Future of Science and Technology Q&A (June 12, 2026)

**Stephen Wolfram** (0:01)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another live stream Q&A about Future of Science and Technology. And I see a bunch of questions here saved up.
Anya asks, could there be a point where technology becomes so personalized that two people effectively live in different realities? I think the answer to that is pretty much definitely yes. And I think there's already a version of that. I mean, social media in for the last close to 10 years has been kind of ranking stories and so on based on what it thinks people are most likely to pay attention to, click on, do whatever else with. And the results of that somewhat unfortunately has been great sort of tribal polarization of people who fundamentally believe one thing about how the world is, another set of people who fundamentally believe another thing about how the world is, because they've been fed different social media. Now, when it comes to kind of us with a cloud of agents around us, with where we're being kind of fed only the information that is, kind of, that our agents give to us, it's kind of a more extreme version of the same thing. And so I absolutely think people can end up kind of living in different realities, even when they're right, right nearby, so to speak. I mean, I think it's a complicated philosophical question.
Do we live in different realities in a sense, because we all sort of perceive the world in a somewhat different way? I mean, it's an old question.
Do people see the same red when they see something that is red? Actually, you can start addressing that question in a more scientific way when you look at AIs and LLMs and so on. Because you can ask, if you model our brains by neural nets, which is not a terrible model, doesn't capture every detail, but it seems to capture some fundamental architectural features, you can ask the question when a neural net has been trained on a bunch of images and it has some notion of red that corresponds to some pattern of activation of the neural net, is another neural net going to have the same pattern of activations based on its training? And the answer is no. Sometimes by sort of trivially, they're different, but sometimes they're different in very subtle ways. And that's the sense in which kind of the internal perception of, the color red is going to be different for different people. That's an extreme version of the issue of, do we sort of perceive the same reality? But I think that this question of, I mean, these are sort of deep civilizational cultural questions, to what extent is kind of reality aligned for different people, let's say in a particular country, in a particular tribe, in a particular community, whatever else. I think one of the things that's quite an interesting sort of general feature of what's a feature of our brains and our minds, that even though we got 100 billion neurons in our brains, all firing some faction on the firing all at the same time, that we nevertheless perceive the world according to some fixed sequence of events that happened in the world. It could be that it's like one set of neurons are firing in your brain to make you think about this, another set about that, another set about that. But the fact is, we somehow collapse all those things down, and the actual structures in the base of the brain that are specifically intended to develop consensus among all those different neurons in the brain, and get us to the point where we can say, oh yes, we're going to say this word next, then this word, then this word, rather than a jumble of words that are all being delivered by different parts of our brains. One fundamental feature of how we deal with the world, is we take all of that sensory input and crush it down into this stream of experience and stream of actions. So an interesting question is when we look at society, or some community within society, is to what extent is the same kind of thing happening? To what extent are all those humans just independently doing their own thing, and to what extent is some kind of coherent direction emerging from that?
We know that the ants and social insects and so on, each ant is doing its own thing, but nevertheless, it's very obvious that there's sort of overall coordination.
Presumably, the same thing is roughly happening in humans, although not as extremely, and we don't feel that we're being as as antified as the ants are, so to speak, in what we're led to do. I think the thing that is sort of interesting to see is to what extent there's kind of a thread of history that emerges from some human community, for example, because everybody in that community, everybody in the world, 8 billion people are all sort of doing their own thing. Yet in some sense, there are some common threads of history that emerge. People may argue, well, I think that's the wrong thread of history that you pulled out of all of those details. But nevertheless, it's important for us, our understanding, what's happening in the world, that there is sort of a somewhat consistent thread of history. We're reducing all of that detail about all the things that everybody is independently doing to that single thread. This question of whether shared reality, shared perception about things seems to be fairly important for the way that we humans are operating in society and so on. I mean, it's the same kind of thing as within our own individual brains. If we were sort of listening to every 100 billion neurons separately, we have very confusing picture. We instead sort of trim things down, compress things down so that we have the single thread where we can have the sequence of thoughts. Well, similarly, in society, if it was the case that we have to pay attention to everything everybody's doing, and it's a big complicated mess, it will be hard to kind of figure out what to do. It will be hard to kind of live one's, sort of make decisions about things. Instead, sort of there's a lot of compression that ends up with these kind of narratives about sort of the thread of history that emerges.