Perspectives on Machine Consciousness asks whether any AIs are conscious today, whether any future ones could be conscious, how we could know, and what implications machine consciousness would have for us and for them.

As AI improves rapidly in performance and capability, these questions are becoming increasingly important. We do not fully understand how AIs work, and even some of the leading LLM developers say they cannot be sure that today’s models are not sentient, though many people are forming relationships with them, sometimes intimate ones. The book explores consciousness alongside our interactions with AI, including the critical need to avoid committing mind crime by causing artificial minds to suffer, as well as considering that if and when superintelligence arrives, its enormous effect on humanity may be significantly determined by whether or not it is conscious. The authors show that machines becoming conscious means we may learn a great deal about our own consciousness – arguably the most important, and yet most mysterious, thing about us.

This book is required reading for anybody developing advanced AI, working in AI safety, responsible for developing AI policies at an organizational or national level, and indeed anybody concerned with the long-term future of humanity.

More at: www.taylorfrancis.com

An edited volume bringing together 25 of today’s most forward-thinking biologists and philosophers on sign processes and meaning-making in organisms.

Theoretical biology is concerned with providing science with explanatory frameworks within which to fit its findings. The relatively newer field of Biosemiotics is the study of sign processes within life processes.

In the tradition of the field-changing four-volume essay collection Towards a Theoretical Biology issued by developmental biologist Conrad Hal Waddington from 1968 to 1972, this volume brings together many of today’s leading scientists to discuss what they consider to be the most important and pressing problems in our current understandings of the biological world—and how best to advance our understandings of such life processes scientifically.

Contributors: Denis Noble, Terrance Deacon, Scott F. Gilbert, Stuart Kaufmann, Tom Froese, Erik L. Peterson, Richard I Vane-Wright, Charles Wolfe, Raymond Noble, Claus Emmeche, Alexei Sharov, Kalevi Kull, Donald Favareau, Arantza Etxeberria, Anton Markoš, Jana Švorcová, Daniel C. Mayer-Foulkes, Federico Vega, Henrik Nielsen, Karel Kleisner, David Cortés-García, Matt Kalkman, Georgii Karelin, Takashi Ikegami, and Mariana Vitti Rodrigues.

Read the full article at: mitpress.mit.edu

What kind of trouble lies ahead? How can we successfully transition towards a sustainable future? Drawing on a remarkably broad range of insights from complex systems and the functioning of the brain to the history of civilizations and the workings of modern societies, the distinguished scientist Marten Scheffer addresses these key questions of our times. He looks to the past to show how societies have tipped out of trouble before, the mechanisms that drive social transformations and the invisible hands holding us back. He traces how long-standing practices such as the slave trade and foot-binding were suddenly abandoned and how entire civilizations have collapsed to make way for something new. Could we be heading for a similarly dramatic change? Marten Scheffer argues that a dark future is plausible but not yet inevitable and he provides us instead with a hopeful roadmap to steer ourselves away from collapse-and toward renewal.

More at: www.cambridge.org

Collective action has been a fundamental aspect of human societies throughout history, from building irrigation systems and defenses in Neolithic times to coordinated disaster relief and scientific collaborations today. In this book, Sergey Gavrilets explains when and why groups of people cooperate, presenting a quantitative framework that unifies game theory with models of social influence, cognition, and individual and cultural variation. He shows how humans’ deep susceptibility to social influence—grounded in evolutionary need to cooperate and learn from peers, reinforced by deference to parents and elders, and extended to cultural, religious, and political leaders—shapes norms, beliefs, and collective outcomes.

Integrating previously separate literatures, Gavrilets introduces explicit dynamics for norms and beliefs, quantifies the effects of individual and cultural differences, and tests predictions across societies. Drawing on formal, data-based mathematical modeling supported by behavioral experiments and studies of online behavior, he concludes that successful collective action depends on six interacting forces: material payoffs, personal norms and attitudes, social influence, cognition, evolving social norms and beliefs about others, and individual and cultural differences. Lasting cultural change, he argues, depends on norms and institutions that shape behavior through persuasion, nudging, and enforcement. Gavrilets translates this theory into practical, testable strategies for policy and design, including targeted messaging, dynamic norms, and culturally sensitive approaches, and connects it to broader theories of behavior change.

More at: press.princeton.edu

The contemporary global economy exhibits unprecedented structural complexity—characterized by nonlinear dynamics, adaptive behaviors, and emergent properties. Understanding these phenomena requires theoretical frameworks capable of addressing complexity, path dependence, and evolutionary processes.

Complexity economics has developed to address such intellectual challenges. Originating in a seminal 1987 Santa Fe Institute workshop and first described in The Economy as an Evolving Complex System (1988), this approach fundamentally reconceptualizes economic systems as complex adaptive systems. Subsequent volumes (1997, 2005) progressively developed this framework, offering new insights into finance, technological innovation, and social interactions.

Like each of its predecessors, this fourth volume is the product of an interdisciplinary workshop hosted at the Santa Fe Institute. It represents the latest synthesis, reflecting theoretical advances and methodological developments achieved over nearly four decades. Drawing on contributions from leading scholars worldwide, the chapters span foundational questions to policy applications—from agent-based modeling and network theory to macroeconomic dynamics, innovation systems, sustainability transitions, and inequality.

The result demonstrates complexity economics’ capacity to generate novel insights into phenomena that remain puzzling within traditional frameworks: financial instability, technological disruption, climate economics, and institutional change. This volume positions complexity economics as an essential analytical framework for understanding twenty-first-century economic realities.

More at: www.sfipress.org