Could AI ever truly "understand"?

ChatGPT knows how to use the word “tickle” in a sentence but it cannot feel the sensation. Can it then be said to understand the meaning of the word tickle the same way we humans do? In a paper for PNAS, SFI researchers Melanie Mitchell and David C. Krakauer survey the ongoing debate in which AI researchers are teasing apart whether Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM understand language in any humanlike sense.

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SFI Press reissues Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information

The specter of information is haunting the sciences. With these words, Wojciech H. Zurek invited fellow scientists to attend the 1989 Santa Fe Institute workshop on which the proceedings volume Complexity, Entropy & the Physics of Information was based. In a two-volume reprint, the SFI Press offers an affordable and accessible update to the original text, with a new preface from attendee Seth Lloyd that contextualizes the significance of this record of a meeting that marked the intersection of information, physics, complexity, and computation.

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Research News Brief: Economics in nouns and verbs

In the last 50 years, economic theory has come to be based almost solely on mathematics. This brings logical precision, but according to a new paper by SFI economist Brian Arthur, it restricts what economics can easily talk about.

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Three SFI faculty elected to AAAS

SFI External Professors Amos Golan, Matthew Jackson, and Doug Eriwn have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for 2022, the association announced on January 31, 2023.

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In Memoriam: Herb Gintis

Herb Gintis, who drew on a variety of disciplines to study human society, passed away on January 5, 2023, in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the age of 82. He had been an SFI External Professor since 2001 and was a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught since 1974.

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New Journal: Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence, a new online open-source journal, launched its inaugural issue this past fall. The editors hope the journal will help stimulate the discovery of the fundamental principles that underlie collective intelligence

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New Short Course & Symposium to explore first principles of collective intelligence

SFI will host a three-day Collective Intelligence Symposium & Short Course on June 20–23, 2023, focusing on foundational ideas like first principles to help establish a rigorous approach to the study of collective intelligence. The event will also leap into unexplored possibilities through a Radical Ideas competition. Applications are required for all participants, and the priority deadline is February 1, 2023.

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SFI Press publishes "Ex Machina: Coevolving Machines & the Origins of the Social Universe”

If we could rewind the tape of the Earth’s deep history back to the beginning and start the world anew — would social behavior arise yet again? In “Ex Machina,” John H. Miller introduces a methodology for exploring systems of adaptive, interacting, choice-making agents. Miller combines ideas from biology, computation, game theory, and the social sciences to simulate the evolution of social behavior.

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Kyle Harper joins SFI's Fractal Faculty

Kyle Harper, a Roman Historian at the University of Oklahoma, uses the natural sciences to reshape his field. Harper joined SFI as a member of the Fractal Faculty in the fall of 2022.

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Study: Why are sustainable practices often elusive?

For at least 200,000 years, humans have been trying to understand their environments and adapt to them. At times, we have succeeded; often, we have not. In a new study, SFI's Stefani Crabtree, Jennifer Dunne, and others analyze how information flows from ecosystems to the societies inhabiting them.

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