The Stephen Wolfram Podcast Wolfram Research

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: How is it that animal species all look relatively similar, or at least similar across a breed (ex: dogs, golden retrievers), yet all humans have unique features?​​ - ​What's your intuition for Euler's number, e?​ - In the recent Halloween spirit, is there any science behind ghostly appearances?​ - If an advanced civilization lived on Earth one billion years ago, would there be signs of there existence in today's time?​ - How does photography work? How are we able to capture an image so easily, whether on film or on a phone screen?​ - Kind of a similar topic: how do mirrors reflect images, and can we trust these images or do they change our perception?​ - Is there a number like e or pi that instead of being small (under 10) is big (like over 100)? How do these numbers get specific notation/names?​ - How many digits of pi can you recite at this moment?​

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: Will startups survive using AI and ML Technology? If so, how to compete with big industries? - How often do you find yourself stuck on what to do next? How do you decide on what project to move forward with? - How do you prepare for conference talks? Do you ever get nervous/stage fright? - Someone asked EW Deming how he felt about his speech and he responded with "I know what I said, but I am not sure what they heard." - I bring my cats to talks so they can look cute if I bomb. - Any thoughts to what a leader or manager can do to support team members to learn and manage stress? - I understand this is a very context dependent question, but lately a lot of large organisations earning profits in the billions have been scaling down their workforce. As a CEO, what would you say are common drivers/motivators behind these trends of scaling down? - What would you say is your favorite aspect of being CEO? What is your least favorite? - I would like your advice. I will retire in about 3-4 years, do you think it is too late to start learning ML, Data science, the entire artificial intelligence environment, with all the mathematics that entails? I was thinking of dedicating part of my day to streaming as a hobby. Something to keep my mind active. - I am in the software QA and testing industry. One of my challenges are convincing decisions makers about investing in early testing approaches to reduce project and product risks later. As a CEO, how would you be convinced to add priority to testing in an organisation? - Any advice on being prolific/focusing as a college student? Specifically the tradeoff between open-ended exploring and focusing. - ​I think a huge amount of the value of college is having informal discussions with small groups of people you care like. Obviously not compatible if you're focused on GPA. - Hermits acquire cats, not children!

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: How will the future of mathematics change? - ​Would there be a way to use the Moon as a gravitational tugboat to slowly tow the Earth away from the expanding surface of the red giant Sun so it can stay in the Goldilocks Zone? - What future applications do you think will come out with the discovery of the ability to measure at the attosecond time scale? - Do you think that new conjectures could also be made by AI/AGI systems? How will humans tackle the abstraction and complexity of them? - SW's TED Talk announcement + discussion of the Wolfram Physics Project - ​Could you speak a bit about energy "as the flux of causal edges through spacelike hypersurfaces"? Specifically, is there some more intuition or narrative you can provide as to why that is the case? - On the topic of conferences, do you think technology will change the format? Or will panels and standard talks remain a constant? Will AIs one day be participants? - What is it like to actually run a task on a supercomputer? - Don't you fear humans will start to live mostly in digital worlds and most cognitive energy will be spent on problems there and not in the natural sciences? - Would it be possible at some point to have both a digital and physical consciousness simultaneously? And then when you sleep, they combine or something to absorb the knowledge of both experiences? - What if we take someone's videos, articles, life notes, a lot of things... and feed them into some specialized AI, and make it answer questions and behave almost like that person? That technology is not so far away... It feels a bit like "concussions transfer." Do you think it can be classified like that? - ​Stephen's livestreams are like mini sci-fi adventures for the mind.

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 talk about the history of quicksort or Hoffman encoding? - TIFF is also lossless... I think in some version... - Standard method for 5G? That is, within 5G, does it operate on the bit level rather than the radio wave level? - There is a similar problem with SIP: not all vendors implement the same standards or follow the standard properly, and you end up with interop problems. - Would that also work with a logographic language? - The future is gonna consist of languages that are just emojis. - ​When did the study of economics form? - What's the history of "double-entry" bookkeeping? Can something as basic be redefined? - ​What were early tabulating machines like (such as the ones IBM sold during WWII)? - Do you think future historians will have a harder time parsing through all the information available in the last 50 years compared to the last century, or even two centuries? What is the best historical record for research in this case? Books, images, video, etc.? - Why doesn't copyright law allow flexibility with people who want to share their works online? When did copyright law begin? - How did legal structures evolve with the creation of the internet? Were completely new structures built because of it?

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 that individual particles have a halo of dark matter, like galaxies have?​ - ​How is antimatter made in the lab, and what makes it so difficult to produce?​ - ​I am curious about your perspective on the recent unveiling of smart glasses equipped with AI assistants (LLMs) by Meta. Do you see this development as a natural evolution of smartphones?​ - But was the separation of matter and antimatter proposed by Feynman, or earlier? And how can this be measured by experiment?​ - Are there anti-neutrons? Anti-elements?​ - Does technology behave differently depending on outside factors (such as atmospheric pressure, temperature of weather, gravity, etc.)? Is there an ideal environment? - Deionized (distilled) water won't conduct.​ - How about solar flares? How do they affect technology?​ - A gamma ray burst hit us last year about this time. It was called the BOAT (biggest of all time). Did we learn anything new from the data from that burst?​ - What determines the color of a leaf when the weather changes? Why are some yellow, some orange and some red?​ - Could there be nanites waiting for more favorable conditions to multiply (nanometer-size robots or organisms) in the samples we brought back from the asteroid Bennu? How could we be sure there aren't any?

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 do you think is the most important aspect to focus on or dedicate the most effort to when running a business? - You were a speaker at the All-In Summit 2023, which was a conference aimed mostly at venture capital folks. What were your impressions of this summit and its attendees? Did you attend parties at the All-In Summit? - Do you get demotivated to do things that AI might be able to do in a fraction of the time in the relatively near future? - What's your take on privacy, especially for digital services and devices (regarding companies using data to manipulate people and things similar to that)? - Could you imagine the web being washed away as it did to other technologies? - How has the concept of "intellectual property" evolved? Is land a good analogy for IP? - Do you know about the recent anti-trust cases brought against Google and Amazon? If yes, what kind of opportunities do you think would open up for competitors if they lose? - ​Have you ever gone through the patent process personally? - ​Maybe ChatGPT can make patenting things easier. - Maybe the ambiguity is a feature of natural language instead of a negative, and it's purposefully not specific to allow more expansive, unpredictable scopes of use. - With LLM lawyers, the patent disputes will end up just being a bunch of robots arguing all the time. - Is diversifying my professional ventures a worse outcome than focusing on one or two occupations that I'm really good at? - There are somewhere between five hundred thousand and two million cuneiform tablets just sitting in warehouses. Untranslated, unscanned, inaccessible. What can we do other than lament? - When you first started making sales with Mathematica, was it mostly to academics or companies? And how did you find these customers? - Let's say an amateur claims to have found a big breakthrough. How do you judge if it is worth the read?