155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hy...

At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to matter -- to ourselves as well as to others? The need to matter can be motivation t ... Show More

It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to think about consciousness. Modern LLMs can mimic human conversation with extraordina ... Show More

Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting.This year, I offer a short apologia for higher education in the liberal arts and sci ... Show More

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. This is our second conversation on the podcast. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast: – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex – Sun Basket, use code LEX: htt ... Show More

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, theoretical physicist, and the founder of Wolfram Research, a company behind Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram Language, and the Wolfram Physics and Metamathematics projects. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – ... Show More

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – ROKA: https://roka.com/ and use code LEX to get 20% off your first order – FightCamp: https://joinfightcamp.com/lex to get free shipping ... Show More

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel who died earlier this year, is famous for forecasting a continuous rise in the density of transistors that we can pack onto semiconductor chips. His eponymous “Moore’s law” still holds true after almost six decades, but further progress is be ... Show More

When discussing the capabilities of the latest AI chatbots, a physicist may argue: “Okay, they’re impressive at regurgitating texts that sound increasingly human. But we physicists don’t have much to worry about. It will be ages before the bots learn to grapple with physical conc ... Show More

Sam Harris speaks with Frank Wilczek about the fundamental nature of reality. They discuss the difference between science and non-science, the role of intuition in science, the nature of time, the prospect that possibility is an illusion, the current limits of quantum mechanics, ... Show More

This is a "return to regular format" episode in one respect - readings from and reflections upon "The Fabric of Reality" but also a departure from regular formatting in another respect: I teach a bunch of simple mathematics. This is for those who might think "quantum computation" ... Show More

Grant Sanderson is a math educator and creator of 3Blue1Brown, a popular YouTube channel that uses programmatically-animated visualizations to explain concepts in linear algebra, calculus, and other fields of mathematics. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence p ... Show More

A true understanding of the pervasive role of software in the world demands an awareness of the volume and variety of real-world software failures and their consequences. No more thorough survey of these events may be available than Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel's Bits and Bugs ... Show More