Future of Science and Technology Q&A (July 19, 2024)

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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 AIs be creative? Should AIs rethink art? - What I think also matters is how creative the humans who write the code are. - Do you think art is a kind of multimodal/scale compression of very complex perceptions or ideas into a single form? Is art a way of coherently representing lots of unconscious computation? - ​​There are fundamental principles in art, seen clearly through art history. The question is, how much of these fundamentals does the user have a grasp on, and how can they use that as leverage? - Could there be "laws of art" available to science, using AI? - AI art is already a form in itself. I am usually able to tell AI art from human art, but maybe that will be harder as tech progresses. - Interesting (the transferal of images without language serialization in between). Do you foresee something similar for complex abstract ideas embodied in human neural networks or firing patterns? - To what extent can AI follow the speed of our mental images that sometimes we can't follow up with, not only in terms of communicative language but in terms of recognition? - Keeping with the "future of art" theme, will there even be a place for human artists in the future, or will generative AI make it mostly obsolete, say decades from now? - Art is an "idea" in the artist's brain that hits the friction of the medium: an instrument in music, or paint or clay in visual art. AI art may become much more interesting once it has more actuators. - Do you believe neural interfacing can increase observer capacity? - The idea that brains operate on "millisecond" scale seems wrong. Brains are not digitized control loops; they are continuous systems. - Could Neuralink-type technologies, with near-speed-of-light transfer speeds between persons, make you think this latency could become almost negligible someday? - Apparently there is a vast difference in people's ability to visualize images in their minds. Interestingly, many artists seem to lack this ability. - During your discussion with a robot, the robot said it liked to tell jokes and make people laugh. How possible is it for robots to develop their own personalities outside of what they are programmed to do?