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 a PhD is worth it when you are later in your career? Or should you just self-learn if you can? - As far as managing life, what has been your biggest takeaway in your career/personal life that you would like to pass on to the younger generation? - How do you approach risk-taking in business, and what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs about managing risk? - Do you have any New Year's resolutions/big plans for 2024? - I am a software engineer, and the field of quant + data science is very appealing to me. What advice do you have? - I teach my first class tomorrow—what advice do you have? Do you have any advice on pricing software licences? - I build bespoke design software and I'm kind of winging the licences. What do you think of subscription vs. one-time purchase for software? - Imagine Mathematica with inline YouTube ads! - What is the coolest thing your company has ever done? - How much computational thinking and modeling do you do on the business itself, both for decision making and planning? - Do you consider yourself a celebrity? -What has been your coolest encounter/weirdest encounter? - What do you think about ​organic education matters? Basically, can you use AI to figure out a fixed point for education (what you want to understand) vs. testing for knowledge? - Can you ski? - Can you picture AI creating an alternative legal system? - I'm wondering how you imagine your symbolic language might interface with AI. I'm not sure about the implementation, but on a surface level, Wolfram Language feels closer to interfacing with an AI than text-based languages. - Your mother was a major anthropologist and philosopher. Has she had any impact on you? - ​It would be cool to live in that future where you talk to your AI in your house and it does things for you. - When talking to ChatGPT, I ask politely and say thank you—way more than I should, too. Uncanny valley and all that! (Plus being Canadian, maybe.) - Do you think there is harm in always learning? I think humans aren't built to be putting so much demand for energy on our brains. But darn, it feels good to learn! - Would you want yourself to be automated, so that you would no longer need to exist? How far would you want yourself automated?