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Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 6: AI’s changing seasons

44 min

Guest:  Melanie Mitchell, Resident Professor, Santa Fe InstituteHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationCompetition: ARC PrizeBooks:  Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas HofstadterArtificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellComplexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie MitchellTalks:  The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellIntroduction: AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2 by Melanie MitchellConceptual Abstraction and Analogy in Natural and Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellPapers & Articles: “The metaphors of artificial intelligence,” in Science (November 14, 2024), doi: 10.1126/science.adt6140“Using counterfactual tasks to evaluate the generality of analogical reasoning in Large Language Models,” in arXiv (February 14, 2024), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08955“Comparing humans, GPT-4, and GPT-4V on abstraction and reasoning tasks, ” (Proceedings of the LLM-CP Workshop, AAAI 2024), arXiv (December 11, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.09247“The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models,” in PNAS (March 21, 2023), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215907120“The ConceptARC benchmark: evaluating understanding and generalization in the ARC domain,” in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (August 2023), arXiv (May 11, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.07141

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 5: How do we assess intelligence?

48 min

Guests:  Erica Cartmill, Professor, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University BloomingtonEllie Pavlick, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Linguistics, Brown UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationDiverse Intelligences Summer InstituteBooks:  Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellTalks:  How do we know what an animal understands by Erica CartmillThe Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellPapers & Articles: “Just kidding: the evolutionary roots of playful teasing,” in Biology Letters (September 23, 2020), doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0370“Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication,” in PNAS (November 13, 2023), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.22187991“Using the senses in animal communication,” by Erica Cartmill, in A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Chapter 20, Wiley Online Library (March 21, 2023)“Symbols and grounding in large language models,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (June 5, 2023), doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2022.0041“Emergence of abstract state representations in embodied sequence modeling,” in arXiv (November 7, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.02171“How do we know how smart AI systems are,” in Science (July 13, 2023), doi: 10.1126/science.adj59

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 4: Babies vs Machines

38 min

Guests:  Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University BloomingtonMichael Frank, Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Department of Psychology, Stanford UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationBooks:  Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellTalks:  Why "Self-Generated Learning” May Be More Radical and Consequential Than First Appears by Linda SmithChildren’s Early Language Learning: An Inspiration for Social AI, by Michael Frank at Stanford HAIThe Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellPapers & Articles: “Curriculum Learning With Infant Egocentric Videos,” in NeurIPS 2023 (September 21)“The Infant’s Visual World The Everyday Statistics for Visual Learning,” by Swapnaa Jayaraman and Linda B. Smith, in The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development: Brain, Behavior, and Cultural Context, Chapter 20, Cambridge University Press (September 26, 2020)“Can lessons from infants solve the problems of data-greedy AI?” in Nature (March 18, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00713-5“Episodes of experience and generative intelligence,” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (October 19, 2022), doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.012“Baby steps in evaluating the capacities of large language models,” in Nature Reviews Psychology (June 27, 2023), doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00211-x“Auxiliary task demands mask the capabilities of smaller language models,” in COLM (July 10, 2024)“Learning the Meanings of Function Words From Grounded Language Using a Visual Question Answering Model,” in Cognitive Science (First published: 14 May 2024), doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13448

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All episodes

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 6: AI’s changing seasons

44 min

Guest:  Melanie Mitchell, Resident Professor, Santa Fe InstituteHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationCompetition: ARC PrizeBooks:  Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas HofstadterArtificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellComplexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie MitchellTalks:  The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellIntroduction: AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2 by Melanie MitchellConceptual Abstraction and Analogy in Natural and Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellPapers & Articles: “The metaphors of artificial intelligence,” in Science (November 14, 2024), doi: 10.1126/science.adt6140“Using counterfactual tasks to evaluate the generality of analogical reasoning in Large Language Models,” in arXiv (February 14, 2024), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08955“Comparing humans, GPT-4, and GPT-4V on abstraction and reasoning tasks, ” (Proceedings of the LLM-CP Workshop, AAAI 2024), arXiv (December 11, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.09247“The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models,” in PNAS (March 21, 2023), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215907120“The ConceptARC benchmark: evaluating understanding and generalization in the ARC domain,” in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (August 2023), arXiv (May 11, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.07141

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 5: How do we assess intelligence?

48 min

Guests:  Erica Cartmill, Professor, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University BloomingtonEllie Pavlick, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Linguistics, Brown UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationDiverse Intelligences Summer InstituteBooks:  Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellTalks:  How do we know what an animal understands by Erica CartmillThe Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellPapers & Articles: “Just kidding: the evolutionary roots of playful teasing,” in Biology Letters (September 23, 2020), doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0370“Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication,” in PNAS (November 13, 2023), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.22187991“Using the senses in animal communication,” by Erica Cartmill, in A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Chapter 20, Wiley Online Library (March 21, 2023)“Symbols and grounding in large language models,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (June 5, 2023), doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2022.0041“Emergence of abstract state representations in embodied sequence modeling,” in arXiv (November 7, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.02171“How do we know how smart AI systems are,” in Science (July 13, 2023), doi: 10.1126/science.adj59

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 4: Babies vs Machines

38 min

Guests:  Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University BloomingtonMichael Frank, Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Department of Psychology, Stanford UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationBooks:  Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellTalks:  Why "Self-Generated Learning” May Be More Radical and Consequential Than First Appears by Linda SmithChildren’s Early Language Learning: An Inspiration for Social AI, by Michael Frank at Stanford HAIThe Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellPapers & Articles: “Curriculum Learning With Infant Egocentric Videos,” in NeurIPS 2023 (September 21)“The Infant’s Visual World The Everyday Statistics for Visual Learning,” by Swapnaa Jayaraman and Linda B. Smith, in The Cambridge Handbook of Infant Development: Brain, Behavior, and Cultural Context, Chapter 20, Cambridge University Press (September 26, 2020)“Can lessons from infants solve the problems of data-greedy AI?” in Nature (March 18, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00713-5“Episodes of experience and generative intelligence,” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (October 19, 2022), doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.012“Baby steps in evaluating the capacities of large language models,” in Nature Reviews Psychology (June 27, 2023), doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00211-x“Auxiliary task demands mask the capabilities of smaller language models,” in COLM (July 10, 2024)“Learning the Meanings of Function Words From Grounded Language Using a Visual Question Answering Model,” in Cognitive Science (First published: 14 May 2024), doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13448

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 3: What kind of intelligence is an LLM?

45 min

Guests:  Tomer Ullman, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard UniversityMurray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics, Department of Computing, Imperial College London; Principal Research Scientist, Google DeepMindHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: EducationBooks:  Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellThe Technological Singularity by Murray ShanahanEmbodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds by Murray ShanahanSolving the Frame Problem by Murray ShanahanSearch, Inference and Dependencies in Artificial Intelligence by Murray Shanahan and Richard SouthwickTalks:  The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellArtificial intelligence: A brief introduction to AI by Murray ShanahanPapers & Articles: “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled,” in New York Times (Feb 16, 2023)“Bayesian Models of Conceptual Development: Learning as Building Models of the World,” in Annual Review of Developmental Psychology Volume 2 (Oct 26, 2020), doi.org/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-121318-084833“Comparing the Evaluation and Production of Loophole Behavior in Humans and Large Language Models,” in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (December 2023), doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.264“Role play with large language models,” in Nature (Nov 8, 2023), doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06647-8“Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Tasks,” arXiv (v5, March 14, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.08399“Talking about Large Language Models,” in Communications of the ACM (Feb 12, 2024), “Simulacra as Conscious Exotica,” in arXiv (v2, July 11, 2024), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.12422

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 2: The relationship between language and thought

37 min

Guests:  Evelina Fedorenko, Associate Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MITSteve Piantadosi, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Head of Computation and Language Lab, UC BerkeleyGary Lupyan, Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-MadisonHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine LearningLecture: Artificial IntelligenceSFI programs: Education Books:  Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellDeveloping Object Concepts in Infancy: An Associative Learning Perspective by Rakison, D.H., and G. LupyanLanguage and Mind by Noam ChomskyOn Language by Noam Chomsky Talks:  The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellThe language system in the human brain: Parallels & Differences with LLMs by Evelina Federenko  Papers & Articles: “Dissociating language and thought in large language models,” in Trends in Cognitive Science (March 19, 2024), doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.01.011“The language network as a natural kind within the broader landscape of the human brain,” in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (April 12, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/s41583-024-00802-4“Visual grounding helps learn word meanings in low-data regimes,” in arXiv (v2 revised on 25 March 2024), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.13257“No evidence of theory of mind reasoning in the human language network,” in Cerebral Cortex (December 28, 2022), doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac505“Chapter 1: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language,” by Steve T. Piantadosi (v7, November 2023), lingbuzz/007180“Uniquely human intelligence arose from expanded information capacity,” in Nature Reviews Psychology (April 2, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00283-3“Understanding the allure and pitfalls of Chomsky's acience,”...

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 1: What is Intelligence

43 min

  Guests:  Alison Gopnik, SFI External Faculty; Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley; Member of Berkeley AI Research GroupJohn Krakauer, SFI External Faculty; John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Melanie Mitchell Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Podcast logo by Nicholas Graham Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Complexity Explorer:  Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine Learning Lecture: Artificial Intelligence SFI programs: Education Books:  Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie MitchellWords, Thoughts and Theories by Alison Gopnik and Andrew N. MeltzoffThe Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. KuhlThe Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Alison GopnikThe Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison GopnikTalks:  The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie MitchellImitation Versus Innovation: What Children Can Do That Large Langauge Models’ Can’t by Alison GopnikThe Minds of Children by Alison GopnikWhat Understanding Adds to Cambrian Intelligence: A Taxonomy by John KrakauerPapers & Articles: “Why you can’t make a computer that feels pain,” by Daniel C. Dennett“Transmission versus truth, imitation versus innovation: What children can do that Large Language and Language-and-Vision models cannot (yet),” in Perspectives on Psychological Science  (October 26, 2023), doi.org/10.1177/17456916231201401“Empowerment as Causal Learning, Causal Learning as Empowerment: A bridge between Bayesian causal hypothesis testing and reinforcement learning,” by Alison Gopnik“What c...

Trailer for The Nature of Intelligence

3 min

Right now, AI is having a moment — and it’s not the first time grand predictions about the potential of machines are being made. But, what does it really mean to say something like ChatGPT is “intelligent”? What exactly is intelligence? In this season of the Complexity podcast, The Nature of Intelligence, we'll explore this question through conversations with cognitive and neuroscientists, animal cognition researchers, and AI experts in six episodes. Together, we'll investigate the complexities of human intelligence, how it compares to that of other species, and where AI fits in. We'll dive into the relationship between language and thought, examine AI's limitations, and ask: Could machines ever truly be like us?

Physics of Life, Ep 6: Multiple worlds, containing multitudes

40 min

Guests:  Heather Graham, Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifish music; “Determination of Azimuth,” written by Heather Graham, staged at the Baltimore Rock Opera Society Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: Apply for the 2024 Complexity Global School at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia SFI programs: Education Complexity Explorer:  Origins of Life: Introduction| Chris Kempes (Link to full playlist)Enroll for the course: Origins of LifeVideos: Asteroids, Agnostic Biosignatures, & Experimental Rock Opera with Dr. Heather GrahamHeather Graham on Katherine JohnsonPapers & Articles: “Investigating the impact of x‐ray computed tomography imaging on soluble organic matter in the Murchison meteorite: Implications for Bennu sample analyses” in Meteoritics & Planetary Science (December 2023), doi.org/10.1111/maps.14111“The Vacant Niche Revisited: Using Negative Results to Refine the Limits of Habitability,” in bioRxiv (Nov 8, 2023), doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.06.565904“Observations of Elemental Composition of Enceladus Consistent with Generalized Models of Theoretical Ecosystems,” in bioRxiv (Oct 29, 2023), doi.org/10.1101/2023.10.29.564608“Planetary Subsurface Science and Exploration: An Integrated Consortium to Understand Subsurface Sources of Energy and the Unique Energetics of Subsurface Life,” in Mars Extant Life: What’s Next? (Nov 2019), hou.usra.edu/meetings/lifeonmars2019/pdf/5047.pdf“Detecting life on Earth and the limits of analogy,” in Planetary Astrobiology (June 16, 2020)“Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry,” in chemRxiv (Nov 16, 202), chemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/resource/item/60c751e59abda27c1af8dce4/original/identifying-molecules-as-biosignatures-with-assembly-theory-and-mass-spectrom...

Physics of Life, Ep 5: How human history shapes scientific inquiry

33 min

Guests:  David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe InstituteSean Carroll, External Professor and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Additional sound credits: Digifishmusic, Trundlefly, Greenvwbeetle, Miksmusic, Brewlabboffin Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: SFI programs: Education Complexity Explorer:  Origins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 1 | David KrakauerOrigins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 2 | David KrakauerOrigins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 3 | David KrakauerOrigins of Life: The Multiple Origins of Life - Part 4 | David KrakauerComplexity Explorer Lecture: David Krakauer • What is Complexity?Books:  Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology by Gregory RadickQuanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean CarrollWorlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984-2019 Edited by David KrakauerTalks:  The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics Sean CarrollPapers & Articles: “The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life,” in Journal of Molecular Evolution (July 12, 2021), doi.org/10.1007/s00239-021-10016-2

Physics of Life, Ep 4: The physics of collectives

33 min

Guests:  Melanie Moses, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Biology at University of New MexicoHyejin Youn, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Professor at Institute of Northwestern UniversityHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: SFI programs: Education Complexity Explorer:  Fractals and Scaling  Fractals and Scaling: Toward a Theory of Urban Scaling Introduction to Complexity: Ant Foraging and Task Allocation Books: Scale by Geoffrey WestComplexity: a Guided Tour by Melanie MitchellTalks:  Toward a Scientific Theory of Cities by Hyejin YounPapers & Articles: “Synergy in ant foraging strategies: memory and communication alone and in combination,” in GECCO’13: Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (July 6, 2013), doi.org/10.1145/2463372.2463389“In vivo, in silico, in machina: Ants and Robots balance memory and communication to collectively exploit information,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Complex Systems 2012“What makes individual I’s a Collective We; coordination mechanisms & costs” in arXiv (November 20, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.02113“How does innovation push its boundaries?” in 43 Visions for Complexity, Exploring Complexity: Volume 3 (January 2017), doi.org/10.1142/9789813206854_0043

Physics of Life, Ep 3: Why is life so diverse?

29 min

Guests:  Brian Enquist, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of ArizonaPablo Marquet, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Professor at Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Pontificia Universidad Católica de ChileHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Other music: Craig Smith, Justkiddink, MaestroALF, ComputerHotline, James Ro Davidson, SoundEnsemble, Trundlefly, Geoff Bremner, Newagesgroup, Oddmonoliths, Thepla Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky More info: SFI programs: Education Complexity Explorer: Origins of Life: Astrobiology & General Theories for Life - Scaling with Pablo Marquet Books:  Scale by Geoffrey WestScaling Biodiversity (Ecological Reviews) edited by David Storch, Pablo Marquet , James Brown How Landscapes Change: Human Disturbance and Ecosystem Fragmentation in the Americas (Ecological Studies Book 162) edited by Gay A. Bradshaw and Pablo A. Marquet Talks:  Better Forecasting our Ecological Future: Taming Big Data with Big Theory, Brian EnquistPapers & Articles: “More than 17,000 tree species are at risk from rapid global change,” in Nature Communications (January 2, 2024), doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44321-9“Metastatic cells exploit their stoichiometric niche in the network of cancer ecosystems,” in Science Advances (December 13, 2023), doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adi79“Environmental heterogeneity as a driver of terrestrial biodiversity on a global scale” in PPG: Earth and Environment (August 11, 2023), doi.org/10.1177/03091333231189045“The number of tree species on Earth,” PNAS (Jan 31, 2022), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115329119“Globally important plant functional traits for coping with climate change,” in Frontiers of Biogeography (October 2, 2021), doi.org/10.21425/F5FBG53774“Scaling from Traits to Ecosystems: Developing a General Trait Driver Theory via Integrating Trait-B...

Physics of Life, Ep 2: How do we identify life?

33 min

Guests:  Ricard Solé, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu FabraSara Walker, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex SystemsHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano Other music: Matucha, Kijjaz, Klankbeeld, Aesterial-Arts, Dijifishmusic, Greenvwbeetle, Odilon Marcenaro, Jobro, Benboncan, Bone666138, Aiwha, Josh Berry, Rubenvvuuren, and Miksmusic Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky SFI programs:  Complexity Explorer: Origins of LifeEducationBooks & Films:  Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, based on book by Mary ShelleyThe Computer and the Brain, by John von NeumannSigns of life: How complexity pervades biology by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. GoodwinTalks:  Liquid and Solid Brains: Mapping the Cognition Space by Ricard SoléEvolving Brains: Solid, Liquid and Synthetic by Ricard SoléA Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information by Sara WalkerPapers & Articles: “Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution” in Nature (October 4, 2023) doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06600-9“Time is an object” in Aeon, May 19, 2023“The Algorithmic Origins of Life” in Journal of the Royal Society Interface (February 6, 2013) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869“Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken” in Entropy (May 9, 2022), doi.org/10.3390/e24050665“Unicellular–multicellular evolutionary branching driven by resource limitations” (June 2, 2022) doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0018

Physics of Life, Ep 1: What can physics tell us about ourselves?

34 min

Guests:  Vijay Balasubramanian, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor of Physics at the University of PennsylvaniaGeoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe InstituteHosts: Abha Eli Phoboo & Chris Kempes Producer: Katherine Moncure Podcast theme music: Mitch Mignano Other Music: Blue Dot Sessions, Pink House Music, Eardeer, and Craig Smith. Follow us on: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn  • Bluesky SFI programs:  Complexity Global School Complexity Explorer: Fractals & ScalingEducationBooks & Stories:  Tell Me Why by Arkady LeokumScale by Geoffrey West“Funes, the Memorious” by Jorge Luis BorgesTalks:  How the Brain Makes You: Collective Intelligence and Computation by Neural Circuits by Vijay BalasubramanianThe Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey WestEnergy, Scaling & The Future of Life on Earth by Geoffrey WestComplex Time Working Group: “What is Sleep?” with Geoffrey West, Van Savage, Alex HermanPapers:  “Brain Power” in PNAS (August 2, 2021) doi.org/10.1073/pnas.210702211“The Physical Effects of Learning” preprint published in biorxiv“Unraveling why we sleep: Quantitative analysis reveals abrupt transition from neural reorganization to repair in early development” in Science Advances (September 18, 2020) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba0398“The Scales That Limit: The Physical Boundaries of Evolution” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (August 7, 2019) doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00242

Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

1 hr 39 min

Episode Title and Show Notes: 106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought you with us for far ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions. We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify and consider making a donation or finding other ways to engage with SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years. Follow SFI on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn 📚Reading & Videos: The Lost World by Michael Crichton Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton The Evolution of Syntactic Communication by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations by SFI Complexity Economics by SFI Press Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Ele...

Mason Porter on Community Detection and Data Topology

1 hr 22 min

One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order…what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with SFI External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode.  Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find. Thank you for listening. Podcast theme music...

Andrea Wulf on Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self

1 hr 6 min

For centuries, Medieval life in Europe meant a world determined and prescribed by church and royalty. The social sphere was very much a pyramid, and everybody had to answer to and fit within the schemes of those on top. And then, on wings of reason, Modern selves emerged to scrutinize these systems and at great cost swap them for others that more evenly distribute power and authority. Cosmic forces preordained one’s role within a transcendental order…but then, across quick decades of upheaval, philosophy and politics started celebrating self-determination and free will. Art and science blossomed as they wove together. Nothing was ever the same. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we engage with returning guest, New York Times best-selling author of seven books and SFI Miller Scholar Andrea Wulf, about her latest lovingly-detailed long work, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self. In this episode we explore the conditions for an 18th century revolution in philosophy, science, literature, and lifestyle springing from Jena, Germany. Over just a few years, an extraordinary confluence of history-making figures such as Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Novalis helped rewrite what was possible for human thought and action. Admist a landscape of political revolt, this braid of brilliant friends and enemies and lovers altered what it means to be a self and how the modern self relates to everything it isn’t, inspiring later British and American Romantic movements. Arguing for art and the imagination in the work of science and infusing art with reason, Jena’s rebels of the mind lived bold, iconoclastic lives that seem 200 years ahead in retrospect. We stand to learn...

Carlos Gershenson on Balance, Criticality, Antifragility, and The Philosophy of Complex Systems

1 hr 6 min

How do we get a handle on complex systems thinking? What are the implications of this science for philosophy, and where does philosophical tradition foreshadow findings from the scientific frontier? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this episode we speak with Carlos Gershenson (UNAM website, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, Twitter), SFI Sabbatical Visitor and professor of computer science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he leads the Self-organizing Systems Lab, among many other titles you can find in our show notes. For the next hour, we’ll discuss his decades of research and writing on a vast array of core complex systems concepts and their intersections with both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions — a first for this podcast. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. For HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, please help us improve our scicomm by completing a survey linked in the show notes. Or just a copy of the recently resurfaced SFI Press Archival Volume Complexity, Entropy, and The Physics of Information. There’s still time to apply for the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students – apps close March 15th. Or come work for us! We are on the lookout for a new Digital Media Specialist, an Applied Complexity Fellow in Sustainability, a Research Assistant in Emergent Political Economies, and a Payroll, Accounts Payable & Receivable Specialist. You can also join our Facebook discussion group to me...

Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick

1 hr 0 min

And now for something completely different!  Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed  the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental questions? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of th...

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06)

1 hr 12 min

There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn’t even always have a metric. And even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can occlude the other factors that determine health, or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which Homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively: What should we count to wisely operate a nation-state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of   political economy? And how can we escape the seductive but false clarity of systems that rain information but do not enhance collective wisdom? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino at UC Merced and University of Utah Professor of Philosophy  C. Thi Nguyen. In this episode we talk about   value capture and legibility, viewpoint diversity, issues that plague big governments, and expert identification problems…and map the challenges “ahead of us” as SFI continues as the hub of a five-year international research collaboration into emergent political economies. (Find links to all previous episodes i...

Dani Bassett & Perry Zurn on The Neuroscience & Philosophy of Curious Minds

1 hr 20 min

This is a podcast by and for the curious — and yet, in over three years, we have pointed curiosity at nearly every topic but itself. What is it, anyway? Are there worse and better frames for understanding how desire and wonder, exploration and discovery play out in both the brain and in society? How is scientific research like an amble through the woods? What juicy insights bubble up where neuroscientists, historians, philosophers, and mathematicians meet to answer questions like these? And how long of a path must we traverse to get there? In this episode, we talk with SFI External Professor Dani Bassett, physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and their birth twin Perry Zurn, philosopher at American University in Washington, DC. You might consider each one of two lenses in a stereoscopic inquiry. Their new MIT Press book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection bridges quantity and quality to recast curiosity as a phenomenon of networks — as a kind of “edgework” (generative, drawing new associations) instead of “acquistion” (of individuals collecting facts). The brain, after all, is made of networked neurons, and society’s a kind of super-brain of networked people, so why not think in terms of links?  Their research offers a taxonomy of kinds of curiosity — three different ways that people move through knowledge networks. Traveling across a web of related ideas, rupturing and mending, weaving, percolating, synthesizing, we embody and perform the objects of their academic study. We hope you find this lively and self-referential conversation offers you a helpful map as you draw your distinct connectome through the world of what is and what could be known... Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage...

Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

1 hr 8 min

Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpose from the study of human cognition as a developmental, stage-      wise process to the refinement and application of machine learning technologies? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we talk to SFI External Professor Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, author of numerous books on psych, cognitive science, childhood development. She writes a column at The Wall Street Journal, alternating with Robert Sapolsky. Slate said that Gopnik is “where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.” In our conversation we discuss the tension between exploration and exploitation, the curious evolutionary origins of human cognition, the value of old age, and she provides a sober counterpoint about life in the age of large language machine learning models. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join...

Ricard Solé on Liquid and Solid Brains and Terraforming The Biosphere

1 hr 13 min

What does it mean to think? What are the traits of thinking systems that we could use to identify them? Different environmental variables call for different strategies in individual and collective cognition — what defines the threshold at which so-called “solid” brains transition into “liquids”? And how might we apply these and related lessons from ecology and evolution to help steward a diverse and thriving future with technology, and keep the biosphere afloat? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Ricard Solé of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Website, Twitter, Google Scholar) about liquid and solid brains, the scaling of cognition, criticality, contagions, and terraforming our own planet with synthetic bio. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including our upcoming program for Undergraduate Complexity Research, our new SFI Press book Ex Machina by John H. Miller, and an open postdoctoral fellowship in Belief Dynamics — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more.  Space is limited! Apps close February 1st. Learn more on our website. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us o...

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)

1 hr 17 min

In his foundational 1972 paper “More Is Different,” physicist Phil Anderson made the case that reducing the objects of scientific study to their smallest components does not allow researchers to predict the behaviors of those systems upon reconstruction. Another way of putting this is that different disciplines reveal different truths at different scales. Contrary to long-held convictions that there would one day be one great unifying theory to explain it all, fundamental research in this century looks more like a bouquet of complementary approaches. This pluralistic thinking hearkens back to the work of 19th century psychologist William James and looks forward into the growing popularity of evidence-based approaches that cultivate diversity in team-building, governance, and ecological systems. Context-dependent theory and practice calls for choirs of voices…so how do we encourage this? New systems must emerge to handle the complexity of digital society…what might they look like? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show we dip back into our sub-series on SFI’s Emergent Political Economies research theme with a trialogue featuring Microsoft Research Lead Glen Weyl (founder of RadicalXChange and founder-chair of The Plurality Institute), and SFI Resident Professor Cristopher Moore (author of over 150 papers at the intersection of physics and computer science). In our conversation we discuss the case for a radically pluralistic approach, explore the links between plurality and quantum mechanics, and outline potential technological solutions to the “sense-making” problems of the 21st century. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simp...

John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness

49 min

What makes us human?  Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solving, and tool-use in other organisms. But there remains a clear sense that humans stand apart — evidenced by our unique capacity to overrun the planet and remake it in our image. What is unique about the human mind, and how might we engage this question rigorously through the lens of neuroscience? How are our gifts of simulation and imagination different from those of other animals? And what, if anything, can we know of the “curiosity” of even larger systems in which we’re embedded — the social superorganisms, ecosystems, technospheres within which we exist like neurons in the brain? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we conclude a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins. In this episode, we talk about the nature of curiosity and learning, and whether the difference between the cognitive capacities and inner lifeworld of humans and other animals constitutes a matter of degree or one of kind… Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com  . If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Please also note that we are now accepting applications for an open postdoc fellowship, next summer’s undergraduate research program, and the next...

John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain

51 min

The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through one approach — be it micro, macro, anatomical, behavioral — are destined to leave out crucial insights. What more, thinking “vertically” across scales, one might miss important angles from another discipline along the “horizontal” axis. For inquiries too big to sit within one field of knowledge, maybe it is time we resurrected the salon: a mode of scientific exploration that levels hierarchies of expertise and optimizes for more complementary and high-dimensional, egalitarian, communal discourse. As with the Jainist philosophic principle anekantavada — how many blind people does it take to grok an elephant? — neuroscience is perhaps best practiced as innately and intensely multiperspectival… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week is part one of a two-part conversation with SFI External Professor John Krakauer, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for the Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins . In this episode, we talk about the history of different ways of studying the brain — in animals and humans — and how subjects as complex as brains invite a different way of seeing, one that synthesizes many different ways of seeing… Thanks for your patience with the recent delays in publication — with InterPlanetary Festival and our Annual Symposium behind us, Complexity will now return to regular biweekly scheduling. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com, and stay tuned for part two — in which we talk about...

David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication

1 hr 6 min

Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and matter is one of the deepest known to science. There appear to be limits to the rate at which communication between two systems can happen…but the search for a fundamental relationship between speed, error, and energy (among other things) promises insights far deeper than merely whether we can keep making faster internet devices. Strap in (and consider slowing down) for a broad and deep discussion on the bounds within which our entire universe must play… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with SFI Professor David Wolpert and MIT Physics PhD student Farita Tasnim, who have worked together over the last year on pioneering research into the nonlinear dynamics of communication channels. In this episode, we explore the history and ongoing evolution of information theory and coding theory, what the field of stochastic thermodynamics has to do with limits to human knowledge, and the role of noise in collective intelligence. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us, including a handful of open postdoctoral fellowships — at santafe.edu/engage. Lastly, this weekend — October 22nd & 23rd — is the return of our InterPlanetary Festival! Join our YouTube livestream for two full days of panel discussions, keynotes, and bleeding edge multimedia...

Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics

1 hr 9 min

What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becomes. What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Maybe life did not begin at all, but rather coalesced piecemeal, a set of properties contingent and convergent, plural, more than once? Maybe the origin of life is happening right now, just over the horizon, forming something new anew. Let’s get into the weeds and see if we can find a continuity between biology and physics. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we speak with Kate Adamala, synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, about her research to produce synthetic minimal cells that are not technically alive but can perform myriad biological processes. Along the way the distant past and future meet. Can we build life? Or can we grow machines? Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Referenced in this episode: Nonenzymatic Template-Directed RNA Synthesis Inside Model Protocells Engineering genetic circuit interactions within and between synthe...

Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society

57 min

One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly analogous are the patterns governing a symphony and those that describe a social transformation? Math and music are old friends, but new statistical and computational techniques afford the possibility of going even deeper. What fundamental insights — and what sounds — emerge by bringing physicists, composers, social scientists, data artists, and biologists together? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we sit with two of SFI’s External Professors — Miguel Fuentes at the Argentine Society for Philosophical Analysis and the Institute of Complex Systems of Valparaiso, and Marco Buongiorno Nardelli at the University of North Texas — for a discussion that roams from their working group on the complexity of music, to fundamental questions about the nature of emergence, to how we might bring all of these ideas together to think about  social transformation as a kind of music in its own right. A show that spend so much time exploring sense and nonsense would hardly be complete without technical errors, so please accept our apologies for losing some of Miguel’s backstory to a recording glitch. For this reason, be extra sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Appl...

Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)

1 hr 11 min

As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so much it undermines the game itself. When economic power overtakes the processes of democratic governance, growth stagnates, and the rift between the rich and poor becomes abyssal. Desperate times and desperate measures jeopardize the fabric of society. How might nonpartisan approaches to this wicked problem help us walk the system back into a healthy balance? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity we speak with Steven Teles, political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and SFI External Professor Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University about how self-serving economic actors intervene in regulation to stifle innovation, increase inequality, and contribute to the conditions in which violence can flourish. Referencing Teles’ aisle-crossing book The Captured Economy with co-author Brink Lindsey, we link the problem of regulatory capture in its myriad forms to Sethi’s work on race, inequality, and crime, which we discussed in Episode 7 (Rajiv Sethi on Crime, Stereotypes, and The Pursuit of Justice). At the interface between the left and right, public and private, our guests shed light on the forces that divide — and may help reunite — the USA and other modern nations. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and...

Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

1 hr 22 min

Chances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of data. A common sentiment among the smartphone-enabled human population is that we not only don’t own our data, but our data owns us — or, at least, the pressure of responsibility to keep providing data to the Internet and its devices (and the wider project of human knowledge construction) implicates us in the evolution of a vast, mysterious, largely ineffable self-organizing system that has grabbed the reins of our economies and cultures. This is, in some sense, hardly new: since humankind first started writing down our memories to pass them down through time, we have participated in the “dataome” — a structure and a process that transcends, and transforms, our individuality. Fast-forward to the modern era, when the rapidly-evolving aggregation of all human knowledge tips the scales in favor of the dataome’s emergent agency and its demands on us… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, about his book, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, and LIfe’s Unending Algorithm. In this episode, we talk about the interplay of information, energy, and matter; the nature of the dataome and its relationship to humans and our artifacts; the past and future evolution of the biosphere and technosphere; the role of lies in the emergent informational metabolisms of the Internet; and what this psychoactive frame suggests about the search for hypothetical intelligences we may yet find in outer space. Be sure to check out o...

Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace

52 min

Human beings are distinctly weird. We live for a very long time after we stop reproducing, move completely differently than all of our closest relatives, lack the power of chimpanzees and other primates but completely outdo most other terrestrial mammals in a contest of endurance. If we think about bodies as hypotheses about the stable features of their ancestral environments, what do the features of our unusual physiology say about what humans ARE, where we come from, the details of our origin story as a profoundly successful species? And what can we learn by telescoping that story forward to explain some of the most persistent puzzles and paradoxes about our health, the way we age, our need for physical exercise, and our nearly ubiquitous aversion to habits that are good for us? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week, we sprint into the paleoanthropology, biomechanics, and physiology of exercise with Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, author of several books including Exercised, The Story of the Human Body, and The Evolution of the Human Head. In our rapid-fire discussion we explore how millions of years as hunter-gatherers equipped hominids with a unique package of adaptations for endurance running, why exercise is so good for us but so generally undesirable, and how physical activity in old age helped shape us into the strongly intergenerational social apes we are today. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. Note that applications are now open for our 2023 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! Tell a friend. And if you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Appl...

Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines

1 hr 14 min

Ask any martial artist: It’s not just where a person strikes you but your stance that matters. The amplitude and angle of a blow is one thing but how you can absorb and/or deflect it makes the difference. The same is true in any evolutionary system. Most people seem to know “the butterfly effect” where tiny changes lead to large results, but the inverse also works: complex organisms buffer their development against adverse mutations so that tiny changes cannot redirect the growth of limbs and other organs. It takes a lot to shake the pattern of five fingers on a hand, or five toes on a paw. This is robustness: how much change can something soak up before it transforms? The question leads us into a secret garden of cryptic variation: mutations waiting for their moment, pieces sitting in place that might suddenly and radically metamorphose in changing circumstances. It’s why evolution stutters, halts and leaps, and maybe it can help us think about society and mind in ways that deepen comprehension of the tangled and surprising forces playing out at all scales, in society and in ecology. For quests as deep as these, we need to wear new lenses and train inquiries stereoscopically. How can and do the sciences and the humanities inform each other as we keep evolving — not just biologically, but culturally? Can we triangulate the truth by holding theories side by side and looking through them all together? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week, we speak with Aviv Bergman (Google Scholar), External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the new Albert Einstein Institute for Advanced Study in the Life Sciences. Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references...

Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence

1 hr 22 min

What is life, and where does it come from? These are two of the deepest, most vexing, and persistent questions in science, and their enduring mystery and allure is complicated by the fact that scientists approach them from a myriad of different angles, hard to reconcile. Whatever else one might identify as universal features of all living systems, most scholars would agree life is a physical phenomenon unfolding in time. And yet current physics is notorious for its inadequacy with respect to time. Life appears to hinge on information transfer — but, again, what do we mean by “information,” and what it is relationship to energy and matter? If humankind can’t settle fundamental issues with these theoretical investigations, we might be missing other kinds of life (and mind) — not just in outer space, but here on Earth, right beneath our noses. But new models that suggest a vastly wider definition of life offer hope that we might — soon! — not only learn to recognize the biospheres and technospheres of other living worlds, but notice other “aliens” at home, and even find our place amidst a living cosmos. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show, we speak with SFI External Professor Sara Walker (Twitter, Google Scholar), Deputy Director of The Beyond Center at ASU, where she acts as Associate Professor in half a dozen different programs. In this conversation, we discuss her pioneering research in the origins of life and the profound and diverse implications of Assembly Theory — a new kind of physics she’s developing with chemist Leroy Cronin and a team of SFI and NASA scholars.  Sara likes to speculate out loud in public conversation, so strap in for an unusually enthusiastic, animated, an...

Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality

1 hr 25 min

Math and music share their mystery and magic. Three notes, played together, make a chord whose properties could not be predicted from those of the separate notes. In the West, music theory and mathematics have common origins and a rich history of shaping and informing one another’s field of inquiry. And, curiously, Western composition has evolved over several hundred years in much the same way economies and agents in long-running simulations have: becoming measurably more complex; encoding more and more environmental structure. (But then, sometimes collapses happen, and everything gets simpler.) Music theorists, like the alchemists that came before them, are engaged in a centuries-long project of deciphering the invisible geometry of these relationships. What is the hidden grammar that connects The Beatles to Johann Sebastian Bach — and how similar is it to the hidden order disclosed by complex systems science? In other words, what makes for “good” music, and what does it have to do with the coherence of the natural world? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on the show, we speak with mathematician and composer Dmitri Tymozcko at Princeton University, whose work provides a new rigor to the study of the Western canon and illuminates “the shape of music” — a hyperspatial object from which all works of baroque, classical, romantic, modern, jazz, and pop are all low-dimensional projections. In the first conversation for this podcast with MIDI keyboard accompaniment, we follow upon Gottfried Leibniz’s assertion that music is “the unconscious exercise of our mathematical powers.” We explore how melodies and harmonies move through mathematical space in ways quite like the metamorphoses of living sy...

Seth Blumsack on Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance

1 hr 7 min

We lead our lives largely unaware of the immense effort required to support them. All of us grew up inside the so-called “Grid” — actually one of many interconnected regional power grids that electrify our modern world. The physical infrastructure and the regulatory intricacies required to keep the lights on: both have grown organically, piecemeal, in complex networks that nobody seems to fully understand. And yet, we must. Compared to life 150 years ago, we are all utterly dependent on the power grid, and learning how it operates — how tiny failures cause cascading crises, and how tense webs of collaborators make decisions on the way that electricity is priced and served — matters now more than ever. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack (Google Scholar page), Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics and International Affairs in EME and Director of the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State. In this conversation we explore the arcane yet urgent systems that comprise the power grid and how it’s operated, reminding us that the mundane is ever a deep reservoir of questions. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • ...

Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)

1 hr 20 min

As our world knits together, economic interdependencies change in both shape and nature. Supply chains, finance, labor, technological innovation, and geography interact in puzzling nonlinear ways. Can we step back far enough and see clearly enough to make sense of these interactions? Can we map the landscape of capability across scales? And what insights emerge by layering networks of people, firms, states, markets, regions? We’re all riding a bucking horse; what questions can we ask to make sure that we can stay in the saddle? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with two SFI External Professors helping to rethink political economy: newly-appointed Science Board Co-Chair Ricardo Hausmann (Website, Wikipedia, Twitter) is the Director of the Harvard Growth Lab and J. Doyne Farmer (Website, Wikipedia) is Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. In this episode we zoom wide to try and find a way to garden all together, learning limits that can help inform discussion and decisions on the shape of things to come… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage. You can find the complete show notes for every episode, with transcripts and links to cited works, at complexity.simplecast.com. Heads up that our online education platform Complexity Explorer’s Origins of Life Course is still open for enrollment until June 1st! We hope to see you in there… Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each...

Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)

50 min

In the digital era, data is practically the air we breathe. So why does everybody treat it like a product to be hoarded and sold at profit? How would our world change if Big Tech operated on assumptions and incentives more aligned with the needs of a healthy society? Are more data — or are bigger models — really better? As human beings scamper around like prehistoric mammals under the proverbial feet of the new enormous digital monopolies that have emerged due to the Web’s economies of scale, how might we tip the scales back to a world governed wisely by human judgment and networks of trust? Would Facebook and Twitter be more beneficial for society if they were public services like the BBC? And how do we settle on the social norms that help ensure the ethical deployment of A.I.? These and many other questions grow from the boundary-challenging developments of rapid innovation that define our century — a world in which the familiar dyads of state and market, public and private, individual and institutional are all called into question. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with two researchers helping to rethink political economy: SFI External Professor Eric Beinhocker is the Professor of Public Policy Practice at the University of Oxford, and founder and Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University’s Oxford Martin School. He is also the author of The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society. Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, and co-director of the Bennett Institute, whose latest book — Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What...

David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)

52 min

The world is unfair — but how much of that unfairness is inevitable, and how much is just contingency? After centuries of efforts to arrive at formal theories of history, society, and economics, most of us still believe and act on what amounts to myth. Our predecessors can’t be faulted for their lack of data, but in 2022 we have superior resources we’re only starting to appreciate and use. In honor of the Santa Fe Institute’s new role as the hub of an international research network exploring Emergent Political Economies, we dedicate this new sub-series of Complexity Podcast to conversations on money, power, governance, and justice. Subscribe for a new stream of dialogues and trialogues between SFI’s own diverse scholastic community and other acclaimed political economists, historians, and authors of speculative fiction. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this episode, we talk with SFI President David Krakauer about the goals of this research theme and what SFI brings to the table. We discuss the legacy of long-standing challenges to quantitative history and mathematical economics, how SFI thinks differently about these topics, and a brief outline of the major angles we’ll explore in this sub-series over the next year-plus — including the roles of dimension, causality, algorithms, scaling, innovation, emergence, and more. Subscribe to Complexity Podcast for upcoming episodes with an acclaimed line-up of scholars including Diane Coyle, Eric Beinhocker, Ricardo Hausmann, Doyne Farmer, Steven Teles, Rajiv Sethi, Jenna Bednar, Tom Ginsburg, Niall Ferguson, Neal Stephenson, Paul Smaldino, C. Thi Nguyen, John Kay, John Geneakoplos, and many more to be announced… If you value our research and communicatio...

C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems

1 hr 14 min

Context is king: whether in language, ecology, culture, history, economics, or chemistry. One of the core teachings of complexity science is that nothing exists in isolation — especially when it comes to systems in which learning, memory, or emergent behaviors play a part. Even though this (paradoxically) limits the universality of scientific claims, it also lets us draw analogies between the context-dependency of one phenomenon and others: how protein folding shapes HIV evolution is meaningfully like the way that growing up in a specific neighborhood shapes educational and economic opportunity; the paths through a space of all possible four-letter words are constrained in ways very similar to how interactions between microbes impact gut health; how we make sense both depends on how we’ve learned and places bounds on what we’re capable of seeing. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to Yale evolutionary biologist C. Brandon Ogbunu (Twitter, Google Scholar, GitHub) about the importance of environment to the activity and outcomes of complex systems — the value of surprise, the constraints of history, the virtue and challenge of great communication, and much more. Our conversation touches on everything from using word games to teach core concepts in evolutionary theory, to the ways that protein quality control co-determines the ability of pathogens to evade eradication, to the relationship between human artists, algorithms, and regulation in the 21st Century. Brandon works not just in multiple scientific domains but as the author of a number of high-profile blogs exploring the intersection of science and culture — and his boundaryless fluency shines through in a discussion...

Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling

53 min

As fictional Santa Fe Institute chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm famously put it, “Life finds a way” — and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than by roots: seeking out every opportunity, improving in their ability to access and harness nutrients as they’ve evolved over the last 400 million years. Roots also exemplify another maxim for living systems: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” As the Earth’s climate has transformed, the plants and fungi have transformed along with it, reaching into harsh and unstable environments and proving themselves in a crucible of evolutionary innovation that has reshaped the biosphere. Dig deep enough and you’ll find that life, like roots, trends toward the ever-finer, more adaptable, more intertwined…we all live in and on Charles Darwin’s “tangled bank”, whether we recognize it in our farms, our markets, or our minds. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Mingzhen Lu (Google Scholar, Twitter) about the lessons of the invisible webwork beneath our feet, the hidden world upon which all of us walk and rely — largely unnoticed, and until recently scarcely understood. We discuss the intersection of geography, ecology, and economics; the relationship between the so-called “Wood-Wide Web” and urban systems; how plants domesticated mycorrhizal fungi much as humans domesticated animals and plants; the evolutionary trends revealed by a paleoecological study of roots and what they suggest for the future of technology and civilization… This episode is an especially intertwingled and far-reaching one, as suits the topic. Plant yourself and soak it up! If you value our research and communication efforts, plea...

The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith

57 min

Autonomous vehicles hardly live up to their name. The goal of true “driverlessness” was originally hyped in the 1930s but keeps getting kicked further and further into the future as the true complexity of driving comes into ever-sharper and more daunting focus. In 2022, even the most capable robotic cars aren’t self-determining agents but linked into swarms and acting as the tips of a vast and hidden web of design, programming, legislation, and commercial interest. Infrastructure is more than the streets and signs but includes licensing requirements, road rules, principles of product liability, and many other features that form the landscape to which driverless cars continue to adapt, and which they will increasingly alter. While most ethical debates about them seem to focus on the so-called “Trolley Problem” of how to teach machines to make decisions that minimize human casualties, there are many other wicked problems to consider: Is automated driving a technological solution or a policy solution? Should policymakers have the same expectations for automated and conventional driving? How safe must an automated vehicle be for deployment? Should humans or computers have ultimate authority over a given action? Should harm that a human could have prevented somehow outweigh harm that a human caused? Given that a hacker could infect entire fleets, maps, or real-time communication between cars, how much new risk are we willing to take to reduce the more traditional safety hazards with which we are familiar? And, perhaps most surreally: How do you ticket a robot, and who should pay? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on complexity, we speak to Bryant Walker Smith (Twitter) at the University of Sout...

Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies

1 hr 13 min

Irrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order. Dominance hierarchies, as they’re called by animal behaviorists, define the lives of social creatures. The society itself is a kind of individual that gathers information and adapts to its surroundings by encoding stable environmental features in the power relationships between its members. But what works for the society at large often results in violence and inequity for its members; as the founder of this field of research put it, “A grave seriousness lies over the chicken yard.” Over the last hundred years, the science of dominance hierarchies has bloomed faster than a saloon brawl — branching out for deeper understanding of the lives of everything from fish to insects, apes to parakeets. Today, amidst clashing national and corporate titans, systemic economic inequality, and legitimacy crises in the institutions that once served to maintain (admittedly unfair) order, the time is ripe to turn to and learn from what science has discovered about the fundamental mechanisms that underly both human nature and the rest of it: who loses and who wins, and why, and at what cost? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with former ASU-SFI Fellow Elizabeth Hobson (Website | Twitter), now an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati, about the last century of pecking order research. Dobson just co-edited an issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B devoted to this topic, and we unpack her and others’ contributions to this volume — including retrospectives, literature reviews, quantitative analysis, and a look at the current state and frontiers of the science of what we...

Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier

54 min

As a careful study of the world, science is reflective and reactive — it constrains our flights of fancy, anchors us in hard-won fact. By contrast, science fiction is a speculative world-building exercise that guides imagination and foresight by marrying the known with the unknown. The field is vast; some sci-fi writers pay less tribute to the line between the possible and the impossible. Others, though, adopt a far more sober tactic and write “hard” sci fi that does its best to stay within the limits of our current paradigm while rooting visions of the future that can grow beyond and beckon us into a bigger, more adventurous reality. The question we might ask, though, is: which one is which? Our bounded rationality, our sense for what is plausible, is totally dependent on our personal life histories, cultural conditioning, information diet, and social network biases. One person’s linear projections seem too conservative; another person’s exponential change seems like a fantasy. If we can say one thing about our complex world, it might be that it always has, and always will, defy our expectations… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we join up with Caitlin McShea and the InterPlanetary Project’s Alien Crash Site podcast for a wild discussion with SFI Trustee, technologist, and philosopher Gary Bengier about his science fiction novel Unfettered Journey. This book takes readers forward more than a century into a highly automated, highly-stratified post-climate-change world in which our protaganist defies the rigid norms of his society to follow fundamental questions about mind, life, purpose, meaning, consciousness, and truth. It is a perfect backdrop to our conversation on the...

Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2

46 min

COVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There are latencies in economies of scale, inequality of access and supply chain problems. The virus evolves faster than peer review. Science is politicized. But thinking across scales offers answers, insights, better questions… Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we conclude our conversation (recorded on December 9th last year) with SFI External Professors Kathy Powers, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico, and Melanie Moses, Director of the Moses Biological Computation Lab at the University of New Mexico. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Please also be aware of our new SFI Press book, The Complex Alternative, which gathers over 60 complex systems research points of view on COVID-19 (including those from this show). Learn more at SFIPress.org. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Related Reading & Listening: “Spatially distributed infection increases viral load in a computational model of SARS-CoV-2 lung infection” by Melanie E. Moses et al. incl. Stephanie Forrest “Sunsetting As An Adaptive Strategy” by Roberta Romano and Simon A. Levin “The Virus That Infected The World” by David Krakauer & Dan Rockmore A Model For A Just COVID-19 Vacc...

Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1

46 min

Some people say we’re all in the same boat; others say no, but we’re all in the same storm. Wherever you choose to focus the granularity of your inquiry, one thing is certain: we are all embedded in, acting on, and being acted upon by the same nested networks. Our fates are intertwined, but our destinies diverge like weather forecasts, hingeing on small variations in contingency: the circumstances of our birth, the changing contexts of our lives. Seen through a complex systems science lens, the problem of unfairness — in economic opportunity, in health care access, in susceptibility to a pandemic — stays wicked. But the insights therein could steer society toward a much better future, or at least help mitigate the worst of what we’re left to deal with now. This is where the rubber meets the road — where quantitative models of the lung could inform economic policy, and research into how we make decisions influences who survives the complex crises of this decade. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, in a conversation recorded on December 9th 2021, we speak with SFI External Professors Kathy Powers, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico, and Melanie Moses, Director of the Moses Biological Computation Lab at the University of New Mexico. In the first part of a conversation that — like COVID itself — will not be contained, and spends much of its time visiting the poor and under-represented, we discuss everything from how the network topology of cities shapes the outcome of an outbreak to how vaccine hesitancy is a path-dependent trust fail anchored in the history of oppression. Melanie and Kathy offer insights into how to fix the vaccine rollout, h...

Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West

1 hr 10 min

If you’re honest with yourself, you’re likely asking of the last two years: What happened? The COVID-19 pandemic is a prism through which our stories and predictions have refracted…or perhaps it’s a kaleidoscope, through which we can infer relationships and causes, but the pieces all keep shifting. One way to think about humankind’s response to COVID is as a collision between predictive power and understanding, highlighting how far the evolution of our comprehension has trailed behind the evolution of our tools. Another way of looking at it is in terms of bottlenecks and reservoirs — whether it’s N95 mask distribution, log-jammed shipping lanes, or everybody looking up to Tony Fauci, superspreader events or narrative rupture, COVID is a global crash course in how things flow through networks. Ultimately, the effects go even deeper: How has COVID changed our understanding of individuality — the self and its relationship to other selves? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. In this special year-end wrap-up episode, we speak with  SFI President David Krakauer and former SFI President and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West about The Complex Alternative, a new SFI Press volume gathering the perspectives of over 60 members of the complex systems research community on COVID-19 — not just the disease but the webbed and embedded systems it revealed. Complexity Podcast will take a winter hiatus over the holidays and return on Wednesday, January 12th. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. Please also be aware that PhD students are now welcome to apply for o...

Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems

58 min

Democracy is a quintessential complex system: citizens’ decisions shape each other’s in nonlinear and often unpredictable ways; the emergent institutions exert top-down regulation on the individuals and orgs that live together in a polity; feedback loops and tipping points abound. And so perhaps it comes as no surprise in our times of turbulence and risk that democratic processes are under extraordinary pressure from the unanticipated influences of digital communications media, rapidly evolving economic forces, and the algorithms we’ve let loose into society. In a new special feature at PNAS co-edited by SFI Science Board Member Simon Levin, fifteen international research teams map the jeopardy faced by democracies today — as Levin and the other editors write in their introduction to the issue, “the loss of diversity associated with polarization undermines cooperation and the ability of societies to provide the public goods that make for a healthy society.” And yet humankind has never been more well-equipped to understand the problems that we face. What can complex systems science teach us about this century’s threats to democracy, and how to mitigate or sidestep them? How might democracy itself transform as it adapts to our brave new world of extremist partisanship, exponential change, and epistemic crisis? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we speak with SFI External Professor Tina Eliassi-Rad, Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, about her complex systems research on democracy, what forces stabilize or upset democratic process, and how to rigorously study the relationships between technology and social change. If you value our research and communicatio...

Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology

1 hr 21 min

What makes a satisfying explanation? Understanding and prediction are two different goals at odds with one another — think fundamental physics versus artificial neural networks — and even what defines a “simple” explanation varies from one person to another. Held in a kind of ecosystemic balance, these diverse approaches to seeking knowledge keep each other honest…but the use of one kind of knowledge to the exclusion of all others leads to disastrous results. And in the 21st Century, the difference between good and bad explanations determines how society adapts as rapid change transforms the world most people took for granted — and sends humankind into the epistemic wilds  to find new stories that will help us navigate this brave new world. This week we dive deep with SFI External Professor Simon DeDeo at Carnegie Mellon University to explore his research into intelligence and the search for understanding, bringing computational techniques to bear on the history of science, information processing at the scale of society, and how digital technologies and the coronavirus pandemic challenge humankind to think more carefully about the meaning that we seek, here on the edge of chaos… If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you  listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Works Discussed: “From Probability to Consilience: How Explanatory Values Implement Bayesian Reasoning” Zachary Wojtowicz & Simon DeDeo (+ SFI press release on this paper) “Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism” Simon DeDeo (SFI lecture video) “From equality to hierarchy” Simon DeDeo & Elizabeth Hobson The Complex Alternative: Complexity Sci...

Lauren Klein on Data Feminism (Part 2): Tracing Linguistic Innovation

33 min

Where does cultural innovation come from? Histories often simplify the complex, shared work of creation into tales of Great Men and their visionary genius — but ideas have precedents, and moments, and it takes two different kinds of person to have and to hype them. The popularity of “influencers” past and present obscures the collaborative social processes by which ideas are born and spread. What can new tools for the study of historical literature tell us about how languages evolve…and what might a formal understanding of innovation change about the ways we work together? Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week we talk conclude our two-part conversation with Emory University researcher Lauren Klein, co-author (with Catherine D'Ignazio) of the MIT Press volume Data Feminism. We talk tracing change in language use with topic modeling, the role of randomness in Data Feminism, and what this work ultimately does and does not say about the hidden seams of power in society… Subscribe to Complexity wherever you listen to podcasts — and if you value our work, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us — including books, job openings, and open online courses — at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Related Reading & Listening: Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio & Lauren Klein “Dimensions of Scale: Invisible Labor, Editorial Work, and the Future of Quantitative Literary Studies” by Lauren Klei...

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