COMPLEXITY Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
Two Complementary Scientific Modes
- David Krakauer frames complexity science and machine learning as complementary siblings.
- ML gives precise opaque predictions while complexity yields explanatory insight at the right scale.
Economy As A Paleontological Process
- Brian Arthur describes economic evolution as a discovery-driven process, not equilibrium fixation.
- New, deeper strategies appear and reshape the economy in long, punctuated shifts.
The Innovation Treadmill
- Jeffrey West shows superlinear urban scaling forces accelerating innovation like an accelerating treadmill.
- Avoiding collapse requires ever-faster reinvention, creating a potentially unsustainable acceleration.
Episode Title and Show Notes:
106 - Michael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park
Welcome to Complexity, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm Michael Garfield, producer of this show and host for the last 105 episodes. Since October, 2019, we have brought 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. Today I step down and depart from SFI with one final appearance as the guest of this episode. Our guest host is SFI President David Krakauer, he and I will braid together with nine other conversations from the archives in a retrospective masterclass on how this podcast traced the contours of complexity. We'll look back on episodes with David, Brian Arthur, Geoffrey West, Doyne Farmer, Deborah Gordon, Tyler Marghetis, Simon DeDeo, Caleb Scharf, and Alison Gopnik to thread some of the show's key themes through into windmills and white whales, SFI pursues, and my own life's persistent greatest questions.
We'll ask about the implications of a world transformed by science and technology by deeper understanding and prediction and the ever-present knock-on consequences. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify and consider making a donation or finding other ways to engage with SFI at Santa fe.edu/engage. Thank you each and all for listening. It's been a pleasure and an honor to take you offroad with us over these last years.
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📚Reading & Videos:
The Lost World
by Michael Crichton
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton
The Evolution of Syntactic Communication
by Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, and Vincent Jansen
InterPlanetary Festival 2018 + SFI Science Explainer Animations
by SFI
Complexity Economics
by SFI Press
Supertheories and Consilience from Alchemy to Electromagnetism
by Simon DeDeo (2019 SFI Seminar)
How To Live in The Future, Part 4: The Future is Exapted/Remixed
by Michael Garfield
Artists Misusing Technology
by NXT Museum
The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
by Melanie Mitchell (2019 SFI Symposium Talk)
The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models
by Melanie Mitchell & David Krakauer
Welcome To Jurassic Park
by Tink Zorg
(re: COVID-19 and the collapse of supply chains)
Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
by Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta Magazine
(re: Albert Kao)
Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
by Jessica Flack
Argument Making In The Wild
by Simon DeDeo
(SFI Seminar re: egregores)
The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society
by Jessica Flack (SFI Community Lecture re: “hourglass emergence”)
Interaction-based evolution: how natural selection and nonrandom mutation work together
by Adi Livnat
In The Country of The Blind (_Afterword: An Introduction to Cliology)
by Michael Flynn
An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence
by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, David Wolpert
Murray Gell-Mann - Information overload. A crude look at the whole (180/200)
(re: the challenges of funding truly innovative research)
The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction
by W.J.T. Mitchell
Intelligence as a planetary scale process
by Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker
Light & Magic (documentary series)
on Disney+
Palantir Analytics
The Lord of The Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Robustness of variance and autocorrelation as indicators of critical slowing down
by Vasilis Dakos, Egbert H van Nes, Paolo D’Odorico, Marten Scheffer
The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone
by Cosma Shalizi
🎧Podcasts:
Complexity Podcast
001 - David Krakauer on The Landscape of 21st Century Science
009 - Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making
012 - Matthew Jackson on Social and Economic Networks
013 - W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics
016 - Andy Dobson on Disease Ecology & Conservation Strategy
056 - J. Doyne Farmer on The Complexity Economics Revolution
060 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt’s Naturegemälde
065 - Deborah Gordon on Ant Colonies as Distributed Computers
067 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics
072 - Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology
087 - Sara Walker on The Physics of Life and Planet-Scale Intelligence
090 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
92 - Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
099 - Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.
Future Fossils Podcast
194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions
190 - Lauren Seyler on Dark Microbiology & Right Relations in Science
165 - Kevin Kelly on Time, Memory, Change, and Vanishing Asia
125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible
Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano
Other music by Michael Garfield