The Stephen Wolfram Podcast (Wolfram Research)

Stephen Wolfram & Jonathan Gorard continue answering questions about the new Wolfram Physics Project, this time specifically for highly technical Math and Physics implications. See the full Wolfram Physics Project video playlist on YouTube: https://wolfr.am/youtube-wpp

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?

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: Large language models like gpt3, the way they work and how to ask the right questions - the dangers of space junk around the earth posing a risk on commercial space hotels in the future as the industry grows? - It seems like science literacy is on the decline, what can we do about it? What does it mean to be scientifically literate? - Stephen_Wolfram do you think the scientific process has been damaged during the pandemic, but more because the speed of information opinion on the internet? - Stephen_Wolfram Why is development of Nanotechnology so slow despite it's effectiveness in medicine, oncology etc?

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 are your thoughts on machine learning to create new genera? Like what would be a good way to go about doing something like that? Like a new genera of plants/animals? - Can you talk about the future of information gathering and research? Say I am discussing with a robot a paper I am writing and the robot is providing examples and evidence to support my arguments–do I cite the robot as my source? Or do I have to find where the robot got the information? - How advanced do you think AI available to consumers (like ChatGPT) will be by August 2029? - Hello, Dr. Wolfram. My name is Grace and I'm currently preparing to pursue a PhD in fiber science. My research interests lie at the intersection of computational materials science and sustainable textile innovation. I have a background in pharmaceutical sciences. I've recently been exploring how advanced computational methods can be applied to fiber science, specifically in developing smart and sustainable textiles. How do you foresee quantum computing impacting the modeling and simulation of complex fibers and polymers? - What's your take on integrating memory into LLMs to enable retention across sessions? How could this impact their performance and capabilities? - What are your intuitions about the AI-generated fake content to deceive people, whether using deep fake face swaps or voice cloning or one or more things combined? Are we rapidly approaching a point where we won't be able to trust anything on the internet? - When do you expect the discovery of life on an exoplanet? - Is the hype around LLMs dying, finally relegating the toys to the toy box where they belong, or do you think anyone will ever be able to make them useful and accurate? - Do you think future cars will be able to get rid of wheels? - What algorithms changed the world the most? What's the next algorithm that will change the world? How does one release such an algorithm so that the result is positive?

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 plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, a robot brought by a student from the Wolfram Summer School joins Stephen.

Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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

Questions include: Can you talk about the history of gazettes, i.e. the recording of "official" information? - Why are some older coins or bills worth more than their original face value? - ​How does Galileo's equivalence principle relate to Einstein's equivalence principle? - ​Important work from bright minds gets shelved, and then we discover the work decades later and put it to use. Have you thought of ways to reduce this happening so much? - Could you elucidate the historiographical development of string theory, assess whether its inception was exclusively within the mathematical domain, and determine if it has yielded any tangible technological advancements? - Some old things are worth more due to nostalgia. Eventually, they will lose their value again. - What is the history behind observer theory?

Stephen Wolfram answers audience questions about science fiction concepts as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: Could our pets become intelligent enough to take over the world? - What would faster-than-light travel look like (visually)? - How could we make a force field? - Does your physics model allow me to build a warp drive? -
Are there any practical 'exploits' that you think may be possible as a result of your model? -
Do you think an organism living through its whole evolution in 3D space can survive entering a higher dimensional area? - How can we use dark matter to accelerate the expansion of the universe and/or stretch space like inside the TARDIS? - Is simulated consciousness the logical endpoint for humanity as a whole? - Would it be possible for an intelligent species to create the conditions of a new universe?

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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 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: If you were transported back in time to say, the time of Aristotle, what would you do? What would you pursue in terms of career/research? - Why are Aristotle, Plato and Socrates the names most people think of when thinking about ancient society and science? - Almost all of these philosophers were also physicists. - How did ancient thinkers like Democritus come up with early ideas about atoms and matter? - Do you think letters or published books/essays are more useful for studying history? - What about things like newspapers, but particularly pamphlets and journals that are lost or completely undervalued for not being books, even though people at the time would have considered them essential? - Would you run off and not drink the poison if you were Socrates? - Do you think it's still possible to be a polymath today like da Vinci? - ​​I found a place that still produces those postcards you play on a record player. Do you think that would be a good way of storing things like a password or crypto, especially utilizing steganography? - If humanity completely falls back to the storage level of knowledge, would we be able to grow our knowledge back fast enough to decipher old SSDs before they decay, or would that be another Alexandria?

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 have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for institute-type work be? ​- What is the Emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? ​​- And what about around the world, overseas and in other countries? - You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like "fishing trips" and "stamp collecting," but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria. - ​Activity overseas and in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems... you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on. ​- Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? ​- British physics is more geometry guild, and American physics is more group theory and particle physics guild. ​- What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? ​​​- I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? - ​​I think in a lot of places in history, the role of academic pursuit was that of a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor." ​​- Philosophy and mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarski's semantics relates formal logic to topology just like math and computer languages. ​​- Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. that cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?

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 is the reason behind an eclipse? How does it happen? - Can we still be wrong about the position of Earth and its motion, or is that debate over? - Earth's moon is important for the tides and for the world climate. - Weren't there experiments reflecting lasers off the Moon before the Apollo missions? - Do other planets experience eclipses?

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 your favorite blog/book you've written? Any specific reason, why or why not? - How was your trip? Was it for business or just for fun? - As a remote CEO, do you ever get cabin fever from being home constantly? Do you try to keep work in certain rooms of your home to combat this? - Have you tried anything like tracking your sentiment as you work by using a neural net to analyze a video feed of your face/body? - I'm struggling with this nagging feeling that I'm progressing slower than I want to. I know I'm doing what I can, but I still can't shake it off. Have you ever dealt with this? If so, how? - What management strategies do you use to get the most out of your employees? - ​How can I increase the chance of my admission to a master's degree in complex systems or cognitive sciences? - How do you decide on when to make a big change in the technology you use/build, for example, switching Wolfram Workbench from Eclipse to VS Code? - Good project definition—formalizing what a project means—is one very important part. But how much do money/stock options/vacations (to avoid burnout) influence employee morale? Or giving them a project that they want to work on, or people they want to work with? - I've been one to say, "If I get more money, I'll care more." In the end, it didn't work. It's better to optimize for things that you just like working on. - What do you think about code review/peer review? Does it slow down a company or research? Do you think there are other alternatives to this? - How often do you work on the Physics Project in terms of weeks or months? How do you manage your life to work on this when finding the rule of our universe has no business case (at least in the short term)? - ​How do you deal with confusion and the feeling of "I don't understand this"? - Given your knowledge of the foundations of math and physics: do you bother to research the fundamental theories of project management, or try an attempt to formalize it, experiment with different project definitions, etc.? - How is the process of picking a mentee? Do you look for specific clues? Is there anything an individual can do to stand out? - You seem to care a lot about the history of ideas in scientific areas. Do you think this is a must for producing meaningful work in research? - I work as an innovation consultant. For a year now I have been on a journey to redesign/innovate and develop a new type of computer case. But I battle with this feeling all the time that I will fail and don't have a chance against all the "giants." How do I overcome this feeling? Or do I just accept it and go on?

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

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

Questions include: What could the following people have done with Wolfram? Aristotle, Archimedes, Emmy Noether, Vega, etc.​ - ​​What would Ada Lovelace have done with current computing? And the possibilities?​ - Did Galileo have some mechanical math tools?​ - How does the abacus fit into the story of calculators?​ - What did Ada Lovelace say when asked about her coding style? "My code is like poetry, it's logical, elegant, and never divided by zero!"​ - Would authors such as Shakespeare find any use in Wolfram tech? How might he react to technology in general?​ - What about someone like Socrates? Or Plato?​

Stephen Wolfram answers 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: Do you only collect books that you find useful/actually read? Or do you have some books that are there purely for "looks"? - On the current topic of books, to what extent have you transitioned to electronic books and reading, if at all, and how do you foresee physical books fitting your workflow and life going forward? - You seem to enjoy what you do with your business very much. I'm curious what you enjoy to do for a good vacation with regard to managing life? - Saw your driver's license on X! What's the biggest difference between UK and US driving? Which do you prefer? - For me the best, I would like to have both the physical book and the audiobook version. The audiobook helps to have a bit passive osmosis-like way to absorb the content, and I can go to parts that I am still confused about in the physical book. But the ability to search what you hear in the audiobook should be an option. - What is the key to a happy/content life in your opinion? - What would be the best arrangement in an innovation setting that collaboration won't create a conflict about who would get what credit? - Have you tried the Daylight computer yet? - Did you ever raise money for your company? It seems you've maintained freedom far better than other entrepreneurs. - Happy early birthday! Do you "feel" your age? You seem surprisingly active for retirement age. - I can't see the point of retiring. If you do what you love, then why stop? - I help people to retire. I would suggest that, if your job is stressful, retirement is strongly correlated with better health. - I am a baker by trade. I wanted to do mathematics when I was a teen but dropped out. Stephen's programs were a huge inspiration for me back in the late 90s. I am now in my 40s and looking to go back into maths and engineering. - What is your choice of birthday cake flavor? - Brain vascularization/oxygenation (through exercise) is such an underappreciated competitive advantage in cognitively demanding fields. - When I went to Switzerland, I indulged in the chocolate frequently!

Stephen Wolfram answers audience questions about physics and astronomy as part of an ongoing livestream Q&A series for kids (and others).

Questions include: Why is there a speed limit (the speed of light)? - What is spin? - Is there maximum temperature? - Is there a maximum location accuracy for a GPS system?

See the full Q&A video playlist on YouTube: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: Considering the Star Trek Universal Translator, what size samples of an unknown language would be needed to begin to understand it? - Is the best way to profit off mars exploration the selling of intellectual property gained from research done there? Can you think of any other ways? - Do you have an advice for all those teenagers who want to discover a new kind of Science? Just as you did! - How do you feel about: Academia vs. Self made men. Is there a place for natural self-taught talent? - Do you think language is evolutionary inevitability of consciousness, i.e if you find sentient life, you will find a language that the consciousness communicates in? As a corollary, given a language can you find a consciousness behind it? - Hello, I am a physics teacher, what is your opinion about teaching physics today? - What's your take on autonomous cars and how long till they become feasible? - What books would you recommend to a curious teen, looking forward to learning more about science and getting more concrete knowledge? - How do you go about building a team around you to solve the problems you want to work on? - Could you share some of your business knowledge with us, maybe writing some blog posts about it? - What's the future of fiat currency?

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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 to start a mega corporation? - How do you retain the best people over the years? - ​I heard, CEOs have actually no impact in large companies. - How do you have a successful software company in this day with only 3 good ML engineers left? Just saying I've heard WRI really needs to hire more ML experts, how do you do that when good ML people don't work for less than 150k - How many people could someone lead? - After starting a business, how do you know when you should secure an attorney? It's such a large expense but seems like an unavoidable necessity. - ​Any plans to take a trip into space? - How much more should the CEO make then the median salary? - I am 17 right now. Do you think the USA is better than the UK for business and innovation? 2nd question: do you think its a good idea to start building companies in your 20s, or is it a better idea to first build (theoretical) experience and go for it later on? as in, what do you think of people in their early 20s building ML/AI startups? - Do you have any heuristics on deciding when to stop or dramatically alter a long term and expensive research project? - It is tempting to be very quantitative about measuring the output of your various projects and teams in Wolfram. tempting to try and optimize it can also leave people feeling like robots? Balance? - Have you ever made any of your employees sign employee contracts with non-compete agreements? - Are there any focused Research teams in Wolfram? Like full-time researchers on AI/ML? - ​Are there any plans to open offices in Germany? - You were very successful at a young age. How can one be confident towards older or more experienced people? - What quality should we look in people to determine if working with them will improve us? - ​Do you have ideas for intermediate-scale projects / companies (maybe 25 or less people) that you aren't working on because they aren't compatible with Wolfram's size? - ​Dear Stephen, what is your favorite chocolate? - What was your reaction to getting the MacArthur grant? Was it exciting? What did you do with the money? (Was there money attached to it back then?)

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: ​What is muography? - How are elements created? Are they finite? - I wonder if graphene might be useful in neutrino detection, but maybe I'm underestimating how small a neutrino is. - So if a chunk of a neutron star fell off, then all the neutrinos fell off?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: Have you discussed the Wolfram Physics Project with any string theorists? - ​What is the possibility of building an unmanned space craft to 'hitch a ride' on a comet, to reach (and perhaps launch) the space craft out of the solar system? - recently watched a video on YouTube by Anton Petrov where he discussed a leak from the radio telescope laboratory about an unusual radio signal from our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, and in the video he said that the reason the signal was so unusual was that it was stuck to a specific frequency of 982.002mhz and I was wondering your thoughts on the unusual nature of it's specificity? - ​Can you explain how APIs work and some difficulties in matching property addresses (variability in how an address is written) to relational databases? - If the average human brain was represented as a PC, what would its technical specifications be? - ​Why is difficult for our brains to perform many simple calculations in a row? - ​Is the eightfoldway of Murray Gell-man easier or more difficult than just learning Quantum chromodynamics?

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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 GDPR legislation and the general hostility towards cloud technologies in the EU? Lots of tech companies are getting huge fines these days? - Your hair is looking sharp today, looks like a fresh cut. What are your thoughts on the grooming habits of scientists and technologists? Any correlation with grooming/dress and productivity? - Can you talk about the perception of CEOs within their own companies and in the public eye? How to maintain one's leadership and reputation when thousands of people rely on one's decisions? - Have you ever felt that you were working on too many projects at one time? I am developing 3 different products now. I love the challenge. But is one project at a time better in your experience? - What be your ideal business size? How many employees is there a sweet spot? - What's your rule of thumb to change your mind? - Your record of being a WFH CEO is unique. Has the pandemic changed how you have been CEO-ing? - If you don't mind me asking, Stephen, what do you do to relax and unwind from your business? - What's the best way to organize thoughts, ideas, pieces of code, frameworks and projects when there are hundreds?

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

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: Just saw your new blog about Ed Fredkin–what an interesting read! What was writing the blog like? Do you enjoy these more biographical pieces vs. more purely technical pieces you've written? - ​When you first created Wolfram Language and the other products around it (Mathematica), how did you develop a team of engineers/scientists to work on building your vision? - Any advice for students returning to school in the coming weeks? - ​Any advice regarding trying to promote technology "from the future"? - I really would like to program, but I feel like I need to grasp every concept before moving forward. Should I give up? It seems like there's always something I don't know, and sometimes others can't explain it, either. Do you deal with this? Any tips? - Do you think it's harder to kick-start a business today than it was 40 years ago? - Agree: Finance, especially quantitative finance, is a black hole for talent/smart minds. - Picking a major that determines your life/career at 18 seems daunting. What advice do you have? I worry about picking something and regretting it later, or feeling like I've wasted my time if I decide to change my major after a year or two. - Some industries just squeeze the juice out of bright young people until there's nothing left and you're replaced: finance, consulting, law, advertising, etc. How do you avoid this? - Regarding: Picking a major that determines your life/career at 18 seems daunting. What advice do you have? I worry about picking something and regretting it later, or feeling like I've wasted my time if I decide to change my major after a year or two. - What do you think is the best way to organize creative work? Personally, I don't think much of creative work is possible to formulate in a step-by-step plan off the bat. - I envy cats with their 18–20 hours/day of sleep. - If you are running a business, is it necessary to have the knowledge or ability to run any aspect of that business yourself, or can you rely on people to run those areas for you? - If you read books, you get better at reading books. If you program, you get better at programming. If you program with a book next to you, you get better at finding relevant examples in that book. But you don't learn to program by reading a book. - Do you think philosophy is still relevant in all these areas? - How would you deal with falling down the recursive rabbit hole too much? Because this makes learning about a specific subject extremely slow. - What do you make of company governance? Is there a "best way to set up a company board" etc.? - I'm really curious on your thoughts about these UAPs as a leader in your field. What is your opinion on what's going on?

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 have any plans, and when can we expect to see a S. Wolfram AI chatbot with voice? - Do you think each AI iteration of the person would be similar at the start and then diverge in personality/intelligence as they continued to "live" and develop? - ​​Are you comfortable with the average quality and correctness of AI-generated answers and commentary? - ​​Due to the success of nature-inspired computing, I am really wondering if like our best bet is creating full-on human replicas, meaning similar learning experiences/processes... - I like the architecture of having many bots with like a base that confer and like upload their findings to a global knowledgebase, then disperse on like new assignments or what have you after returning. - ​​Do you think human brains compress data in a lossy way, and will future AI brains also have to use lossy compression methods to be more human like? Or would AI perfect memory be more desirable? - ​​Could an element printer theoretically work, e.g. one feeds it with carbon atoms and it prints out an arbitrary element? - ​​Can you explain the quantum LLMs idea, and what advantage exists in applying multi-computation, if any, to LLMs? - What would an AI look like that is rewarded based on questioning rather than answering? - ​​What do you think will happen when we understand prime numbers to their fullest? And when we can translate this knowledge to AI?

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: In addition to keystrokes, do you monitor your words spoken? - Does your system record all your passwords? - How do vaccines work? - If a disease is such that the thing which kills is the immune response itself could a vaccine based on these principles be actually dangerous? - Have you ever met Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Feigenbaum, and/or Shafi Goldwasser? - Stephen Wolfram, my 3 years old sister told me that she doesn't likes math, and doesn't want to play with science with me, what can I do to change her mind? - What are time crystals? Do they become ordinary space crystals when moving very fast? - Do we have explanation why people have sense of discreteness (symbols, objects and such). Is world implicitly discrete or we just perceive it that way? - Can't we upload all the data about the human body and fix everything. We have computing power and A.I to classify why don't we understand it? - Has anyone looked at the complexity of a cell? can we not say that it exhibits intelligence? can intelligence exist without brains?

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

Excerpt from livestream episode Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [Part 146], Stephen Wolfram answers: What is muography?

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 you had to explain your "Why Does Biological Evolution Work? A Minimal Model for Biological Evolution and Other Adaptive Processes" blog to middle-school students, how would you begin that discussion? - What is convergent evolution? - Different genotypes come to the same phenotype—did I remember that right? - Regarding your blog, ​​I think it might be interesting to run rules toward each other from opposite sides and adaptively evolve them for length. Cells that both rules would affect are won by the rule with more width. - ​Do you think life existed before it did on Earth? - What is the importance of biodiversity and ecosystems in biological evolution? - ​​About life: follow the water. - ​​Did microorganisms have teachers? Who was the Einstein of microorganisms? - If you put A LOT of laser in ONE spot, would that create matter?

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 and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Tell us about your failures as an entrepreneur and what you learnt from them? - What is your opinion about software patents? - How many hours did you work in academia compared when you went to industry? - How can young people, like my niece obsessed with Fusion Rockets, follow their dreams? - How much should one be projected in the future, rather than staying focused on the present? - Why was Steve Jobs so successful? Was he a good engineer or a good seller? Or a good designer? - What is more important: focus or a good idea? - How quickly did you get help with Biz Admin, accounting and such? - How much of the operations of the biz are you able to automate with functions in WL, are there special functions for this unique purpose? - What is your success/failure ratio for ideas/projects you've started, that haven't quite worked out? - ​How much do you think that the title of your degree affects what projects you will be able to work on? Do you think the label traps you in one field or type of job? - Have you ever thought about talking on the Indie Hackers podcast? They showcase self-funded businesses - In what category am I? is 39 considered young, or am i in the "Others" category? Thousands of ideas I have, so thousands things to do, but how to prioritize? That I don't care about the money when doing something interesting and working on a project, is that a good idea?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: ​Who are your favourite Science fiction authors? What are your favourite stories/movies? - Why do people have emotions and feelings? How do emotions and feelings work? Happiness, anger, etc. - In the space of all possible mental states, what is the ratio of positive vs negative states? Is this a relative quantity? Does it obey certain transformations? - ​If people didn't have emotions then nothing would ever get done. - Do you think the set of emotions is finite? Is it possible evolution to bring a new kind of emotion in that set? Can we artificially create a new emotion? - Given our brains are most likely the source of our thoughts/emotions/etc. If there is a finite set of combinations of matter in the brain, could there then be a set of all possible thoughts? - What about the movie The Matrix? - What are your comments on the recent superconductor breakthrough? Is it a breakthrough? - If the resistance goes to zero, would the electron start accelerating without bound? - Why doesn't every single thought episode last forever? why does thought disappear after it arise? - How do you get your staff to get so much done, especially so much hard stuff??

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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 keep track of all of the information you have reviewed? From articles to journals to emails to books. - What are your thoughts, on technology/startups in Latin America (present and future)? Starting a company where there are no specific tech community, or the people might not be ready for adoption - How do you manage your family life around your busy schedule with personal and business interests? - How can you deal with school that demotivates your will to explore and learn new stuff? - How much time do you spend on technology intelligence? How are you keeping eyes on topics you may be interesting on? - I started a business by accident, and now I'm trying to find out, how to build a real business around that - How important is Law for success and or payoff, what are the doors it opens? Given Bill Gates having a much higher net worth than Steve Jobs - Who are the people under 30 that inspire you? - How to deal with the feeling that you need to understand everything that exists before you can do something original? - What do you do when you suffer credibility due to lack of paper credentials? - Dr Wolfram - do you have an ideal "ratio" where you split your time between working "IN" the business as opposed to working "ON" the business. If not a ratio - do you have rules of thumb when. - How many companies live stream meetings on a frequent and regular basis? Food for thought. - Would there be value to developing a PhD equivalent for generalists instead of specialists? - Yeah it's crazy that Wolfram research Streams everything! It's the best!

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: When will we run out of scientific innovations? Is there a limit to technology? -
Is it possible to build a place without gravity? - Do you think there is anything between the known particles (and Planck length 10^-33) and your hypergraphs (at length 10^-93), such as another set of "elementary" particles? - Will technology allow for one true universal language [for the deaf, blind, romance languages, Arabic languages, Asian languages, computer languages, etc...], eliminating the need for translations? - Who is the leader in information technology at the moment (my guess is China!)? - Is there a relationship between computational irreducibility and the uncertainty principle from Quantum Mechanics? - Is there a formal definition of Number? - Why all electrons are same? - What temperature does a laser have? - How does a laser work? - How can galaxies retain their shape for billions of years? - Will it be possible to tell a joke in a symbolic discourse language. Who (and what) may find it funny? - You once said that when you were starting out, Feynman gave you a collection of his mathematical tricks for integration, which you didn't end up using. Have you published this? I would really really like to see his notes!

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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

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

Stephen 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 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 any experiment in computation similar to Miller - Urey experiment? - Can there be life inside a solid? - ill it be possible in the future to create an atmosphere on a planetary scale? - Why can electromagnetic waves transfer in space while sound waves can't? - Could the physics project predict a phenomenon that can't be observed by humans but would be "faster than light"? - What about low frequency electromagnetic waves from giant electromagnets ULF could they be sent and detected like from giant coils? - Do you think AI based government and regulation of economy will be a reality in this century?

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: You recently talked about relearning the history of thermodynamics. Can I ask for resources for learning the history of thermodynamics? - Can you talk about the history of mathematical/computational linguistics (the one that studies the principles and regularities of natural languages)? There are famous Soviet mathematicians (Andreev, Sobolev, Kantorovich, Markov - son of his great father) of Kolmogorov's school who advanced this field in the 1950s through the 1970s. - What do you think about the science of statistics? Is AI just computational Statistics? - What's the most exciting thing about the AI art revolution taking place now? Was there ever a time like it? - What did Henri Poincaré think about the infinities considered by Cantor, Hilbert and Zermelo? Do engineers need the concept of a complete infinity?

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 any models that predict how society behaves? - What knowledge helps weather prediction and how? Like pressure, temperature, wind, distances, etc..? - When you (Stephen Wolfram) count in your head, do you count verbally or visually (or another way)? Feynman wrote an interesting story about this in one of his books. - If you write enough errors that cancel each other out perfectly, your code is perfect. - How do we improve our inductions towards producing creative results for science? - Which side of the quarter has better aerodynamics? If a quarter was flipped by a human hand 100,000 times on a windy day, and another 100,000 times on a non windy day, would the overall outcome still be 50/50 heads/tales in both instances? - How can you end up with a different set of rules while describing a system with definite and observable behavior? No matter alien consciousness or not, the rules will remain the same - How do you spell that? ooogleriffousness? - Why can't logic be easier to understand? What I mean is all this academic stuff that teaches logic, it seems all Greek to me. When I try to learn more, I get bored fast because they explain it too complicated.

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 the history of bugs and debugging? - ​Did you ever meet Andrei Sakharov? What do you think of his Cosmology? - How did you meet Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and why do you think he was able to take very computational approach to finance instead of reasoning by analogy? - ​How does Log4Shell compare to other historically-significant web vulnerabilities? Does the internet tend to course correct after large vulnerabilities?

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 does history have to say about combating anti science movements/wacky conspiracy theories, especially when it comes to the more dangerous ones such as the anti-vaccine movement? - How have people come to believe in grey-headed aliens? - ​The counter culture movement is sometimes associated with a renewed interest in quantum mechanics in the sixties. Would Richard Feynman, who lived the era, have agreed? - ​Did Dick Feynman ever prank you or pick a lock that belonged to you? - How much of your work on cellular automata was influenced by Ulam's work during the Manhattan 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: Did you have any fun April Fools' Day occurrences this year? - What is the best April Fools' joke you've been a part of or experienced? - Do you enjoy traveling? Is there anywhere you haven't been yet that you've always wanted to visit? Good food is an added benefit also. - Travel tip: I always have a big snack hidden in my bag, just in case. - There is nothing wrong with chocolate (no matter what the truth is). - These days, people don't remember portable computers being 10+ pounds. I'm curious: did you ever own an old Toshiba? - This is what I feel we are on the cusp of. Less rigid paradigms like general media consumption have ballooned (look at Twitch). - I hope to see the day that unknown citizen scientists can democratically do research with thousands of others, and get compensated for that research. - Absolutely. I can only feel like academia is on its way out, and more sophisticated platforms will emerge for collaboration.

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 is computation in nature different than the computation that a computer does? ​- Why do cars get much hotter than the outside air temperature? In Austin this week, my car's internal air temperature was 130° F, while it was 100° F outside. - Why haven't we discovered a cure for baldness? Compared to the other great apes, we have lost most of our body hair, so I wonder if baldness is not just our further evolutionary progression of losing all body hair. - Think about things in nature as having autonomous rules. For example, a flower is one rule, but different shapes, colors, etc. of flowers have different initial conditions. Is this too crazy an idea? - To what extent are plant cells Voronoi meshes? How about animal cells? To what extent could one build a simulation of a tree using something like a "Voronoi mesh automaton"? - Do you believe there is a concrete description of evolution waiting to be fleshed out in the multicomputational paradigm? If so, does its basic rule relate to the expansion of the hypergraph? - If mammals have a common ancestor, then how did they get divided into carnivores and herbivores? - What do you think of the notion of chemical interspecies communications? - ​Can we think of some fungi species that could reach some kind of intelligence like the human one in the future? - Are bubbles round because of gravity?

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Bob Metcalfe joins Stephen at the 20th annual Wolfram Summer School. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

Questions include: Has Wolfram Research, Inc., done any research and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? - Question about your personal data logging: have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any ML on that data? - When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? - Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? - What do you do to keep up your energy, supplements, omega 3 oils? - What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? - I work 9 AM to 9 PM, in programming/math. I feel its fine, but people say i work too much and that i should give myself a break. Should i listen? When does your working day end? - Music while working? - Do you advise young professionals to "play the game", as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial? do you respect people who do this approach? - What do you spend your personal money on, do you ever treat yourself to sth nice, jewelry, fine dinner, etc. ? - Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbors? - How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? - What's your opinion on company acquisition? Have Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how to quickly integrate an acquired company? - My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise he learns/does that would be worth the doing? - ​Building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/Trees/AST from >30 years ago) are in need of a rethink?

Questions include: Has Wolfram Research, Inc., done any research and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? - Question about your personal data logging: have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any ML on that data? - When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? - Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? - What do you do to keep up your energy, supplements, omega 3 oils? - What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? - I work 9 AM to 9 PM, in programming/math. I feel its fine, but people say i work too much and that i should give myself a break. Should i listen? When does your working day end? - Music while working? - Do you advise young professionals to "play the game", as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial? do you respect people who do this approach? - What do you spend your personal money on, do you ever treat yourself to sth nice, jewelry, fine dinner, etc. ? - Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbours? - How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? - What's your opinion on company acquisition? Have Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how to quickly integrate an acquired company? - My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise he learns/does that would be worth the doing? - ​Building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/Trees/AST from >30 years ago) are in need of a rethink?

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

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

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: How does one imagine a color they've never seen before? - Why does blue light prevent you from sleeping? - What advice would you give to learn real analysis? - What happens when you cry in space? - Who is the most underrated scientist? - How did the early universe manage to get mixed up enough that it is roughly the same? - How does one see colors? - Radio waves from the planets, when transformed into the audio spectrum, sound so very strange. Why do they sound so spooky?

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: Have you studied the Crick-Mitchison theory of REM sleep? Do you think that their theory is relevant to artificial intelligence and/or the theory of pattern recognition? - Thoughts on the significance of the triangle and why it seems to be one of if not the strongest 2d shape? - Are quasicrystals useful? - What does it mean to map a brain? Why is there a race to map the brain correctly?

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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

Questions include: What company would you start today if you grew up during these times? - How much do you think your high scores in school/college influence your employees or your new employees? - When do you decide to release a product, assuming that you never feel like something is ever completely "done" or "perfect" - How would someone who picked an education that didn't provide worthwhile skills and connections catch up? - You value culture and flexibility why do you need to grow your team? Is it just not possible to outsource (via open source) a large amount of work to the people? - What business principles are of the greatest utility yet are never addressed in university programs or courses? - Do you think the current trend of high-value tech IPOs is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s? - What education do you need to receive to be able to research markets and design products if you are more from a technical side of things? - Is it difficult to fire people? - ​Do you think that with increasing power of monopolies, small tech start ups will still be able to held up? - Is publicity magic, does it just happen, or is it well thought out some way? - Are there any planned "wolfram ventures" startups that people can join and work for equity? - Do you use version control in your company?

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

Stephen Wolfram answers audience questions about mathematics and computation as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: What is the most curious property of prime numbers? How far are we from building self-replicating Von Neumann machines? How do online advertisers know what I want?

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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 is quantum chemistry good for? Anything interesting? - Chemistry is great! Just fertilizer has made an incredible impact throughout history. The Haber process almost single-handedly changed human history. - Isn't organic chemistry/biology the study of programmable matter? - Can you tell the story of traveling through a central processing unit from the electron's perspective? - FETs use voltage at the gate to make a field that "pinches off" the flow of current from the drain to the source.

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?

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in this new, on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests, this time specifically with Louis Kauffman. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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

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: Why did electromagnetism become a focus of study so late into human civilization? Wouldn't the ancients have observed and studied magnets and static electricity and characterized it as easily as we did? - Why did Turing come up with Turing machines as a basis for computation and not tag or substitution systems, or mobile automata or register machines? - According to Wikipedia, Telex became an operations teleprinter service in Germany in 1933. Maybe not Telex, but ticker tape. Ticker tape was around in the 1800s. - According to Wikipedia, ticker tape stock price telegraphs were invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an AT&T employee. - The joke was that Gödel was the only one who read it! - Einstein came to regret the name "theory of relativity." Would "theory of invariance" have been a better choice? - It's somewhat ironic that Russell had one of the clearest prose styles of all time and was responsible for one of the most unreadable books! - At least he didn't name it "Spacetime Stuff and Things."

Part 2 (of 2)—Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Terry Sejnowski joins Stephen to discuss the the long story of how neural nets got to where they are. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: What is imaginary about imaginary numbers and what do they represent? - How can you split an atom and why is it difficult? - Is making an arc reactor (iron man) possible? - Beryllium experiment resulted in a 5th force -> what is that and how does it work? - Are there more substances or elements that work like palladium? - Where does the energy come from to emit all these virtual gluons? - Are helium3 and moon minerals useful for fusion? - If a matter black hole collided with an antimatter black hole of the same mass, would the explosion be contained to a new black hole? - Is there anything special about the size of animals on earth that makes us conscious? Could the weather system on large planets, or galaxies be conscious? - How is something like a physical push or friction force explained in terms of the 4 fundamental forces? - Has a question about "hard light" been asked? As in keeping photons still. (not a light saber, or laser beam, but like hard light that you could "walk on". Something along those lines) - But it is still unknown whether antimatter gravitates or anti gravitates for certain? - Thank you for streaming Stephen! Do you prefer Stephen or Steve or something else?

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: When, for you, was a computational approach introduced to the scientific process or the scientific culture? - Who began the trend of naming discoveries, inventions, etc. after yourself? - Became clear? How? Pretty sure no one ever solved the three-body equation. - Commentary about naming conventions. - The Trojan asteroids are named after characters from the Trojan War in Greek mythology because of the convention that started with the discovery of the first few such asteroids near Jupiter. These asteroids occupy stable Lagrangian points (L4 and L5) in Jupiter's orbit, and astronomers decided to name them after heroes from the Trojan War, with those at L4 being named after Greek heroes and those at L5 named after Trojan heroes. - Any planned work with tungsten? - ​​​​Regarding naming, is there are good naming convention is computer languages? - What's your view of innovation in economic science? We are nearly 250 years since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. - Recall the idea of "Recapitate" instead of "Apply."

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: Why is history important? - History is very good at preventing humanity from making the same mistakes. - How would you explain the history of pi? - Do we know why Brahmagupta came up with the rules for arithmetic and algebra with zero and negative quantities? His book does appear to be a discontinuous jump in understanding. - Do you know if there was any physical reason that the Greek "elements" were associated with particular geometric shapes? - The Pi Day thing is great; I think I might get a shirt. - To what extent did your own path/work intersect the heydays of Bell Labs and notable people therefrom? - Did you ever use an Amiga computer? - With mobile devices we are basically going back to terminals. - ​​I used to have a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 sitting on my desk for AutoCAD and 3D modeling. Those were great machines and fun times! - Speaking of McCarthy and those days, do you think that sticking to s-expressions as opposed to m-expressions and Wolfram Language-style ones impeded Lisp's adoption historically?

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?

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: When researching, do you find it's more helpful to stay close to modern times in terms of content, or do findings from hundreds of years ago also prove valuable? - ​Can you talk about the history of theories of cognition and consciousness? What did the ancients think? Did Gödel or Turing think about this much? Does ChatGPT disprove Penrose's Orch OR? - Aristotle, Leibniz, Godel, Wolfram: How were/are these philosophers able to somewhat understand the idea of universal computation? How did they and you reach those insights? - Is there something you could speak to about von Neumann's work to understand that the models of computation could relate to the mind? - Has the importance of areas of science shifted in history? What was the main focus of science five hundred years ago? One hundred years ago? Ten? - Is there a connection between these advances in science and education? Does education evolve with these changes? - What has been the most important invention that has improved research overall? - Right! By 1991 we had ERIC for upper-graduate research, and it was a game changer. No more need for librarians in the traditional way and history at our fingertips. - Historically, what have been the the most difficult problems or obstacles for us to overcome or solve in the areas of science and technology? - About unintended consequences of revolutions: what lessons from the Industrial Revolution have we learned that we could use for the AI revolution? - Do you think it's fundamentally possible for science as we know it to hit a wall at some point and slowly degenerate into a nonproductive state?

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

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 common is 'atomic oxygen' in the universe? - if temperature and pressure both comes from gas molecules bouncing around with a certain momentum, why are the two different/what's the difference between the two? - ​How do I educate my children like your experience growing up in order to give them the potential for any STEM field? - If you were in your young twenties and just graduated college which field would you go into? AI/ML Programming - Aerospace Engineering - Blockchains/Crypto. - ​Is there a closest packing for Spikeys? What's the smallest & largest Spikey ever constructed or discovered? - ​Speaking on AI, do you think we will see AGI this century, if yes what is your best guess at to when? - ​So what's the deal with superfluids. Any useful purposes?

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 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 audience questions about physics and astronomy as part of an ongoing livestream Q&A series for kids (and others).

Questions include: Is it possible to communicate with worlds outside our solar system? - Is it possible to make a suit that can make you grow and shrink at will like in Ant-Man? - How does a satellite stay in orbit around the earth (or a planet stay in orbit around the sun)? - Could we access other dimensions? - What are protons, neutrons, and electrons made of? - If neutron stars are just neutrons, how come they produce light? - How do magnets work?

See the full Q&A video playlist on YouTube: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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 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: ​​I read that recent advancements in AI research are partly based on McCulloch and Pitts's famous paper on neural nets. Do you think there are more ideas worthwhile to explore again in cybernetics? - What is the future of technology about speech recognition? - How do I know if I am speaking to a human? The future is crazy! - Future of finance! Talk about AI talking to AI for trading. - Getting an AI to understand economics seems like it'll be quite a step. - What's the difference between a computational and a mathematical model? - Have you seen Blaise Agüera y Arcas's recent paper on self-replicating programs? Published on arXiv recently. - Wouldn't chaos theory be an example of the computational case? You know the rules of the system but have to set the initial conditions to see how it plays out. - How do we prepare for the risk of bots/worms invading everyday life as we become more dependent on technology?

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 can you tell us about the next Wolfram Language release? What are you most excited to see added to the language? - Do you worry about the increasing appearance of incompetence in the world? - ​The version numbers do get fuzzy over time.... Are you thinking about using years instead? It would be clearer how old your version is.... - Any advice for autodidacts? How does one turn a personal curiosity or question about science into a structured project that can be published, as you often do? - Do you think AI will take away some human autonomy, ultimately making humans less intelligent overall as they rely on AI too much? - ​​How do you think the patent system could be improved by AI? - I wonder if we will go through a cycle of trusting AI far too much for answers to our questions, and then when we get too much incorrect information we give up and move to a position of total distrust. Where do you think we will end up? - What has been your favorite place/country to visit? Is there someplace you have yet to visit that you would like to? - What is like starting one's first business? I'm just wondering because I don't personally know anyone who has a business. - On that topic, if you had to start an innovation-intensive business nowadays, requiring R&D before revenues, would you go the VC route or find ways to bootstrap it (and if so, how)? - Can AI systems be effectively applied to customer support roles, or is there too large of a security vulnerability? - Can you elaborate on your experience expanding your business and products to be used by others whose language(s) you don't speak? -​​ What's your favorite new revelation or idea you read in your recent deep dive into philosophy? - How often do you revisit your own personal goals in life and in your career? What are some things you look at that make you feel accomplished, whether small or big?

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 tell about the history of the computer until the creation of Apple 2? - ​What is the fine structure constant, and why was Dirac so interested in it? - Can you recall any "what could have been" moments in the development of computers that could have taken off had the right decisions/factors occurred? - What do you think would happen if Archimedes discovered calculus in 200 BC? Thank you for sharing your amazing knowledge. - Do you agree with the people that physics and science has made minimal progress in last 25 years, compared to before? - Did you ever meet Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow? - Did you and John Conway get along? Do you have any stories about him?

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

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

Stephen Wolfram answers 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's the densest thing in the universe? I've heard that black holes don't count—why? - The entire mass of the Earth at neutron star density would fit into a sphere of 305 m in diameter (the size of the Arecibo Telescope). - What if black holes are like visible branchings in the multiway system? Consider the existence of white holes. So if there is "another universe" on the other side, that universe is causally... - AFAIK, fractal-like patterns are the best method to receive signals, but we now have cellular automata—which can maybe do it even better? - ​I lived in a 16th-floor apartment across from a field of transmission towers for an AM station. There were 5–6 radio towers, the closest about 200 yards away. So the AM station could be heard on lots of electronic devices in our house: telephones, answering machine, recording devices, etc. (The AM station towers were powerful.) - Can it be that one day we will be able to see into Earth's past, finding an object in space that mirrors light left by Earth a long time ago? ​- I can imagine future humans, having forgotten we sent such a signal on a long round-trip journey, receiving our message and jumping to all sorts of funny conclusions, depending on what we sent.

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 having many (eventually thousands of) IoT devices will necessitate some kind of additional routing logic on local networks to prevent primary devices (desktops) from being slowed? - ​​The implementation of IPv6 solved the problem of the number of possible internet addresses, at least. ​​​​- As higher frequencies are utilized in Wi-Fi to achieve higher bandwidth, Wi-Fi range and penetration are reduced. Is there some tech that would simultaneously increase both bandwidth AND range? - ​​​​​If gravitational waves travel through Penrose's eons, wouldn't these gravitational echoes make every particle wiggle at the quantum level, considering that there is a "noise" in spacetime? - ​​​How can we still see radiation from the early universe? Did it expand faster than light? ​​​​​Was it like a balloon expanding, where the light source was in the beginning expanded along with the universe? ​​- Is it theoretically possible to detect individual gravitons by launching space probes into black holes?

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 much of your work on cellular automata was influenced by Ulam's work during the Manhattan Project? - ​How do you approach studying the history of technology to inform your work on current projects? Do you do very targeted studies when starting a project? How much historical context is enough? - ​Is there a list of Wolfram recommended history of science and technology books? - What was it about ancient Greece that allowed for great advancements in math and science and great thinkers? - Could you talk about the history on Ed Fredkin's work and if its similar to your work about Cellular Automata? - In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the alien monolith is a Von Neumann probe. Is it rectangular because of the cellular automata inspiration? - ​What is the book top right with the horse's head? Just curious! - What do you think is the significance of the antikythera mechanism? How close do you think the Greeks were to a technological civilization? - Have you read Asimov's Foundation? Do you think psychohistory could actually be an actual science with real predictive power? Does it need to find pockets of computational reducibility - ​You said the cellular automata experiments you did in the 80s could have been done in Los Alamos, why do you think those weren't done then?

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 does Occam's razor work? - Stephen, do you know how to cook? - How would you explain the goal of your physics project to a 5 year old? - Yuval recently indicated that the next pandemic (crisis) will be an attack on the internet. What do you think? - What did you think about that strange shaped asteroid passing the solar system, which caused speculation it was an interstellar voyager? - Going back to the original thoughts of the "net" but based on new but now almost existing tech/Software? The important part of the attack on the Iranian Uranium system was that it was done through the electric grid and not the "internetgrid". Explaining how that is relevant and possible would be enlightening to many. That can be made a mainly physics answer. - In the Wikipedia article for Outmuamua they say "it did exhibit non‑gravitational acceleration" - what does that mean?

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 business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Why did you choose to partner up with Ethereum and Cardano? What do you think of Cryptocurrencies in general? - Have you ever meet Stephen Wozniak? - How do Wolfram Research determine the prices of its products? Any tips for pricing products? - Cryptocurrency is living a top of the demand that ransomeware generates - What are the biggest obstacles to using smart contracts in day-to-day transactions? - Who taught you first about how to run a software company? Did your family taught you this, or some professor from your university? What they taught you? Who was the first person to buy your software? - Is it more difficult to start a new company and make it big or to enter a big company and climb the hierarchy? - If I may ask, how important do you think advanced education (i.e. a PhD) is in starting a company? Do you think it is necessary if you're interested in a high-tech industry (quantum computers, synthetic biology, etc.)? - Did you write your first piece of software in assembly language on a 386? - How do you organize your ideas, projects, notes, etc.? Pen & paper, or electronic-based? - When is it the right time to put the books down, bite the bullet and start a company around your idea? It always seems like we don't know enough to start. - How much knowledge/ understanding of economics and finance is needed to start a company, in particular in tech/ science? - Couldn't they fork off an experimental company, to try the experimental billion dollar making way, without risking much of the millions of income? - How did you find the best partners for your company? Did you find it among your friends from university?

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

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series. See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Does Wolfram believe in supersymmetry? - Do the particles mass vary or are they exactly the same all the time? - Gravitational mass always the same in the history of the universe? Is the inertia mass always the same, how does that work? - What is category theory? - Is it possible to make a lens/ camera for WiFi? What would differ from a regular CMOS digital camera. Can there be a 'pinhole' WiFi camera? - What would happen if you live streamed a video from a vessel that is going near the speed of light? Would it be slowed down? - Whats up with the muons discovered?

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?

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

Questions include: Why do flies fly around seemingly constantly with no apparent goal whatsoever? - Why don't we make houses out of some kind of amber and then carve them? - How do traffic light systems work? - Does Stephen prepare any of the answers? they are all so clear and thought out - Hello, how are the magnetic north and geographical north related? - 1 How come oil is deposited in Arctic regions? -  Could you please explain what Eigenvalues/vectors and what you can do with them. Thanks.

Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in this new, on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests, this time specifically with Mario Carneiro and Norman Megill. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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

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

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the 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 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 the history of "infinity" in mathematics, or in science in general? - I would like to see a differentiation between eternity and infinity. ​- Can you talk about the history of the "elementary length"? What have people believed to be the smallest possible length, and what events have changed this belief? - If space is discrete, does this mean that the fundamental constants are rational numbers? If the fundamental constants were real numbers, couldn't you encode arbitrary amounts of information into your theory, hiding the complexity in these constants? - ​​At what stage in history did the idea of extraterrestrial alien life start to be entertained? Is this a relatively recent phenomenon, or was it a thing even in ancient Greek philosophy? - When did we first realize that we only see the same side of the Moon?​ - What belief systems/groups of people have historically believed in a fundamentally discrete universe? ​- Why do you think the distribution of new discoveries is so random? See, for example, Nassim Taleb's example of 6,000 years between the wheel and wheels on a suitcase, for example.

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: Questions include: How does an Easter Bunny lay eggs? - Why is the Planck temperature the limit of potential heat? - Is void space really void, or is there something there? - Does that mean there are more dimensions than the typical ones? - From how many discrete stars was our Earth made?

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: From a leadership standpoint, what are your best teachings on how to lead with purpose? What is your leadership style? - How do you handle making mistakes? - It is impressive to see you (in a livecoding session) pull open a 20-year-old Mathematica document to refer to an earlier idea that you had. How have you managed your massive inventory of Mathematica idea notebooks over 30+ years? (e.g. do you create standalone Mathematica notebooks or massive ones?)? - Have you seen other people learn to not need to "relax" and to continuously work, as you do? I am most satisfied when I'm being productive, but I find myself getting fatigued or losing focus at some point. How do you maintain your work ethic? - Could you share your personal experience with how your intelligence has evolved as you've aged, particularly in terms of recall? Specifically, can you describe what it feels like for you when you take a brief pause of 0.2-2 seconds to grasp a concept while discussing complex topics in communication or video presentations? - Do you have any advice for the new generation of college graduates entering the workforce? What's the best way to apply for jobs? How do you maintain those jobs for years to come? - Do you think we'll get to a point where AI is in charge of interviewing? How could this be beneficial? Or even harmful? - What is your advice on how to lead when you sincerely do know less about the subject than the people you're assigned to lead? - As a company that functions worldwide, do you find language barriers to be an issue? Can AI help eliminate these barriers with some sort of universal translator? - Are there any self-evaluation techniques that you would recommend for everyone? - I'm curious about your approach to digesting new content, especially in the context of a research paper. In circumstances where time is limited and reading everything is not feasible, how do you determine when it's worth pausing to explore a referenced citation in depth versus continuing the reading without fully understanding the citation? Could you share your strategies for efficient and selective reading? - How do I go about learning mathematical thinking? My school focuses on learning formulas and just solving questions in the age of computers. - What would you suggest for a self-taught programmer on the "trader" side who wants to get more knowledgeable on "computational thinking"–books, courses, topics, anything you could share as clues for making a personal curriculum would be great!

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

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 was DNA discovered? The history behind its discovery? - ​Is there a history of musical digital instruments? Like the synth seems to me the beginning of exploration of "computational music". Maybe electronic music should be called that way.... - can you build a cellular automata for each sound font? how does one construct the CA in general to map onto functions like sine or wave forms? - Is science slowly becoming a meme, considering how strongly supported the theory has been of natural origin of COVID-19 by the so-called scientific community? It appears, a scientist's opinion is more and more becoming a product. -  Question: There was, and seem to be still today, a very discriminating and political approach in the world of science when someone tried to present another or different ways of approaching something. What are your thoughts on how we can improve those "strict/closed" science groups to support a broader and more "open minded" philosophy? - Did summer school and incubator programs exist hundreds of years ago? - Do you think the relationship between the scientific community and media/business/government is fundamentally different today or pretty close to what we've seen in the (typical ebb & flow) past many decades/century?

The last five years (since Stephen's last birthday livestream: https://youtu.be/2-aAi6QXsl0) have been his most productive yet. Join him as he celebrates by looking back at the last five years and looking forward to what's next.

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

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

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

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 software innovations are stronger with mathematical research tied to them, even for "non-mathematical software"? - Can you say more about your writing process? How much time does it take for you to finish writing a blog post? How do you integrate a bunch of connected ideas into a coherent post? - The way I write is writing a rough draft of the most general ideas, then working to clarify them through more precise prose. - How do you tell a good story within your writing and also when communicating that story, i.e. when telling it to people in real life? - Are you going to publish a collection of open questions in ruliology? - Was Steve Jobs a "wave machine," or did he just have the tremendous luck and skill to ride five or six waves during his career? - What is your opinion on the usefulness of pure philosophy? - Would you separate business ideas and ideas that are curiosity- or discovery-driven, i.e. NKS? 

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series.

Questions include: How did Alan Turning crack the Enigma Code? - Can you explain Newton seconds law of motion? - How much of science is kept secret, either classified by the military or waiting for monetization inside private research labs? - How should we understand the double-slit experiment with light? If light is made of particles whose quantum wave functions interfere, producing the diffraction pattern we see? Or is light an electromagnetic wave that produces an interference pattern like any other wave phenomenon? - Why does no time pass at the speed of light? - Computers were inspired in particular by Turing works, right? - Where does the word compute in English come from? - Why is the Von Neumann CPU architecture still dominating instead of more parallel solutions?

See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

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

Questions include How do you maintain the work-life balance? How do you decide what is more important the meeting or the gym training? - Could you list all of apps and big app projects u ever made? With brief descriptions - How do you decide your employees' compensation? - Why were you a physics prodigy? Did you just fall in love with the subject? Did someone encourage you? - How can venture capitalists identify the most talented young entrepreneurs? - ​What do you recommend for obtaining funding for your new business? - How to gain internal confidence and believe that what you do is right? - Does Wolfram handle its own cybersecurity or use third party MSP? - I have many questions. Do you automate testing? Do you group clients? How? Do you test UX? How? How would you connect CRM to the model of everything? - What is better kanban or scrum? - How do you work with executives when your job relies on long term thinking and investing (ex. cybersecurity) - Would have a question for Mr. Wolfram, how did you overcome the hurdles of being a solo founder - Another cybersecurity question: how do you address the risk of supply chain attacks since your language is used by other companies? - This is probably an undetermined question, but a friend of mine is starting a company in the healthcare software space and he wants me to leave my PhD program and help him co-found the company. What are the criteria that you would use to judge (the company idea, the grad school, and others) to evaluate this decision?

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.