Bottom-Up Emergence vs Top-Down Design Tension

Baudouin Saintyves is an artist, physicist, and roboticist, inventor of Granulobots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnbdneho78M

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03125

Research: https://voices.uchicago.edu/bsaintyveslab/

Art: https://www.shapesofemergence.com/

Fascinating conversation, starting with an intro of soft and swarm robotics and his work on designing Granulobots, self organizing aggregates of small wheels with magnets and a simple motor.

We then dive deep into a deep dialogical out-loud thinking about self-organization, self-coordination, synchronization, and emergence. We are both at the edge of what we know, dancing around and with these fascinating subjects.

At around the hour mark, I ask Michael Levin's three questions: 1) Any surprising system-level behavior? (yes!!) 2) Any way to control the system at the top level? (hard to say but Baudouin really riffs off this) 3) How does the world look like for a Granulobot? (fascinating :) ).

The last half an hour is Baudouin's amazing journey, triangulating between art, science, and engineering, a perfect illustration of the perspectival philosophy of science that we discussed with Yogi Jaeger in my upcoming next episode.

Watch it, and please give it thumbs and sign up at the YouTube channel if you like it, it's a small gesture that could help these sober conversations about AI and science reach more people.

00:00:00 Intro

00:03:40 Robots, hard and soft, distributed and liquid.

00:14:25 Mobile Lego. Modular robots, swarms and flocks, decentralized embodied intelligence.

00:21:29 Granulobots. Machine is the material vs the material is the machine. Motorized grains of sand.

00:29:02 Self-organization, self-coordination, synchronization, emergence.

Hysteresis as a precondition of control. Solid and liquid.

01:03:28 Michael Levin's three questions: 1) any surprising high-level behavior?

01:13:30 2) Top-down: any way to control the system at the top level?

01:22:22 3) First person systems. How does the world look like from the system's perspective?

01:30:36 Music, visual art, self organization, physics, shapes of emergence, contemplative cinema, robotics. Baudouin's journey across art and science.

01:38:37 The marvelous triangle of science, engineering, and art.

01:43:39 TAME: the link to Baudouin's work.

I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/balazskegl

Artwork: DALL-E

Music: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw

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