Conversations · First Principles First

Conversations on the Transition

Long-form interviews with the scientists, builders and institutionalists whose work bears on the shift from a directionless model of the world to one in which agency, adaptation and increasing complexity can be studied directly.

The new series

Raising the level of the conversation.

Most interview series about artificial intelligence argue about capability. This one is about the underlying model of the world that capability arguments quietly assume. Episodes are released as they are recorded.

Strand one
The physics of living systems
Free energy, active inference, Markov blankets, and the formal treatment of what it means for a system to hold a boundary and act on its own behalf.
Strand two
Agentic nature
Directionality and problem-solving in biology, and what follows once agency is treated as a property of material systems rather than an achievement of minds.
Strand three
Institutions that adapt
Governance, markets and democratic practice read as adaptive systems, and what it takes for them to update at the speed their environment now moves.
Strand four
Machine intelligence, honestly
What the current systems are and are not, assessed against a formal account of agency rather than against benchmarks built to be passed.

To suggest a guest or propose a conversation, get in touch.

Archive

Earlier conversations.

The back catalogue, including the exchanges on free energy, agentic biology and epochal change out of which the framework was built. Episode listings are being migrated here.

Read the framework →