The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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**The Stephen Wolfram Podcast**

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

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

Latest Episodes:

Stephen Wolfram on Observer Theory Jan 12, 2024

Show notes

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

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

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

History of Science & Technology Q&A (May 10, 2023) Jan 05, 2024

Show notes

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?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [May 5, 2023] Jan 05, 2024

Show notes

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

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

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (May 3, 2023) Dec 29, 2023

Show notes

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 like philosophy? Do you see math as a part of it? - Is it better to get a college degree in something practical like business and save interests as extracurricular classes or side hobbies? - It just seems like being in a university allows you to spend more time learning, and also lends you access to the best tools and access to published information. But is there time to do things that you are personally interested in, like invention? - Looking at all your blogs, which has been your favorite to write? Which has been the hardest? - How successful do you think educational games would be for teaching children higher-level skills? Do you think they would absorb information faster compared to traditional education methods? - Do you tend to focus on multiple tasks at once or focus on a single task until it's complete before moving on to the next one? I feel like I get overwhelmed by folders if I try to work on several projects at once, and would like advice on how to manage the overload. - Are there conditions or situations that make you particularly creative? - What do you pack when traveling? - Is there a distinction like "continental vs. analytic philosophy" in computer science? - How do you cultivate peace of mind? - Do you have research assistants, or do you work on your projects on your own? - How important do you think your culture of very direct communication has been to Wolfram's success? - In retrospect, college is most important for opportunities to sit down with a few like-minded people and just openly talk. - What are the most important insights and fundamental questions for planning and establishing a career? - Do you find yourself still learning new things today? Is there a point in life where learning slows? What are some ways to combat that? - How helpful is it to have routines? I find it a helpful method to make fewer decisions about my day and put my focus elsewhere. - What is your breakfast?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [April 28, 2023] Dec 29, 2023

Show notes

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 quantum chromodynamics, what is color confinement? - How did we discover strong nuclear force? - Is there a finite number of sub-atomic particles? Or will we forever find new unique ones? - How do detectors sense the presence of these particles? For example, if a microphone has a diaphragm detecting vibrating air, what is the diaphragm of this detector?

History of Science & Technology Q&A (April 26, 2023) Dec 22, 2023

Show notes

Questions include: Can you discuss the history of programming languages? Is programming always associated with computers or were there other forms of programming? - Didn't IBM have its own extremely labor intensive "telegraph" system? - How do you think Ada Lovelace would view the current age of AI? - Sometimes I wonder what'd happened if Newton or Gauss had access to digital computers. - Any thoughts about Plankalkül? - Isn't mathematics itself following rules? - Could you talk about the history of cybernetics and the idea of feedback loops in general? - How are the history of education and programming connected? When did degrees in programming become significant? - Do Wittgenstein's experiments with language models have any relevance to LLM and AI today?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [April 21, 2023] Dec 22, 2023

Show notes

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 ask the AI the exact same question several times, will it give the same answer or will it change it based on some random function? Or do the neurons change during self-learning and change the answer? - Do you think at any point we will create an AI factory? Like specialized AI algorithms that create other AIs (which can do very well one specific task)? - Any thoughts on using physics simulations vs. the real world to teach robots? - Is it computer power then that speeds real progress? - What do you think about sources of energy now and in the future for developed and developing countries? - What will happen when oil runs out? Will there be a shift to "clean" energy well before this happens? - For nuclear energy, do the dangers pose a problem? Or do the pros outweigh the cons in this situation? - Apparently the death rate for nuclear energy is around 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour, which is similar to wind and solar. - Nuclear is safer than coal, because people are more cautious when the stakes are higher. - What do you think of small modular reactors? - What is the connection between computational irreducibility and extracting usable energy? Can energy be "mined" with computation? - Nuclear is not going to be a good thing until we have some way of dealing with the waste products.

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (April 19, 2023) Dec 15, 2023

Show notes

Questions include: If you have a goal with many clearly defined milestones that are dependent on each other in order to get to the finish line, how do you generally approach that? - Do you have a bucket list? What are some things you hope you see or experience in life that you haven't yet? - What are common business skills that science people are commonly lacking? - Did you ever imagine you would end up as a CEO, or did you plan to stay in the world of academia? - Do you work more than you should? What's a good "work–time for yourself" ratio during a day for a person? - Suppose that scientist X has published an important, empirically valid idea that all other scientists completely ignore. How should scientist X proceed? - What was the last movie you watched? It's interesting to me to see how old movies imagined the "future" and seeing it compared to what today is actually like. - What do you order from the concessions stand at the movies? - What is more fun: being a professor at a university or teaching people live about things that interest you? - What are the foundations that made you a decent scientist? - What are your thoughts on the future of education?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [April 14, 2023] Dec 15, 2023

Show notes

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:
I've been hearing of AI and LLMs in context of an "arms race" between countries. What do LLMs look like scaled up in that manner (vs. a global LLM)? - What about model interoperability? Where are we at on the research for that? Do we need to develop new and more sophisticated mathematics to begin to understand these black box models? Do you think in time we will be able to do casual inference with them? - Do you agree with Yann LeCunn and Andrew Ng that recent affirmation that AGI is still decades away and cannot be achieved with the current transformer architectures, regardless of parameter and token count? - Where is the line then between a program with an inner experience and one without? - So with unlimited intelligence, maybe everything can be predicted with accuracy. - When will an AI write a work worth feeding into another AI?

History of Science & Technology Q&A (April 12, 2023) Dec 08, 2023

Show notes

Questions include: Do you think it will be possible to recreate historical figures as bots to interact with and get their perspective on current research areas? - Why do many great mathematicians complete their most influential work in their early 20s? - Does "prompting" (as for LLMs) have some historical precursors? - So Feynman could have been a great prompt engineer (given that he was such a great expositor/teacher)? - How do you think future researchers will look back at this current time in history? We look at bones and architecture to determine facts about the past; what will they look at to determine facts of our time? AI? - Can we restore old, lost books by reading other old books which talk about them? - Seneca wrote many many letters. Could we detect if some have been wrongly attributed to him? - I love a historian David Lewis's possible world that we can create alternative history/hypothetical situations to learn what went wrong historically. I just wonder whether AI can utilize deep learning to generate the sequence of historical events with the constraint of data and and recreate the alternative historical events with the known variables to generate hypothetical outcome? - Isn't sonographic/x-raying safer than digging through ancient architecture? Or is it still dangerous somehow? - They have been using muons to probe the pyramids in Egypt. - Maybe AI can help with such more passive imaging through buildings? - Neural network weights will be a more efficient means of archive through the centuries than books and libraries—which will matter as with ChatGPT the volume of published writing will climb exponentially. - Prompting has relevance in psychology and philosophy. - Could it be that the best prompter now are poets? Or better... computational poets? - I don't think RAM or ROM-chips will survive the passage of time or solid state drives...

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