43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)

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Mar 11, 2026

Laura Tripaldi, material scientist and writer at NYU Shanghai known for Parallel Minds, explores how intelligence is tied to the stuff that carries it. She dives into biocomputing like DishBrain, contrasts substrate-specific learning, and links myth, alchemy, and soft robotics to new ways of thinking about technology and agency.

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INSIGHT

Substrates Shape Forms Of Intelligence

Intelligence is not substrate-independent; matter co-produces intelligence through plasticity, feedback and thermodynamic constraints.
Laura Tripaldi argues different substrates generate different ontologies of intelligence, reframing questions to which matter we ask to think and at what cost.

ANECDOTE

From Nanotech PhD To AI And Culture Researcher

Tripaldi wrote Parallel Minds during her PhD in material science and nanotechnology and later moved to NYU Shanghai's Center for AI and Culture.
She transitioned from lab scientist to interdisciplinary researcher, informing her hybrid pop-science and theory approach.

INSIGHT

Biocomputing Makes Substrate Plasticity Functional

Biological computing treats substrate transformation as function rather than failure; living neuronal cultures reorganize and learn as they operate.
Tripaldi notes identical training can produce different behaviors because neuron types and material embodiment differ.

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We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles.

Tripaldi's work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy computation: that intelligence is substrate-indifferent, that it can scale and migrate independent of what carries it. She argues the opposite, that you cannot separate intelligence from the materials through which it is conveyed.

This becomes experimentally clear in her recent essay Substrates Unbound (Antikythera, 2025), where she tracks biocomputing systems like DishBrain — living neuronal cultures interfaced with silicon chips that don't execute pre-given code but reorganize, learn, and adapt. Mouse neurons and human neurons perform differently under the same training conditions. This reframes a central question of the moment: not 'can we scale intelligence,' but which matter are we asking to think, under what energy regime, and at what cost?

References:

Tripaldi, Laura. Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022).
Tripaldi, Laura. "Substrates Unbound" (Antikythera, 2025).
Tripaldi, Laura. Soft Futures (newsletter, Substack).
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).
Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum, 2004) — source of the concept of hyper nature.
Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China (Urbanomic, 2016) — source of the concept of cosmotechnics.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke, 2007) — onto-epistemology and intra-action.
Irigaray, Luce — referenced as an influence on Tripaldi's feminist materialism.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023) — discussed in relation to technology as captured labor; Tripaldi pushes back via the history of automata.
Laschi, Cecilia. Soft Robotics Lab, National University of Singapore — pioneer of octopus-inspired soft robotics.
Hookway, Branden. Interface (MIT Press, 2014).