The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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: Have you had a chance to try Apple's new VR headset? - You previously discussed the role of AI in the future of science. What about the role of AI in the future of business, innovation or managing life? - ​Have you ever determined your Myers–Briggs personality type? - Ever considered hiring based on a personality test? - ​​What's some good advice for starting work on a super-novel thing where there is almost no literature about it? - At this stage in your career, has your vision for your legacy reified fully, and if so, what do you imagine it being? Eliminating computational irreducibility within the ruliad and maximizing its positive impact on the world, for example? ​​- How have your experiences in education influenced your approach to innovation? - Einstein is attributed as having said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." - Do any of your businesses have plans to build blockchain solutions? How does blockchain technology fit into your vision of the future? - What is a fun business idea you have had but never executed? - Do you think we'll get to a point of textbooks by AI? - Wolfram was one of the pioneers in using notebooks for scientific programming, i.e. literate programming. Do you think new programming languages will be more expressive? - Do you think philosophy and psychology (or an applied version of these for those less theoretical) should be taught throughout the school years just like English and math (in addition to everything else)?

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: ​Can you explain dark matter in layman's terms? - Could dark matter just not be interacting with light/photons? - If our universe is accelerating faster than the speed of light, does that mean we cannot see anything past the speed of light? - So the "viscosity" of the Higgs field gives mass to particles? - How might the topological stability and quantization of skyrmions, initially proposed as models for nucleons, relate to our understanding of gravity, considering their presence in solid-state physics? - Can the probability of a random walk returning to its origin be another way of defining local dimension on a graph? - I'm quite confused with heat/temperature and the general introduction of thermodynamics. Can you explain?

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: What are the key requirements in place for past scientific revolutions? - What do you think about the effective accelerationism movement? What history led to or influenced it? - ​​Exploring binary code's historical role in programming and its connection to physics laws, in the universe as a giant computer: do parallels exist between binary principles and underlying structures? - ​​Can you talk about the history of cybernetics, second-order cybernetics and its current connections to the observer in the ruliad? - Did the "cyber" definition come before the definition of "robotics"? - You are forgetting George Spencer-Brown for the second-order cybernetics topic. - Have you ever used the ideas he expounded in Laws of Form​? - What was the significance of the ENIAC computer?​ - Isaac Newton was known as the father of modern physics. How might he view advancements since his time? Would he have anything to add? - What is the history of small business vs. big business? Was there a shift in history when one overtook the other? - Can you talk about the history of traveling to space? How come Moon visits aren't more frequent?

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 AI be swallowed by more advanced AI by feeding it via "virtual" input? The motivation could be the increased efficiency of "larger" AI. - Do you think anyone will solve the Riemann hypothesis in your lifetime? ​​​- Aren't there thousands upon thousand of written papers that assume the Riemann hypothesis is true? - Will AIs be the ones to explore space? - ​It's ​4.37 light years to Alpha Centauri. - We should harness light/light waves so that we can take a picture of the planets there, then bring them back and produce pictures in 8+ years. - Do you think Ray Kurzweil's longevity predictions are likely to happen in our own lifetime? - Would it make sense for alien AI civilizations to broadcast radio or other signals with information on how to build such AI as a way to propagate in the universe faster than material space travel? - People automatically assume that AI will create this type of step function upward in everything in the world or in the economy. This may not be the case due to diminishing returns.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions about business, innovation, and managing life. Topics include the value of a PhD, risk-taking in business, advice for software engineers, pricing software licenses, and the importance of computational thinking in decision making. Reflects on teaching classes, evolution of pricing models, and the role of AI in education.

Exploring the significance of Sadi Carnot's book on heat and the introduction of the second law of thermodynamics, the impact of the steam engine on industries, the life and work of Sadi Carnot, principles for healthy living and philosophy, dark matter and gravity laws in cosmology, and the thermodynamics of vacuum and energy extraction.

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 do you think there is matter at all? - How does friction affect the motion of an object? - On the topic of physics, what is the relationship between force, mass and acceleration? - Can you explain the difference between static and kinetic friction in the context of Newton's laws? - How do Newton's laws of motion apply to objects moving in circular motion? - How would you structure a discussion on the introduction of physics?

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: How often do separate ideas emerge (like convergent evolution) and merge to either compliment each other or "make whole" ideas that didn't have all the answers themselves? - What surprises you most about the history of science and technology? What is there to learn? - What's the history of timekeeping? - How did civilizations create the calendar and clocks? What science supports this? - How would you keep track of time/sync up your devices? Today it's easy with electronic devices. I'm imagining my microwave and stove clock always being a minute or two out of sync from manually setting it. - How did you get to know so much, and in such depth, about such vastly disparate historical topics? Seems this could be fascinating to hear about in and of itself. - Makes me think that maybe blockchains are the evolution of agreed-upon ledgers in one single agreed-upon time. - Do you think the Fourier transform is fundamental to nature? - Historically, it appears in quantum field theory, quantum computing, signal processing, etc. - When did time become an important variable in science?​ - Why do you suppose no one tried to continue with Nikola Tesla's incomplete inventions?​ - As a software engineer, I discover elegant academic programming languages all the time, but they never seem to gain much traction in industry. On the other hand, we have languages like JavaScript, which was pretty much developed as a prototype but is now ubiquitous in web development. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this history of "organic" development of programming languages. - Are there any pros to using "historical" technology, or is newer always better?

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 scientific breakthroughs would you like to see in 2024? - Whatever happened to graphene? Is it still a viable product of future technologies? - Could we build "bio-vehicles," e.g. instead of batteries, use synthetic adipose tissue, which is ~50–100 times more mass efficient per kWh? (Is there a future in bio-batteries?) - Based on the level of computational advances this last decade, with the trend only showing even more of the same, do you think that traditional engineering disciplines will be relegated to OpenLLM? - Do you think we'll see mass-producible, room-temperature superconductors in the next decade? - ​It has been suggested that AI will displace coders/programmers. Do you think AI might also replace many physical and chemical experiments? - Any thoughts on "zero-knowledge proofs," i.e. the ability to make proofs without revealing details? - Given that some of our greatest accomplishments as a species have happened when we mimic nature, how important do you think biomimetics will be going forward? - Can you see a time when the discovery of new mathematical theorems and axioms will be generated from AIs? - When Betelgeuse explodes, will humans be okay? - Do you think smart textiles/computing fabrics will take off or be viable? Would you wear, say, a sweater to hear instead of a hearing aid? - But things like math, geometry and especially tessellation have patterns that are universally implicit and can be interpreted as interesting by their own existence, and not just by the view of humanity. - Is there a way we can use Brownian motion at a molecular scale as a type of fingerprint for nano-sensors to create things that are piracy-proof? - Why are the axioms of mathematics necessarily the ones that are effective at describing things we see as well? - What do things like dreams and "higher states of consciousness" spoken about in Eastern philosophies tell us about ourselves as observers? - Would it be easy to have an AI remaster old movies, both real ones and cartoons, so we can watch all the old gems in high-end graphics? - "Interesting" is defined by a "coolness" threshold. - Since the scientific paradigm was a major cause for the Enlightenment, can we expect the (multi-)computational paradigm to kick off a socio-philosophical paradigm of comparable importance? - If someone invented calculus in the Stone Age, it would probably have not been used for anything... Do you think there are some ideas that may be "rediscovered" because they have a better use?

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 have been some of the most fascinating questions you have answered? Are there still topics to explore? - What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges facing businesses in your industry in the next five years? - What is the best approach to develop sound computational thinking? Are there really good books or courses? - Are there fields you know have depth but don't interest you at all? I'm a person who gets easily distracted—a jack of all trades, but master of none. I envy people who dedicate their focus on a specific field to become an expert, but I fail to do so myself. As I'm getting older, I still dabble and try to find "my thing." Do you reckon there's an approach that could help me to get more focused on a single field without that initial spark? - How do you keep track of what you want to learn? - How do you manage your time effectively so you dedicate ample time to each of the things you want to learn? - Do you have some activity to calm your brain (perhaps after a long day of concentrating), i.e. to wind down, before you go to sleep? - Learn to surf, then wait for the right wave: what was the wave you would say you caught that kicked off your career? - How has publishing as a singular author on innovative ideas changed your life trajectory? Do you feel like institutional authority was important for you to be heard, or was it truly the merit of your work? - Have you ever thought about leaving the software world and producing hardware? - ​Is it feasible for an individual to start a software company from scratch today the way you developed SMP into a viable, complete product? - Are there other types of technology or software you would like to experiment with for future endeavors? - I am a very big user of the Wolfram Cloud on mobile when I am out and about. I would love for the iOS version to be given more love. - ​​Would you say that the accessibility of education on the internet is making universities obsolete? - I work in logistics and we're FAR away from using AI. We actually took a step backward recently with an internal software solution that does not work for specific customers at all. I do have ideas, but I have to open tickets that are never resolved. I know for sure my ideas can be built into the system. I'm about to give up or write a better system (kidding). How would you approach a huge business about this? - How do we encourage more people to study the difficult mathematics behind machine learning and robot process automation, especially when they're younger and more neuroplastic, so that many of the most groundbreaking developments are accessible to a greater contingent of global society?