewed the Wolfram Metamathematics Project! - ​What has been the typical response when reaching out to "academics" to join the Physics Project?

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 much time do you spend on building Wolfram Language vs. doing research on the Physics Project? And what are the pros and cons of doing both things? - When working on something new, how do you know if you're making progress? Have you had stretches of time when you were exploring something, but it turned out that you weren't making much progress? - How do you choose whether to throw a project in the trash or not? Sometimes you invest so much of yourself in something that it feels just impossible to do so. - What tools, practices and/or policies can be implemented to mitigate the effects of reduced attention span and memory from social media use (and short-form content in general)? - When you code, do you apply a test-driven design approach, or do you enjoy a more exploratory approach? - What's "a day in the life of Stephen Wolfram" look like these days? - With so much email, how do you bucket your email? Have you been running it through a rules engine of your own design? - Why do so many companies prove such easy targets for hackers? Is robust security really so hard? - Any future interviews of any public physicists, mathematicians, etc. coming soon? - Do you take notes of things you learn? What's the system that you use for managing new information (when researching or learning new things)? - What is your opinion on solo work vs. group work and how it impacts the legacy of a product that has tangible and intangible business products? - How do you identify great developers? Do you test developers, be that with code or psychometrics, as part of the hiring process, or do you prefer to rely on conversation? - Any philosophy book or article you recommend reading?

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: Should we try to contact extraterrestrial beings by broadcasting signals into space, or is it too dangerous to reveal our location? - How do you tell if something is natural or artificial? - How far can an EMP from the human heart travel? - If I am on an object moving two-thirds of the speed of light moving towards another object that is moving two-thirds of the speed of light toward me, what would the object look like to me while on the first object? - Dogs can not understand mathematics; similarly, humans must be limited in their ability to grasp aspects of reality. Is our ability to understand upgradable? Would biological evolution, better brains or merging with AI allow us to break through our biology's limitations and become new "dogs who can understand mathematics"? - ​​I think that is no problem; the brain would just incorporate the new frequencies and we would see it like a new color. - Do we see more green in one eye and more red in the other eye or something? Is that how we perceive things in 3D?

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's the history behind emails and instant messaging? I have a hard time imagining life before then and handling communication that may not get a response for days (waiting for a letter in the mail). - What were the early days of Wolfram|Alpha like? - I see papers from '40s - even '30s - of PRL (physical reviews). They are typeset so cleanly. How did they do this without LaTeX at that time? - It's been said that a real perpetual motion machine cannot exist. Do you agree, or do you think we can get there and we just don't know how yet? - At a quantum scale, there seems to be perpetual motion. Otherwise the electron would collapse into the nucleus. So is there a Maxwell's demon at the quantum scale that can only open very small doors? - What were people's reactions to Carnot's exploration of steam engine mechanics and the development of the idealized Carnot cycle? - What is the history of Fahrenheit and ancient representations of temperature - perhaps some that were even non-numerical?

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: Is there a directionality to science and technology?​​ - Has anyone sort of applied the hacker mentality to the Antikythera mechanism to figure out what else you could use it for? What kind of uses could a time-traveling von Neumann figure out?​​ - What is the likelihood that ancient tech we've discovered had vastly different uses than what we believe?​​ - ​​Southeast Asia is terrible for archeology because you can make almost anything from bamboo: tens of thousands of years ago, people obviously used wood etc., but only stone remains.​​ - What does that say going forward, with our fast-rotting bits, in contrast with stone or wood, or even paper? - ​​Any thoughts on the ancient dodecahedra? Do you have one?​​ - Who started research on the periodic tables? Can you discuss a bit about its development?​​ - What motivated the advent of the fast Fourier transform algorithm? What was its creator wanting to solve?​​ - ​​How advanced did analog computers get before we moved to digital computers? Was there any debate on whether we shouldn't move to digital at the time?​​ - Why did modern formal logic take so long to develop historically, compared to other branches of mathematics or physical sciences? What explains the delay until the mid-nineteenth century?​​ - Is there any knowledge in physics today that has been influenced by ancient texts like the Vedas etc.?​​

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 are there herbivores and carnivores? Isn't it evolutionarily best for everything to be omnivorous? - Short digestive systems are better for meat, as they offer some protection from infection, but are less efficient for extracting nutrients from plant matter. Fire allowed us to enjoy both worlds. - Aren't we "specialists" in terms of our ability to think? - What is holding back robotics? Why don't we have humanoid robots yet? - Neural nets and learning algorithms can find approximate solutions to many problems in robotics, I guess. - Dr. Wolfram, do you have any thoughts on Michael Levin's work with biological systems using bioelectricity for self-organization and communication? - Any thoughts on computer-designed organisms? - Could we build robots out of random proteins? - K. Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute researched and designed molecular machines on the assumption one that day a universal assembler will be created. - What if every microorganism is also a macroorganism? What is a macroorganism?

Stephen Wolfram celebrates 35 years of Mathematica, originally launched on June 23, 1988, starting with a look at V1 of Mathematica on a Mac SE/30. The live demonstration (part 1) is followed by a discussion (part 2) covering the development and timeless nature of Mathematica, as well as answering viewer questions. Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HxWg8exJxNY

Stephen Wolfram celebrates 35 years of Mathematica, originally launched on June 23, 1988, starting with a look at V1 of Mathematica on a Mac SE/30. The live demonstration (part 1) is followed by a discussion (part 2) covering the development and timeless nature of Mathematica, as well as answering viewer questions.

This podcast episode is an audio recording from a video livestream, and some of the topics discussed may reference visual examples that are not available in this audio format. Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HxWg8exJxNY