Once upon a time at UC Santa Cruz, a group of renegade grad students started mixing physics with math and computers, determined to discover underlying patterns in the seeming-randomness of systems like the weather and roulette. Their research led to major insights in the emerging field of chaos theory, and eventually to the new discipline of complexity economics — which brings models from ecology and physics, cognitive science and biology together to improve our understanding of how value flows through networks, how people make decisions, and how new technologies evolve. As the human world weaves new global economic systems and sustainability looms ever-larger in importance, it is finally time to heed the warnings — and the promises — of this new paradigm of economics.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 J. Doyne Farmer at INET Oxford, to tour his fifty years of pioneering work and current book-in-progress, The Complexity Economics Revolution. Topics include how ecology inspires novel forms of macroeconomics; how “bounded rationality” changes the narrative about rational self-interested economic actors; how leverage leads to greater instability; how new tools can help us predict emerging innovations and engineer a better banking system; the skewed incentives of science funding and venture capital; his take on cryptocurrencies; and more…If you value our research and communication efforts, please rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive. You can find numerous 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 • LinkedInKey Links:Doyne Farmer’s Personal Website | SFI Page | INET Oxford Page | Google Scholar PageDoyne Farmer and related talks on our YouTube channelComplexity Economics from SFI PressRelated Complexity Podcast Episodes:W. Brian Arthur on The History & Future of Complexity Economics[Farmer’s PhD student] R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor MarketsMatthew Jackson on The Science of Social NetworksGeoffrey West on Scaling and Superlinear InnovationDavid Krakauer on Collapse & High-Beta Investment Strategies

In the 21st Century, science is a team sport played by humans and computers, both. Social science in particular is in the midst of a transition from the qualitative study of small groups of people to the quantitative and computer-aided study of enormous data sets created by the interactions of machines and people. In this new ecology, wanting AI to act human makes no sense, but growing “alien” intelligences offers useful difference — and human beings find ourselves empowered to identify new questions no one thought to ask. We can direct our scientific inquiry into the blind spots that our algorithms find for us, and optimize for teams diverse enough to answer them. The cost is the conceit that complex systems can be fully understood and thus controlled — and this demands we move into a paradigm of care for both the artificial Others we create and human Others we engage as partners in discovery. This is the dawn of Social Computing: an age of daunting risks and dazzling rewards that promises to challenge what we think we know about what can be known, and how…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, I speak with SFI External Professor James Evans, Director of the University of Chicago’s Knowledge Lab, about his new work in, and journal of, social computing — how AI transforms the practice of scientific study and the study of scientific practice; what his research reveals about the importance of diversity in team-building and innovation; and what it means to accept our place beside machines in the pursuit of not just novel scientific insight, but true wisdom.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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 Key Links:• James Evans at The University of Chicago• Knowledge Lab• Google Scholar• “Social Computing Unhinged” in The Journal of Social ComputingOther Mentioned Learning Resources:• Melanie Mitchell, “The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence”• Alison Gopnik’s SFI Community Lecture, “The Minds of Children”• Hans Moravec, Mind Children• Ted Chiang, “The Life Cycle of Software Objects”• Re: Recent CalTech study on interdisciplinarity and The Golden Age of Science• Yuval Harari, “The New Religions of the 21st Century”• Melanie Mitchell & Jessica Flack, “Complex Systems Science Allows Us To See New Paths Forward” at Aeon• Complexity Episode 9 - Mirta Galesic (on Social Science)• Compexity Episode 20 - Albert Kao (on Collective Behavior)• Complexity Episode 21 - Melanie Mitchell (on Artificial Intelligence)

Art history is a lot like archaeology — we here in the present day get artifacts and records, but the gaps between them are enormous, and the questions that they beg loom large. Historians need to be able to investigate and interpret, to unpack the meanings and the methods of a given work of art — but even for the best, the act of reconstruction is a trying test. Can we program computers to decipher the backstory of a painting — analyzing light and shadow to guess at how a piece was made? And, even more ambitiously, can AI learn to see and tell the stories rendered in an image’s symbolic content? Recent innovations yield surprising insights and suggest a cyborg future for art scholarship, in which we teach machines to not just recognize a set of objects, but to grok their context and relationships — shining light on messages and narratives once lost to time, and deepening our study of the world of signs.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 David Stork, who has held full-time and visiting faculty positions in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Art and Art History variously at Wellesley and Swarthmore Colleges and Clark, Boston, and Stanford Universities…as well as holding corporate positions as Chief Scientist at Ricoh Innovations and Fellow at Rambus, Inc. We talk about the what happens when computers look at art — and the implications for  art history and connoisseurship.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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 • LinkedInGo deeper with these additional resources:David’s bio at International Academy, Research, and Industry AssociationDavid’s Google Scholar PageDavid’s SFI SeminarDavid’s talk at The Frick Collection, “Rigorous Technical Image Analysis of Fine Art: Toward a Computer Connoisseurship”

The consequence of living in a complex world: one tiny tweak can lead to massive transformation. Set the stage a slightly different way, and the entire play might unfold differently. This path-dependency shows up in both the science fiction premise and the hypothesis of scientific research: What can we learn about the hidden order of our cosmos by adjusting just a single variable?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, Complexity Podcast becomes its own experiment after an invasion by our sister podcast, InterPlanetary Festival’s Alien Crash Site. SFI Miller Omega Program Manager Caitlin McShea joins as guest co-host for a conversation with SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Tamara van der Does (who models belief change using techniques inspired by statistical physics) for a three-headed conversation totally befitting the subject matter: a work of speculative “sci-fi science” produced by SFI’s postdoctoral researchers during a 72-hour lock-in complex systems charette. Their question: how might an extraterrestrial civilization much like our own work if their biology required three-parent families? We discuss the interplay between individual and society, the role of counterfactuals and speculation in both scientific research and sci-fi, and what technology she’d hope to find left in the wake of an alien visitation.Tune in two weeks from now for a return to our regularly scheduled programming...If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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 • LinkedInGo deeper with these additional resources:• Tamara’s Website, Google Scholar Page & Twitter• InterPlanetary Festival Website• Alien Crash Site Podcast• In 72 hours of sci-fi, postdocs transmit parental model of alien civilization [video]• Greetings from a Triparental Planet 72 Hours of Science Pre-Printby Gizem Bacaksizlar, Stefani Crabtree, Joshua Garland, Natalie Grefenstette, Albert Kao, David Kinney, Artemy Kolchinsky, Tyler Marghetis, Michael Price, Maria Riolo, Hajime Shimao, Ashley Teufel, Tamara van der Does, and Vicky Chuqiao Yang• Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution by Jaeweon Shin, Michael Holton Price, David H. Wolpert, Hajime Shimao, Brendan Tracey, and Timothy A. Kohler• SFI’s VP for Science Jennifer Dunne Remembers Ecologist Bob May• Complexity 43: Vicky Yang & Henrik Olsson on social science• Complexity 24: Laurent Hébert Dufresne on network epidemiology• Complexity 19: David Kinney on the philosophy of science• IPFest 2019 Worldbuilding Panel with Rebecca Roanhorse, Ty Franck, Daniel Abraham, Michael Drout, and Cris Moore• David Stout on Alien Crash Site Podcast• Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers• Stalker (film adaptation of Roadside Picnic) by Andrei Tarkovsky• Anathem by former SFI Miller Scholar Neal Stephenson• Dark Integers by Greg Egan• Aliens comic series by Dark Horse• UFO sculpture in cover image by R.T. Davis

Most maps of the world render landscapes in 2D — yet wherever we observe ecosystems, they stratify into a third dimension. The same geometries that describe the dizzying diversity of species in the canopies of forests also govern life in other  living systems, from the oceans to the linings of our mouths. Behind the many forms, a hidden order shapes how organisms live in and on each other — and this emerging discipline of “canopy biology”  may yield important insights into modern urban life. Human societies, like gigantic swarms of ants, are elaborately coordinated super-organisms. In these enormous in-groups, one key feature is the anonymity of members. By studying a treetop world where organisms never see the ground that humans take for granted, structural ecologists glean lessons for the denizens of concrete jungles.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’s guest, Mark Moffett, did his doctoral work at Harvard under E.O. Wilson, helped fund decades of research with wildlife photography for National Geographic, and currently holds research positions at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and as an entomologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He has resisted conventional professorship in order to climb trees in over 40 countries and write four books on ecology and evolution. In this episode, we talk about the vertical dimension that theoretical ecology has largely overlooked, and the fruits of his investigation into the nature of societies — both ant and human.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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 • LinkedInMore on and by Mark Moffett:Mark’s Website & Google Scholar PageMark’s SFI Virtual Seminar on Canopy Biology & SFI’s Twitter ThreadAnt colonies: building complex organizations with minuscule brains and no leadersComparative Canopy Biology and the Structure of Ecosystems“What’s 'up?’ A critical look at the basic terms of canopy biology” Supercolonies of billions in an invasive ant: What is a society?Supercolonies, nests, and societies: distinguishing the forests from the treesHuman Identity and the Evolution of SocietiesWhy a Universal Society Is UnattainableDivided We Stand: Patriotism vs. NationalismMore related reading:Marcus Hamilton, Robert Walker, Chris Kempes - Diversity begets diversity in mammal species and human culturesRodney Brooks & Anita M. Flynn - Fast, Cheap, and Out of ControlRelated episodes of Complexity Podcast:10 - Melanie Moses re: ant colony scaling and 3D chip architecture17 - Chris Kempes re: stromatolites and scaling ribosomal and genetic volumes inside cells leading to multicellularity39 - Eddie Lee re: fractal violence43 - Vicky Yang re: out-group formation20 - Albert Kao re: stalemates in collective computation35 - Geoffrey West re: overlay of social networks in geographic space vs. cyberspace

It’s tempting to believe that people can outsource decisions to machines — that algorithms are objective, and it’s easier and fairer to dump the burden on them. But convenience conceals the complicated truth: when lives are made or broken by AI, we need transparency about the way we ask computers questions, and we need to understand what kinds of problems they’re not suited for. Sometimes we may be using the wrong models, and sometimes even great models fail when fed sparse or noisy data. Applying physics insights to the practical concerns of what an algorithm can and cannot do, scientists find points at which questions suddenly become unanswerable. Even with access to great data, not everything’s an optimization problem: there may be more than one right answer. Ultimately, it is crucial that we understand the limits of the technology we leverage to help us navigate our complex world — and the values that (often invisibly) determine how we use it.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.We kick off 2021 with SFI Resident Professor Cristopher Moore, who has written over 150 papers at the boundary between physics and computer science, to talk about his work in the physics of inference and with The Algorithmic Justice Project.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous 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 • LinkedInRelated Reading:Cris Moore’s Google Scholar PageThe Algorithmic Justice Project“The Computer Science and Physics of Community Detection: Landscapes, Phase Transitions, and Hardness"The Ethical Algorithm by SFI External Professor Michael Kearns“Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment” co-authored by SFI External Professor Thalia Wheatley“The Uncertainty Principle” with SFI Miller Scholar John KaagSFI External Professor Andreas Wagner on play as a form of noise generation that can knock an inference algorithm off false endpoints/local optimaRelated Videos:Cris Moore’s ICTS Turing Talks on “Complexities, phase transitions, and inference”Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency:  Lessons from predictive models in criminal justiceReckoning and Judgment  The Promise of AIEasy, Hard, and Impossible Problems: The Limits of Computation. Ulam Memorial Lecture #1.Data, Algorithms, Justice, and Fairness. Ulam Memorial Lecture #2.Related Podcasts:Fighting Hate Speech with AI & Social Science (with Joshua Garland, Mirta Galesic, and Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi)Better Scientific Modeling for Ecological & Social Justice with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 7)Embracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5)Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice

COVID-19 hasn’t just disrupted the “normal” of everyone’s social practices in what we take for granted as “daily life.” The pandemic has also, more granularly, changed the way scientists research and publish; it has changed the way science interfaces with institutions as varied as local governments and cell phone companies; it has changed the way we host and produce this podcast. This episode, for instance, with SFI External Professor Sam Scarpino and Resident Professor Michael Lachmann was recorded live over a year-end Donor Appreciation Zoom call, for those who both contributed to SFI in 2020 and could handle yet one more group video chat. In it, we discuss their lessons from the “front lines” of network epidemiology this year: what has surprised them, what has stayed with them, and what they expect it all to mean in the years to come…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.Tis the season, so if you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. Avid readers take note that the SFI Press’ latest, Complexity Economics, is now available as a free ebook with donation at sfipress.org. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage — and undergrads, you still have until January 11th to submit for our 2021 Undergraduate Complexity Research program at santafe.edu/ucr. 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 • LinkedInMore Resources:Michael Lachmann’s Google Scholar PageSam Scarpino’s Google Scholar PageThe University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium Public Dashboard“Crowding and the shape of COVID-19 epidemics”SFI’s Twitter thread re: auto-correlation in networks on the cusp of a breakdown or breakthrough”Asymptomatic transmission and the resurgence of Bordetella pertussis”Sam Scarpino on Complexity Podcast Episode 25Harvard’s Michael Mina (hosted by Michael Lachmann) at SFI speaking on rapid testing for COVID-19“How Data Became One of the Most Powerful Tools to Fight an Epidemic” by Steven Johnson for The NY TimesRT.Live“If Cancer Were Easy, Every Cell Would Do It” (SFI Press Release on Lachmann’s cancer research)

The podcast explores the connection between information, meaning, and energy in complex systems. It features an interview with Artemy Kolchinsky, who studies information organization in biological, neural, and physical systems. Topics discussed include the evolution of sensory organs, evolutionary constraints, and the alignment of knowledge and ability.

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”– Vladimir Ilyich LeninWhen human beings saw the first pictures of the Earth from space, the impact was transformative. New instruments for taking in new vistas, for understanding our relationships and contexts at a different scale, have in some ways defined the history of not just science but the evolution of intelligence. And now, thanks to the surfeit of textual data offered up by social media, researchers can peer into the dynamics of human society and analyze the turbulent flows of stories that drive our collective behavior and twist time itself into nonlinear structures. As a species, we are on the cusp of a new epoch in which the body politic reveals itself to us in real-time like a single human body in an MRI. How will these tools change how we think about the world and what it means to be a person in it?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 Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center and Computational Story Lab about how to use Twitter data as a kind of satellite telescope observing the collective mentation of humankind — what it reveals, and what it doesn’t, opening a cornucopia of questions about how we measure sentiment and the power of narrative for social control.Tis the season, so if you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/podcastgive — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage.Avid readers take note that SFI Press’ latest volume, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium, is now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle eBook formats.Thank you for listening!Follow Peter Dodds at Twitter and read the papers we discuss (and many more) at Google Scholar.And then go play with Hedonometer & Story Wrangler.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

The modern world has a way of distancing itself from everything that came before it…and yet the evidence from archaeology supports a different story. While industrial societies tend to praise markets and advanced technologies as the main drivers of the last few centuries of change, a careful study of civilizations as distinct as Ancient Rome, Peru, and Central Mexico reveals an underlying uniformity. Consistent patterns have played out in human settlements across millennia and continents, regardless of the economic systems we’ve employed or the inventions on which we’ve relied. These patterns, furthermore, look just like those that govern and delimit evolutionary change; the scaling laws determining the growth of cities are, apparently, the same that led to cities in the first place, or to human social groups, or complex animals. Human settlements act as social reactors, by facilitating interactions — in other words, the functional relationships within communities drive history, and this century has more in common with the distant past than commonly believed.These revelations, though, might have remained invisible to us if archaeology itself had not transformed over the last few decades, evolving new approaches to cross-disciplinary synthesis. It’s time to update both our notions of the ancient world and our popular conception of the archaeologist…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 Former SFI Omidyar Fellow Scott Ortman, Associate Professor of Anthropology at The University of Colorado Boulder, about his work on settlement scaling theory and fostering synthesis in archaeology to advance science and benefit society.If you value our research and communication efforts, please consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give — and/or rating and reviewing us at Apple Podcasts. You can find numerous other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening!Check out Scott’s CU Boulder Website and Google Scholar Page for more information and links to the research papers and opinion pieces we discuss in this episode.For more on universal scaling laws and the science of cities, revisit these earlier episodes of COMPLEXITY:4 — Luis Bettencourt10 — Melanie Moses17 — Chris Kempes33 — Tim Kohler & Marten Scheffer35 — Geoffrey West36 — Geoffrey WestJoin 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