History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 28, 2022)

Stephen Wolfram hosts a live and unscripted Ask Me Anything about the history of science and technology for all ages. Find the playlist of Q&A's here: wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa
Originally livestreamed at: / stephen_wolfram
If you missed the original livestream of this episode, feel free to submit a question you would like Stephen to answer in a future Q&A livestream here: wolfr.am/12cczmv5J
00:00 Start stream
00:10 SW starts talking
00:30 Was the invention of computers inevitable? Will evolution always stumble upon universal computers, given enough resources? What are the implications for the laws of physics and reality?
28:26 I don't think computing technology could have possibly been conceived until after the Industrial Revolution.
38:13 ​Ideas alone don't govern how science evolves. It's a combination of factors, including technology, mode of production of society, etc.
39:07 The Sun's computation helps sustain us.
39:14 I like thinking about machine learning as a black box that gets to a human-comprehendable product, but the "reasoning" that enables it to get to that output is not really understood. Once we understand what's really going on in a machine learning model, we can be confident that its output is sound.
41:51 I started playing chess lately and I noticed that high-level and machine chess are a lot like proof of computational work and willingness to commit it. Do you have any thoughts on this?
43:25 I wonder how much power one would need in order to run a mechanical computer comparable to a modern CPU.
45:58 Historically speaking, do you think the modern AI systems are unique in terms of replacing human work, or just another step in automation?
56:58 ​I may change my email signature to "Written by ChatGPT. Please excuse any nonsense."
59:00 It's tempting to think general AI could emerge from some digital version of evolution. That seems to require digital entities competing for resources and a "will" to fight for survival.
1:00:10 Historically, how has written record keeping evolved? Will we ever revert back to oral records (spoken stories, songs, etc.)?
1:05:46 GPT-4 and GPT-5 are going to be amazing.
1:08:33 The question is whether the interviewer will care if the candidate is an AI. For some roles, it will not matter, and that number will increase.
1:09:27 Has ChatGPT passed the Turing test? Or can it pass the test soon?
1:10:40 I suspect the major deployment of AI in the short term will be phishing. For the time being, it can't replace regular employees at legitimate businesses because it can't be legally held culpable because it's not conscious. But for scammers, that's not an impediment.
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[@Dessoxyn]

Wolfram independently thinking up the Voight-Kampff test is the highlight of my day

[@robocop30301]

This is just great. Once again, thanks for doing these.

[@Dessoxyn]

I like to imagine Stephen is using the royal We when mentioning "Our" physics project ;)
Please keep doing it, it gives me a little giggle and silliness has always been deeply entwined with theoretical physics

[@maxwelldillon4805]

Is the Wolfram model superdeterministic?

[@NightmareCourtPictures]

Sorta but no. The history of the universe can be traced back super deterministically, but the future is in a superposition of many possible rewrite orders that could take place.
I’m addition your can’t trace back the universe in practice because all systems in the universe are computationally bounded and can’t resolve the irreducible complexity of the universe (or any system) other than the universe itself.
The above is the implication of his computational equivalence principle and the phenomenon of computational irreducibility.

[@_ARCATEC_]

Kinetic Power of Quantum Neuro Linguistics in Spacetime .
N²
SPTQ² K³
L²
N•X (s zPk tq(l ) ZK ( L)QT kpz S) Y•N

[@DC-wz7ob]

soooooooooo we are living in a simulation..>