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 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 it possible to create more universe? - Why does running my Waterpik interrupt Bluetooth connections? - In third grade, I had an argument with a teacher. She said, "Before humans had language, they thought just like us." I argued that couldn't be true–instead, language gave way to complex thoughts. Was I right? - Why do many medications have side effects? - Why do we yawn? Are yawns truly contagious? - Why do cats meow, why do dogs bark, why do birds chirp? - Why can't AI help us to analyze animal sounds? - Do photons run through antimatter? Does that make them matter? - Is chemistry really just physics? - Does brain size have any correlation to IQ? - Well, the hardware of the brain is an ongoing process, especially in childhood. Nurture, environmental, social and natural circumstances can cause changes in brain hardware. - Do bigger brains actually have more functional neurons, or are they just more spread out? - Would all whales speak the same whale language?

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: Are the stars and constellations we see today the same that were seen by the ancient civilizations who first studied them? Do star positions ever change? - What do you make of the relationship between rhetoric and math? They are held in contradistinction, but I am thinking of the relation between rhetorical invention and Chaitin's idea of math-creativity. - What about sudden novas and comets? Sudden shifts in orbits? - Is the Moon moving away measurable compared to human history? As in, since humans started recording history, did the Moon appear to get 10% smaller or so? - How will history be able to correct the continuous conundrum of the accuracy of our forefathers' discoveries, inventions and ideas? Additionally, how can we as humans preserve this? - How did early civilizations explain supernovas? Did they understand it as a star exploding? How did they come to this conclusion? - "The stars are like the Sun, but far away." When said for the first time, this must have been crazy to hear for others. How often were ideas like these disregarded at first? How did researchers of this time convince society of their findings? - Is it possible that errors in translation have affected results of research? Are there any examples of this in history? - When was the first time anyone considered what the angle of our solar system's ecliptic is relative to the Milky Way's galactic plane? Apparently, the angle is about 60 degrees. - Why did science evolve so rapidly in the Western world? - What's there to say about alchemy in history? - Is that because ethical questions are fundamentally computationally irreducible questions? - How do you filter out the "good new" from the "bad new"? It's remarkable that old ideas stood the test of time.

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 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 is it important that the periodic table is structured as a table rather than a list of elements? - Is the periodic table just the table for the current state? Since there weren't heavy atoms from the start (Big Bang), maybe in the far future everything decays and just the electrons survive. - How certain are we that the Big Bang actually happened? What are the chances of the Big Bang theory being displaced in the future? - What do you make of the very early galaxies seen by JWST, which seem too large to exist so early? - Is it possible that the expansion of space due to dark energy could eventually be fast enough that even atoms and nuclei come apart? - How is the temperature of cosmic background radiation measured? Is it just from the wavelength of the microwaves?

Renowned physicist Stephen Wolfram delves into observer theory, discussing the interplay between computation and observation, the complexities of chaos theory, and the expansion of observer abilities through scientific measurements. The podcast explores how observers perceive the world, the challenges in predicting outcomes, and the significance of enhancing observational skills.

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?

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.

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?

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?