Podcast: Modern Complexity and the Cybernetic Future

Show notes:

In “Autopoiesis in Systems of People and Machines,” Peter Wang welcomes Paco Nathan. Paco is a Managing Partner at Derwen, Inc., a company that offers enterprise customers full-stack engineering for AI applications at scale, with an emphasis on open-source integrations. Paco forged a career in artificial intelligence when many people were skeptical of it and now boasts over 40 years of computer science experience.

Peter and Paco discuss histories and frameworks that are impacting today’s systems of people and machines. Paco touches on corporate law and how long ago, the concept of insurance allowed for the externalization of risk and corresponding enablement of capital ventures. Paco goes on to talk about autopoiesis, the Chilean Project Cybersyn and the significance of groupware, and the core of human intelligence.

Peter and Paco also discuss the increasing complexity of today’s world in which less and less is linear, which requires improved cognition for survival, and the cybernetic future.

Resources:

• “A Brief History Of Reinsurance” (David M. Holland)
• Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886)
• “Law as an Autopoietic System” (Gunther Teubner)
• Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela)
• Project Cybersyn
• “Understanding Computers and Cognition” (Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores)
• Macy Conferences, Norbert Wiener
• “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” (J.Y. Lettvin et al.)
• Social Systems (Niklas Luhmann)
• Dubberly Design (Paul Pangaro) (When Paco references Donoho Design, he means Dubberly Design.)
• René Thom
• “Corporate Metabolism” (Paco Nathan)

You can find a human-verified transcript of this episode here.

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