The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Dive into a thought-provoking exploration of time as Stephen discusses its computational nature. He challenges the conventional linear view, introducing concepts like computational irreducibility. The intricate link between time and the universe's structure, illustrated by the Ruliad, is unveiled. Engaging with ideas of time travel and relativity, he also examines how our perceptions are shaped by computational principles. Philosophical questions arise about time's progression and its deep connections to memory and space.

In a lively Q&A, fascinating questions about the universe as an automaton take center stage. The discussion dives into the evolution of scientific thought, highlighting the shift from philosophy to mathematical modeling. Concepts like the ruliad spark debates about free will, consciousness, and the nature of reality. Exploring how observers interpret existence adds layers to our understanding of identity and social dynamics. Philosophical reflections on infinity further enrich the conversation, revealing the complexities of computation and comprehension.

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 your top picks for "startup ideas for Mathematica users"? - What's the future looking like for entrepreneurial business ventures and technology ones in particular, given what's happening with tools, capital, etc.? More solopreneurs? More big VC? Neither? - In business, do you think it is better to try and start a business with a totally new idea that hasn't been done before or to reinvent an old idea your way? - How do you advise young people with a similar all-consuming, intrinsic compulsion as yours, be it in their quest for knowledge/understanding or otherwise, and going about their careers/lives? - If you're debating the efficiency of algorithm design with your team, how do you navigate conflicting feedback? - Do you have an innately good memory or do you use memory tricks? - Did you ever play an instrument? - How do you develop speed reading and improve memory for a student or anyone who wishes to be better off intellectually? - What financial advice would you offer to someone developing a new business idea with limited capital? - ​​When you run a business that provides a web service to international users, are you bound to comply with the laws of all countries from where the service is accessed? - Learning to ask better questions seems to be arguably more relevant than ever before. How do you learn to ask better questions?

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: If you were transported back in time to say, the time of Aristotle, what would you do? What would you pursue in terms of career/research? - Why are Aristotle, Plato and Socrates the names most people think of when thinking about ancient society and science? - Almost all of these philosophers were also physicists. - How did ancient thinkers like Democritus come up with early ideas about atoms and matter? - Do you think letters or published books/essays are more useful for studying history? - What about things like newspapers, but particularly pamphlets and journals that are lost or completely undervalued for not being books, even though people at the time would have considered them essential? - Would you run off and not drink the poison if you were Socrates? - Do you think it's still possible to be a polymath today like da Vinci? - ​​I found a place that still produces those postcards you play on a record player. Do you think that would be a good way of storing things like a password or crypto, especially utilizing steganography? - If humanity completely falls back to the storage level of knowledge, would we be able to grow our knowledge back fast enough to decipher old SSDs before they decay, or would that be another Alexandria?

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: ​​I read that recent advancements in AI research are partly based on McCulloch and Pitts's famous paper on neural nets. Do you think there are more ideas worthwhile to explore again in cybernetics? - What is the future of technology about speech recognition? - How do I know if I am speaking to a human? The future is crazy! - Future of finance! Talk about AI talking to AI for trading. - Getting an AI to understand economics seems like it'll be quite a step. - What's the difference between a computational and a mathematical model? - Have you seen Blaise Agüera y Arcas's recent paper on self-replicating programs? Published on arXiv recently. - Wouldn't chaos theory be an example of the computational case? You know the rules of the system but have to set the initial conditions to see how it plays out. - How do we prepare for the risk of bots/worms invading everyday life as we become more dependent on technology?

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: Can you comment on the recent Nobel Prizes? - Do you think you'll ever try to win a Nobel Prize? - Are this year's Nobel Prize nominations a kind of interim step towards Nobel Prizes awarded to AI "entities" (rather than programs)? - I'm not that fond of prizes, because there's many people out there that deserve it as much as they do. There's no need to waste too much time on it, since they probably already got the recognition. I mean, I'm more interested in understanding the contributions rather than the prizes themselves. Its like... OK. So what? They got a prize that somebody else wanted to give them... - What software do you use for the graphs/illustrations in your books? I always find the illustrations in your posts, books, blog to be aesthetically pleasing, and I'd like to reproduce that. The combinations of colors are amazing. Did you take any special course on visual representation of concepts or something? - What is your advice for attending technology conferences as a student? - ​​Do you have general advice for university students (in my case I am a CS student) that do not necessarily have the confidence to begin a big project? - What has made you happy or is the best thing about running a business? - What do you think about literature? About fiction books? What are some of your favorite books? What are some you would recommend? Do you think it is important to read fiction? - Have you ever been to Japan, Stephen? - How did you come up with your new blog about time? - Recently some friends' daughter was sharing enthusiastically what she was passionate about career-wise, and it crushed my soul that it was being taken over by AI already... what's one to say? - I'm learning about AI models right now. And I've come to the point where I am adjusting hyperparameters a lot, which is driving me nuts. Do you have any advice on what to do with this? - What gave you the confidence to work hard on your vision before you saw any external validation/success? - What is your advice for the people who are "not good employees"? How do they get to do their own things in their own way, but still contribute value and "make a living"?

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: May I ask a simple question? What aspects or elements of a probability distribution can be computed or quantified, and how are these computations used to describe the distribution? - Why are some creatures nocturnal? Why aren't humans? - Is the normal distribution related to the complexity of the dynamics, or is it found equally at all scales? - ​Does pi have a normal number distribution? - ​​Google says the average human height is 5'9"–​​it's 5'10" in the US. - I read that there is a puzzle over why no new body plans developed since the Cambrian. In your machine learning view of adaptive evolution, what's happening here? - Apparently Japanese kids are getting taller, correlated with red meat consumption. - ​​Do you think there are so many variables that it's impossible to figure out? Everyone knows about corn syrup, but there are also things like smoking was very common, etc. - ​​What kinds of diseases that have afflicted humanity for almost all of our history would stunt growth? - If you consume less energy, your processes including various damage and aging slow down, right? - Could we have evolved out of needing an appendix because of diet? - Is it possible to measure somehow the intelligence of dinosaurs?

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: Why is history important? - History is very good at preventing humanity from making the same mistakes. - How would you explain the history of pi? - Do we know why Brahmagupta came up with the rules for arithmetic and algebra with zero and negative quantities? His book does appear to be a discontinuous jump in understanding. - Do you know if there was any physical reason that the Greek "elements" were associated with particular geometric shapes? - The Pi Day thing is great; I think I might get a shirt. - To what extent did your own path/work intersect the heydays of Bell Labs and notable people therefrom? - Did you ever use an Amiga computer? - With mobile devices we are basically going back to terminals. - ​​I used to have a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 sitting on my desk for AutoCAD and 3D modeling. Those were great machines and fun times! - Speaking of McCarthy and those days, do you think that sticking to s-expressions as opposed to m-expressions and Wolfram Language-style ones impeded Lisp's adoption historically?

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: ​​What research is essential for putting people on Mars? - Any comments on the future of arts and literature in the face of AI-related challenges? Will individual creative impulses forever be subjugated to AI? - How often do you find yourself thinking about the future of science and technology? Does this affect how you prioritize certain projects (say, wait five years because the tech will be better to handle it)? - Is there a chance we will ever have giant insects or animals akin to those that lived during the age of dinosaurs reappear? - How can we combine LLMs with first-generation AI algorithms like "MiniMax" and tree search? At the moment, LLMs can't even play tic-tac -toe. - ​​Have you heard about AI reading minds through brain waves and fMRI, researched by Michael Blumenstein and Jerry Tang? - Have your thoughts on the future of education changed at all recently? - Would you ever go to Mars? - Are the challenges different from colonizing the bottom of the ocean, other than obvious logistics? - ​​Given the uptick in robotics advances, including humanoid, I wonder if there will even be a point to sending humans to Mars anymore, beyond tourism. - ​​Wasn't there a significantly higher percentage of O2 back then? - A pygmy Stegosaurus would be adorable! - ​​I would not like to go to Mars. It seems boring. They don't even have a Starbucks. - How might the Physics Project help advance technologies like fusion power?

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 the US will ever transition to the metric system? - What tricks or methods do you use to stay focused on developing a core innovation, while not getting distracted by related features or future potentiality of the innovation (either as an individual or a team)? - Do you have any thoughts why people always seem to underestimate the amount of time a specific project takes? Everyone knows a project always takes roughly double the amount but never plans around that knowledge. - What country do you think is the best to live in? How would you compare the ideal of living in Europe, the ideal of drinking nice wine and good food with friends, to the ideal of working in the US and creating a business which solves some need? - Do you think contemporary books are worse than the classics? Do you think contemporary films are worse than the old ones? What do you think about the art being made today in general? - I'm in awe of your archive of information and would love to know about the mechanics of how you operate that and the tools you use. Would you be able to talk more in depth about how you add to this archive on a day-to-day basis, please, and your general setup? - Speaking of your setup, how do you deal with "pen & paper," notably for preliminary thinking that may be visual/diagrammatic (i.e. free-form), and how does it fit your digital/"quantified" setup? - How do you deal with "memorabilia," both physical and digital? - I saw the kids on a iPad with a pencil doing math homework digitally and it works great to keep all the notes for homework!