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Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Excerpt from livestream episode History of Science and Technology Q&A (March 22, 2023), Stephen Wolfram answers: What is the history of AI? What is the first recorded example of artificial intelligence? Stephen's conversation with Terry Sejnowski on the history of neural nets is available here: https://youtu.be/XKC-4Tosdd8

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 rasterization? -  Does the human visual system use a molecular-scale version of rasterization? - When I close my eyes and apply pressure, why do I see colored dynamic geometric patterns? ​I also see the grid, and it's interesting how it fades when your normal vision fades back in, and the gray/black squares sometimes oscillate while maintaining the grid structure. - Do you have any stories about Fresnel lenses? I just got the Meta Quest 2 VR headset and it uses them; the same kind that a rear-projection TV or a lighthouse uses, which is amusing. - ​Considering visual perception discontinuous or discrete, can we consider it quantized? In that case, could it be calculated as "discrete packets of visual perception," based on quantum physics?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history 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 the thinking process of the discovery of complex numbers, quaternions and octonions? - Can you go over the history of Grothendieck? What lead to the homotopy hypothesis? - Can you talk about the history of four-function calculators? - Could you tell us when cybersecurity was considered an important topic in computer science? - I bet one of the first major applications of cybersecurity was for the telephone system, which was essentially a giant computer that people started hacking to make free long-distance calls in the 1960s. - If nature is fundamentally computational, then what are the bugs in nature? - Can you talk about Steve Jobs's NeXTSTEP approach to software? Does it have an ongoing legacy? - In the Netherlands, if you dial #31# before the phone number, the other person won't see your phone number, so these things still exist. - So is evolution a bug or a feature?

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: Considering visual perception discontinuous or discrete, can we also consider it quantized? In that case, could it be calculated as "discrete packets of visual perception," based on quantum physics? - If the level of CO2 was much higher in the past, why wasn't there a runaway greenhouse effect back then? - I looked into it, and apparently limestone rocks absorb carbonic acid in rain and "scrub" the CO2 out of the atmosphere, but it takes forever! - Do the electron orbitals of an atom ever rotate? Do they rotate at the same rate as the nucleus, or can they rotate independently? Is this the same property as electron spin, or is it separate?

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 take work problems home? What are your thoughts about a balanced work life? - What is a "shocking" meeting? - What do you think of Elon Musk buying Twitter? - It's like voting for algorithms in elections! Algorithm personalities or bias will be increasingly important, I think. - Now that I think of it, a "master AI" will basically mimic a human—a "well-rounded" human derived from all the info out there. - The real world is also highly dynamic, so one AI might be ideal for a while, and then another will be better. - When something seems to be a mishmash of complicated spaghetti code, it's often because the obvious and simple solution is being dismissed early on for mistaken reasons. - No code is the best code in the case of Twitter ranking algorithms. Just let users do it with sorting/filters! - It's pretty funny watching people get excited about Twitter again. How can we avoid the world becoming an electronic panopticon when everything goes digital (currency, ID, AI government...)? - I do think the marketplace approach isn't a bad option, but it seems like the optimal way to do that is just to reopen the Twitter API and let different people create clients. - You end up with a social network as good as the people in the network. I don't think you can elevate people by moderating what they are allowed to say. - I don't think you can avoid bias; it's just inherent to language and minimally complex knowledge units. Bias should be a feature more than something to avoid. It's more useful to understand bias than to attempt to neutralize it. - What tools do you use to get refocused? How do you set yourself up for more creative exploratory activities?

Part 2 (of 2)—Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Terry Sejnowski joins Stephen to discuss the the long story of how neural nets got to where they are. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

Part 1 (of 2)—Stephen Wolfram plays the role of Salonnière in an on-going series of intellectual explorations with special guests. In this episode, Terry Sejnowski joins Stephen to discuss the the long story of how neural nets got to where they are. Watch all of the conversations here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-conversations

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: What is quantum chemistry good for? Anything interesting? - Chemistry is great! Just fertilizer has made an incredible impact throughout history. The Haber process almost single-handedly changed human history. - Isn't organic chemistry/biology the study of programmable matter? - Can you tell the story of traveling through a central processing unit from the electron's perspective? - FETs use voltage at the gate to make a field that "pinches off" the flow of current from the drain to the source.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What is the history of dimensional regularization and zeta regularization? How are they related to renormalization? - ​​When and how was the first compiler made? What language was it for, and what language was it written in? ​​​- Can you talk about the history of computer graphics standards and libraries, such as OpenGL etc.? ​​- Larry Sanger - ​​HP 9800s were awesome. They had two overlap video memories. One was ASCII character–based, and the other was HP plotter language controlled. They both showed up on the screen. Handy/versatile.

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: Questions include: How does an Easter Bunny lay eggs? - Why is the Planck temperature the limit of potential heat? - Is void space really void, or is there something there? - Does that mean there are more dimensions than the typical ones? - From how many discrete stars was our Earth made?

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 have any fun April Fools' Day occurrences this year? - What is the best April Fools' joke you've been a part of or experienced? - Do you enjoy traveling? Is there anywhere you haven't been yet that you've always wanted to visit? Good food is an added benefit also. - Travel tip: I always have a big snack hidden in my bag, just in case. - There is nothing wrong with chocolate (no matter what the truth is). - These days, people don't remember portable computers being 10+ pounds. I'm curious: did you ever own an old Toshiba? - This is what I feel we are on the cusp of. Less rigid paradigms like general media consumption have ballooned (look at Twitch). - I hope to see the day that unknown citizen scientists can democratically do research with thousands of others, and get compensated for that research. - Absolutely. I can only feel like academia is on its way out, and more sophisticated platforms will emerge for collaboration.

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 was it possible for civilizations across the world to develop pyramids independently (Egypt and Mayans/Aztecs)? Is there any scientific significance to this? - Does the double-helix shape in DNA show up anywhere else in nature? ​- Are there any examples of logical gates being built out of chemical reactions? What breakthroughs are needed to achieve this? - How many gates are needed for a programming language like C? - Is it necessary to have supercomputers to do meaningful biomolecule-level simulations? - What life forms have arbitrary differences between individuals and what life forms have meaningfully "unique" individuals? - Are Darwin's survival of the fittest, evolution and machine learning all basically the same thing? If not, how do they differ? ​- Can you please say something about the formation of buckyballs? - How are gemstones formed and how can we model all gem features? Colors, textures, asterism, anisotropy, everything? What do you know? - In quartz, I also notice imperfections like streaks; seems to be the molecular analog to cellular automata.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history 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 have a sense of the skills that an incoming fellow to the Wolfram Institute will have? What would effective preparation for institute-type work be? ​- What is the Emerald functionality that was mentioned for biological/cellular computational explorations? ​​- And what about around the world, overseas and in other countries? - You get some wonderful things out of pursuing science just for the sake of it. There are pejorative terms for this, like "fishing trips" and "stamp collecting," but such pursuits led to PCR technology just because someone was curious about thermophile bacteria. - ​Activity overseas and in other countries in regards to outreach programs in cooperation with education systems... you were mentioning some campaigns you had going on. ​- Will there be more active development on the computational capabilities of Wolfram Mathematica with the Wolfram Institute? ​- British physics is more geometry guild, and American physics is more group theory and particle physics guild. ​- What is your opinion about experimental mathematics and its relationship with classical "mainstream" mathematics? ​​​- I often hear that science needs philosophy to justify it. What are some historical examples of this? - ​​I think in a lot of places in history, the role of academic pursuit was that of a philosopher's role, but academic pursuit has attained a large amount of "division of labor." ​​- Philosophy and mathematical logic are starting to overlap more. Tarski's semantics relates formal logic to topology just like math and computer languages. ​​- Are there inherently philosophical ideas (i.e. that cannot be turned into a scientific one like the question of motion)? Can we distinguish them outright without knowing future scientific development?

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: Thoughts on longevity research and its feasibility? Does computational irreducibility have practical implications for the difficulty of solving this complex biological problem? Also, do you ever get sad about the shortness of the current human lifespan causing us to miss out on the (potentially unimaginable) future opportunities for understanding the universe?  - Do you think a multi-computational approach to medicine will detect disease first by observing visual systems or chemical systems or otherwise? - ​Is this discussion of mortality curves related to the survivorship function? - ​Would there be any justification for pursuing eternal life for humans, if feasible? - Aging might be the condition that makes the most sense to study economically, in terms of the money spent by health systems on related problems overall. - According to Michael Graziano, immortality will be achieved by uploading human consciousness into computers. - The discussion today reminded me of this post I saw where it asked if you could live for 150 years but you had to upload your brain to the metaverse and give up your real body, would you? - Would you upload your brain? - Yes, but uploading a copy of your brain into a computer means there are two of you, and computational irreducibility means that the two are different from each other! -  Is bureaucratic inefficiency analogous to aging in biological systems? That the system over time grinds to a halt and dies due to build up of systematic inefficiencies? Can we apply life extension to institutions?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What happened with the computer during WWII? ​​- The ​Imitation Game is a great movie about computers in World War 2. - ​​How important are Nobel Prizes? Are there any scandalous omissions? ​​- It is taxable income. - ​​Some of the physics prizes have been a bit random. - Penzias and Wilson more or less accidentally discovered the CMB, but Gamov predicted it and got nothing (I think). -​​ Thank you for encouraging our curiosity. My question is: When and why did apprenticeships end? It seems all the greats, such as Benjamin Franklin, were sent to be apprentices. ​​- What happened to the interdisciplinary science of the Renaissance? - Do the efficiency gains of specialization outweigh the harms of institutional departmentalization? - ​​Are crazy ideas useful to talk about, or are they only good for guiding intuition in 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: So do we live in a simulation or not? - So how do we perceive change? Why is motion possible? Why do we perceive that we can make "choices"? What does it mean to make a choice? - But every observer observes the same dimensionless constants (like the fine-structure constant), we don't have any choice about that observation. Or is 1/137 something that lies on an observable manifold of the ruliad? ​​- What if the beautiful images of stars and galaxies really are a molecule in another universe and time is very, very slow in that universe from our view? - ​I always thought, what if we are like bacteria living on a bit of sand on the bottom of an alien's shoe while he rides an elevator, and what happens when the elevator stops? - ​​Moving at the speed of thought, is there a max on how fast we can think?

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: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Any business/scientific reason why that place? - University vs. experience in programming and computer science: which one is more valuable? - How do you manage technical debt? - What advantages come from using Wolfram Language as in-house code? - How do you manage technical debt in Java codebases? - Good afternoon, Dr. Wolfram. How do you cope with the stress of releasing new products? As it is very hard to judge the success beforehand, do you have any techniques to reduce that stress? - If you were never allowed to use Wolfram Language, what would you use? - Do you find that innovation is largely driven from within, or is it largely external (e.g. your users push you for more features)? - How does Stephen see the current co-creation space and how can we bring the benefits to smaller businesses with smaller budgets? - What is the best way to fund a research project? - Would you always have to artificially describe some midterm future application of your research to sell a business plan to some investors?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What is the history of "infinity" in mathematics, or in science in general? - I would like to see a differentiation between eternity and infinity. ​- Can you talk about the history of the "elementary length"? What have people believed to be the smallest possible length, and what events have changed this belief? - If space is discrete, does this mean that the fundamental constants are rational numbers? If the fundamental constants were real numbers, couldn't you encode arbitrary amounts of information into your theory, hiding the complexity in these constants? - ​​At what stage in history did the idea of extraterrestrial alien life start to be entertained? Is this a relatively recent phenomenon, or was it a thing even in ancient Greek philosophy? - When did we first realize that we only see the same side of the Moon?​ - What belief systems/groups of people have historically believed in a fundamentally discrete universe? ​- Why do you think the distribution of new discoveries is so random? See, for example, Nassim Taleb's example of 6,000 years between the wheel and wheels on a suitcase, for example.

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 why Earth's air doesn't escape into the vacuum of space, considering gas expands to fill the available volume without a container? - Why are there these phases of matter? Are these phases "real" or do they depend on what we can "observe"? - Sodium chloride makes incredibly square crystals. - The patterns snowflakes are predisposed to follow also drive the patterns that evolving vegetation (ferns, and the two types of trees) grows/grew into. It is all super interesting. - How perfect are crystals? Can they be used to detect the microscopic structure of space? - If the atoms of space act like a superfluid, would that mean vortices may arise if the universe is rotating? - And yet diffusion doesn't work in space. This is why I think it is electrostatic forces that must initiate coalescence. - Could photons frozen in absolute zero create "hard light"?

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 Excerpt from livestream episode Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [Part 117], Stephen Wolfram answers: How does ChatGPT work?