Scaling Patterns: Nature Meets Technology

My guest today is Melanie Moses, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, an External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and Chair of the New Mexico AI Consortium. Melanie's work spans a wide range of disciplines all unified by her deep understanding of complexity theory.

In our conversation, Melanie and I explore how scaling theory reveals surprising patterns across nature, technology, and society. We discuss what decentralized systems like ant colonies can teach us about building more robust AI, and what the immune system tells us about information networks. We also delve into the costs of building scalable infrastructure, and why we might need new approaches to governance that can scale with our global challenges. Finally, we explore whether there could ever be a universal scaling law and what young researchers should know about pursuing interdisciplinary paths. I hope you enjoy our discussion.

You can follow me on X (@⁠ProfSchrepel⁠) and BlueSky (@⁠ProfSchrepel⁠).

References:

• Melanie Moses’ Biological Computation Lab https://moseslab.cs.unm.edu
• Metabolic Scaling From Individuals to Societies (PhD, 1993) https://www.unm.edu/~melaniem/DISSERTATION_MEM.pdf
• Cities as Organisms: Allometric Scaling of Urban Road Networks (2008) https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/29
• Biologically inspired design principles for Scalable, Robust, Adaptive, Decentralized search and automated response (RADAR) (2011) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5954663