As a careful study of the world, science is reflective and reactive — it constrains our flights of fancy, anchors us in hard-won fact. By contrast, science fiction is a speculative world-building exercise that guides imagination and foresight by marrying the known with the unknown. The field is vast; some sci-fi writers pay less tribute to the line between the possible and the impossible. Others, though, adopt a far more sober tactic and write “hard” sci fi that does its best to stay within the limits of our current paradigm while rooting visions of the future that can grow beyond and beckon us into a bigger, more adventurous reality.

The question we might ask, though, is: which one is which? Our bounded rationality, our sense for what is plausible, is totally dependent on our personal life histories, cultural conditioning, information diet, and social network biases. One person’s linear projections seem too conservative; another person’s exponential change seems like a fantasy. If we can say one thing about our complex world, it might be that it always has, and always will, defy our expectations…

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on Complexity, we join up with Caitlin McShea and the InterPlanetary Project’s Alien Crash Site podcast for a wild discussion with SFI Trustee, technologist, and philosopher Gary Bengier about his science fiction novel Unfettered Journey. This book takes readers forward more than a century into a highly automated, highly-stratified post-climate-change world in which our protaganist defies the rigid norms of his society to follow fundamental questions about mind, life, purpose, meaning, consciousness, and truth. It is a perfect backdrop to our conversation on the role of complex systems science in our understanding of both present-day society and the futures that may, or may never, come to pass…

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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Go Deeper With These Related Media

Science:
Paul Smaldino: The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societies
Geoffrey West: Scale
Bob May: Will a Large Complex System be Stable?
Melanie Mitchell: The Collapse of Artificial Intelligence
Melanie Mitchell: On Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in AI
Elisa Heinrich Mora et al.: Scaling of Urban Income Inequality in the United States
SFI ACtioN Climate Change Seminar: Complexity of Sustainability
Raissa D’Souza: The Collapse of Networks
David Krakauer: Preventative Citizen-Based Medicine
Simon DeDeo & Elizabeth Hobson: From equality to hierarchy
Peter Turchin: The Double Helix of Inequality and Well-Being

Speculative Fiction:
2019 IPFest World Building Panel Discussion with Rebecca Roanhorse, James S.A. Correy, and Cris Moore
Robin Hanson: Age of Em
Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
Peter Watts: Blindsight
Isaac Asimov: Foundation
The Strugatsky Brothers: Roadside Picnic

Podcast Episodes:
Complexity 10: Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation
Complexity 14: W. Brian Arthur (Part 2) on The Future of The Economy
Complexity 19: David Kinney on the Philosophy of Science
Complexity 21: Melanie Mitchell on Artificial Intelligence: What We Still Don't Know
Complexity 22: Nicole Creanza on Cultural Evolution in Humans & Songbirds
Complexity 36: Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)
Complexity 51: Cris Moore on Algorithmic Justice & The Physics of Inference
The Jim Rutt Show 152: Gary Bengier on Hard Sci-Fi Futures