Future of Science & Technology Q&A (May 24, 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: Continuing the dinosaur theme, is it possible biology can repeat patterns of evolution? Is it possible for dinosaur-like creatures to reappear? - Why is it as technology advances, it goes through phases of bigger to smaller to bigger? I've seen this with phones, computers, TVs, cars, etc. What does this say for the future of technology? - ​​What would be the future of the personal computing paradigm? Would we see more remote cloud-like computing and storage in the future, essentially making personal computing devices obsolete? - The current AI/LLM models aren't good at the mathematical and statistical computational methods. What areas do you think should be focused on in computer science and mathematics to teach these models to be better at computation and assist researchers and scientists? - What do you think of the amount of data that gets processed or code that is run in terms of bytes vs. bytes that are used for storage in the world? - What exactly is 5G? How is it different from 4G or 3G? - Nowadays, instead of getting higher resolution, we can get higher color range and frame rate. - If AI is being used for autonomous vehicles, then presumably technology could improve to the level where vehicles could "see around corners" by different vehicles communicating with each other, buildings, etc.–so the video stream is from multiple perspectives? - Taking the concept further, could vehicles on a motorway and those joining seamlessly interweave at high speeds safely and traffic be diverted automatically in real time to ensure that there are no blockages etc.? - Turns out that as computer displays get better, our sensor limitations turn out to be higher than we used to think. - I recall reading something saying that 5G and low-latency connectivity would be important for self-driving cars. That seems somewhat unlikely to be an important component of self-driving now. - What's the future of fiber optics? - In the future, will cell towers be more advanced to prevent dead zones?