History of Science and Technology Q&A (January 11, 2023)

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
1:00 SW starts talking
1:24 What could Aristotle have accomplished if he had a modern machine-learning system? Could he have discovered logic?
39:21 Didn't Noam Chomsky also do some work in the intersection between math/logic and language? I wondered if language models are based on that at all?
45:42 Will the next generation of ChatGPT or VoiceGPT have any negative recourse, especially when it comes to impersonation?
48:43 A similar Chomsky idea is "can a submarine swim?" In English it can't, and in Japanese it can.
49:42 Do you think AI presents an existential risk? If so, how could we mitigate it?
1:02:04 How do you think Einstein or even Stephen Hawking would react to ChatGPT? Are there any figures in science who predicted this development?
1:08:31 Given what we have learned from AI models, does learning from history allow us to better predict the future? Does modeling the past imply modeling the future?
1:19:20 Ants are structured distinctly enough and that can lead to immediate conclusions on many levels.
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[@Youtubelaschool]

If we live in a computational univers is it not a paradox that if it was scientifically proven we will continue to study biology and computer science as two differents things ?

[@connorjerzak]

"Mathematics locked itself into the educational curriculum. Logic did not." It is interesting to ponder the reasons why certain things become mandatory in the curriculum, while others do not. What will the set of mandatory subjects look like in 100 years?

[@duggydo]

I think that the way modern culture is going, the curriculum in 100 yrs will be either about how crazy things were in the 2020's & 2030's or it will have gotten worse and there will many courses on the hundreds of made up genders other irrational things like that.

[@Dessoxyn]

I think that would be quite depressing to research, there are all sorts of things related to bureaucracy and the iron law of oligarchy, etc.
Like I think it's obvious and pretty ludicrous to require HS students to take trigonometry (it should certainly be an option). I would guess 95% of your class has never used it outside of school. I feel like literally recess would be a better use of time for anyone who isn't eventually going to learn that the sum of angles can actually be greater or lesser than 180 degrees.

[@Dessoxyn]

Plenty of people agree with me but we also realize this is almost impossible to change.
Same thing with math being the perfect subject for non-human teachers. There are different ways of explaining concepts, some students "get it" if it's explained like X, others if it's explained like Y. Every student essentially has a private tutor teaching them at their own pace. And unlike say, English class, there's almost no student to student interaction.