Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [January 20, 2023]

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 talk a bit about Pangaea? How do continents shift? Is it possible to reform Pangaea? Is there technology that could prevent this? - How does ChatGPT work? - Could you say that Chat GPT has made a graph of the space of words or ideas? - I'd love to see a thesaurus based on vectors into semantic space, so you could ask it to give you a word with a meaning close to "A" but heading in the direction of "B." - How well does ChatGPT handle slang or figures of speech? Does it understand text as literal, or is it capable of picking up these notes? - Could it be that ChatGPT isn't accurate because its training data is text, which may or may not correspond to the real world? Shouldn't we use only real-world data, such as sensory information of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell? - With all the new "AI" tools rolling out, what do you think will be the effect on "truth" and "facts" as we know them? - Does ChatGPT's ability to mimic emotions means that it is able to feel anything, and how much consciousness does it have? - Do you believe physics boundaries need to be coded explicitly, or do you think enough data will result in the model learning principles? - How does a neural network experience time? How do all these threads of computation combine to form a whole from its parts?

Om Podcasten

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business. On his podcast, Stephen discusses topics ranging from the history of science to the future of civilization and ethics of AI.