Recent Essays
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The Bizarre Bazaar: Complex Agentic Ecosystems and the Limits of Predictability
For millennia, humans understood Nature through paradigms rooted in divine order and intervention. When Sir Isaac Newton published The Principia, a new paradigm of empirical and scientific inquiry began to replace the old. With it came a worldview grounded in certainty and determinism, one later challenged by Quantum Theory and probabilistic approaches such as…
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Perceiving New Paradigms: Innovation Premia in Technological Revolutions
Conceptual paradigms do not progress in a linear and orderly fashion. Scientific paradigm shifts occur with punctuated regularity, as do the techno-economic paradigm changes brought about by technological revolutions. Carlota Perez provides a framework that describes how technological revolutions diffuse through the economic, institutional, and technological spheres of the incumbent techno-economic paradigm. Financial capital…
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Machina Cogitans: The Promethean Fire Yet Smoulders
Many ancient cultures share fire myths that frame fire as the foundational tool that allowed humans to prosper yet also carries the potential for destruction, a metaphor for humanity leaving the Savanna for civilization. Mumford suggests language was the first tool that allowed all others to be conceived, yet leaves no trace in the…