The Growing Gap Between our Physical and Social Technologies Discussants
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
An SFI ACtioN Applied Topical Meeting
August 1 & 8, 2018
Santa Fe, NM
Discussants for the August 1, 2018 session include:
Eric Beinhocker, Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School & Santa Fe Institute
Eric Beinhocker is a Professor of Public Policy Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He is also the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University’s Oxford Martin School. INET Oxford is a research center devoted to applying leading-edge interdisciplinary approaches to economic theory and public policy practice. INET Oxford researchers are working on issues ranging from financial system stability, to innovation and growth, economic inequality, and environmental sustainability. Beinhocker is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to joining Oxford, Beinhocker had an 18-year career at McKinsey & Company where he was a partner and held leadership roles in McKinsey’s Strategy Practice, its Climate Change and Sustainability Practice, and the McKinsey Global Institute.
Doyne Farmer, Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School & Santa Fe Institute
Doyne Farmer's current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to the United Bank of Switzerland in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. During the eighties he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 70’s he built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.
Fotini Markopoulou, doppel
Fotini Markopoulou is a theoretical physicist interested in foundational mathematics and quantum mechanics. She was a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and was an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo. Markopoulou is also the co-founder of doppel, a wearable tech company that uses research in psychophysiology to create technology that changes how a user perceives, feels and behaves.
Steen Rasmussen, University of Southern Denmark & Santa Fe Institute
Steen Rasmussen's main scientific effort is to explore, understand and construct minimal living processes through bottom up assembly of protocells in the lab and to explore the relationships between living processes and evolutionary learning in different systems. Another line of research is to explore how living and intelligent technologies increasingly transform society and what it means to be human. Due to these activities he has frequently consulted on science and technology issues for the European Commission, the Danish Parliament, the German Reichstag, and the US Congress.
Mark Bedau, Reed College
Mark A. Bedau is an American philosopher who works in the field of artificial life. Bedau teaches philosophy at Reed College in Portland. He is also the co-founder of the European Center for Living Technology and Visiting Professor, Ph.D. Program in Life Sciences: Foundations and Ethics, European School of Molecular Medicine. He is also the editor of the Artificial Life Journal.
Jenna Bednar, University of Michigan & Santa Fe Institute
Jenna Bednar's research is on the analysis of institutions, focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of the stability of federal states. Her most recent book,The Robust Federation demonstrates how complementary institutions maintain and adjust the distribution of authority between national and state governments. This book makes two theoretical contributions to the study of federalism's design. First, it shows that distributions suggested by a constitution mean nothing if the governments have no incentive to abide by them, and intergovernmental retaliation tends to be inefficient. The book's second contribution is that while no institutional safeguard is sufficient to improve the union's prosperity, institutions work together to improve compliance with the distribution of authority, thereby boosting the union's performance.
Rob Boyd, Arizona State University & Santa Fe Institute
Robert Boyd is an evolutionary anthropologist whose research is focused on the evolutionary psychology of the mechanisms that give rise to, and shape human culture, and how these mechanisms interact with population dynamic processes to shape human cultural variation. Prior to his current position as Professor of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, Boyd taught at Duke University, Emory University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is considered a forerunner in the field of cultural evolution and uses a combination of mathematical modelling, laboratory experiments, and ethnographic fieldwork in his research.
David Christian, Macquarie University & The Big History Project
David Christian is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, but since the 1980s he has become interested in world history on very large scales. He has written on the social and material history of the 19th-century Russian peasantry, in particular on aspects of diet and the role of alcohol. In 1989, he began teaching courses on "Big History," surveying the past on the largest possible scales, including those of biology and astronomy.
Molly Crockett - the human social mind
Joel Mokyr - historical economist on the Industrial Revolution
Nick Pinkston - digital manufacturing
Andy Shreve - nanoscience and novel complex materials
Discussants for the August 8, 2018 session include:
Eric Beinhocker, Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School & Santa Fe Institute
Eric Beinhocker is a Professor of Public Policy Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He is also the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University’s Oxford Martin School. INET Oxford is a research center devoted to applying leading-edge interdisciplinary approaches to economic theory and public policy practice. INET Oxford researchers are working on issues ranging from financial system stability, to innovation and growth, economic inequality, and environmental sustainability. Beinhocker is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to joining Oxford, Beinhocker had an 18-year career at McKinsey & Company where he was a partner and held leadership roles in McKinsey’s Strategy Practice, its Climate Change and Sustainability Practice, and the McKinsey Global Institute.
Doyne Farmer, Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School & Santa Fe Institute
Doyne Farmer's current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to the United Bank of Switzerland in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. During the eighties he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 70’s he built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.
Fotini Markopoulou, doppel
Fotini Markopoulou is a theoretical physicist interested in foundational mathematics and quantum mechanics. She was a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and was an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo. Markopoulou is also the co-founder of doppel, a wearable tech company that uses research in psychophysiology to create technology that changes how a user perceives, feels and behaves.
Steen Rasmussen, University of Southern Denmark & Santa Fe Institute
Steen Rasmussen's main scientific effort is to explore, understand and construct minimal living processes through bottom up assembly of protocells in the lab and to explore the relationships between living processes and evolutionary learning in different systems. Another line of research is to explore how living and intelligent technologies increasingly transform society and what it means to be human. Due to these activities he has frequently consulted on science and technology issues for the European Commission, the Danish Parliament, the German Reichstag, and the US Congress.
Johan Bollen – opinion dynamics
‡ Kate Crowford – artificial intelligence/robotics/ethics
‡ Drew Endy - synthetic biology
Carl Frey - economic history with focus on new technologies
Nick Hanauer – entrepreneur and civic activist
Ricardo Hausmann - economic development and policy
Klaus Lackner - carbon capture and sequestration
Lawrence Lessig – law, ethics and writer
‡ = invited as of April 22, not yet confirmed