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The Complexity in the Social World series of interviews (and YouTube Playlist) follows on from the seminar we organised in March 2021. The aim of this series is to capture some of the foundational thinkers in conversation around how to apply complexity thinking to the social world, the world of managers, economists, change agents and societies. In this way, some of these foundational thinkers, many starting their work in the 1980s, are represented and their differing perspectives and different foci of application are available in one place.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

The popular conception of ants is that “anatomy is destiny”: an ant’s body type determines its role in the colony, for once and ever. But this is not the case; rather than forming rigid castes, ants act like a distributed computer in which tasks are re-allocated as the situation changes. “Division of labor” implies a constant “assembly line” environment, not fluid adaptation to evolving conditions. But ants do not just “graduate” from one task to another as they age; they pivot to accept the work required by their colony in any given moment. In this “agile” and dynamic process, ants act more like verbs than nouns — light on specialization and identity, heavy on collaboration and responsiveness.

What can we learn from ants about the strategies for thriving in times of uncertainty and turbulence?What are the algorithms that ants use to navigate environmental change, and how might they inform the ways that we design technologies? How might they teach us to invest more wisely, to explore more thoughtfully?

Listen at: complexity.simplecast.com

It’s not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It’s even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, positing a simple underlying system and a simple set of rules for it, and hope that everything we know about the world somehow pops out. That’s the project being undertaken by Stephen Wolfram and his collaborators, who are working with a kind of discrete system called “hypergraphs.” We talk about what the basic ideas are, why one would choose this particular angle of attack on fundamental physics, and how ideas like quantum mechanics and general relativity might emerge from this simple framework.

Listen at: www.preposterousuniverse.com

Dashun is an Associate Professor and the Founding Director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at Northwestern University. 

He works on the Science of Science, turning the scientific method upon ourselves, using amazing new datasets and tools from complexity sciences and artificial intelligence.

His research has been published repeatedly in journals like Nature and Science, and has been featured in virtually all major global media outlets. Dashun is a recipient of multiple awards for his research and teaching, including Young Investigator awards, Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors, Junior Scientific Award from the Complex Systems Society, Thinkers50 Radar List, and more. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about his life, career and his new book The Science of Science.

Listen at: toolazy.buzzsprout.com

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Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated with a variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that might threaten our own survival. Furthermore, the pace of the expected changes is likely to be abrupt: catastrophic shifts might be the most likely outcome of this ongoing, apparently slow process. Although different strategies for geo-engineering the planet have been advanced, none seem likely to safely revert the large-scale problems associated to carbon dioxide accumulation or ecosystem degradation. An alternative possibility considered here is inspired in the rapidly growing potential for engineering living systems. It would involve designing synthetic organisms capable of reproducing and expanding to large geographic scales with the goal of achieving a long-term or a transient restoration of ecosystem-level homeostasis. Such a regional or even planetary-scale engineering would have to deal with the complexity of our biosphere. It will require not only a proper design of organisms but also understanding their place within ecological networks and their evolvability. This is a likely future scenario that will require integration of ideas coming from currently weakly connected domains, including synthetic biology, ecological and genome engineering, evolutionary theory, climate science, biogeography and invasion ecology, among others.

Watch at: www.youtube.com