Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (January 3, 2024)

okay hello everyone welcome to another episode of Q&A about business Innovation and managing life I am not in my natural and usual habitat so uh uh all sorts of terrible technical things might go wrong um but we'll we'll see how how we can get on here so let's see I see a bunch of questions that have queued up here so let's see what I can take here there's one from Ben what have been some of the most fascinating questions you've answered are there topics still to explore oh boy I'm uh um I'm a I'm a difficult one to ask that question of because I've been I've spent my life working on kind of foundational questions about science and technology and so on um uh you know a very very fundamental question is sort of what's the raw material from which our universe is made and in the last three and a bit years we made tremendous progress on that and understand sort of computational foundations for uh the structure of physics and so on and um uh now one of the things that's come out of that is the realization that the way we observe the universe is critical to what we perceive the laws of the universe to be and so there are a lot of uh lot of questions around that that I've been pretty interested in you know at a at a broader scale there are I have an interance of foundations of almost everything how physics Works foundationally how mathematics Works foundationally how computation Works biology economics lots of different areas and kind of I think in a sense the the the sort of Arc of my life at least has been sort of trying to do foundational things in science that inform found ational questions in technology building tools from technology that then let one Explore More in science and so for example in our development of w from language and uh our whole sort of making computable the world it's all about kind of this this question of how how can we think about the world foundationally in computational terms and I find these kinds of questions these kinds of foundational questions really interesting but it's it's also the case that they're very long long-term questions and they're questions where you know a lot of these questions I've thought about for 40 years more than that uh uh for example recently I I finished uh some work turned into a book on the second law of Thermodynamics the the law that tells one that uh uh things that start orderly tend to become more random that things where you have initially sort of systematic mechanical processes going on that the energy will be dissipated as random heat that's the second of Dynamics says those things it's been very confusing for the last 150 years kind of why the second law is true and how that all works I think I figured out sort of scientifically how it works which is kind of exciting but um the thing that is notable is I started thinking about the second law in 1972 when I was 12 years old which means I'm ancient now um but uh it really took 50 years actually before I got to the point where I thought I really had a a good explanation of what was going on there it's a very long-term thing and and thinking about these foundational questions can be very very long term and a lot of the things that I think are really interesting to figure out and which I think we can make progress on in for example the foundations of Economics the foundations of biology and so on are things which I've thought about often on for many decades and I've gradually sort of accumulated more knowledge about these things and you know it's it's funny because I find that once I start thinking I'm going to pay attention to some particular field like let's say biological evolution I've paid attention to biological evolution since the early 1980s theories about that etc etc etc you gradually once you decide there's an area you're interested in at least for me I'm gradually picking up more and more information about this area and as I go around the world and I talk to different people it's like there'll be this person that I talked to you know 15 years ago when I learned this one particular thing that was interesting about biological evolution I kind of put that in the bag of stuff that I know about that area and then at some moment it gets sort of to the point where I say yes I can really dig in and start seriously working on this and making progress and you know I tend to as an organizational matter for myself I just have folders on my computer where you know when when I get so when I hear about something interesting I'll make some notes notes I'll stick them in the folder when I see some paper or something or whatever in that area I'll stick it in the folder and then when I'm finally ready to really get going in that field I'll go through everything that I've collected and and in fact sometimes I'll go through it uh at intermediate stages I was I was um uh just doing that looking at some some things um uh related to the question of of how well AI can contribute to science I've been collecting things in that area for a long time I was just just yesterday actually looking through a bunch of the things that i' collected in that area to try and sort of refresh my develop my intuition to the point where I can actually go in and really start doing sort of serious work there and so so for me at least that's that's been the the thing and and there are there are these areas like I don't know nanotechnology you know how do you how do you make molecular scale stuff work which I've been interested for a really long time it's not quite gotten to the point where I can say I I kind of where I'm I'm ready to jump in and really do things in that area getting close but it hasn't quite gotten to that point so that's kind of been the the the rhythm of of things I've done and I and I I have to say I find it you know once once I'm sort of primed to say this is an area I'm interested in then it's really a useful thing to know those this is an area I'm interested in I might do serious things in because then as you go around the world and you're talking to people you kind of know what you want to what information you want to collect from them otherwise it's like I run into somebody who's doing I don't know Evolution biology let's say and it's like well that's very nice and I can have a little discussion about it but I don't really it doesn't really it doesn't really engage in my memory um unless I have for me at least unless I have some anchoring question that I'm trying to think about in the case of evion biology it's kind of what's the big Theory how do we really think theoretically about Evolution at more than a descriptive level so uh just a few thoughts about that and I I would say that in this question are there topics still to explore you know one of the things that is a consequence of science I've done is there will always be an infinite Frontier of science it's you might say at some moment everything about science will be figured out let's say we figure out the fundamental Theory of physics I think we're pretty close to that is that is that the end of science well no and the reason is a piece of science it's this phenomenon I call computational irreducibility just because you know the rules by which something operates does not mean that you could immediately kind of jump ahead and so okay then I know everything about that thing you have to follow through these rules and see what their consequences are and sort of there are infinite potential consequences so in a sense there's always sort of an infinite Frontier of things to discover and another way to put that is that a lot of inventions a lot of results in science and so on are about kind of finding places where this whole computational irreducibility of what will happen little places where you can jump a little bit ahead you can use a little a little sort of uh uh pocket of computational reducibility and there are an infinite number of such pockets in a sense the inventions we make that allow us to take kind of the the physical world and do useful things with it kind of we're jumping ahead instead of instead of saying oh we just have a bunch of different kinds of atoms of this and that and the other we say we have a smartphone made of all those atoms the smartphone then allows us to do more things and having that aggregated thing that we've sort of identified and put together that's the thing that sort of is a is a way to Jump Ahead from just having to follow through each of the details of what we do with each of those individual atoms and and it's sort of a a feature of a fundamental feature it follows from sort of very foundational issues about how computation Works in some sense you can think of it as following from things like G theerum from 1931 and the concept of universal computation ruring machines and so on but there's sort of a a bit of a stack of ideas that I suppose I've worked on a lot that um that really take you to the point of realizing there is sort of an infinite sequence of of inventions and discoveries to be made the only thing that's an issue is will we humans care about all those things or will we get to a point where we say we know everything we care about you know we're just going to lead our lives only dealing with that sort of subpart of the world that deals with things we already know about turns out that won't work because turns out that the way the world operates computational irreducibility eventually impinges on something where you thought you had this closed set of rules about how the world should work it's kind of like I invent a set of laws and I say this set of laws is going to describe everything that's going to happen in the world it's going to tell me what I should do and shouldn't do it will always be the case that eventually something that just naturally happens in the world will give you a case that wasn't covered by that sort of enclos closed collection of laws so it's it's sort of inevitable that Innovation is both possible forever and forever going to be forced upon one and but I think it it's still sort of at what rate and and how that works does depend on what humans want I mean in other words if humans decide we're done with progress we're just going to go hang out we've got you know there are certainly cultures in which that's that's happened right now it's like we're really happy we don't need electricity we don't need this we don't need that we are happy as as humans doing some particular set of things that is sort of a limited that that that thing which doesn't break out into this new area of innovation and progress and uh you know there are other people like myself I'm in always interested in kind of the new or at least I have been my life so far um it's always the the new always takes more effort than the than the current so to speak the new is both both I suppose uh uh exciting and enriching but it also takes effort to do new stuff and there's a there's a tremendous tendency for everybody including myself to say hey I know how to do that let me just keep doing that um for me in particular i' I I just find it so exciting to see new things so to speak new intellectual Vistas so to speak that I'm always driven to uh uh you know even if it's like yes I can do that I can do it well it's kind kind of fun but it's like but there's another thing to see and I'm always I'm always uh you know I happen to be built in such a way that I'm I'm always interested in that let's see Joey is asking what are the biggest opportunities and challenges facing businesses in our industry in the next five years um you know I think the business that I in in a sense is trying to make the world computational trying to make it so that we have this way of thinking about the world in kind of structured computational terms and trying to provide a language and a system that allows us to make use of that thinking I would say the biggest challenge in in my world is for people to understand this computational way of thinking about the world it's kind of like there was a time when people learned logic and that was a way of thinking about the world there was a time when people learned mathematics it's a way of thinking about the world this computational thinking idea is a tremendously important way of thinking about the world and it's a question of how do people learn that how do people conceptualize the world in this new way and you know I spent the last 40 years building a computational language W from language um that is a language for letting you describe things computationally kind of like mathematical not ation is in mathematics it's kind of a a a thing for concretizing computational ways of thinking about the world and I would say that the both the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge is for people to really understand that computational way of thinking it's an opportunity because every field basically as it's a way of structuring one's thinking about every kind of field and making systematic progress with the help of computers and it's tremendous trendly tremendously powerful I mean computational X is for all X is kind of the future of of everything in in in terms of intellectual development I mean imagine that we didn't have mathematics as a way of thinking systematically about things we wouldn't have most of modern engineering and we wouldn't have just vast pieces of the modern world but mathematical thinking is a small subset of computational thinking computational thinking is this tremend tremendously powerful thing question is how do people learn this stuff and you know as I say I've tried to do my bit in the last 40 years developing our computational language as a way to sort of concretize computational thinking but it's still a big kind of societal issue like how do you teach people computational thinking the the efforts to do that that say oh you should learn programming well that isn't really the same thing learning how to make a computer go you know do a loop of operations or set variables or whatever else is not the real story of computational thinking that's a story of how computers work inside and how we connect the things we want to do to some aspects of how computers work inside it's a computational thinking is a much more uh much more General way of thinking about the world and for example I'm I'm trying to do a project right now of trying to write a sort of book and course and so on about computational thinking I'm only on about page I don't know how many pages it is probably about page eight or something of this project so still early days but it's been interesting to see kind of I thought well you know I'm sort of frustrated that I have to do this myself because I figure that lots of other people who have through our computational language and so on understood things about this area but I'm I'm ending up doing it myself but as I get into it I realize it's actually quite difficult there's actually a lot of sort of rethinking of how one presents things thinks about things and so on that's necessary to really broadly Express computational thinking but this is uh you know this is something it's far away from what is taught sort of in education system um it's uh it's something well that's that's the thing if people really understood this this would be tremendously valuable now I think it helps you know llms being able to write some computational language code from much vager uh kind of uh um sort of natural language that that's certainly helpful it's kind of a follow on to you know in Wolf malfa we're able to take sort of small Snippets of natural language and do very precise things with them um AIS and large language models take big complicated chunks of language and don't do such precise things with them but can sort of untangle them in certain ways that's pretty useful as an onramp to sort of this precise computational way of thinking so that's that's sort of an opportunity I think the um and and that you know that there are many more detailed pieces to that of sort of to what extent do the llms end up being these kind of large scale cloudbased systems as opposed to things where it's just the little linguistic layer and most of what's there is the linguistic layer on top of kind of the computational system underneath and that that becomes a thing that you can you know run on your phone or whatever else so I think those are those are a few directions in there let's see uh what kinds of questions here um well apolinario is asking what are the best approaches to develop a sound sound computational thinking are there good books and courses well that's what I'm trying to write so thank you for asking that question because it's a helpful motivational uh uh statement but um you know I think right now there are endless examples of people doing things with Oran language um that are pretty good examples and uh you'll find that oh I mean sort of a um a rather practical piece is the book I wrote in 2016 called Elementary introduction to W language um but that's that's a that's at the more practical level that's the less conceptual level but that's a good kind of onramp to this and then looking at a bunch of the things people have done um on W from community and other other places with the language um let's see question here from 1H I can never decode these these handles quite an interesting question are there Fields you know have depth but don't interest you at all yeah fortunately Lots because otherwise I mean one has to pick one's battles I mean I I have picked off some pretty big things like like fundamental Theory of physics or foundational ideas about computation and so on but there's uh you know there are there are things where I know there's a lot there and I just don't know it I mean for example politics is an area where I just I don't know much about it I you know I I have only a tremendously uh sort of superficial level of kind of news following type thing um and you know there clearly lots of it I know a little bit about political philosophy but that's that's uh but it's an area with with lots of uh depth of a some some sense I suppose in in um uh you know as I'm as I'm thinking about this I'm I'm my immediate response is oh there are lots of things that I don't know about you know another area that there a lot of kind of you might think of them as not very sciency type areas but like fiction for example is something about which I know rather little and um I don't really it's not something I expose myself too terribly much and uh I just don't know much about it um but in terms of sort of more sciency areas what are some areas I don't know there are areas of engineering that have lots of depth and where I'm like yes if I ever needed that I would try to learn it but I don't know it right now um and uh uh you know I'll typically know the kind of physics end of that piece of engineering but not it's um uh but not kind of the um the full story of how you really do it um gosh I'm just trying to think of different areas I mean another area that I was um um yeah I mean the this is this is actually a worse question for me than I had than I had imagined as I as I picked it up to try to answer it because in fact I really am interested in an awful lot of different things although I haven't gotten very deep in many of them another area I haven't got very deep in is music lots of sort of theoretical depth there which I don't I mean I know a little bit about it but I don't know you know there's there's clearly a lot of depth that I haven't haven't penetrated and where I I am uh you know it's kind of like if one had an infinite lifespan one would I would be interested in all these things but one has to pick one's battles I suppose and um I I've tended to you know what I tend to do is to you know what what are the criteria first well lots of things I find interesting but there are things where I think I can really make progress and where I'm not going to be waiting for some ambient you know technological or or sort of issue in the world to resolve where I might have to wait for for 30 years for that to resolve I mean for example when I was a kid in the 196s and so on I was interested in space and I got you know interested in how would you design spacecraft like this and thank goodness I didn't stay doing that because I would have been waiting for 50 years for kind of the ambient structures in the world to develop to the point where one can really sort of where an individual can innovate in things to do with space and um so you know one Criterion is is it the right time is the world sort of set up is the is the ambient technology and knowledge and so on to the point where one can really actually make progress where where one person or one person person plus you know maybe a company of 800 people or something can make progress um the uh or is it something which requires some a heavier lift more time more resources than one can Marshall to to to geted it that that's that's um one kind of Criterion is is sort of can one make progress the other question that has some effect on me is if I make progress is there any way of telling the world you know is it the case that the thing one's making progress on is is there effectively a distribution channel for the ideas and you know I have to say that hasn't affected me as much as perhaps it should have done but uh you know for instance I don't know I wrote this book recently about meta mathematics and there's no market for meta mathematics I mean there was a big enthusiasm for metam mathematics in the 1930s 1940s most of those people are long gone uh there certainly interest in matter mathematics but it's not the professional uh you know if if I say what's the market size of professional people interest than that it's microscopic if you ask what's the set of people in the world who have a sort of philosophical conceptual interest is much larger than that but it's still the case that sort of a market-driven analysis would cause one not to work in that area and and there's certainly are areas where I am uh I wonder about that so so for example another area I've been considerably interested in is kind of AI I don't know what the right word is management governance I don't know what the right word is AI um sort of how one thinks about sort of AIS in the world and their interaction with humans and society and uh and so on and uh you know I I some of what I think about there has the sort of frustrating feature that okay I figure out something about you know sort of the the AI future of democracy or something and I realize I don't know what to do with this because you know there's so many strong kind of opinions and and and ideologies and so on in these areas that if I say well I've got this I've got this idea over here and it has some kind of technological entanglements it's like no no no that that violates this ideology and that ideology and it's it's very it's kind of very unpleasant uh you know one has to figure out how does one how does one do something in this area without just uh uh you know sticking oneself into something where there's just a you know intense U intense fighting going on all the time you know I had this experience actually uh I wrote this book called the new kind of science that came out in 2002 and uh sort of one of the use cases of the new kind of science had to do with physics and I'd been involved in physics I've been a professional physicist so to speak uh a number of years earlier than that and you know in in the world of physics pretty universally the tools I built get used by people so I sort of had and had many friends in the physics area but yet back in 2002 physics as a field was was kind of had sufficient self-esteem or arrogance you might say to say we don't need a new approach to physics we've got great stuff already and so the response from my friends in physics to the things I was sort of a new foundational directions was very negative and so you know I decided at the time I'm not going to work on this right now I've got a zillion other things to work on where kind of the I'm not I don't have to fight people might not you know nobody's going to aggressively fight back it's it's really a question of build things and the world might care the world might not care I can feel good about them and so on now happily you know 15 years or so later when I came back to working on physics physics as a field had had tanked in terms of self-esteem because it really hadn't a lot of things and things like strength the and so on hadn't really worked out the way people had hoped and uh so a very different response very very much more uh you know very much more collaborative and uh you know much pleasanter to be around so to speak and so that's a that's a reason to now now explore that area and and we've been very successful there and it's it's all good um let's see uh just comments say I'm a person that easily gets distracted jack of all trades master of none I envy people that dedicate their focus on a specific field to become an expert but I fail to do so myself as I'm getting older I still dabble around and try to find find my thing still do you uh is there do I have a suggestion for an approach that can make one more focused in a single field without that initial spark you know I have a very maybe optimistic view of people which is that you know we all have certain characteristics and we're all kind of naturally built different ways and I kind of feel like we all have something going for us and the question is can we match the thing that's going for us with things that really work in the world as the world is and you know I think it's a question of if you are a person you know I know people who are like I'm doing one thing I'm going to do it my whole life it is one very specific thing I'm going to be the world expert on that thing and that's my thing and uh uh you know that's that's a way of life there's a different way of life which is I'm interested in lots and lots of different kind kind of things now sometimes the interest in lots and lots of different kinds of things allows you at some moment in your life to realize oh my gosh there are 20 different areas that I've been interested in and now I can pull them all together and and make them into something great and I've seen that a number of times I suppose um a person who I'm afraid didn't like me very much but but that's beside the point of chap called Vana mandle brought inventor of fractals um he was in a situation where he done many different r R things in his life and at some point he was writing this book which became book called fractals where he was trying to pull together all these different things which really actually were not that convincingly fitting together but he managed to find a theme and the theme was very strong and the theme was was an important contribution to science but really he'd been a dabbler in lots of different areas and somehow he managed to pull out of all that dabbling a theme so I think you know one exercise is if you've dabbled in many different areas is there in fact a theme because many of us actually you know I've worked in a lot of different areas but in a sense the way I've done it has always been the same it's always this kind of look at foundations build up from foundations it turns out there's a lot of commonality in the foundations that I'm using and that allows me to understand more and to build build something bigger out of all those different areas I've been working on so I would say that the the first the first kind kind of uh you know thing for the dabler is was there a common theme is there a common theme can you pull that out and then realize that all these things that you thought were unconnected actually become just sort of legs in this in this big thing that you're building that's one thing another thing is there are different sort of activities in the world where dabbling is what matters I mean if you're like tell me an interesting thing one you know one interesting thing every day if it's always about the the same topic that's less interesting to people than if it's about lots and lots of different topics I mean similarly you know there are different kinds of professions whether you're you know doing uh expository writing about different areas where it's like oh well I want to dabble in this area for two weeks as I write about that and then I'm going to work in some other area and so on and you're delivering a portfolio of things but in terms of of sort of the one true spark what I've noticed is that people I suppose I've the for me it's like I'll notice things and then I'll be like I'm really excited about that I'm going to chase that but one thing that can happen is that the world Ser evolves and different opportunities come along like you know if you really wanted to be a prompt engineer before there were llms prompt engineering wasn't a thing you know if if you were like I'm a a good expository writer I really want to be an AI Wrangler using my expository writing that wasn't a thing until llms came along so what tends to happen is things things evolve in the world and something new comes along and what I've noticed is that there usually is a set of people in the world for whom that new thing that came along is the thing for those people and those people might be when it comes along they might be 20 years old they might be 60 years old but when the thing comes along it's uh you know they kind of notice that it's their thing they grab onto it and then they have an exciting ride and you know one might be more and less lucky that in the span of one's life that the thing that really is the thing one resonates with comes along or doesn't come along and I think that's the but but one of the things that's important there is to be kind of you know watching the the the the scenery so to speak well enough that if the thing does come along that that you can grab onto it now sometimes people are not in a life situation where they can really go whole in you know Whole Hog into this particular thing it is always worth remembering that you know one does have sort of you know in most situations people have sort of the hobby time the time when they might have been watching television or something but where they you know they could be pursuing something that that is an intellectual interest and that's always that tends to be more of a possib than people sometimes sometimes would say let's see John asks how do you keep track of what you want to learn and how do you manage your time effectively so you dedicate ample time to each of the things you want to learn I can only learn when I have a reason to learn really I mean I learn a little bit by just talking to to people and just reading random articles about things just because oh I happen to run across it but serious learning I can really only do in response to something I want to do some project or something like that and for me it's pretty concrete how I keep track of these things I just have folders on my computer like 50 of them or something that are the things I'm trying to S of I'm I'm I'm circling around getting ready to really get serious about um and that's that's kind of my mechanism for that um I think uh as I was saying earlier I you know there comes a point where I get really serious about a project and I'm very intensely focused on that for however long it takes to make it happen but before that time I'm kind of just circling just sort of collecting things and I don't really set myself any particular time frame because it's kind of like I might run into somebody who happens to be a world expert on this and I can ask them the key question and maybe I didn't even know what the right question to ask was but something that they said kind of tipped me off to this is the question I should be asking and I'm often running there I don't really budget that time because I just don't know what I'm looking for um and uh once I'm actually locked in on a project well then I'm much more serious and and uh and and then you know one of the things about projects actually particularly projects I do so so there's like okay I'm trying to solve this problem let's say then there's a different issue which is am I going to do it as a scholar and am I going to know the history of the field am I going to know all the sort of academic tentacles of the thing and that's actually a slightly different project from just doing the project I mean when you do the project sometimes it's like yes I want to know what other people did because that's going to help me sometimes it's like the thing I'm doing is just too far away from what anybody else has ever done there there really isn't going to be that much useful stuff almost certainly and so to know what the connections are is really a matter of scholarship rather than a matter of necessity for doing the project and sometimes I've sometimes for example the project I did on the second second law of Thermodynamics uh the things that I was saying was sort of sufficiently radical that I wanted to check that you know the conventional wisdom why do I disagree with the conventional wisdom where did the conventional wisdom come from so I was highly motivated in that case to really do the scholarly Deep dive on the history so on and piece all those things together but that's sort of a separate Branch I would say from uh uh from the um from the project of just sort of getting to the answer so to speak uh let's see Eddie asks do you have some activity to calm your brain down after perhaps a long day of concentrating to wind down before you go to sleep uh I'm a very habitual person so I go to sleep at a pretty much a fixed time of something past 2 am local East Coast us time kind of wherever more or less wherever I am unless I'm sort of in some really exotic time zone where I have to kind of randomize myself for hopefully not too long uh you know I suppose it has been for me a the fact that I'm sufficiently habitual means oh my gosh you know know by that time really quite suddenly you know very specific time I'll I'll usually be like I'm working along and I'm just I'm just going to get tired and then I'll fall asleep and I suppose one thing this is a maybe a too much information personal sort of thing I when I was a a kid I I kind of I used to be too revved up and I couldn't sleep and so on sometime I was maybe 14 15 years old I just decided I'm going to learn to sort of relax I lie on my back close my eyes and I sort of taught myself okay I kind of switch off and go to sleep and I suppose I taught myself too well because you know if I'm like going to a dentist or something and I'm tipped back I'm like I I always have to apologize I say I'm probably going to fall asleep because I've sort of set myself this kind of reflex of in that I don't know I don't know I don't know whether what um I don't know whether this is something everybody could do or whether it's a um uh sort of a special to the way that that I'm built but I found that that having that sort of both the the the general habitual thing of timing and also the specific oh yeah well I'm I'm just used to the fact that if I you know lie lie flat and I just you know I just fall asleep and that's that's just what I do so if I'm actually there have been other situations where I don't know in in different different kinds of situations where for one reason or another I'm lying flat and it's just like I I fall asleep I find it I find it very hard to stay awake in that situation and um so that that's uh for me that's that's what I tend to do and I i' I've not I really haven't done any of the things that people say about you know changing the light levels that you have and the this and the that I really haven't done any of that I suppose I I avoid eating you know dark chocolate shortly before I go to sleep because I figured that probably is a bad idea but but and I I'm not a coffee drinker or anything like that at all so so that's not really an issue for me but um uh that's that's my you know habit is my main my main mechanism for that and I do think the other thing that I have noticed is the one absolute it's probably true for most people if you're kind of you say I'm going to go to sleep and then I'm going to keep thinking about this thing that I was thinking about oh and I have an idea about it it's like unless you write down that idea you're not going to be able to fall asleep because you're kind of looping saying I'm going to maintain that idea I'm going to maintain that idea and you know at least for me it's like you write it down okay we're done now now you can fall asleep type thing um let's see Pastor asks if you learn to s something I've never done then you wait right wait for the right wave what was the wave that uh I caught that um that kicked off uh my career um yeah I mean there's a definite answer to that I was when I was a kid aged about 10 11 or so I got interested in physics and it so happened that by the time I was like 13 14 years old physics was really in a golden age a lot of things were getting discovered and I kind of you know I surfed that wave basically um because and it turned out you know when there is a young field physics wasn't a young field but but there was a particularly when there's a young field if you're you can enter that field with fairly low cost because there's not a lot to know it's not a giant stack of you have to learn all the stuff to be able to contribute you can enter that field and if you kind of hit it at the time when it is in its maximum vibrancy most fields of intellectual Fields technological Fields actually go through these kind of five or 10 year intense periods when you know something opens up some new method is invented some new technology whatever else and then there's there's a whole bunch of low hanging fruit to be picked and it's five or 10 years worth of lwh hanging fruit and at that time it starts very small not very many people know to pick that fruit then people realize there's a lot of fruit being picked so lots of people go into that area and then all the lwh Hang fruit gets picked and then it's a long hard grind but at the point where there's just early fruit being picked typically that area is not that visible and um uh you know so you have to be kind of alert to to find those kinds of things and I was fortunate I suppose that that physics which I was interested in I gotten interested and sort of independently kind of got this this big boost in 1974 with a bunch of discoveries in particle physics and so on and uh you know I was able to make some contributions to that and uh that was super helpful to me that you know as the 16 year old kid or something I was able to sort of do professional grade particle physics and make contributions where people would say oh that's Club type thing um that was a big you know I would say not so much what other people said but what I could see for myself so to speak it was very satisfying and confidence building to be able to to make progress in in something which seemed like an important field and so on for me personally the other thing that really launched things I've done is computers and the fact that computers got to the point where one could really use them one could just use them one didn't have to kind of you know know how to build a piece of electronics to use them one could just use them and they still things started to scale up that way and I think that's uh uh and for me the thing that was really important is is yes you can actually use them and you know in physics for example people were like oh computers well there're something else we don't use those for physics and I'm like but look it's a tool you can use it and bringing that together with the things that I was interested in in physics and in content uh that was an important kind of launching thing but I would say that the thing it's sort of both I landed in a field that was sort of in its golden age I had this methodology namely computation which was a uh methodology that was out there but not widely appreciated by by scientists for example and I suppose the the third thing for me is um that uh I kind of had um uh Progressive achievement in the sense that it did something it worked out okay then that gives you the confidence to do something more ambitious next and so I kept doing that and I've kept doing that sort of my whole life and um uh you know the fact that one has the confidence oh I'm going to do some project you I've got projects right now that in the abstract they're just crazy difficult projects it's like how could this possibly how could one possibly make progress you know let's say finding some foundational theory for economics how could one possibly make progress on that people have been thinking about that for 500 years or whatever you know how could one make progress I don't know if I will but I I'm not immediately turning away because I know I've made progress on a lot of things where people have said uh you know this is a thing that they'll never make progress on and I think that um uh both the confidence to try and do difficult things but also another important thing for me at least and I've seen it in other people as well is I don't kind of it's not like I say I've done these difficult things the next thing I do must be more difficult than everything I've done so far it's like I'm just going to do what I think is interesting even if the thing that's interesting if I'm lucky maybe it'll be easy um it's not and maybe it will be maybe the thing I'll do will be super important maybe it won't be that important I'm not you know I'm not insisting on sort of progressive growth in the difficulty or importance of the things I'm doing I think that's a very significant thing because I see a lot of people who get trapped you do one good thing and then you say now the next thing I do must be at least as good as the thing I already did or at least as important and that's a trap because sometimes you won't be able to find that next most important thing and sometimes you don't even know what's going to be important and what's not so you should just do it if you know if you think it's interesting do it even if that next thing you do ends up being kind of a thing that you think is rather easy like like for example this last year uh you know when chat gbt came out and so on we were involved with it and such like I thought okay people have been asking me how does chat gbt work so I should sit down for you know a week or something and write out sort of my version of of kind of how that works well I thought that would be kind of a simple thing to do it was rather simple to do but then as I was doing it I realized wait a minute I've got some theory about how it works that's turned out to be quite interesting and also the thing that I wrote you know millions of people have read it and I think it's had some significance in the world in terms of people's understanding of kind of what the whole shtick of llms is and such like so that thing that I thought was kind of a oh this is simple throwaway you know not really the terribly important turned out to be much more important than I expected both because I discovered more and because it had more influence in the world than I'd expected so you know it would have been a mistake for me to say oh that's too easy for me I shouldn't do it so that that that's um you know I I try to not fall into that trap um question here uh let's see Pastor asks let's see how is publishing is as a singular author on uh innovative ideas changed your life trajectory do you feel like institutional Authority was important for you to be heard or was it truly the Merit of your work uh I'd like to say that if anybody paid attention to things I've done it's because of the things I've done but I don't think that's realistic I think that there's a certain prior that people assigned to things and to whether they should bother to pay attention to things that depends on kind of the the history and and environment of the of the source of the ideas now I have to say that sometimes it surprises me because I think I've built a reasonable amount of credibility for myself in my life and I've you know built tools a lot of people use and it surprised me sometimes that people are like well yes I know you've done a lot of of very good things but this new thing you've done I think that's totally crazy even when it isn't and it hasn't been so far uh it sort of surprises me because when I see something that I see oh this person has a long history in doing delivering really interesting things in these areas of let's say technology and then they do something different over in this area my prior for that is I'm going to take that more seriously than if I look at this person and the person has never produced anything that interesting it doesn't mean they couldn't produce something interesting but my prior for you know saying I should look seriously at this if the person has delivered real things before I'm going to look more seriously because I think the likelihood of that they produced five really good things and the sixth thing is just total nonsense is low whereas if they produce zero things in the past the first thing I don't know whether it's going to be good or not it's not as obvious um and similarly if they produce five things that were all pretty silly and then they produce another thing my prior is going to be it's probably pretty silly it's probably you know some sometimes when there's a new thing that comes into existence it'll take some learning some some effort to to to dig into it figure out what's going on with it and so on should you put that effort in you know there are cases where somebody will tell me oh I heard about this thing from this place and so on and it's like oh my gosh I've seen five other things there and they've all been nonsense it's going to be very hard to convince me to look at the six thing whereas the other way around five things that all been really good I'm going to look at the six thing so I think it would be unrealistic to say that that isn't an effect um I think it is and I think it's very rational for people looking at things to to pay attention to that now in terms of in the modern world you know if I say I'm a professor in place X I think that was probably more significant uh decades ago few decades ago than it is today I think people are a lot more familiar with the fact that ideas can come from companies or independent people whatever else it's much more the history of that person than it is oh they're a professor at at esteemed University X now that's that's happened for two reasons one because there's been more Innovation from places outside of the mainstream esteemed Professor X and second because some of the esteemed Professor X's have done pretty silly stuff and that means that sort of their the platform they've built for credibility has been deeply eroded I think um and that's uh which is perhaps a shame perhaps not a shame perhaps it's actually a good thing for the world because it it levels the playing field for where innovative ideas can come from and and the thing to realize is when there is a very well-developed area and very institutionalized structure it's much more difficult for innovative ideas to come from that and so you know you don't want to stifle the less well-defined less institutionalized areas if you want Innovation to happen and if you say the only Innovation can come from the heavy institutionalized well plumed you know with good plumage so to speak places then you're you're you're immediately writing out lots of innovation I mean if you take an area like machine learning for example a lot of the Innovation there did not come from the obvious sort of well plumed well- known really didn't actually at all from from it came from things that were a bit more interstitial um and uh uh you know in in in recent times so um let's see uh um M asks have you ever thought about leaving the software world and producing Hardware you know people suggest this I would say at different rates of um it's become a little less common but people would suggest every couple of years oh you know you want your software to run better make Hardware I remember my first company this is back in 1982 or so one of the most stupid decisions that uh uh and that that company I I I brought in a CEO I was not the CEO um I was just the technical founder um and uh you know that was a time we had a bunch of software the hardware workstation computers and so on weren't really up to running the software that we had so it was like let's build Hardware that can run our software and I was like let's not we're a software company the economics and so on of the hardware are quite different and by the way other people are going to build this hardware and they have much more economy of scale than we do for making something good happen here and so I think the the um uh and this has come up over and over and over again I mean people have like let's make a a kind of a cheap thing that um sort of everybody can run uh or from language on well the Raspberry Pi has provided that and so on I remember one time we were looking at should we make a calculator probably a little bit more than 10 years ago now should we make a wolf from language enabled calculator and actually we built a really pretty nice piece of software that ran on the iPad this must have been right when the iPad came out in 2010 or so um and we actually invented some pretty interesting user experience uh uh kind of methodology for how to enter things in a touch screen that were had various kinds of notation and so on but anyway we made this thing it was kind of an interesting problem how do you make a a calculator with 5,000 buttons which is kind of what a WL from language calculator would be like and obviously you don't make 5,000 buttons you have other mechanisms for dealing with that that from a ux point of view but anyway we made this thing and then it was a question of well were we going to you know make it as a hardware calculator because we could um and uh it was sort of funny funny story because we have this um uh summer program for high school students we have another summer program for for grown-ups so to speak actually right now we're in the middle of a winter school that we have for for for grown-ups also um but uh the um uh I was at the summer camp and I'm like should we make a calculator and all these kids high school kids were like yes you should make a calculator and I showed the demo of what we had and they're like yes you've got to build this you got to make a piece of hardware and then I I went to the you know we run them simultaneously so I went to our our summer school of grown-ups and I said should we make a calculator and they're kind of like why would you make a calculator nobody cares about calculators if we want to do these things we'd use a computer and and then I realized at some point that there's this weird dynamic of calculators getting sold to high school kids because a calculator is a closed object that you can use in a test by the way I think it's a big mistake that that's I've always thought that having uh kind of a a well-defined piece of software that's accessible to anybody is much better than having a $200 calculator that only some small subset of kids can buy that does things it just seems like a goofy uh kind of weird you know evolution of commercial interests in the world but that's what's happened any case it was kind of a a a uh you know that was a let's do a hardware play making a calculator and then like that's for a particular use case of using it in a test that nobody cares about other than this very artificial kind of kind of setup so uh that that's that's been a our story and I think um I think for me sort of the the Dynamics of make making Hardware is so different from software uh I mean occasionally we've thought about making various kinds of specific devices I've been interested in kind of making a universal sensor platform uh you know one one has a universal computer you feed in any program it will do compute different kinds of things what about sensors if you want to measure something humidity versus uh you know carbon monoxide level versus uh uh you know light level of this versus winds speed versus whatever else is there a thing you can get that would have a set a small number of broadspectrum sensors from which you can synthesize information about all those different kinds of things I think the answer is yes there about 10,000 kinds of things you can measure we've inventoried that for or Alpha and for our our knowledge base and so on it's a question of can you can you sort of break that down into things where oh you've got a microphone you've got a camera now you can deduce things from looking at the images and the sounds and deduce all of those particular things so uh that's that's a case where I I actually have thought about building hardware for that well more to the point I tried to convince the CEOs of several large semiconductor companies and they're like you know realistically we can't do something as Innovative as this you know try a smaller company and then for smaller companies it's like look you know the investment to make this work is just too big for our small company so it's kind of like you're you're caught between those two things you can't do innovation in a large production kind of oriented environment and yet in Hardware unlike in software the sort of minimum investment is really quite large let's see um no catha asks Is it feasible for an individual to start a software company from scratch today uh the way I did long ago with developing S&P for Ral W language I should emphasize that I did not build S&P on my own I had a team of people um I you know with with mathematical and morph language again team of people I did a lot of the work I designed the thing I wrote a bunch of core code but I didn't do all the work um and could I have done all the work uh you know it would have taken a bunch more years um I don't think it would have made a better product uh I think um I think the um uh you know how big a team do you need to do what s what kind of software thing you know there are there are things where you know if you if you take the constraint I want to do something where I can do it all with my own fingers so to speak then that in modern times particularly I would like to say with technology we we we've built with wolam language and all the automation we've built there it is much more realistic for a an individual person to build a substantial product offering and it also depends on are the deployment mechanisms smooth enough and we've worked very hard with orm language to provide deployment in the cloud on the desktop as Standalone in this and servers etc etc etc so that an individual can readily deploy in all those different channels and and so I think it becomes realistic with the kind of Technology stack we have becomes pretty realistic for an individual person and it's happened a bunch of times for an individual person to build a pretty substantial kind of product in in that area if you insist oh I'm going to just use you know write everything in C code or something um then it's going to be much more difficult to get to the point depending on how what your product is I mean you might have some product that is just some amazing you know component for some networking thing or or something like this where it's just the raw code and that's all you need but I think in for many kinds of things going from the idea to the reality well that's what we've spent so many years building a unique technology stack for making that possible and you know I think much more of that should be done it's a great opportunity for people and that's a place where an individual can really build a substantial thing uh re asks are there other types of technology or software you would like to experiment with if your future endeavors oh yes I mean one in particular we've worked for for a decade now with a a well I would say a startup it's no longer really a startup because it's at least a decade old called Emerald Cloud lab that is making automated biology and chemistry uh experiment technology using using W language and I have long been intending to to actually use that to do a bunch of biology and chemistry experiments I've never been other than the most minimal you know put a bunch of chemicals in a test tube and stir them I've never really done those kinds of experiments but this is my opportunity to do that that's a place where I'd really like to do some experiments I'd like to do some experiments in nanotechnology which are sort of enabled by that that's still a little bit further down the line um I think uh in terms of um in terms of software I mean you know right now playing with u using all kinds of neuronet based systems and so on and trying to understand how they work and trying to see what their uses and limitations are that's another kind of Technology um I suppose uh oh another thing is sensor Technologies you know I I'd like to understand what it's like to have a different experience of the world uh you know well presumably soon will get better sort of augmented reality experience but it's like okay put an infrared sensor and UltraViolet sensor let me get a sense of the world with with with those other kinds of components added um so you know and I think even with augmented reality uh and and uh there's there's probably other I mean i' I've used that over gosh I first played around with with VR back around 1990 1991 and um uh various times tried to see whether it was actually useful to me for you know visualizing things so on it it hasn't been so far and I have the problem that I tend to get motion sick using those things but that's a that's a temporary technological problem I think maybe it's a permanent physiological problem for me I don't think so um the uh I think it just has to do with the delay between when you move your head and when the when the system responds to that um but uh uh you know that's a place where I'm very curious whether you know once I am familiar with using that what will it enable for me um I don't know yet uh rickus comments the big user of of cloud when on mobile and uh this is a a a poke that the iOS uh version of our our wolf and Cloud app should be given more love thanks for the poke um we'll uh I'll pass on the Poke I I don't disagree with you I use I use this a bunch myself um and uh mostly as a I use it as there's a notebook and I have it in an email or something and I can open the notebook on my phone I don't tend to do as much editing on my phone it's a rare sort of emergency case um that uh um uh that I'll actually edit and and you know I think this is one of the things like like for me as an old fogy you know I just do simple things on my phone I don't you know for anything serious I'm going to get out my computer um and uh but you know I I see the young um and it's not just the young who have smaller fingers than I do um it's the conceptually young so to speak uh the um uh you know using their phones for everything and the question of sort of programming on one's phone we've done some experiments with that and I think there's more ux that could be done I I'd be interested to know where whether people really care about that I haven't quite seen that take off I think by the time one's doing sort of programming um one's probably using a computer uh let's see um Patrick is asking uh would you say that the accessibility of education on the Internet is making universities obsolete I don't think so you know during the pandemic it looked like that might be the end because it was like education went online if that works then who needs a university with you know all the physical plants and all that kind of thing but it didn't work that well it didn't work for K it work worked really bad for K through 12 and it worked not as well for universities and I think part of the point is people like many people like being around people and they like the dynamic of kind of learning together and being together and so on not me particularly I'm I'm not I'm not shy and people avoiding but I I suppose I have a strong enough I'm strong enough willed in terms of the things I want to do that I'm just going to sit and do them I don't really need to be in an environment where it's like yeah you should do this class or you should you know all collectively do this thing doesn't for me personally that doesn't make much difference in fact it actually it's a negative effect for me because I'm kind of strong willed and I want to do my thing I don't want to do the thing that was part of the the sort of the collective thing to do but I would say that the vast majority of people particularly at the stage where they're just sort of college or something like that they want to be at at a university physically there having the kind of uh full experience I mean I have to say particularly in the US I I sort of roll my eyes slightly at the almost Resort nature of uh uh you know kind of um the the the full service uh kind of um luxury resort character I don't know how luxury sometimes the dorms are not that luxury even at very fancy universities but um uh in um you know the the fact that there's this kind of full experience of you know you have the swimming pool and the Squash Courts and the concerts and the this and the that it's kind of a an Allin experience it's not true in all countries in some countries it's people don't even live at the University and they just you know it's just classes and nothing but classes so to speak so I I I think the um it's sort of interesting I think that uh in the kind of work sector there's been much more success in work from home and distributed teams and things like this than there is in the the online education sector I mean online education certainly has its place and for some people and situations it's super valuable and maybe much better than the in-person thing but it seems like people still want the in-person thing now the question is well what should universities be teaching and are they modernizing that and you know one thing that that's happened particularly in US universities is a certain narrowing perhaps of uh uh you know some for example the sort of narrowing of ideologies of universities has been an unfortunate thing I think it's not universally true there are certainly universities that have different but it seems like a lot of the elite universities have become very narrowed in that respect and that's a shame and that will be a uh you know going forward that will be a big uh you know I see that a bunch with people who work at our company and things like this and people who are out and about in the world having ideas but not part of Academia they say I don't like Academia Academia has a sort of ideological structure that I don't like I like the ideas but I don't like the ideological structure and I don't think those two things come hand in hand I think they're just a feature of the actual evolution of universities and that's a that's sort of a negative thing as far as I'm concerned I think the the broader the ideological base and the cultural base and so on of universities the more they're able to kind of carry uh sort of uh civilization forward so to speak you know as soon as they get narrowed into we're just doing this very specific thing I mean the the lesson of History particularly in things like oh the churches and things like this is that you know as you as you narrow it down and it becomes some some subset of what's needed and you kind of say it's our way or or you know it's kind of like we just have the one particular direction it it doesn't end up being the thing that will will sort of carry forward civilization I think but um uh you know I I I feel like in terms of can you learn without a university the answer is absolutely yes but that was that was always true when I was a kid you know I didn't nobody sort of told me this but you know like when I'm 11 12 years old I realized you can learn physics by just reading books and you know I didn't even know that you could go to lectures about these things I just figured you'd read the book and you'd learn about it um and and in fact uh uh it it so that's always been possible you know it's it's it's a lot easier with the weby spose and and maybe it the but it's always been possible and it's been a matter of will I would say rather than motivation rather than um rather than the access to the to the to the um materials and I mean then that's where I ities and they're sort of collective we're all in it together and we're going to learn math or whatever it is or we're going to learn you know medieval literature or something it's kind of like there's a there's a certain a certain satisfaction or something in being part of some some group of people that's all excited about that particular kind of thing so let's see uh um okay maybe a couple more things here and then I should wrap up for today just is commenting they work in logistics and we're far away from using AI we actually took a step backwards just now with an internal software solution that does not work for specific customers at all I do have ideas but I have to open tickets that are never resolved I know for sure my ideas can be built into the system I'm about to give up a write a better system how would you approach a huge business about this you know Innovation is very very difficult for big companies and mostly they don't do it mostly they get their Innovation by by gobbling up small companies that did The Innovation sometimes big companies will have an innovation group that is responsible for the rhythm of work that is innovative which is very different from the rhythm of work that is mainstream production and and to be clear if you want to make money mainstream production is almost certainly the way to go Innovation is not not you know in the long term Innovation is makes can make money if it's handled correctly but in the short term Innovation just costs money typically and you know it is absolutely correct in some sense for sort of business folk who are running a company for the sake of maximizing the amount of money it makes to just figure out what makes money and do more of it um that's which is very different from innovating and doing something better and and you know there may be cases where there are very paradoxical things that happen like for example you know software can be bad and that's actually good for the company that makes it because then people spend more on services having people you know it's just like we'll make this piece of Open Source software and it's bad and you always have to buy services and that's how the company makes its living so it's kind of paradoxical you would think oh let's make the best product we can I've always tried to set up our company so that we are aligned with trying to make the best product we can for the customers we have so to speak rather than trying to do something that's kind of weird and uh uh and you know sort of an indirect way to to make make the company be be commercially viable but I think um kind of in the I've got a better way to do it there's a big company that's doing it a particular way and you've got a better way to do it it's really challenging I mean well companies sometimes if somebody comes up and and says uh uh I've got this great way of doing it I can show up you know show how this works and so on sometimes with really good management people will say fantastic show us that and and you know it's a big win a lot of times that Innovation will be blocked by the incumbents of like we don't want Innovation we don't want you coming over and take coming in taking over our jobs we've been doing this job for 25 years and we're very happy doing it let's just keep doing it and I suppose the worst case which you see with some frequency is the innovator just gets fired because it's like we don't want we don't want to hear about that Innovation we just want I mean it's a lot better than the you know burnt at the stake back in the in in long ago in history so we can be grateful for that but it's still you know this we don't want Innovation just get rid of that we don't want to hear about that I mean that's certainly something you see and I'm afraid you know if I'm to be to be a little bit cynical but but um uh you know that is what you will find in in in certain cases bringing Innovation to a to an existing running large business and and as I say I don't think it's irrational because if your goal is to make money then you know it doing more of the same is probably the right thing now in terms of you know entering a market where you have something oh like I was just talking to a company that I'm under advisor to yesterday that has a solution that costs 10 times less than the current incumbent solution and it's like why aren't people using this and I had to say I think that the very fact that you're charging 10 times less is a problem because people look at it and say how can these be doing the same thing one costs 10 times less than the other there must be a trick here there must be something that we're missing you know really you should just increase your prices so maybe it's half the price or something uh but but um and you know pocket the the uh you know the difference so to speak because as soon as it's 10 times less there a signal it's very hard to signal that this is really doing the same thing weird and paradoxical but I think I think correct and I think when you say well we've got you know the the thing is in a in an industry that is a you're mentioning Logistics as an industry you know I've seen cases I've seen seen startups that have been successful at things with Logistics where there various kinds of optimization like weather related optimization or or even routing optimization and so on where it's like you know you don't get the biggest companies as your first customers you you kind of create something and then you get typically the companies which are sort of on the on the edges of logistics like it's not really a logistics company it's you know routing school buses or something and they're not they're just think oh my gosh we should start to use something more sophisticated than just a person with a clipboard kind of thing and and that's a place where a young company uh with an Innovative solution can enter by the time you're saying you know package delivery or something like this where you have giant giant companies doing it they're not going to listen to some kind of upstart small company typically and they probably shouldn't from a commercial point of view even though in the end that might be the the the the thing to do the best possibility is that at some point the small company gets kind of notable enough that it gets eaten by the big company unfortunately usually when small companies are eaten by big companies the small company is ground up by the teeth of the big company and little is left unfortunately it's a it's a bad thing for both sides there are cases where you know the small company that gets eaten by the big company becomes the future of the big company but those cases are the exception rather than the rule the rule is that somebody sees something where they say oh that's going to be valuable they buy it and it's really hard to ingest the value into the big company and there's lots of lots of mechanics that don't really work very well um okay one last thing here Al is commenting or maybe it's AI is commenting how do we encourage more people to study the difficult mathematics behind machine learning and robot robot process automation especially when people are younger and more neuroplastic so that many of the most groundbreaking developments are accessible to a greater contingent of global Society well I'd like to think that the kinds of things I'm trying to do with computational thinking might help in that respect I think one of the challenges is what do you really want to teach if you're teaching like the mechanics of mathematics there's only a small subset of people that are going to be into that I think what you have to do is leverage what people are intrinsically interested in and kind of amplify from that and teach kind of the the modern skills modern computationally oriented skills based on what people sort of amplifying what people are intrinsically interested in I think that's a that's a good potential approach plus also you know there's sort of a societal issue of oh I don't know do you okay there's kind of what's cool to do at a given time and you know there was a time when oh I don't know there were there was a time when being a techie was definitely not cool uh you know there was a time when you know being uh being a politician was cool being a techie was was uh you know just a a weird thing which people did in a corner somewhere there was a you know there's a time when being a a professional manager was the coolest thing you could be and then there was a a time when when being an entrepreneur was the coolest thing you could be there was a time when you know being an entrepreneur was seen as this Scrappy thing that people didn't really talk about doing and uh you know it's it's over the course of time Things become cool and not so cool like being a physicist actually has been surprisingly cool I don't know what it was like before the Manhattan Project and things like that but being being a physicist has been cool at least since probably the 1940s or 1950s um and uh this somewhat cool being being an academic being a professor that was at some at one time that was like as cool as could be and then it became less cool so you know I think one of the issues is what from a societal point of view uh the kinds of things that people uh you know do you want to be a computational thinker when you're grown up do you want to be an entrepreneur do you want to be a this do you want to be a that as is kind of a a if Society starts valuing those things you know one thing that I think is sort of interesting is there are uh there are things where sort of let's take I don't know actors for example you know people know the names of famous actors they're they're notable people and it didn't have to be that way it could have been the case that the only thing you ever know about is like the producer of the movie and the actors are just sort of uh you know they're plugged in they're plugged out they're just operatives somewhere but they became a thing where you know about the individual people well there are other areas I don't know like like computer system design I most people have not heard of the individuals who design most of the computer systems that they use and you know the the uh uh it's not a a thing where there's a lot of glorification of that activity even though things that that people who design computer systems create end up getting used by zillions of people and their their creativity is is is directly impinges on a lot of people's lives but yet it doesn't happen to be a thing that Society has identified as being a thing you you you know you you kind of glorify so to speak so you know I think that there's a certain amount of uh I'm not sure you know it's one of these be careful what you wish for if you're in the business of actually doing those things which I'm saying should be glorified because I'm not sure that that necessarily is a is a good outcome so to speak for the for the people doing it but for society as a whole the idea that there are people there are things there you know there real achievements there is um is something uh that I think is is um uh would help in terms of having kids you know kids would say you know what do you want to be when you're grown up I want to be a rock star I want to be a um you know I want to be a something where they've they've heard of it it's like I want to be a a computational language designer nobody's heard of that um you know nobody I want to be a a um people have sort of heard of I want to be a programmer but mostly they've heard of that because they say I want to go into the tech industry because I can make a bunch of money in the tech industry the actual what do you do every day as a programmer I'm not sure people know and sometimes when they find out they're horrified they say oh my gosh I don't want to do this um but uh uh you know so I think that that would be one comment there all right we should wrap up for now thank you for a lot of interesting questions and comments as usual um and uh I look forward to seeing you another time bye for now

Channel: Wolfram

Views: 1,186

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Id: XE4UuIsF0OE

Length: 84min 13sec (5053 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024