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 systems as they traverse evolutionary fitness landscapes. We examine the application of information theory to chord categorization and functional harmony. And we ask about the nature of randomness, the roles of parsimony and consilience in both art and life.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 • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:All of Tymoczko’s writings mentioned in this conversation can be found on his Princeton.edu websiteYou can explore his interactive music software at MadMusicalScience.comThe Geometry of Musical Chordsby Dmitri TymoczkoAn Information Theoretic Approach to Chord Categorization and Functional Harmonyby Nori Jacoby, Naftali Tishby and Dmitri TymoczkoThis Mathematical Song of the Emotionsby Dmitri TymoczkoThe Sound of Philosophyby Dmitri TymoczkoSelect Tymoczko Video Lectures:Spacious Spatiality (SEMF) 2022The Quadruple HierarchyThe Shape of Music (2014)On the 2020 SFI Music & Complexity Working Group (with a link to the entire video playlist of public presentations).On the 2022 SFI Music & Complexity Working GroupFoundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics Institute at SFIShort explainer animation on SFI Professor Sidney Redner’s work on “Sleeping Beauties of Science”The evolution of syntactic communicationby Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent JansenThe Majesty of Music and Math (PBS special with SFI’s Cris Moore)The physical limits of communicationby Michael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cristopher MooreSupertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to ElectromagnetismSFI Seminar by Simon DeDeoWill brains or algorithms rule the kingdom of science?by David Krakauer at Aeon MagazineScaling, Mirror Symmetries and Musical Consonances Among the Distances of the Planets of the Solar Systemby Michael Bank and Nicola Scafetta“The reward system for people who do a really wonderful job of extracting knowledge and understanding and wisdom…is skewed in the wrong way. If left to the so-called free market, it’s mainly skewed toward entertainment or something that’s narrowly utilitarian for some business firm or set of business firms.”– Murray Gell-Mann, A Crude Look at The Whole Part 180/200 (1997)Related Episodes:Complexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex SystemsComplexity 72 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of EpistemologyComplexity 70 - Lauren F. Klein on Data Feminism: Surfacing Invisible LaborComplexity 67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & MathematicsComplexity 46 - Helena Miton on Cultural Evolution in Music and Writing SystemsComplexity 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer

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 • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:Topological Models and Critical Slowing down: Two Approaches to Power System Blackout Risk Analysisby Paul Hines, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, & Seth BlumsackDo topological models provide good information about electricity infrastructure vulnerability?by Paul Hines, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, & Seth BlumsackCan capacity markets be designed by democracy?by Kyungjin Yoo & Seth BlumsackThe Political Complexity of Regional Electricity Policy Formationby Kyungjin Yoo & Seth BlumsackThe Energy Transition in New Mexico: Insights from a Santa Fe Institute Workshopby Seth Blumsack, Paul Hines, Cristopher Moore, and Jessika E. TrancikEBF 483: Introduction to Electricity Marketsby Seth BlumsackWhat’s behind $15,000 electricity bills in Texas?by Seth BlumsackRTOGov: Exploring Links Between Market Decision-Making Processes and Outcomesby Kate KonschnikEnsuring Consideration of the Public Interest in the Governance and Accountability of Regional Transmission Organizationsby Michael H. Dworkin & Rachel Aslin GoldwasserElectricity governance and the Western energy imbalance market in the United States: The necessity of interorganizational collaborationby Stephanie Lenhart, Natalie Nelson-Marsh, Elizabeth J. Wilson, & David SolanUntangling the Wires in Electricity Market Planning, with Kate Konschnikby Resources RadioMatthew Jackson on Social & Economic NetworksComplexity Podcast 12Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance HierarchiesComplexity Podcast 78The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and SocietyJessica Flack’s 2019 SFI Community LectureTyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & MathematicsComplexity Podcast 67Early-warning signals for critical transitionsby Marten Scheffer, Jordi Bascompte, William A. Brock, Victor Brovkin, Stephen R. Carpenter, Vasilis Dakos, Hermann Held, Egbert H. van Nes, Max Rietkerk & George SugiharaRicardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)Complexity Podcast 84Anjali BhattTina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex SystemsComplexity Podcast 73Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-makingComplexity Podcast 9Jessika TrancikSignalling architectures can prevent cancer evolutionby Leonardo Oña & Michael LachmannThe Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker SmithComplexity Podcast 79Image Credit: Paul Hines

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 episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:The new paradigm of economic complexityPierre-Alexandre Balland, Tom Broekel, Dario Diodato, Elisa Giuliani, Ricardo Hausmann, Neave O’Clery, and David Rigbyin Research PolicyHow production networks amplify economic growthJames McNerney, Charles Savoie, Francesco Caravelli, Vasco M. Carvalho, and J. Doyne Farmer in PNASProductive Ecosystems and the arrow of developmentby Neave O’Clery, Muhammed Ali Yıldırım, and Ricardo Hausmann Horrible trade-offs in a pandemic: Poverty, fiscal space, policy, and welfareRicardo Hausmann and Ulrich Schetterin ScienceDirectHistorical effects of shocks on inequality: the great leveler revisitedBas van Bavel and Marten Schefferin Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications(Twitter thread)Complexity 56 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics RevolutionThe Multiple Paths to Multiple LifeChristopher P. Kempes and David C. Krakauer in Journal of Molecular EvolutionScaling of urban income inequality in the USAElisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Christopher P. Kempesin Journal of The Royal Society InterfaceComplexity 12 - Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic NetworksComplexity 81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex SystemsPitchfork Economicsby Nick Hanauer (podcast)Complexity 15 - R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech UnemploymentWill a Large Complex System be Stable?by Robert Mayin NatureInvestigationsby Stuart KauffmanThe Collapse of Networksby Raissa D’Souza (SFI Symposium Talk)

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 It Should Be— was published by Princeton University Press last fall.In the first episode of this subseries, we spoke with SFI President David Krakauer about how the study of political economy has changed over the last two hundred years due to the innovation of new mathematical and computational methods.  In this episode, we examine how the technological milieu that empowered these changes has also transformed the subject of study itself:  digital surveillance architecture, social media networks, big data, and (largely inadequate) attempts to formalize econometrics have all had a profound impact on modern life. In what ways do new institutions beget even newer institutions to address their unintended consequences? How should we think about the complex relationships between private and public agencies, and what status should we give the data they produce and consume? What is it going to take to restore the trust in one another necessary for society to remain coherent, and what are the most important measures to help economists and policymakers navigate the turbulence of our times into a more inclusive, prosperous, and sustainable world?Subscribe to Complexity Podcast for upcoming episodes with an acclaimed line-up of scholars including 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 communication efforts, please 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 • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:Toward a New Ontological Framework for the Economic Goodby Eric D. BeinhockerComplexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposiumedited by W. Brian Arthur, Eric Beinhocker, Allison StangerSocializing Databy Diane CoyleThe Public Optionby Diane CoyleCommon as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownershipby Lewis HydePitchfork Economicsby Nick HanauerThe Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolvesby W. Brian ArthurGeoffrey West on Complexity 35Will A Large Complex System Be Stable?by Robert MayBlockchain: Trust Companies: Every Company Is at Risk of Being Disrupted by A Trusted Version of Itselfby Richie EtwaruHelena Miton on Complexity 46The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrativeby Sam Bowles, Wendy CarlinRecoupling Economic and Social Prosperityby Katharina Lima de Miranda, Dennis J. SnowerSignalling architectures can prevent cancer evolutionby Leonardo Oña & Michael LachmannWhy we should have a public option version of Google and Facebook (response to Diane Coyle)by James PethokoukisBryant Walker Smith on Complexity 79“Premature optimization is the root of all evil."— Donald Knuth

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 communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, 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 • LinkedInMentions and additional resources:Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibilityby David Krakauer for SFI Parallax Newsletter, Spring 2022 EditionPolicing stabilizes construction of social niches in primatesby Jessica Flack, Michelle Girvan, Frans de Waal, and David Krakauer in NatureConflicts of interest improve collective computation of adaptive social structuresby Eleanor Brush, David Krakauer, and Jessica Flack in Science AdvancesThe Star Gazer and the Flesh Eater: Elements of a Theory of Metahistoryby David C. Krakauer in History, Big History, and Metahistory at SFI PressThe Cultural Evolution of National Constitutionsby Daniel Rockmore, Chen Fang, Nick Foti, Tom Ginsburg, & David Krakauer in SSRNScaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Socialityby José Lobo, Todd Whitelaw, Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Polly Wiessner, Michael E. Smith, & Scott Ortman in Current AnthropologyW. Brian Arthur on Complexity Podcast (eps. 13, 14, 68, 69)Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West (Complexity Podcast)The Dawn of Everythingby David Graeber and David Wengrow at Macmillan PublishersMitch Waldrop speaks on the history of SFI (Twitter excerpts)The Hedgehog and the Foxby Isaiah BerlinWar and Peaceby Leo TolstoyOn the Application of Mathematics to Political Economyby F. Y. Edgeworth in Journal of the Royal Statistical SocietyHow Economics Became A Mathematical Scienceby E. Roy Weintraub at Duke University PressMachine Dreamsby Philip Mirowski at Cambridge University PressAll Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (TV series)by Adam Curtis for BBCCan’t Get You Out of My Head (TV series)by Adam Curtis for BBCThe Collective Computation Group at SFISeeing Like A Stateby James. C Scott at Yale BooksUncertain timesby Jessica Flack and Melanie Mitchell at AeonAt the limits of thoughtby David Krakauer at AeonPreventative Citizen-Based Medicineby David Krakauer for the SFI Transmissions: Reflections seriesThe uncertainty paradox. Can science make uncertainty optimistic?by Stuart Firestein (SFI Seminar)Editorial note: At one point DK mentions "John" Steuart but meant James Steuart, author ofAn Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy(a more thoroughly-indexed and searchable version can be found here)

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 that will not be contained, about some of the biggest questions and discoveries of our time.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. You'll find plenty of 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 • LinkedInDiscussed in this episode:“I do my science biographically…I find a personal connection to the essence of the question.”– C. Brandon Ogbunugafor on RadioLab"Environment x everything interactions: From evolution to epidemics and beyond"Brandon’s February 2022 SFI Seminar (YouTube Video + Live Twitter Coverage)“A Reflection on 50 Years of John Maynard Smith’s ‘Protein Space’”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in GENETICS“Collective Computing: Learning from Nature”David Krakauer presenting at the Foresight Institute in 2021 (with reference to Rubik’s Cube research)“Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power”Alexander Matt Turner, Logan Smith, Rohin Shah, Andrew Critch, Prasad Tadepalli in arXiv“A New Take on John Maynard Smith's Concept of Protein Space for Understanding Molecular Evolution”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Daniel Hartl in PLOS Computational Biology“The 300 Most Common Words”by Bruce Sterling“The Host Cell’s Endoplasmic Reticulum Proteostasis Network Profoundly Shapes the Protein Sequence Space Accessible to HIV Envelope”Jimin Yoon, Emmanuel E. Nekongo, Jessica E. Patrick, Angela M. Phillips, Anna I. Ponomarenko, Samuel J. Hendel, Vincent L. Butty, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Yu-Shan Lin, Matthew D. Shoulders in bioRxiv“Competition along trajectories governs adaptation rates towards antimicrobial resistance”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Margaret J. Eppstein in Nature Ecology & Evolution“Scientists Need to Admit What They Got Wrong About COVID”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIRED“Deconstructing higher-order interactions in the microbiota: A theoretical examination”Yitbarek Senay, Guittar John, Sarah A. Knutie, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in bioRxiv“What Makes an Artist in the Age of Algorithms?”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIREDNot mentioned in this episode but still worth exploring:“Part of what I was getting after with Blackness had to do with authoring ideas that are edgy or potentially threatening. That as a scientist, you can generate ideas in the name of research, in the name of breaking new ground, that may stigmatize you. That may kick you out of the club, so to speak, because you’re not necessarily following the herd.”– Physicist Stephon Alexander in an interview with Brandon at Andscape“How Afrofuturism Can Help The World Mend”C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in WIRED“The COVID-19 pandemic amplified long-standing racial disparities in the United States criminal justice system”Brennan Klein, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Benjamin J. Schafer, Zarana Bhadricha, Preeti Kori, Jim Sheldon, Nitish Kaza, Emily A. Wang, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Samuel V. Scarpino, Elizabeth Hinton in medRxivAlso mentioned:Simon Conway Morris, Geoffrey West, Samuel Scarpino, Rick & Morty, Stuart Kauffman, Frank Salisbury, Stephen Jay Gould, Frances Arnold, John Vervaeke, Andreas Wagner, Jennifer Dunne, James Evans, Carl Bergstrom, Jevin West, Henry Gee, Eugene Shakhnovich, Rafael Guerrero, Gregory Bateson, Simon DeDeo, James Clerk Maxwell, Melanie Moses, Kathy Powers, Sara Walker, Michael Lachmann, and many others...

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, 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. You'll find plenty of 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 • LinkedInDiscussed in this episode:“Evolutionary history resolves global organization of root functional traits”by Zeqing Ma, Dali Guo, Xingliang Xu, Mingzhen Lu, Richard D. Bardgett, David M. Eissenstat, M. Luke McCormack & Lars O. Hedinin Nature“Global plant-symbiont organization and emergence of biogeochemical cycles resolved by evolution-based trait modelling”by Mingzhen Lu, Lars O. Hedinin PubMed“Biome boundary maintained by intense belowground resource competition in world’s thinnest-rooted plant community”by Mingzhen Lu, William J. Bond, Efrat Sheffer, Michael D. Cramer, Adam G. West, Nicky Allsopp, Edmund C.  February,  Samson Chimphango, Zeqing Ma, Jasper A. Slingsby, and Lars O. Hedinin PNASComplexity ep. 8 - Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary HistoryA (Very) Short History of Life on Earthby Henry Gee (Senior Editor of Nature)"General statistical model shows that macroevolutionary patterns and processes are consistent with Darwinian gradualism”by SFI Professor Mark Pagelin NatureComplexity ep. 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer“Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions”by SFI Professor Alison Gopnikin Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society BComplexity ep. 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey WestComplexity ep. 17 - Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionComplexity ep. 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's NaturegemäldeDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?by Philip K. DickThe Shock Doctrineby Naomi KleinDoughnut Economicsby Kate RaworthThe Long Descentby John Michael Greer“6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World”by Paul StametsComplexity ep. 43 - Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on Political Polling & Polarization: How We Make Decisions & IdentitiesThe Expanse (novel series)by James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck, here at IPFest 2019 on our World Building panel)

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 South Carolina School of Law and The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford, whose work centers on the ethics of autonomous vehicles. We link up to explore the myriad complexities — technological, regulatory, and sociocultural — surrounding the development and roll-out of new mobility platforms that challenge conventional understanding of the boundaries between person, vehicle, institution, and infrastructure. Buckle up and lean back for a dynamic discussion on the ever-shifting locii of agency, privacy and data protection, the relationship between individuals, communities, and corporations…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.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 • LinkedInDiscussed:• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Transport• Who is driving driverless cars?• From driverless dilemmas to more practical commonsense tests for automated vehicles• Who’s Responsible When A Self-Driving Car Crashes?• How Do You Ticket a Driverless Car?• Controlling Humans and Machines• Regulation and the Risk of Inaction• Government Assessment of Innovation Shouldn’t Differ for Tech Companies• New Technologies and Old Treaties• It’s Not The Robot’s Fault! Russian and American Perspectives on Responsibility for Robot HarmsMentioned:Melanie Mitchell - A.I.: A Guide for Thinking People + Complexity ep. 21Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses on The Complexity of Harm, Complexity ep. 75Cris Moore on Algorithmic Injustice, Complexity ep. 51Luis Bettencourt on Urban Networks, Complexity ep. 4Sabine Hauert on Swarming Robots, Complexity ep. 3Kevin Kelly - Out of ControlEmergent EngineeringCory DoctorowJake Harper (formerly of Zoox)InterPlanetary FestivalJose Luis BorgesW. Brian Arthur - The Nature of Technology + Complexity ep. 13Ricardo HausmannAmazon Prime Video - UploadCharles Stross - Halting StateDoyne Farmer on Market Malfunction, Complexity ep. 56Marten Scheffer on Autocorrelation & Collapse, Complexity ep. 33

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 can colloquially call “punching up and down”…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.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 • LinkedInPapers & People Discussed Include:• The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchiesEli D. Strauss, James P. Curley, Daizaburo Shizuka and Elizabeth A. Hobson• Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy researchElizabeth A. Hobson• DomArchive: a century of published dominance dataEli D. Strauss, Alex R. DeCasien, Gabriela Galindo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Daizaburo Shizuka and James P. Curley• Social hierarchies and social networks in humansDaniel Redhead and Eleanor A. Power• Dominance in humansTian Chen Zeng, Joey T. Cheng and Joseph Henrich• From equality to hierarchySimon DeDeo and Elizabeth A. Hobson• More is DifferentPhil Anderson• Environmentally Mediated Social DilemmasSylvie Estrela, Eric Libby, Jeremy Van Cleve, Florence Débarre, Maxime Deforet, William R. Harcombe, Jorge Peña, Sam P. Brown, Michael E. Hochberg• Jessica Flack• Michael Mauboussin• Joshua Bell• Robert Kegan• Thorleif Schjelderup-EbbeRelated Podcast Episodes Include:• Sidney Redner on Statistics and Everyday Life• Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology• Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers• Jonas Dalege on The Physics of Attitudes & Beliefs• Fractal Conflicts & Swing Voters with Eddie Lee• Fighting Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (with Joshua Garland, Mirta Galesic, and Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi)• Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks• Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice

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 role of complex systems science in our understanding of both present-day society and the futures that may, or may never, come to pass…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.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 • LinkedInGo Deeper With These Related MediaScience:Paul Smaldino: The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societiesGeoffrey West: ScaleBob May: Will a Large Complex System be Stable?Melanie Mitchell: The Collapse of Artificial IntelligenceMelanie Mitchell: On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in AIElisa Heinrich Mora et al.: Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United StatesSFI ACtioN Climate Change Seminar: Complexity of SustainabilityRaissa D’Souza: The Collapse of NetworksDavid Krakauer: Preventative Citizen-Based MedicineSimon DeDeo & Elizabeth Hobson: From equality to hierarchyPeter Turchin: The Double Helix of Inequality and Well-BeingSpeculative Fiction:2019 IPFest World Building Panel Discussion with Rebecca Roanhorse, James S.A. Correy, and Cris MooreRobin Hanson: Age of EmAyn Rand: Atlas ShruggedPeter Watts: BlindsightIsaac Asimov: FoundationThe Strugatsky Brothers: Roadside PicnicPodcast Episodes:Complexity 10: Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationComplexity 14: W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The EconomyComplexity 19: David Kinney on the Philosophy of ScienceComplexity 21: Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't KnowComplexity 22: Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & SongbirdsComplexity 36: Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)Complexity 51: Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of InferenceThe Jim Rutt Show 152: Gary Bengier on Hard Sci-Fi Futures