Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Could we be inside of a black hole? Can biological life survive?​ - Would something trapped in the liminal space between the event horizon and "singularity" eventually be able to escape?​ - ​In a black hole, does time stop? Is this a case for string theory?​ - What are the implications of a naked black hole (one without an event horizon)​ on the universe? - ​It is very interesting that the more the black hole "eats," the larger the surface gets. So what exactly is the singularity?​ - If matter and antimatter both have positive mass, then wouldn't Hawking radiation increase the mass of a black hole?​ - How small can a black hole be? "Micro-black holes," maybe?​ - Do you think it will ever be possible to reproduce a black hole situation in a lab for practical research/experimentation?​ - What is spinning in a spinning black hole?​ - Can black holes have a charge? Can the effect of the charge propagate out of the black hole if photons cannot escape?​ - Why are they named black holes and not after the name of the people who found/discovered this phenomenon?​ - ​Could lasers be used to display an advertisement (or perhaps a clock) on the Moon? Can high-bandwidth internet connections be bounced off reflectors on the Moon?​ - If the Moon is responsible for the tides, can the Earth be responsible for some micro-movement of moon dust?​ - Buying an ad that burns up upon reentry sounds incredibly wasteful.​ - ​Would the tea dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party have affected the underwater ecosystem?​ - How would biologists test for the effects of caffeine on fish?​ - ​Why are the elements on the Earth not more homogeneous? Why are there areas/mines abundant with certain metals? Is the heterogeneity of elements increasing or decreasing on Earth? Is this the same for other planets? Galaxies?

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 think houses are going to change much in the future? Will we reach the age of true "smart houses"? - Within the next 20 years, will "artificial intelligent" image recognition and/or image segmentation systems equal the accuracy of expert humans? For example, will an AI pathologist or radiologist equal the performance of a human pathologist or radiologist? - How long do you estimate before AI can do creative mathematics? How will this technology be similar to or different from GPT? - Do you think smartphones will replace desktop computing? - Does it make sense to pursue a math degree in the age of AI? - ​Will different advanced AGIs try to compete with each other for resources? - ​Which is more of an existential threat: AI or quants? - ​Are we now stuck with COBOL running most of the world economy for the rest of our lives? - In your opinion, is the concept of Maxwell's demon theoretically possible, and does it have the potential to violate the second law of thermodynamics? Furthermore, could you shed light on how computational limits may affect physical phenomena and our understanding thereof? And what about time: how are the second law of thermodynamics, computation and time connected? - Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae made some strikingly accurate predictions about technology development back in the 1960s. What is your perspective on Lem's predictive prowess? Do you find it remarkable that such accurate foresight of the distant future is possible? I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on the predictive power and limitations of technological forecasting. - Were there ideas to put 10 months in a year? - Can AI be used to create better prompts, or is that dependent on human consciousness? - ​Which will history judge as the biggest letdown: 2023's AI mania and panics, "VR is the inevitable near future" from the 2010s or the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence from 2001? - Will AI-based tutors replace most human tutors in the next five years?

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 know the history of the invention of OCR (Optical character recognition)? - With recent developments, can you talk about the history of theories of extraterrestrial life and search for extraterrestrial life? - Who do you think is the most undervalued scientist in the last 100 years? Someone who has contributed a great deal to society, but has largely gone unnoticed by the public eye? - ​Why were elite physicists (and others) reluctant to embrace computers? - I saw an interview of Ed Fredkin, where he explained how he tried to learn Richard Feynman on how to use a Commodore PET I think it was. - "There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!"–Feynman - Didn't he end up causing a hubbub at Los Alamos because he was personally repairing calculators/computers rather than the IBM person? - ​In the early-mid 60s, the Soviet Union was very seriously considering what would have been a sort of proto-internet. Do you know anything about this? - How do you think kids today would react if they were suddenly teleported 40 years in the past? - Have aliens always been referred to as "aliens"? Or did they have another name in history? - Has there been any observable changes to planets during human life on Earth? - There's a weird Catholic history of discussing ETs that are neither human nor angels. As a theoretical theological field called "exo-theology". - ​What is the oldest book that you actually use and is not a museum piece?

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 the challenges of working in interdisciplinary fields? - What do you make of one-person businesses? They seem to be trendy these days. - How do I become "world class" in a subject? It might be mathematics or computer science etc. - Who are some young people who inspire you? What are they working on? - When did you realize that what you do now is what you wanted to do in your life? - ​Have you always been an excellent public speaker? - Thomas Watson used the THINK slogan to exhort employees to "take everything into consideration." Can you share some of the things you do as a manager/CEO to create a culture of people who actually think? - In a previous episode, you said that you personally learned most efficiently by doing small self-initiated projects. How did you generate the project ideas? Could you give an example? Is there a systematic way to do this? - Has livestreaming changed any aspects of development meetings? How has that changed your workday? - Are there any classic novels or nonfiction books that helped form your curious and resilient mindset, i.e. books that soothed any anxiety about potential negative implications from scientific advancements? How do you stay brave?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What would a bio-computer look like?​ - ​Interesting to think whether John Conway's Life is a kind of life. Can you grow life from a computer program?​ - ​Why are there different colors of flowers but not trees?​ - What causes a four-leaf clover? Why are they so rare?​ - ​The mantis shrimp has 12 types of cone cells in its eyes. Do you have any intuition what space all these colors occupy in the brain of this animal? Is it something 11-dimensional?​ - There has been a lot of cool research in regards to photosynthesis recently. Anything to say about that?​ - ​What's the difference between "species" and "variety"? How do you know if something is the main species or its variety?​ - Could it be possible to disable some kind of cone cell (maybe with a paralysis drug) in our eye and thus lead someone to perceive some super-color, i.e. something that activates the other two types of cone cells while not activating the other type, in a way that is not normally physically possible?

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 we know what the first piece of technology was? - ​If Alan Turing had not died at age 41, what might he have worked on during the remainder of his life? - What if von Neumann lived longer? Would computation and cellular automata have any potential? - ​Who was the first who used statistics to predict something? - Having recently watched the Oppenheimer film and seen portrayed there Einstein, Gödel and Oppenheimer at this small lake, I realized that there have barely been any relevant theoretical insights in the last few decades, especially compared to about one hundred years ago. What does this mean for the science of the next hundred years? - Where do you see applied psychology in a decade? Is the quantification of behavior and thought going to be a shift, as advertised? - Could you discuss the history of cellular automata?

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 see the Oppenheimer movie? If so, what were your thoughts? - What are the things one should do to prepare oneself to become a scientist regarding education path, ideas, tools in the upcoming age of computation and AI? - Can "Kelly Criterion", aka calculating size of bets to place in markets, also be a good tool to manage life? Which is to say, you limit the size of your experiments by design? - ​Are you using any LLM Functions for managing your daily workflow? If so, which ones? - What's the "next big thing" in business? How will virtual spaces (like with Apple's new headset announcement) gaining popularity impact the workplace, if at all? - I'm a software engineer with about 8 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? - What would you say to people who are scared to lose their jobs to AI? There are a lot of young professionals in the tech sector that are just getting started in becoming data analysts, project managers, and engineers. We are starting to hear a lot of bustle about these careers not being good investments in the long term. - A bit of a funny lifestyle question. What's your opinion on living off-grid (living in the rural quiet area) in a modern time? - Given the computational limitations of the human brain, are there drawbacks in thinking computationally? Do we risk losing track of high level patterns with too many parts to count? - When you were starting SMP, if someone else had already made significant progress in building a full-scale computational language, what would you have done? - Any cool projects you enjoyed working with during Summer School? - Science somewhat requires integration of many disciplines but in academia, almost only way to progress in your career is to publish stuff in your "area of expertise"

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 discuss a bit of your personal history with AI? When did you first become interested in the idea? - Have you seen Oppenheimer yet or do you plan to? What can you say about the history it's based on? - Have new scientific discoveries historically initiated out of myths?

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: Can you comment on the future of LLMs being running in the cloud vs. being run on one's local machine? - Does the NANOGrav discovery spark ideas for experimental validation of the Physics Project? - Can you discuss the next evolution for AI models? So far we have: language models, image – text (classifiers), text – image (generators), etc. - What can be said for training multimodal AI models? - Do you think that we have reached a point of singularity such that any child born from today onward will never be able to surpass AI at any intellectual task, i.e. are we the last "useful" generation? - Is VR the future of UIs? - Given the two contrasting scenarios of a "Pink Plasma Heaven," where artificial general intelligence optimally solves problems for all sentient life, and a "Matrix Hell," where AI exploits humans as energy sources, how can we establish a guiding framework to navigate between these extremes? - To what degree do you think LLMs provide us with insights on the internal workings of our brain? Do you think there will be more lessons to learn from the structure of the human brain when designing the next generation of LLMs? - Does the spread of LLMs incentivize scientists (and humans in general) to become more deeply specialized (to "out-compete" LLMs in a narrow domain) or to become more broadly spread (in order to creatively generate connections between apparently remote domains)? - Will it be possible to use LLMs to achieve world peace? Or if world peace isn't big enough, can we beam LLM chats into outer space to try and get universal peace? - What do you think of power laws? What do you think are some good entry points for explaining the principles behind power laws? - What do you think of the future of AI in video games? They can be used to control the actions and dialog of NPCs, the design of the game's world and even the design of assets on the fly using little data. Video game assets can take up a lot of data, and if we could use AI to generate assets on the fly using a smaller amount of data, we could cut down on the download size of games as well as the effort needed to make assets. - How will we be able, in the future, to tell what we're seeing on screen isn't AI generated? Anything we could do today? (I think you might be a bot.) - Thinking in terms of inter-concept space, do you think there is an approach to using technology to develop a way in which we may better understand or gain experience to bridge the gap of inter-concept space between what we know and what we don't know? - When will this statement, "I think you might be a bot", be a compliment, rather than a criticism or an insult?