Digital Transformation: Interview with Geoffrey West, Professor at Santa Fe Institute

Digital Transformation, A Project by Manuel Stagars

Conversations with visionaries, decision makers, technologists, leading scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and others around the world start a conversation about the global digital future, its most pressing challenges, and biggest opportunities.

[rickcoyote]

Thank you for this excellent film, Mr. Stagars. Dr. West is an extraordinary man.

[quinncunningham]

Really fantastic and much food for thought, it brings back memories of reading his book, Scale. As he and others have said, complexity science is science for the 21st century

[johnreidy]

Superb interview. As an occasional author of human evolution I agree, the next great "escalator" will need to be non-technological in nature. Societal dynamics and community by way of HGT or horizontal gene transfer perhaps?

[dtaylor]

even though the telephone can send a message just as fast as an email, this doesn’t mean that the internet’s impact on communication is the same as that of the telephone. for instance, social media facilitates much more social interaction than the telephone because it functions much more like a public square than it does sending letters.

[ericwickey]

These ideas are extremely illuminating. They have an echo in the Republic of Plato. Book 2, on the growth of cities.

[dtaylor]

the difference between the steam engine and the internet is that while the steam engine led to a more interconnected world, it required people to physically move around, in contrast, the internet can facilitate much more social interaction without requiring people to physically move.

[dtaylor]

he states that the infrastructure networks are space filling but this is not the case with online infrastructure. we will likely increase our social interaction in cyberspace which can increase exponentially without significantly taking up more physical space, and therefore our gains from innovation will not be consumed by the need to build more infrastructure.

[FrnnkEducation]

Most important information humans will ever study. And only 5 comments smfh

[dtaylor]

the rate of innovation seems like it won’t be able to keep up in the near future only if you assume that innovation will always come from human brains. but if we develop true artificial intelligence then the rate of innovation will likely always outpace the Malthusian Trap and thus avoid the finite time singularity. i like Prof West but he seems to be making the same mistake that Malthus made.