Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram
Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.
Current Events
(11)January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
Has data collection become too excessive?
I think it is inevitable. It’s just going to happen. Let me give you a personal example; you can find tons of data about me but until recently you could not find the names of my kids. I know enough about data and decided not to publish their names on the web. Read more
January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
Can we really trust companies with our personal data?
It’s nice if people trust companies that collect data and hope they don’t do something terrible with it. Trust has been good for the Wolfram Alpha project. People do trust us, probably because we are not as commercial as other companies. And we are not going to use the personal data that we have. Read more
January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
What do you think about the idea that data should get an expiration date?
That question has been overlooked for a long time. I know that some people and companies are finally working on it. For years, I have been wondering whether you could build a “digital time safe” to safely store data that only becomes accessible 20 years later. Can you put information away? Read more
April 26, 2013
From: Interview by Patrick Tucker, IEET
How do you see personal analytics trends evolving in the context of present-day battles over privacy and over access to information technology? And what has to happen in order for the self-quantification trend to become a truly sustainable movement?
Right now, for most people, it’s dealing with this data. There’s all kinds of plumbing that has to be done. Like, how do you actually get your cell phone call record out? It’s going to stay a complex, multi-part, multi-vendor environment, where people have different phones, email systems, computers, and little devices like pedometers. Read more
May 14, 2018
From: Interview by Lara Crigger, ETF.com
What sort of applications could smart contracts have in the financial markets?
In the world of finance, it’s already happened a bit. For the last, I don’t know, 30 years, options [contracts] have been expressed in essentially an algorithmic way.
But mortgages haven’t. So, if you take this multipage mortgage document and express it in computable form, then you can take 10,000 and do systematic analysis on them. Read more
May 14, 2018
From: Interview by Lara Crigger, ETF.com
What sort of limitations do smart contracts introduce that don’t exist in the status quo right now?
You lose wiggle room. Instead, it’s basically, “Well, there was this piece of code we set up, and it ran, and these are the consequences”. In a sense, it’s more like dealing with the natural world. You can ask, “Why did the tornado turn left?” Well, ultimately it’s the laws of physics that determined that.
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
If not Facebook and Twitter, what entities would create the social algorithms that sort news feeds?
The thing I was most dealing with was automated ranking of content. That is one of the big issues, obviously. There is lots of content out there in the world. A lot of what is important about these platforms these days is their ability to rank what content a particular person should see and when. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
Why would people want a brand to run their news feed?
I trust my final ranking provider, which is some brand that I’ve known about for decades, to be the thing that is defining my way of thinking about the world that represents the values that I want in my news feed.
It’s nothing really new. People have always had a choice to read this newspaper or that newspaper. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
There has been a lot of concern that CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg decide what can and can’t be seen on platforms. How do you address that?
One of the mistakes that shouldn’t be made is [assuming] that somehow technology will solve the problem. There’s a technical component to it that is quite sophisticated and complicated, but it’s not something that at end of day Mark Zuckerberg or anyone is going to be able to say “We’re going to have AI figure out what the right thing to do is”. Read more
November 20, 2019
From: Interview by Garett Sloane, AdAge
Why did you propose to Congress that they hand over control of social media algorithms, giving outside companies the ability to sort posts for users in news feeds?
The reason I agreed to testify when I did was because things were being proposed that didn’t make any scientific and technological sense, and so I thought I should point that out. And then I realized, “Gosh I’m just going to come and say a bunch of negative things about things that won’t work. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
What is your reaction to the reputation of science these days, particularly at the highest levels of our government?
Science is in some ways its own worst enemy in that regard because what’s happened is that there are things that science has done a really good job of establishing. There are things where there is science that can be said about them, but it’s kind of overreached in some way or another, Read more