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Sam Arbesman

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27
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2017-10-18
most recent
2017-10-18
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1
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podcast

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  1. “I guess I might say the ability to kind of move from one topic to another throughout the course of the day because I end up being involved in huge number of different areas. But if I'm really honest with myself, I'm interested in so many different topics that it actually ends up energizing me rather than exhausting me. So it's hard, but I love it and I wouldn't have it in any other way.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, I love Jason Kotky's Kotkey.org. It's this cornucopia of science, tech, typography, humanities, and wonder about the world. It's awesome and I love it. I'm also a big fan of Tyler Cowan and Alex Tabrock's blog, Marginal Revolution, which is amazing.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So I have a lot of books I like. I would certainly say one of my favorite books is actually The Baroque cycle, which is, I guess, not quite a single book. It's a trilogy by Neil Stevenson. It's this great story about the scientific revolution, the nature of money, incipient globalization, beginnings of technological progress. And it's essentially like it is the quintessential nerd fiction. It's awesome. And then as a bonus, another more recent trilogy. I'd also recommend the three-body problem trilogy by Liu Xiin. And then if we're going to go in nonfiction realm, I love the book Immortality by Stephen Cave.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, when I'm working on a book, this is the ideal writing process. So, the ideal writing process involves probably a couple hours in the morning trying to actually generate just a certain amount of raw number of words, and then the rest of the day when I'm kind of in writing mode, either doing research, doing some editing, or kind of like lightly thinking about it because you actually can't write intensely for many, many hours during the day. You burn out. So you need to kind of have that balance.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, and so I'm certainly interested in a lot and definitely one that I'm excited for is computational criterivity. I think it's going to be incredibly transformative, as I've mentioned. But another technology that I'm excited about currently is autonomous vehicles, both on personal level. I don't particularly enjoy driving, but I also think that there are some deeply exciting transformations for society in store when humans no longer need to drive. It's just not, oh, we don't need to drive. It's suddenly there's implications for rethinking urban design, as well as things related to public health. So I think it actually can be incredibly transformative.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “While there might be certain similarities, I think frontier tech overall, and it's really broad and diffuse space. And so in many ways, I'm almost hesitant to group it all under kind of that umbrella term. And because the knowledge you need to do something, let's say, related to drones might be very different from something related to biology. And so ultimately, it really comes down to recognizing that there are certain wells of knowledge that you have to draw from any sort of technical area. And just make sure that you're aware of that knowledge and how best to navigate that specific space.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yes, I do think so. As long as we're really just not stepping too naively from one domain to another, and we recognize essentially both the promise and perils of analogizing from one complex system to another. So as long as we do this with open eyes, I think we'll be fine, but you really just have to make sure that you are grappling with the complexity of these technologies.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Complexity and high dimensional data. And a lot of this nonlinear subtlety. And so what this sometimes means is that you don't necessarily entirely understand how a drug works initially, but that's okay because it's a complex system. And so what this requires is iteratively understanding, slowly but surely, as opposed to immediately and completely figuring out the mechanisms because at base, and because you have this assumption that like, oh, it's code and therefore should be simple. And so you have to kind of really grapple with the complexity. So I think there's a lot of power in analogizing from biology to computer science and technology, but there are also a lot of perils and we have to be very mindful of that kind of thing.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So I think in our rush to import ideas from computer science, data storage or other technological concepts, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that biological systems, they're different in a very important way, which is they are massively and often non-intuitively complex. So biological systems, they've evolved over millions of years. They might be much messier and much more complex than an engineer or computer scientist might expect. There's actually this great XKCD comic highlighting this. There's this engineer type. He's arguing that biology should be simple because DNA is just source code. Of course, it's not. In engineered systems, they could be orders of magnitude much, much simpler than biological ones. And so when we apply ideas from computer science to biology, we end up failing sometimes. So if we use traditional linear thinking to understand them, we have to take into account the massive nonlinear complexity of these things. And so, for example, one of Lux's investments recursion actually uses machine vision in order to find drug treatments for diseases, but it engages with the full force of biology.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “This sort of technological thinking to biological wetware. Of course, though, that's not quite the whole story. There's promise, but there are also a little bit of perils in doing this kind of thing as well.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “come to the integration of bio and So tell me first what's the promise of Face of such a complex system. So obviously there's some very intriguing similarities between biology and computer science. And I'm far from the first one to notice this kind of stuff. We have in biology, it's defined by a discrete language of symbols. So in this case, base pairs of DNA. Computers operate in bits. And in fact, it turns out actually there's some interesting historical analogies where the common roots, they're actually from around the same time period. So like 1953 saw the structure of DNA being elucidated. And that was also around the same time when a lot of early kinds of computing were developed, the kind of computing that we're familiar with. We're now able to store data in DNA, which has a certain similarity to computation. Modularity is a hallmark of both biology and technology. We've actually seen in the news recently this app that malware was encoded in DNA and then it compromised and took over machine involved in analyzing the sequences, which is pretty wild stuff. So there's a great potential for taking ideas from one domain and applying them to the other. We've seen this in many people from the CS and AI side applying.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think people will appreciate it. And I think we're going to see new and more exciting forms of creativity. But we already have this. I mean, when I was younger, people were on their computers. They had screensavers. We don't really need screensavers anymore. They're still around, but they've kind of fallen out of favor. But screensavers, in a sense, they were this beautiful computational creative act. But they were incredibly generative and algorithmic where you didn't really know exactly what the screensaver was going to look like from moment to moment. And so there was this combination of, oh, it's this algorithm generating something, but the algorithm was written by a person. And I think that kind of thing is perfectly fine. And the way I like to think about this is there's a term from Yiddish called Nachus, which is essentially kind of like this vicarious pride or joy that you have. So you might have Nachus or the Yiddish term is to shuff Nachus at like a kid's wedding or graduation. These are not your own achievements, but you can still take pride in joy in them. And I think to a certain degree, even though it almost sounds a little bit silly, we are going to increasingly need to have a certain amount of nakis.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “These kind of machine partners in order to continue making advances. And so rather than viewing it as humans are being displaced, it's really essentially that humans are only through this partnership are humans going to be able to continue to work in these fields, which is actually pretty exciting.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So I think there definitely are certain concerns in terms of the speed, in terms of automation, destabilizing job stability and things like that. But I think when it comes to certain areas within creativity, ideally, I think over the next like several years, it's going to involve building systems that actually make creative knowledge workers more productive versions of themselves. So rather than plateauing when it comes to creative output or discovery, we can actually continue doing more. For me, there's going to be certainly some destabilizing effects, and I think we need to be very, very mindful about that. But for me, one of the things that I think are really, really exciting are the ability to actually make novel types of advances and creative outputs in a way that we're just not possible before. And so, like, for example, going back to what I was talking about, the incredibly complex systems around us, like whether or not it's like things in biology that are very hard to understand, or even just dealing with the technologies that we ourselves have built in terms of machine learning, things like that. There's a certain amount of limitation in terms of all the stuff that we can hold in our head and actually truly understand. And so we're going to need”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think we've always been using machines to a certain degree to kind of augment discovery and creativity. I mean, this can be everything as simple as using. Like, yeah, calculators or various different tools to make our art or using telescopes or microscopes to discover new things. And so I think this kind of thing has always been with us. That being said, it does feel somewhat different when a certain amount of the cognitive effort is being offloaded into machine and algorithmic world. We've always been doing this. And so there's always been a certain amount of partnership. And so it's being able to kind of use these tools in service of our own creativity as opposed to at the expense of kind of just being worried about all these advances.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And big data to optimize our own technologies or even generate novel source code when we can't fully understand the technologies that we're building or grapple with them in quite the same way we could when they were maybe smaller and more easily understandable. But ultimately, I think creativity, it's always been, to a certain degree, a collaborative act, and now we're going to increasingly count machines as part of our collaborative teams now.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So I'm going to limit my comments primarily to the partnership, at least in the space of creativity, but I think that there are a huge number of rapid advances where computational approaches mean that actually computers can make advances in domain, means that we view as broadly creative. And so this can be art and music, design, even computer programming, or even scientific discovery. This is all fantastic, but it actually can be somewhat worrisome for some people. So I view this as a partnership where machines actually allow humans to sift through creative solutions, allowing us to do our work in even better ways. But even more than that, I think as the world around us is becoming more and more complex, it's becoming more difficult to fully understand either the technologies that we ourselves have built or the systems that we're trying to understand in science, like biological system, for example. And so which means we might actually need computers to help us explore these systems that we might not fully understand any longer. So this can mean maybe we need the creation of things like automated hypothesis generation and science or using machine learning.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So, you certainly have to focus on your success, but if that focus derives from bringing together ideas from multiple different areas, then you should be doing that. At the same time, though, you don't want to be billed as a dilettante, just someone who says, okay, here's a really cool area, but wait, there's also this other area over here that's really interesting. And I can also combine these other two things and maybe do something else if that's not part of your core mission and you can't see a clear path to success, then you are going to be distracted. So there is a balance between you want to focus and maybe that focus derives from being able to bring different ideas together in some sort of novel and defensible way. But at the same time, though, you don't want to just kind of be interested in lots of different things because they're simply interesting.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I do think we need to have it integrated to a certain degree throughout. I'll contrast it with the startup egoism is certainly in a much better shape than, for example, academia, where academia is incredibly siloed. But we need to make sure startups are drawing people from lots of different areas with widely divergent backgrounds and knowledge. But the other thing, though, is you also have to recognize that in many cases, startups, you want them to be monomaniacally focused on a certain topic that makes them much, much more successful. While oftentimes in the venture world, you have the luxury of being able to think about lots of different ideas. That being said, in the startup world, you might want to be monomaniacally focused on your success, but that success might derive from many, many different areas. And so being able to synthesize these in some sort of productive way really gives you some sort of committed advantage. So you really actually need it at both level, kind of the startup level as well as the investor level.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And so there's kind of the organizational level of organizations need. Have the ability to bring lots of different people together who are specialists, but you also need individuals who are more generalist-minded who can do that within a single person. This often involves actually the ability to overcome jargon boundaries. So like, let's say one person who's deeply versed in one specific area has their own sort of jargon, sort of language they use to talk about something. Area that the same problem arises where they also have their jargon barriers. You have to find someone who actually is somewhat averse in both of these who can almost act as a certain amount of translation and can actually translate from To another, thinking about what a good balance might be. So there's a term that some people talk about called”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Combined to create novel foods. And so these kinds of interdisciplinary perspectives, they're very useful in a number of tech companies are actually rethinking the future food through this kind of stuff. But ultimately, interdisciplinary thinking, it's not just a source of new ideas, but it also provides new and defensible modes of operation for startups”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Startup can bring together disparate ideas and carve out a niche and unique way. And provide something of value to the world. That's something that is both differentiable and also a defensible moat because it's hard to jump across different domains. So a startup's openness to Thinking can therefore be a proxy for its ability to adapt and to thrive. So for example, let's say a company can bring together a team or a set of ideas from computer science, AI, and the tax code, which is something that's reasonably novel and hard to replicate accountants aren't. With machine learning and vice versa Let's say combining together recipe generation and big data, which is something that's actually part of a field. Computational gastronomy Approaches to do things like rethinking how”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The power of domains that are not normally connected is actually a competitive advantage. So ideas from one area can and should then be connected to other areas, whether it's importing ideas from physics, understand the science. Living things These ideas from network science being used to understand technological complexity, or even mathematics for thinking about Legos. You can actually do all these different kinds of things and combine lots of different areas. And because specialization, it's not enough in this highly connected age. And so this kind of thinking is particularly important for startups to embody and for helping Through bringing ideas from one area to another.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “In an age of specialization, we strive to learn more and more about less and less as we specialize, which is great. It's a great thing to be a specialist. We need experts and people deeply versed in Small specialized areas. But as the world becomes more complex and interdisciplinary, where ideas are interacting and even technologies rely on a huge number of different domains in order to operate, we can't actually just be specialists anymore. We need people who are more generalist-minded and more essentially radically interdisciplinary. So radical interdisciplinarity, it's essentially then an import-export basis of ideas, recognizing that in this age of specialization, the”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “My role is one of really acting as connective tissue for ideas and people. So I surveyed the landscape of science and technology, finding areas that we might want to explore. And then based on this, do a number of different things. I source deals. I find people we might want to build companies around. I engage with the public through writing and speaking about these topics. But then I also connect scientists and technologists and other groups that are not traditionally connected to startups in the venture world to our portfolio companies. And so what this means kind of on a daily basis essentially is thinking about something new every day or sometimes even every hour and interacting with lots and lots of people who are really just creating the future that we want to live in.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Then, after my postdoc, I left the world of academia and then joined the Kaufman Foundation, doing essentially that kind of stuff, trying to better understand innovation, science and tech, and then became enmeshed in the world of startups and their role in essentially unfurling the future. Alongside this, I also began doing a lot of writing about science and technology for popular audiences too. And so then after the Coffin Foundation, I ended up joining Lux as their scientist in residence to help bring this sort of interdisciplinary approach related to complexity science, the future of science and technology to the venture world. Then the question becomes, what is scientists and residents exactly? What does this title mean? Yeah.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Is certainly a circuitous path, as it is for many people in the venture world. I grew up in Buffalo, obsessed with science, technology, science fiction, surrounded by a mix of Martin Gardner, Legos, Arthur C. Clark, all that kind of stuff. And I wanted to work at the Frontier Science and went eventually to graduate school for a PhD in computational biology, where I was initially interested in using computational mathematical approaches to understand evolution. And then while I was there, I became fascinated by complexity science more generally, which is the science of trying to understand big complex systems, whether in biology, technology, or social systems like cities or societies. And so after the PhD, while I was doing a postdoc involved in this area, I also began thinking about the nature of innovation more generally and the future of scientific and technological change.”

    2017-10-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lux Capital's Scientist-In-Residence on Why We Cannot Just Be Specialists Today, The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Thinking & Computational Creativity That Makes Man and Machine Partners with Sam Arbesman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source