The 21st Century Question: Emergently Engineering the Future

SFI co-founder Murray Gell-Mann once quipped “Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.” The same kind of difficulty confronts societies, economies, polities, institutions, and distributed software technologies. The outstanding 21st century question is how do we understand and guide large-scale collectives? Emergent Engineering is the name we give to this pursuit.

Traditional engineering is relatively simple. Emergent engineering is fiendishly difficult.  Imagine how much harder designing a building, machine, or watch would be if their components could autonomously adapt and pursue their own objectives?

We face this challenge when tackling many of humanity's greatest challenges: ideological polarization, systemic poverty, climate change, running global organizations, hyper-inflation, technological takeover, and  pandemics. All of these  motivate us to engineer outcomes in systems that are collectively based on adaptive agents.

In November 2022, our Annual Applied Complexity Network and Board of Trustees Symposium continued to build on a series of prior ACtioN meetings and ongoing SFI research to take a broad survey of Emergent Engineering applied to the 21st Century’s most challenging problems, which are potentially all variants of a single dilemma.

This is a private meeting, open to SFI researchers, Trustees, ACtioN members, and Complexity Society donors. To learn more about becoming an ACtioN member or Complexity Society donor, please contact action@santafe.edu.