All day
Developing an alternative vision for our future.
The widening gap between accelerating technological advancements (“physical technologies”) and lagging cultural structures and institutions (“social technologies”) is causing a variety of complex societal challenges, including the rise of populism, the erosion of the collective perception of objective facts, and increasing inequality. There is a sense of urgency to understand the root causes of these disturbing trends and to offer feasible alternative visions of cultural and technological change that can take us in a better direction.
There will be a two-week scientific workshop on this topic from July 30 through August 10. Two days of the workshop, August 1 and August 8, will be open to practitioners from our applied complexity community and invited guests. Although the broad topics discussed on both days will be similar, the individual participants will vary. Discussants involved on August 1 can be found here. Discussants involved on August 8 can be found here.
Organizing Researchers
Eric Beinhocker is the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. INET Oxford is a research centre devoted to applying leading-edge interdisciplinary approaches to economic theory and public policy practice. He 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 is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His 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.
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 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 is a physicist mainly working in the areas of artificial life and complex systems. He is currently a professor in physics and a center director at University of Southern Denmark as well as an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He spent 20 years as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the last five as a leader of the Self-Organized Systems team. His main scientific effort over the last ten years has been to explore, understand and construct a transition from nonliving to living materials.
Registration is open to SFI Applied Complexity Network members and invited guests only. Please contact action@santafe.edu for registration information or to learn how to become a Santa Fe Institute Applied Complexity Network member.