This movie describes at least five different ways in which Cybernetics can change the world for the better. The plot: An effort is made to try to sabotage a meeting of beautiful minds fearing the effect that knowledge of Cybernetics can have on both Christians and Muslims, and the world economic system. A 100% educational film to teach the history and uses of Cybernetics, as for instance to redesign many pathological organizations.

It has been called the third great revolution of 20th-century physics, after relativity and quantum theory. But how can something called chaos theory help you understand an orderly world? What practical things might it be good for? What, in fact, is chaos theory? "Chaos theory," according to Dr. Steven Strogatz, Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, "is the science of how things change." It describes the behavior of any system whose state evolves over time and whose behavior is sensitive to small changes in its initial conditions.

From its beginnings as a discipline nearly 150 years ago, economics rested on assumptions that don’t hold up when studied in the present day. The notion that our economic systems are in equilibrium, that they’re made of actors making simple rational and self-interested decisions with perfect knowledge of society— these ideas prove about as useful in the Information Age as Newton’s laws of motion are to quantum physicists. A novel paradigm for economics, borrowing insights from ecology and evolutionary biology, started to emerge at SFI in the late 1980s — one that treats our markets and technologies as systems out of balance, serving metabolic forces, made of agents with imperfect information and acting on fundamental uncertainty. This new complexity economics uses new tools and data sets to shed light on puzzles standard economics couldn’t answer — like why the economy grows, how sudden and cascading crashes happen, why some companies and cities lock in permanent competitive advantages, and how technology evolves. And complexity economics offers insights back to biology, providing a new lens through which to understand the vastly intricate exchanges on which human life depends.
This week’s guest is W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Visiting Researcher at Xerox PARC. In this first part of a two-episode conversation, we discuss the heady early days when complex systems science took on economics, and how biology provided a new paradigm for understanding our financial and technological systems. Tune in next week for part two...

Ai's are diagnosing cancer, driving cars, acting as police agents, and it seems that judging their decisions are not as easy as we first think.

Are we more forgiving when a machine makes a mistake? Would you trust an AI to be in charge?

Let's find out with Cesar A. Hidalgo, the mastermind of collective learning from MIT!

MIT's Alex 'Sandy' Pentland explains ‘social physics’ - the analysis of human interactions to improve communities.

Is complexity a Science? Is it a possibly useful new way of engineering? In this video narrated by Maxi San Miguel it will be argued that Complexity is a new way of thinking necessary for a scientific renaissance that can transform society.

In this episode, Haley talks with Albert-László Barabási. Barabasi is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research. He is also a renowned author of several books including his newly released book, The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success, which he discusses in-depth during his interview. Barabási shares key takeaways and important lessons from his new book and research on the science of success. He also gives us insights from his journey of learning about and pioneering the young field of network science and shares his hopes for the future of this field.

The first computers were not invented by humans but by nature. The mantra of complexity science — that complexity arises from interactions among simple components — is wrong. The parts—whether cells, neurons, bees, or humans—are often wonderfully complex themselves but operate under many constraints and are prone to failure and myopia and, consequently, errors in information processing that can lead to a profound misunderstanding of the nature of reality. In this public lecture, Jessica Flack will discuss how nature computes. She will build on the above points to argue collective computation—computation by the parts together—evolved as a solution to imperfect information processing, sometimes resulting in recovery of the “ground truth out there in the world” and sometimes resulting in a collectively constructed reality that takes on a life and meaning of its own. Flack will also discuss how an understanding of computation in nature challenges us to broaden our understanding of computation’s theoretical foundations.


All things are words belonging to that language
In which Someone or Something, night and day,
Writes down the infinite babble that is, per se,
The history of the world. And in that hodgepodge
Both Rome and Carthage, he and you and I,
My life that I don’t grasp, this painful load
Of being riddle, randomness, or code,
And all of Babel’s gibberish stream by.
—Jorge Luis Borges, two stanzas from his poem, The Compass


Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and director of its Collective Computation Group. Flack’s interests include the role of collective computation in the origins of biological space and time, coarse-graining in nature, causality, and robustness.

The noted mathematician and author Steven Strogatz explains why he wanted to share intimate conversations with leading researchers from diverse fields in his new Quanta Magazine podcast.

This is a quick tour through Ashby's Introduction to Cybernetics. Leads to the Cybernetic paradigm.

Far-reaching conversations with a worldwide network of scientists and mathematicians, philosophers and artists developing new frameworks to explain our universe's deepest mysteries. Join host Michael Garfield at the Santa Fe Institute each week to learn about your world and the people who have dedicated their lives to exploring its emergent order: their stories, research, and insights…

Alice Eldridge - Learning to listen

In this podcast, the author of Nudge, Professor Cass Sunstein, presents a guide for anyone who wishes to fuel – or block – transformative social change.

Sometimes all it takes to change society is for one person to decide they will no longer remain silent. A child announces that the emperor has no clothes. A woman tweets, #MeToo. Suddenly, a taboo collapses for the better – or for the worse. Once white nationalism was kept out of the mainstream media and politics; now it is in the White House. Social movements can begin when rage is released – or quietly, with millions of people nudged into making different decisions until, without noticing, we live with a new status quo.

Bringing together behavioural economics, psychology, politics and law, Cass Sunstein and LBC Presenter Matthew Stadlen explore Cass’s career new science of social movements. What can we as individuals do to harness the power of social movements to make change happen? What kinds of interventions make a difference, and what kind lead to bans and mandates? How can we overcome social division, cause transformative cascades, and employ political parties as a force for good?

The Internet is a totally internet phenomenon. In this talk, Dr Taha Yasseri gives answers to burning internet questions. Are users biased like an English tea merchant? Why do we care more about some events and not about others? And for how long do we care? He presents research findings on collective memory on the internet, as well as on the threshold of death toll that attracts our attention and empathy when it comes to social media. Although the interned is constantly criticized as being a threat to our democracy, he reminds us that it is a place of cooperation, a land that has the power to unite us, not divide us.

In this episode, Haley interviews research professor and leader of the Self-Organizing Systems Lab at UNAM, Carlos Gershenson. Gershenson discusses findings from his book, Complexity: 5 Questions, which is comprised of “interview style contributions by leading figures in the field of complexity”. He also shares his own perspectives on the past, present and future of complexity science, as well as how philosophy plays a role in the emergence of science.