Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [March 31, 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: If ChatGPT's transformer model stores the averaging of the text that regular people produced on the internet plus millions of books, is it fair to say that it's going to produce mediocre output? What if we train a model with text produced by geniuses ONLY, like Euler, Gauss, Newton, Benjamin Franklin, etc.? Would it be superior? - What are you most excited to see from AI? - Is AI guaranteed to be 100% accurate? Or does it behave in a way similar to humans, where mistakes are possible and there should be some sort of quality assurance, either built in or separate, that requires human labor? - Does Elon Musk's call for halting AI development make any sense? Wouldn't people elsewhere do it anyway? Would this just hurt Western development at the cost of others pursuing it elsewhere? - Do you think if AI is given control of some trivial systems that it could inadvertently snowball into gaining control of other systems and become a hazard to humans? - ​A recent study has linearly mapped the activation of an LLM to activations in the brain. Do you think that might be a hint that we may be on the right path? - Do you think an artificially generated intelligence (AGI) could achieve an economic equilibrium for humans? - The interesting difference of ChatGPT to actual intelligence is you can fool it easily with crafted input. - Is there going to be a spread of misinformation due to AI (deep fakes, etc.)? - As someone with allergies, being able to adopt an AI robot dog would be kind of cool! - Human wants are not a fixed set of things. They evolve as society evolves. - Do you think AI might just be a part of evolution like farming, the usage of electricity and smartphones (in the "extension of man" sense), and that we actually don't really have a say in it? - With a powerful tool like AI, how does the education system need to be changed to meet the needs of future generations? How do teaching methods in schools need to be revamped? - The question is, will the dog have the IQ to understand us deeply? That's the problem with AI: we might be like dogs in terms of our understanding of AI. We might not understand it, and that's the scary part.