For 300 years, the dream of science was to understand the world by chopping it up into pieces. But boiling everything down to basic parts does not tell us about the way those parts behave together. Physicists found the atom, then the quark, and yet these great discoveries don’t answer age-old questions about life, intelligence, or language, innovation, ecosystems, or economies.
So people learned a new trick – not just taking things apart but studying how things organize themselves, without a plan, in ways that cannot be predicted. A new field, complex systems science, sprang up to explain and navigate a world beyond control.
At the same time, improvements in computer processing enabled yet another method for exploring irreducible complexity: we learned to instrumentalize the evolutionary process, forging machine intelligences that can correlate unthinkable amounts of data. And the Internet’s explosive growth empowered science at scale, in networks and with resources we could not have imagined in the 1900s. Now there are different kinds of science, for different kinds of problems, and none of them give us the kind of easy answers we were hoping for.
This is a daring new adventure of discovery for anyone prepared to jettison the comfortable categories that served us for so long. Our biggest questions and most wicked problems call for a unique and planet-wide community of thinkers, willing to work on massive and synthetic puzzles at the intersection of biology and economics, chemistry and social science, physics and cognitive neuroscience.
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The Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten Scheffer
Exponentials, Economics, and Ecology with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 6)
Embracing Complexity for Systemic Interventions with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 5)
Rethinking Our Assumptions During the COVID-19 Crisis with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 4)
On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 3)
Caroline Buckee on Improving COVID-19 Surveillance & Response
COVID-19 & Complex Time in Biology & Economics with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 2)
Rigorous Uncertainty: Science During COVID-19 with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 1)
Sam Scarpino on Modeling Disease Transmission & Interventions
Laurent Hébert-Dufresne on Halting the Spread of COVID-19
Andy Dobson on Epidemic Modeling for COVID-19
Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & Songbirds
Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know
Albert Kao on Animal Sociality & Collective Computation
David B. Kinney on the Philosophy of Science
Kirell Benzi on Data Art & The Future of Science Communication
Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & Evolution
Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy
R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment
W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The Economy
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