Future of Science & Technology Q&A (January 5, 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: What scientific breakthroughs would you like to see in 2024? - Whatever happened to graphene? Is it still a viable product of future technologies? - Could we build "bio-vehicles," e.g. instead of batteries, use synthetic adipose tissue, which is ~50–100 times more mass efficient per kWh? (Is there a future in bio-batteries?) - Based on the level of computational advances this last decade, with the trend only showing even more of the same, do you think that traditional engineering disciplines will be relegated to OpenLLM? - Do you think we'll see mass-producible, room-temperature superconductors in the next decade? - ​It has been suggested that AI will displace coders/programmers. Do you think AI might also replace many physical and chemical experiments? - Any thoughts on "zero-knowledge proofs," i.e. the ability to make proofs without revealing details? - Given that some of our greatest accomplishments as a species have happened when we mimic nature, how important do you think biomimetics will be going forward? - Can you see a time when the discovery of new mathematical theorems and axioms will be generated from AIs? - When Betelgeuse explodes, will humans be okay? - Do you think smart textiles/computing fabrics will take off or be viable? Would you wear, say, a sweater to hear instead of a hearing aid? - But things like math, geometry and especially tessellation have patterns that are universally implicit and can be interpreted as interesting by their own existence, and not just by the view of humanity. - Is there a way we can use Brownian motion at a molecular scale as a type of fingerprint for nano-sensors to create things that are piracy-proof? - Why are the axioms of mathematics necessarily the ones that are effective at describing things we see as well? - What do things like dreams and "higher states of consciousness" spoken about in Eastern philosophies tell us about ourselves as observers? - Would it be easy to have an AI remaster old movies, both real ones and cartoons, so we can watch all the old gems in high-end graphics? - "Interesting" is defined by a "coolness" threshold. - Since the scientific paradigm was a major cause for the Enlightenment, can we expect the (multi-)computational paradigm to kick off a socio-philosophical paradigm of comparable importance? - If someone invented calculus in the Stone Age, it would probably have not been used for anything... Do you think there are some ideas that may be "rediscovered" because they have a better use?