R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech Unemployment
Since the first Industrial Revolution, most people have responded in one of two ways to the threat of technological unemployment: either a general blanket fear that the machines are coming for us all,...
23 Jan 202050min
W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The Economy
If the economy is better understood as an evolving system, an out-of-equilibrium ecology composed of agents that adapt to one another’s strategies, how does this change the way we think about our futu...
15 Jan 20201h
W. Brian Arthur (Part 1) on The History of Complexity Economics
From its beginnings as a discipline nearly 150 years ago, economics rested on assumptions that don’t hold up when studied in the present day. The notion that our economic systems are in equilibrium, t...
8 Jan 202057min
Matthew Jackson on Social & Economic Networks
It may be a cliché, but it’s a timeless truth regardless: who you know matters. The connectedness of actors in a network tells us not just who wields the power in societies and markets, but also how n...
18 Des 20191h 5min
Ray Monk on The Lives of Extraordinary Individuals: Wittgenstein, Russell, Oppenheimer
In this show’s first episode, David Krakauer explained how art and science live along an axis of explanatory depth: science strives to find the simplest adequate abstractions to explain the world we o...
11 Des 201950min
Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation
What is the difference between 100 kilograms of human being and 100 kilograms of algae? One answer to this question is the veins and arteries that carry nutrients throughout the human body, allowing f...
4 Des 20191h 6min
Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making
We live in a world so complicated and immense it challenges our comparably simple minds to even know which information we should use to make decisions. The human brain seems tuned to follow simple rul...
27 Nov 20191h 19min
Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History
It’s easy to take modern Earth for granted — our breathable atmosphere, the delicately balanced ecosystems we depend on — but this world is nothing like the planet on which life first found its footho...
20 Nov 20191h 4min
