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 a 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 & 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, Yale University
Molly Crockett is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University, where she is director of the Crockett Lab. Her team takes as a starting point Blaise Pascal's description of human beings as “the glory and scum of the universe”. The Crockett Lab seeks to understand this paradox by studying the cognitive building blocks of human morality, including social learning, impression formation, empathy, moral judgment and decision-making. Their approach integrates methods and insights from social psychology, behavioral economics, computational neuroscience and philosophy. They use behavioral experiments, computational modeling, functional brain imaging and field studies to investigate the social mind.
Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University
Joel Mokyr conducts research on the economic history of Europe, and specializes in the period 1750-1914. His current research is concerned with the understanding of the economic and intellectual roots of technological progress and the growth of useful knowledge in European societies, as well as the impact that industrialization and economic progress have had on economic welfare. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society as well as the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the President of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. His latest book is A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy, published by Princeton University Press in 2016.
Nick Pinkston, Plethora
Nick is the founder of Plethora, a rapid manufacturing service with tools that let you design for manufacturability inside your CAD software, and then let you make them using a flexible manufacturing system. Previously, Nick started CloudFab: the world's first manufacturing-as-a-service API, and also HackPittsburgh: a collective workshop for the makers of Pittsburgh. Nick's mission is to make developing hardware as easy software through better tools. He also organizes the SF Hardware Startup Meetup and is heavily involved in building the hardware movement broadly.
Andy Shreve, University of New Mexico
Andy Shreve is a professor at the University of New Mexico and the Director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering. Andy holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Cornell University. Following postdoctoral training, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 18 years and served in various scientific and technical leadership positions, most recently within the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), a Department of Energy (DOE) Nanoscience Research Center. His research interests include development and applications of thin-film nanostructured self-assembled materials and biomimetic membrane architectures, self-assembled materials, bio-inspired materials, materials for alternative energy applications, biosensor technology, spectroscopic studies of protein structure and dynamics, applications of spectroscopic techniques to the study of electron and energy transfer processes, theory of electron and energy transfer, experimental and theoretical development of spectroscopies.
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, Indiana University
Johan Bollen is a professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by the NSF, DARPA, IARPA, EDA, NASA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
‡ Kate Crowford, Microsoft & AI Now Research Institute
Kate Crawford is leading researcher, academic, and author who has spent the last decade studying the social implications of data systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She is a Distinguished Research Professor at New York University, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and a Visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab. Her recent publications address data bias and fairness, social impacts of artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and due process, and algorithmic accountability and transparency. Kate is the co-founder and co-director of the AI Now Research Institute, along with Meredith Whittaker: a new interdisciplinary research center dedicated to studying the social impacts of artificial intelligence. In July 2016, she co-chaired the Obama White House symposium on the impacts of AI in the near term. The symposium addressed artificial intelligence across four domains: labor, health, social inequality, and ethics.
‡ Drew Endy, Stanford University & BioBricks Foundation
Drew Endy is a member of the bioengineering faculty at Stanford University and BioBricks Foundation president (biobricks.org). His research teams pioneered amplifying genetic logic, rewritable DNA data storage, reliably-reuseable standard biological parts, and genome refactoring. Drew helped launch the new undergraduate majors in bioengineering at both MIT and Stanford; he also co-founded the iGEM competition, a global genetic engineering “olympics” now engaging over 6,000 students annually (igem.org). In 2013 the White House recognized Drew for his work on open-source biotechnology and, more recently, he received an honorary doctorate from the Technische Universiteit Delft. Drew has served on the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the Committee on Science, Technology, & Law; he currently serves on the World Health Organization’s Smallpox Advisory Committee. Drew lives in Menlo Park, California with Christina Smolke (Stanford colleague & Antheia, Inc., CEO), their two boys, and two cats. Drew was a co-founder of Gen9, Inc., a DNA construction company; he returned to serve as a director while Gen9 was successfully acquired. Drew worked briefly with the Rapid Evaluation team at Google [X] and also served on the building project team for the Shriram Center at Stanford. He is a founding co-director of the NIST/Stanford Joint Initiative for Metrology in Biology (jimb.stanford.edu). Esquire magazine recognized Drew as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century.
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