Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Frederick S. Pardee Visiting Professor Murray Gell-Mann introduces the concept of complexity and explains how a relatively large number of individual components interact to form regularities, which may come to form a complex system.
The conference discussants and participants analyze why transitions happen, and why they matter. Transitions are those wide-ranging changes in human organization and well being that can be convincingly attributed to a concerted set of choices that make the world that was significantly and recognizably different from the world that becomes.
The conference focused on scientific and technological advances in genetics, computer science and their convergence during the next 50-250 years. The participants were especially interested in directed evolution, the futures it allows, the shape of society in those futures, and the robustness of human nature against technological change at the level of individuals, groups and societies.