Libsyn Directory

Roadmapping Science with Adam Marblestone [Idea Machines #26]

Idea Machines

Release Date: 04/20/2020

Speculative Technologies with Ben Reinhardt [Macroscience cross-post]

Idea Machines

Tim Hwang turns the tables and interviews me (Ben) about Speculative Technologies and research management.

Industrial Research with Peter van Hardenberg [Idea Machines #50]

Idea Machines

Peter van Hardenberg talks about Industrialists vs. Academics, Ink&Switch's evolution over time, the Hollywood Model, internal lab infrastructure, and more! Peter is the lab director and CEO of , a private, creator oriented, computing research lab. References (and their many publications) Transcript Peter Van Hardenberg [00:01:21] Ben: Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Peter van Hardenbergh. Peter is the lab director and CEO of Inkin switch. Private creator oriented, competing research lab. I talked to Adam Wiggins, one of inkind switches founders, [00:01:35] way...

MACROSCIENCE with Tim Hwang [Idea Machines #49]

Idea Machines

A conversation with Tim Hwang about historical simulations, the interaction of policy and science, analogies between research ecosystems and the economy, and so much more. Topics Historical Simulations Macroscience Macro-metrics for science Long science The interaction between science and policy Creative destruction in research “Regulation” for scientific markets Indicators for the health of a field or science as a whole “Metabolism of Science” Science rotation programs Clock speeds of Regulation vs Clock Speeds of Technology References Transcript [00:02:02] Ben:...

Idea Machines with Nadia Asparouhova [Idea Machines #48]

Idea Machines

Nadia Asparouhova talks about idea machines on idea machines! Idea machines, of course, being her framework around societal organisms that turn ideas into outcomes. We also talk about the relationship between philanthropy and status, public goods and more. Nadia is a hard-to-categorize doer of many things: In the past, she spent many years exploring the funding, governance, and social dynamics of open source software, both writing a book about it called “” and putting those ideas into practice at GitHub, where she worked to improve the developer experience. She explored...

Institutional Experiments with Seemay Chou [Idea Machines #47]

Idea Machines

Seemay Chou talks about the process of building a new research organization, ticks, hiring and managing entrepreneurial scientists, non-model organisms, institutional experiments and a lot more! Seemay is the co-founder and CEO of — a research and development company focusing on underesearched areas in biology and specifically new organisms that haven't been traditionally studied in the lab. She’s also the co-founder of — a startup focused on harnessing molecules in tick saliva for skin therapies and was previously an assistant professor at UCSF. She has thought...

DARPA and Advanced Manufacturing with William Bonvillian [Idea Machines #46]

Idea Machines

William Bonvillian does a deep dive about his decades of research on how DARPA works and his more recent work on advanced manufacturing. William is a Lecturer at MIT and the Senior Director of Special Projects,at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning. Before joining MIT he spent almost two decades as a senior policy advisor for the US senate. He’s also published many papers and a detailed book exploring the DARPA model. Links Transcript [00:00:35] In this podcast, William Bonvillian, and I do a deep dive about his decades of research about how DARPA works and his more recent work...

Philanthropically Funding the Foundation of Fields with Adam Falk [Idea Machines #45]

Idea Machines

In this conversation, Adam Falk and I talk about running research programs with impact over long timescales, creating new fields, philanthropic science funding, and so much more. Adam is the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which was started by the eponymous founder of General Motors and has been funding science and education efforts for almost nine decades. They’ve funded everything from iPython Notebooks to the Wikimedia foundation to an astronomical survey of the entire sky. If you’re like me, their name is familiar from the acknowledgement part of PBS...

Managing Mathematics with Semon Rezchikov [Idea Machines #44]

Idea Machines

In this conversation, Semon Rezchikov and I talk about what other disciplines can learn from mathematics, creating and cultivating collaborations, working at different levels of abstraction, and a lot more! Semon is currently a postdoc in mathematics at Harvard where he specializes in symplectic geometry. He has an amazing ability to go up and down the ladder of abstraction — doing extremely hardcore math while at the same time paying attention to *how* he’s doing that work and the broader institutional structures that it fits into. Semon is worth listening to both because he has great...

Scientific Irrationality with Michael Strevens [Idea Machines #43]

Idea Machines

Professor Michael Strevens discusses the line between scientific knowledge and everything else, the contrast between what scientists as people do and the formalized process of science, why Kuhn and Popper are both right and both wrong, and more.

Distributing Innovation with The VitaDAO Core Team [Idea Machines #42]

Idea Machines

A conversation with the VitaDAO core team. VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization — or DAO — that focuses on enabling and funding longevity research.

More Episodes

In this episode I talk to Adam Marblestone about technology roadmapping, scientific gems hidden in plain sight, and systematically exploring complex systems. Adam is currently a research scientist at Google DeepMind and in the past has been the chief strategy officer at a brain-computer interface company and did research on brain mapping with Ed Boyden and did his PhD with George Church. He has a repeated pattern of pushing the frontiers in one discipline after another - physics, biology, neuroscience, and now artificial intelligence. I wanted to talk to Adam not just because it’s fascinating when people are able to push the frontier in multiple disciplines but because he does it through a system he calls technological roadmapping.

Most of our discussion is framed around two of Adam’s works - a presentation about roadmapping biology and his primer on climate technology. The conversation stands on its own, but taking a glance at them will definitely enhance the context. Links below.

Key Takeaways

Technological roadmapping enables fields to escape local maxima
It might be possible to systematically break down complex technical disciplines into basic constraints in order to construct these roadmaps
Figuring out these constraints may also enable us to reboot stalled fields

Links

TOPICS