With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire --- it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big data brings us to interesting times. We're going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human socie

ALEX 'SANDY' PENTLAND is a pioneer in big data, computational social science, mobile and health systems, and technology for developing countries. He is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world and was named by Forbes as one of the world's seven most powerful data scientists. He currently directs the 

Sandy Pentland's Edge Bio Page

[24:08 minutes]

REINVENTING SOCIETY IN THE WAKE OF BIG DATA

[SANDY PENTLAND:] Recently I seem to have become MIT's Big Data guy, with people like Tim O'Reilly and "Forbes" calling me one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world. I'm not sure what all of that means, but I have a distinctive view about Big Data, so maybe it is something that people want to hear.

I believe that the power of Big Data is that it is information about people's behavior instead of information about their beliefs. It's about the behavior of customers, employees, and prospects for your new business. It's not about the things you post on Facebook, and it's not about your searches on Google, which is what most people think about, and it's not data from internal company processes and RFIDs. This sort of Big Data comes from things like location data off of your cell phone or credit card, it's the little data breadcrumbs that you leave behind you as you move around in the world.

We have always had this tension of understanding the world, at small spatial scales or individual scales, and large macro scales. In the past when we looked at macro scales, at least when it comes to many social phenomena, we aggregated everything. Our idea of macro is, by an accident of history, a synonym of aggregate, a mass in which everything is added up and in which individuality is lost. What data at high spatial resolution, temporal resolution and typological resolution is allowing us to do, is to see the big picture without losing the individuality inside it.

CESAR HIDALGO is an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Center for International Development.  His work focuses on improving the understanding of systems by using and developing concepts of complexity, evolution, and network science. He is also the founder and driving force behind Cambridge Nights, a series of online video interviews with academics who discuss the way in which they view the world.

Cesar Hidalgo's Edge Bio Page

[44:08 minutes]

WHAT IS VALUE? WHAT IS MONEY?

[CESAR HIDALGO:] I've been thinking about a variety of things. One of the things that I come across a lot is this idea of big data, or the use of data. Whether it's just hype, or whether it's going to be something deeper, something useful. There's a big promise on our newfound ability to collect large amounts of data and I can illustrate that through a few examples. I think that our ability to collect data  is opening an increase in resolution that is unprecedented. We are able to see systems that we have looked at many times before. But we're able to see them in much more detail, and my belief is that increase in detail is not cosmetic.

One of the fundamental questions here is, is extinction a good thing? Is it "nature's way?" And if it's nature's way, who in the world says anyone should go about changing nature's way? If something was meant to go extinct, then who are we to screw around with it and bring it back? I don't think it's really nature's way. I think that the extinction that we've seen since man is 99.9 percent caused by man.

RYAN PHELAN is the Executive Director of Revive and Restore, a project within The Long Now Foundation, with a mission to provide deep ecological enrichment through extinct species revival.

Ryan Phelan's Edge Bio Page

[14:33 minutes]

REALITY CLUB: Jennifer Jacquet

[ ED. NOTE: The following conversation took place at the seventh annual Science Foo Camp (SciFoo),  hosted by Nature, Digital Science, O'Reilly Media, and Google, August 3 - 5, 2012, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Special thanks to Philip Campbell of Nature, Timo Hannay of Digital Science, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media ("Foo" stands for "friends of O'Reilly"), and Chris DiBona and Cat Allman of Google. —JB ]

TO BRING BACK THE EXTINCT

[RYAN PHELAN:] The big question that I'm asking right now is: If we could bring back an extinct species, should we? Could we? Should we? How does it benefit society? How does it advance the science? And the truth is, we're just at the beginning of trying to figure all this out. I got inspired really thinking about this through my involvement with George Church, and I've been on the periphery of an organization that he started called The Personal Genome Project. Over the last seven years I've been working primarily in personalized medicine, keeping my eye on the application of genomic medicine in different areas, and the growth of genomics and the shockingly drop in the sequencing price, and the cost of sequencing, and what that means to all different areas of science.

One thing led to another and we started talking with George about what it would mean if we could actually apply this towards the de-extinction of species. It turns out, of course, that in George's lab he's pioneering in all these methods. Right now, George's approach of basically editing the genome starts to make the concept of bringing something back really plausible.

Think about it this way: previously we thought that our universe was like a spherical balloon. In the new picture, it's like a balloon producing balloons, producing balloons. This is a big fractal. The Greeks were thinking about our universe as an ideal sphere, because this was the best image they had at their disposal. The 20th century idea is a fractal, the beauty of a fractal. Now, you have these fractals. We ask, how many different types of these elements of fractals are there, which are irreducible to each other? And the number will be exponentially large, and in the simplest models it is about 10 to the degree 10, to the degree 10, to the degree 7. It actually may be much more than that, even though nobody can see all of these universes at once.

ANDREI LINDE, a Russian-American theoretical physicist and professor of Physics at Stanford University, is the father of "eternal chaotic inflation", one of the varieties of the inflationary multiverse theory, which proposes that the universe may consist of many universes with different properties. He is an inaugural winner of the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, awarded by the Milner Foundation. In 2002, he was awarded the Dirac Medal, along with Alan Guth of MIT and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.

Andrei Linde's Edge Bio Page

[14:55 minutes]

A BALLOON PRODUCING BALLOONS, PRODUCING BALLOONS: A BIG FRACTAL 

 [ANDREI LINDE:] I should probably start by explaining what happened during the last 30 years in cosmology. This story will begin with very old news, the creation of inflationary theory. Then we will talk about the relatively recent developments, when inflation became a part of the theory of inflationary multiverse and string theory landscape. Then—what we expect in the future.

It's one thing to say that the way in which we study our object of inquiry, namely humans, is undergoing profound change, as I think it is. The social sciences are indeed changing. But the next question is: is the object of inquiry also undergoing profound change? It's not just how we study it that's changing, which it is. The question is: is the thing itself, our humanity, also changing?

NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS is a Physician and Social Scientist, Harvard University; Coauthor (with James Fowler) of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

Nicholas A. Chrsitakis's Edge Bio Page
 

[40:59 minutes]

A NEW KIND OF SOCIAL SCIENCE FOR THE 21st CENTURY

[NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS:] In the 20^th century, there was a tremendous expectation, or appreciation, for the role that the biological and the physical sciences could play in improving human welfare and human affairs. We had everything from the discovery of nuclear power to plastics to, in biology, the discovery of new drugs, beginning with penicillin (which is one of the gigantic feats of human ingenuity ever). We had this phenomenal progress that was made in the sciences, in the physical and the biological sciences.

In the 21^st century, the social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare. The advances that we have made and will be making, especially in understanding human behavior and its very deep origins, will be translated into interventions of diverse sorts that will have a much bigger impact in terms of improving human welfare than many of the prior examples that I gave. 

The advantage of neuroscience is being able to look under the hood and see the mechanisms that actually create the thoughts and the behaviors that create and perpetuate conflict. Seems like it ought to be useful. That's the question that I'm asking myself right now, can science in general, or neuroscience in particular, be used to understand what drives conflict, what prevents reconciliation, why some interventions work for some people some of the time, and how to make and evaluate better ones.

REBECCA SAXE is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She is also an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is known for her research on the neural basis of social cognition.

Rebecca Saxe's Edge Bio Page

[32:58 minutes]

IMAGING CONFLICT RESOLUTION

[REBECCA SAXE:] One of the questions I'm asking myself from my work is the question I've always been asking myself: how is it going to be useful? I have an idea for how the kind of work I do could be useful, but I'm not at all sure this is possible, or possible in my lifetime. The idea has a big version and a little version. The big version has to do with self-knowledge and understanding ourselves. The big idea is that neuroscience is a kind of self-knowledge. It's a way of understanding our minds and our behaviors. If we get it right, if we really come to understand our brains, we will understand ourselves, we will be better at predicting our behaviors in contexts and in ways that really matter. In trying to run a society, you need to know how the elements of it would work, just as much as to run a machine you need to know how the physical elements work. 

Our society is built of a bunch of minds trying to work together. It seems like having better, more scientific understanding of the mind is the only possible way to have a better functioning society. That's the big idea, which seems quite ludicrous. Then the question is to try to work it out in an example. The example is almost as ludicrous. The example I'm working on right now is conflict and conflict resolution: how to make groups of people that are suspicious of one another and on the brink of war with one another more tolerant, more accepting, more forgiving, and more capable of working together. There are a bunch of ways that the kind of neuroscience I've done could help in that context. 

(click to expand)

Ginevra Elkann e Carlo Antonelli
hanno il piacere di invitarla all'
Edge Dinner 
in onore di John Brockman, J. Craig Venter e Brian Eno 
martedì 10 luglio
ore 19.30 aperitivo
ore 20.30 cena
Ristorante Del Cambio – Piazza Carignano, 2  – Torino

[34:16 minutes]

Introduction
by John Brockman

It was a perfect trifecta of invitations. 

1. An invitation from Craig Venter to join him in Dublin for "one of the landmark events of 20th Century science" in which he had been asked, to celebrate and reinterpret for the 21st Century Erwin Schrödinger's seminal lecture, entitled "What is Life?"delivered in 1943 at Trinity College, Dublin. The then Prime Minister, Éamon de Valera, attended the lecture along with his cabinet.

Venter, at the forefront of recent advances in genetics and synthetic biology, was asked to reconsider the fundamental question posed by Schrödinger 70 years ago. Would I join him for the lecture in Examination Hall, Trinity College, and Dublin on Thursday, July 12th? Having been on the road with Venter in Europe and elsewhere, I didn't hesitate. "Maybe", I replied.

2. "I'm a deity in Torino", said a bemused Brian Eno. The artist-musician was talking about expectations for his new exhibition, an installation of clouds of music at the Royal Palace in Venaria Reale,  just outside Turin, one of Italy's magnificent public places.  "When I gave the public lecture," Eno said, "thousands of people wanted to get in.Eno is one of the most interesting intellectuals I know, is and always worth my time, so spending a couple of days with him in Italy,  was an attractive proposition. We had recently collaborated on an Edge dinner at his London studio in Notting Hill. Since then, I learned some more about Eno's background in music and art when I happened to watch a documentary about U2's early days in Germany. In it, Bono explains that he, and many musicians in his world, started as artists, and Eno was their teacher. 

3. "Yes, you should go to Torino", said the curator and Edge collaborator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of London's Serpentine Gallery. "It is very glamorous. And Edge has a big following there. Whatever Ginevra has in mind, it will be elegant". He was talking about Ginevra Elkann, a film producer, as well as President of Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, the modern museum that houses part of her grandparent's permanent collection which was designed for the Agnelli family by the architect Renzo Piano. Perched on the roof of the gigantic building that once housed the Fiat plant in Turin, the museum is surrounded by a race track for testing the automobiles manufactured for Fiat and Ferrari by Elkann's late grandfather, Gianni Agnelli, the biggest industrialist in Italian history. The museum, in addition to its permanent collection, is primarily devoted to exhibits of personal collections of interesting people from the artist Damian Hirst, to the dealer Bruno Bischofberger, to Jean Pigozzi, the owner of the largest collection of African art and a long-time Edgie.

It was at the DLD Conference in Munich last January that I met Elkann and Carlo Antonelli, editor-in-chief of the Italian edition of Wired. "Come to Torino," they said. We'll host an Edge evening, an Edge dinner. "Everyone" will come, not just from Torino, but from Rome and from Milan as well.

So, I told Venter I would go to Dublin to hear his talk if he would come to Turin with me and do a trial run at an Edge dinner two days prior. Eno agreed to stay on for the event. Elkann and Antonelli created a marvelous ambience of people and place that made for a memorable event, particularly due to Venter's provocative talk on new developments in synthetic genomics research, which set the stage for his historic lecture in Dublin later in the week.

—JB

Introduction
by John Brockman

Several weeks ago, I received the following message from Craig Venter:

"John,  

"I would like to extend an invitation for you to join me in Dublin, Ireland the week of July 10 during which one of the landmark events of 20th Century science will be celebrated and reinterpreted for the 21st Century as part of the Science in the City program of Euroscience Open Forum 2012 (ESOF 2012). This unique event will connect an important episode in Ireland's scientific heritage with the frontier of contemporary research.  

"In February 1943 one of the most distinguished scientists of the 20th Century, Erwin Schrödinger, delivered a seminal lecture, entitled 'What is Life?', under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, in Trinity College, Dublin. The then Prime Minister, Éamon de Valera, attended the lecture and an account of it featured in the 5 April 1943, issue of Time magazine.

"The lecture presented far-sighted ideas on how hereditary information could be encoded in a chemical structure (aperiodic crystal) in living cells. Schrödinger's book (1944) of the same title is considered to be a scientific classic. The book was cited by Crick and Watson as one of the inspirations which ultimately led them to unravel the structure of DNA in 1953, a breakthrough which won them the Nobel prize. Recent advances in genetics and synthetic biology mean that it is now timely to reconsider the fundamental question posed by Schrödinger 70 years ago. I have been asked to revisit Schrödinger's question and will do so in a lecture entitled "What is Life? A 21st century perspective"; on the evening of Thursday, July 12 at the Examination Hall in Trinity College Dublin."  

Never one to turn down an interesting invitation, I was able to organize an interesting week beginning with an Edge Dinner in Turin, in honor of Venter, Brian Eno and myself, where Venter, in an after-dinner talk, began to publicly present some of the new ideas he would flesh out in his Dublin talk.

Then on to Dublin, where I sat in the front row at Examination Hall next to Jim Watson and Irish Prime Minister (the "Taoiseach) Enda Kenny for Venter's  lecture. At it's conclusion, the two legendary scientists, Watson and Venter, shook hands on stage, as Watson congratulated Venter  for "a beautiful lecture". Schrödinger to Watson to Venter: It was an historic moment.

Listen and watch carefully. 

—JB

[55:14 minutes]

There's a new kind of socio-inspired technology coming up, now. Society has many wonderful self-organization mechanisms that we can learn from, such as trust, reputation, culture. If we can learn how to implement that in our technological system, that is worth a lot of money; billions of dollars, actually. We think this is the next step after bio-inspired technology.

PROFESSOR DIRK HELBING is Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation, at ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the Scientific Coordinator of the FuturICT Flagship Proposal.

Dirk Helbing's Edge Bio Page

[42:54 minutes]

A NEW KIND OF SOCIO-INSPIRED TECHNOLOGY

[DIRK HELBING:] People are sometimes asking me what would we do if we had one billion euro for research. We have been thinking about that, actually, for a while. We thought we know so much about our universe and about our physical world, but we don't understand all the problems on earth, so we should really turn around this man on the moon mission and basically take the shuttle down to the earth in order to see what is going on there. The big unexplored continent in science is actually social science, so we really need to understand much better the principles that make our society work well, and socially interactive systems.

Our future information society will be characterized by computers that behave like humans in many respects. In ten years from now, we will have computers as powerful as our brain, and that will really fundamentally change society. Many professional jobs will be done much better by computers. How will that change society? How will that change business? What impacts does that have for science, actually?