Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (April 27, 2022)

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 take work problems home? What are your thoughts about a balanced work life? - What is a "shocking" meeting? - What do you think of Elon Musk buying Twitter? - It's like voting for algorithms in elections! Algorithm personalities or bias will be increasingly important, I think. - Now that I think of it, a "master AI" will basically mimic a human—a "well-rounded" human derived from all the info out there. - The real world is also highly dynamic, so one AI might be ideal for a while, and then another will be better. - When something seems to be a mishmash of complicated spaghetti code, it's often because the obvious and simple solution is being dismissed early on for mistaken reasons. - No code is the best code in the case of Twitter ranking algorithms. Just let users do it with sorting/filters! - It's pretty funny watching people get excited about Twitter again. How can we avoid the world becoming an electronic panopticon when everything goes digital (currency, ID, AI government...)? - I do think the marketplace approach isn't a bad option, but it seems like the optimal way to do that is just to reopen the Twitter API and let different people create clients. - You end up with a social network as good as the people in the network. I don't think you can elevate people by moderating what they are allowed to say. - I don't think you can avoid bias; it's just inherent to language and minimally complex knowledge units. Bias should be a feature more than something to avoid. It's more useful to understand bias than to attempt to neutralize it. - What tools do you use to get refocused? How do you set yourself up for more creative exploratory activities?