All day
What will the complex world look like in 2100? There has never been a time when an understanding of the scope and limits of individual and collective adaptation has been more important. Rapid changes in technology, society, urbanization, the climate, the economy, and education are all challenging the established order and the effectiveness of our current models and expertise.
The Santa Fe Institute, working with its resident and Boston-area faculty and selective local experts, will investigate the range of ways in which the new sciences of complexity might help us better understand the world in which we live and the directions in which the world is evolving.
Some of the areas we aim to explore include:
1. Managing rates of change and developing new mechanisms for dealing with uncertainty over both short and long time scales.
2. Exploring the operating principles of hybrid societies–machine/human interactions.
3. Considering the future of large scale collaborations in a densely connected human population.
4. Speculating about possible Earth futures, including those beyond our atmosphere, into the ocean and into near-Earth orbit.
On the first day of this workshop, a group of 12 – 15 leading scholars with expertise in fields as diverse as urban systems, climate, intelligence, health and global networks will meet privately and discuss their current research and consider which obstacles they would need to overcome to achieve a successful research trajectory over the next 80 years - What kind of data sets would they need? What kind of computational platforms would be necessary? What is limiting their science now? What might be achieved if those limitations could be overcome?
On day two, researchers will form panels with practitioner discussants. These panels will report highlights of the previous day’s discussions to ACtioN members and select guests. The discussants will initiate and lead the room-wide conversation to explore how the researchers' insights might impact practitioners today.