Mingzhen Lu on The Evolution of Root Systems & Biogeochemical Cycling
As fictional Santa Fe Institute chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm famously put it, “Life finds a way” — and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than by roots: seeking out every opportunity, impr...
26 Maalis 202253min
The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles with Bryant Walker Smith
Autonomous vehicles hardly live up to their name. The goal of true “driverlessness” was originally hyped in the 1930s but keeps getting kicked further and further into the future as the true complexit...
11 Maalis 202257min
Elizabeth Hobson on Animal Dominance Hierarchies
Irrespective of your values, if you’re listening to this, you live in a pecking order. Dominance hierarchies, as they’re called by animal behaviorists, define the lives of social creatures. The societ...
25 Helmi 20221h 13min
Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose with Gary Bengier
As a careful study of the world, science is reflective and reactive — it constrains our flights of fancy, anchors us in hard-won fact. By contrast, science fiction is a speculative world-building exer...
11 Helmi 202254min
Multiscale Crisis Response: Melanie Moses & Kathy Powers, Part 2
COVID has exposed and possibly amplified the polarization of society. What can we learn from taking a multiscale approach to crisis response? There are latencies in economies of scale, inequality of a...
27 Tammi 202246min
Fractal Inequality & The Complexity of Repair: Kathy Powers & Melanie Moses, Part 1
Some people say we’re all in the same boat; others say no, but we’re all in the same storm. Wherever you choose to focus the granularity of your inquiry, one thing is certain: we are all embedded in, ...
13 Tammi 202246min
Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey West
If you’re honest with yourself, you’re likely asking of the last two years: What happened? The COVID-19 pandemic is a prism through which our stories and predictions have refracted…or perhaps it’s a k...
22 Joulu 20211h 10min
Tina Eliassi-Rad on Democracies as Complex Systems
Democracy is a quintessential complex system: citizens’ decisions shape each other’s in nonlinear and often unpredictable ways; the emergent institutions exert top-down regulation on the individuals a...
13 Joulu 202158min
