Episode 115: Joe Tranquillo on the Revolution in Biological Science

Informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight brought to you by the team@ooda.

Loop.Com hello, I'm Bob Gourley, the Chief Technology Officer of OODA llc. And today on the oodacast professor of Biomedical Engineering at Bucknell University and a provost there, Joseph Tranquillo. Joe.

All right, thank you, Bob. This is exciting to get a chance to join you.

This is really exciting for me because I did get to meet you and talk a bit about your background and some of the things you're working on. And I think what you're working on will be of interest to all of us. So first I wanted to say, I looked over your bio and I wanted to ask you for a bit of your foundational story. Would you tell us how you got into this world of biological sciences?

Yeah, sure. It's like probably many folks who are listening. It was not a straight line by any stretch of the imagination. I actually started off in music, so I got into music school for jazz, which there's a connection there for anybody who wants to look into it to complex systems. Right? Kind of, you've got some framing, but then you have a lot of room to kind of play around and improvise on that. I think that's a, that's a feature and a, in a topic that's, that's pretty relevant to folks in complex systems, but decided not to do that. I didn't want to make it a career. Ended up at a liberal arts school and thought I was going to do philosophy and kind of the more analytical parts and then was told that I should. Well, if you're going to do that, you should probably end up taking some, some math and physics courses from there. I got sucked into engineering and it was a really tiny program. And one of the faculty members there said, hey, you know, do you want to do some research? I was a first year student, so this was, this was like a huge treat. And it turned out his name was Joe Bronzino and he was a big deal in the biomedical engineering world. I had no idea about that at the time. And he was in the process of editing a brand new biomedical engineering handbook and I got to see some early drafts of it and this really lit me up. And he also connected me with some other faculty who were in there who were doing some biomedical related research. At the time, undergraduate research was not the norm, so that was a little bit unusual. And we sent some things off to some conferences. They got accepted and that got me going to conferences and meeting other people. It was actually my Very first time out of the country was to go to a biomedical engineering conference in Amsterdam, which there's a whole bunch of other stories that are related to that, that have nothing to do with, with biomedical engineering.

And what year was that, Joe?

That was 1996, I believe. So that was the, the Biomedical Engineering Society meeting was going to be held there. And it gave me a chance to just see the breadth and depth and see what was coming. And I think that, that, that was exciting. But the other piece that was exciting was as an engineer, sometimes it's easy to geek out about the tools, right? You know, it's like, oh, these springs or these circuits or. Right. Like, you can get really focused on the, the tools. And I think what I saw at that conference was a group of people who were engineers, but they, they, their entire focus was on how do we help people in particular, how do we give back to society in some way. And, you know, the tools were secondary. The, the, the mechanisms were secondary. It was really looking at that. And it also highlighted me the scale at which you can do that as an engineer. And so, again, this kind of, you know, lit me up. And I probably couldn't have said any of this as an undergrad or even a grad student, but I think now that I've had a little bit of time, I can articulate this better. We often learn some phenomenon about the world, right? So you may say, you know, why, why biomedical? There's other, there's definitely other engineering disciplines that do this, but why biomedical? I think there's a long trend in history of us learning some new piece of knowledge or some new thing that's out there in the world, and it's sort of human nature to say, all right, well, that's neat, but how do we use that? Like, where, where could that be helpful or useful in some way? And, you know, over the past, whatever, 50, 100 years, there's been an absolute explosion in what we've learned about biology all the way from the level of molecules and cells all the way up to ecosystems. And I think, you know, there's folks working at all those different levels. And so it was also fun to see that also rising as well. So it was a wow. I'm, I'm joining these two fields that are both kind of in and of themselves rising. And wouldn't it be cool to work at the intersection between the two?

Fascinating. And so you have a PhD from Duke. You graduated with your PhD in 2004 in biomedical engineering. So I, I note that because I think you were still very early, that. That discipline was still very, very early. In many ways, maybe it still is, but that was exceptionally early and a. A coincidence. That same year I noted William Gibson made one of the. My favorite quotes. He wrote in an article that the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. And man, I love that quote. It applies to so many technological disciplines that you can look around and see these incredible technological innovations that you just know are going to proliferate. And you early on decided you're going to hit this field where you're going to be building the future. And it was an interesting coincidence.

Yeah, I think you're, you're right. When I got in, it was, it was relatively early, although it depends on who you talk to right there. You know, the, the pioneers had already done a lot of their work. And biomedical engineering, I don't want to say it was a common PhD program at that time, but there were, you know, a couple dozens of schools that were around that offered a PhD, but there weren't any that offered anything at the bachelor's level. So there's. There were bachelor's programs, but not bachelor's only. So places like duke had a PhD program, but then they added a master's program and then they added a bachelor's program. And I think where I am right now at Bucknell, after I graduated, it was kind of a unique time of. Again, a proliferation of schools that were thinking about this as a bachelor's degree. And that was unique because up until that point it was a. Yeah, no, Biomedical engineering is something that you do after you get a mechanical degree or an elect electrical degree or a physics degree or something like that. So going to Bucknell was a little odd and strange. I think we were the second school that offered a bachelor's only, so we don't have a master's program or a PhD program. And I got in at a time when there was really no curriculum. There weren't students, there was no space, there's no equipment. We didn't have fun. Right. So I got to actually be an academic entrepreneur, which was, which was really, really fun. I think that, you know, you mentioned some, some things about William Gibson. The fun part about that has been helping students see that in the same way that I was lit up as an undergraduate and it was like this mind blowing experience of, wow, this is so much more than I could have imagined. That that's really fun to be with undergraduates, showing them that for the first time. Most of them, I mean, you don't See this during high school experience. So that, that was that really that in addition to the biomedical engineering part, the educational component of this is also just absolutely fascinating to me. Cool.

Let me ask another question about Bucknell and your title, as I read it, was Associate Provost. And I'm not academic, but when I hear provost, I think that's like the CEO. Is that a rough analogy? You're responsible for executing and keeping the program running and all aspects of it.

So, so yeah, COO is kind of the sort of equivalent on the academic side. So it's not a, not a perfect mapping. But a provost typically sits above the deans of different colleges and is meant to kind of unite the university around the academic mission. The line that's often used is chief academic Officer. And just as one piece, I'm, I'm an associate provost, which means that there's a provost and then there's three of us that are associate provost. So we have our own sort of set of folk of folks that are underneath us. But yeah, it's been an interesting path in my career and I'm the only engineer in that group. So it's kind of interesting being in that group with artists and social scientists and humanists and others. And the piece that I get to bring, and this is the fun part about being on one of these cross disciplinary teams is systems thinking, design thinking, you know, some pieces that they may not have, but it's been a fun adventure because they, they end up adding things to the team that I'm constantly learning from. Wow. This is the way an artist would actually approach this topic or this piece. So we're it, it's, it's fun to be a part of a team that's, that's working in that way.

Cool. Well, I want to ask you more questions about the system thinking in a minute. But regarding biological sciences, I, I had a undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology, but that was 1982 and the world really changed since then. As I had kids go through high school and college, I would glance at their biology books. Of course I watch YouTube on how biology is changing and the incredible discoveries out there. There's so many great TED talks. I remember a TED talk is 20 years old now probably. But it was showing the visualization of how chemicals interact, the complex chemicals around DNA. And it' just amazing now what can be seen. And the world of biology when I studied it was very much black and white and there were grainy videos and you could see, well, here's DNA separating, but who knows how that works? Whereas now there's just so much insight and it's really a different world. I feel like the revolution in biological sciences underway needs to be paid attention to by business executives far more. And that's what I really want to ask you about. Some of the things that I'm seeing just as a layman is the use of engineering, biomedical engineering, to create new therapeutics or to deliver medicines to specific tissues, or sometimes to manufacture things using biology, including food and fuels and fabrics and other things like this, or new ways to grow crops better that will help feed humanity and do that while using fewer pesticides and fertilizers. And there's just so many things I think we all need to pay attention to. But I wanted to ask you as a, an expert, what excites you about this biological revolution?

I mean, what's there not to be excited about, right? I mean, there's also some things to be terrified about, and maybe we'll, we'll blend into some of those. But I think there's a couple things, just about the things that you already listed. What is again, they're, they're all thinking about how the things that we're learning in a biological world can be helpful, can be useful. Can we, can we help them to improve humanity? In some ways. And you know, some of the terrifying pieces, are we biasing it so much towards humanity that we're forgetting about the whole ecosystem that we're around? And, you know, maybe we'll, we'll blend into that. But I, I think there's new stuff coming out all the time, so it's impossible for even one person to know about all the lists of things. I have a science magazine sitting on my, my, my nightstand. And you go through that and like, half of the articles that are in there are about biological things one way or another. Right? So I think it, it's, it's impossible to keep up. That's one of the great things. One of the, one of the fr. Well, the other thing is I love that your, your list spanned beyond just the, you know, cures and clinical sorts of things because, because you're right. It goes into food sources and thinking about the world that we live in. But I, I think that I, I, I actually want to blend into something that you touched on, which is, we're getting to the point where, and where some of the most exciting opportunities are, are our ability to actually manipulate biology, to think of it as a system to be designed and so things like crispr, right? So this is where you can actually go in and targeted change, actually whole sections of DNA to be whatever you want. And again, that's exciting. It's also terrifying. It brings with it all sorts of ethical components to it. Whether those are ethical, political, social, economic. And some of those are outpacing the technologies, outpacing our ability to keep up with how do we keep a lid on some of these things. And I know this is jumping around a little bit, but we have AI on one side that's sort of growing in our ability to allow that to emerge. And it's scary to see intelligence emerging in some way. And we're terrified of that. I think equally on the other side is our ability to actually manipulate and design in a biological realm. So I actually think that those two are kind of interestingly related. So I'm going to put a twist on your question just a little bit. I actually think that one of the real impacts of what we're learning in biological innovation and even biomedical engineering is that we can take things from a biological realm and by understanding them, we can begin saying, well, what if we did that on the technological world? What if we basically stole a concept from biology and use it to solve a problem in a totally different domain. To be honest with you, that's actually a lot of what's driving this artificial intelligence revolution right now. For decades, artificial intelligence was very top down, right? We, we were the humans and we were going to design an intellig, but for that reason we were really constrained by the computing architectures, by the algorithms we could design, by the computing languages that existed. And so it was right, we were trying to approach it the same way that we would design a car, right? Like we know what we want to do and we're going to just design it, make it do that thing. There was a little bit of flurry into this things like artificial and neural networks, right? Where we said, well, we kind of know how a neuron works, so we're going to kind of model it a little bit. But even when you look at that, we only modeled the idea of a neuron. We didn't really model how those neurons connect up together, which is far more emergent. It was not something that a designer was saying, put this neuron here and connect it to that neuron, put that neuron there and connect it to that one. And I think some of the things that that are coming out now are far more bottom up. Giving the artificial intelligence a task and saying, put things together here are the building blocks. Play around. This is the idea of self assembly, which is what Biology does on all levels self assemble solutions. It does lots of quick testing and quick iterative loops. This probably sounds agile. And the faster you can go around that loop, the faster you can evolve. And so it's adding a piece, subtracting a piece, right? Trying out different pieces to see what the best solution may be. And I think in my mind some of the most powerful AI components that are out there are saying, you know what, throw the problem at the intelligence and let it figure out how to actually create a solution. And you know, the, the terrifying and amazing and wonderful part of that is, wow, it, it's advancing really fast, right? This is why you have all these regulators going. Like, is it advancing to the point where we don't know if we can contain it anymore? And again, you know, we don't want to get too post apocalyptic, but I, I think that what's coming is not just the digital version of that, but imagine if what you did with designing a sneaker was instead of having a designer who makes the sneaker and right. All that other stuff, if it was a, you know what, we're going to actually put some self assembled material around your foot and we're gonna let you walk around with it for a bit of time. But then it can actually change, right? It can actually change whether while you're sleeping or whatever, but it's actually recording data throughout the day of how are you using your sneakers? And it can add or subtract materials or pieces or whatever as you go. Now that, you know, sounds like science fiction right now, but that's kind of the idea. And the question is, at what point will we get, will we reach a phase where your car is doing that or the building that you work in is doing that? That, that's all stolen from the biological world because that's what biology does all the time. It has a basic framework and then it just expresses the pieces as it needs to adapt to its environment. And that, that's, that's a fundamentally different way of thinking about objects in the world or the role of trainer or of an engineer.

It is, it really is. And I'm also wondering if it's also a new way of looking at science. When I was a kid, there was one scientific method you, and maybe you guys still teach that. It's like you observed, you create a hypothesis, you test that hypothesis, you beat it up, you come up with a new thesis, you observe and it's the scientific method. And. But what you described seems to me to be advancement of science and engineering without using that method, right?

Well, yeah, I mean it's, it, it's. We talk about revolutions, right? And we've had it, we have had a, you know, there's been an industrial revolution, there's digital revolution, all that. Nobody can predict exactly what the next one's going to be or if we're just going to blend into one. But I would venture to guess that at least some part of the next revolution is going to be that. How do we arrive at new knowledge? Right? What, what does it mean to arrive at new knowledge? And there are already folks out there, especially I think in math and physics and some other of the more technical disciplines where there are journals that will actually allow you to add a computer algorithm as an author. It made a contribution that is author worthy. And they say, okay, right. And that, wow, that's kind of mind blowing, right, that, that you can actually have something that's working in synergy with a human as a collaborative partner to, to do something, do a component that a human either couldn't do or couldn't do quite as well. Again, this blends into the Internet of things. It blends into a lot of the trends that are happening right now. It's just taking many of those to their sort of logical conclusion.

Yeah, fascinating. And I think back on my life and my interaction with say, the medical community and I'm so lucky. I've had some of the greatest doctors and medical folks for me and my family, but every once in a while there's someone that really made a mistake that could have been dangerous. And AI can make mistakes too, of course. But will there come a day when I would prefer my treatment to come from a advanced algorithm that I don't understand how the algorithm thinks?

Sure, sure. You know, you, you bring up a great point because folks are making a big deal out of, you know, chat, GPT and all of the other different, different pieces out there. But you know, that's a, that's a, an AI that's linguistically gifted. Right. It, it's gone out and figured out how to create beautifully crafted sentences. Even if, even if, sometimes the, the information that it's giving is not entirely accurate or it's pulling from right sources that are not necessarily verified or that that's all stuff. That's right. We're going around the loop fast, fast, fast, fast. And eventually, you know, that question of is the, is what it's spitting out correct or not? That that's going to get, going to get figured out. I have, I have no doubt about that and probably Pretty quickly. But I think what you bring up is the question of when will some of these AIs blend into other areas where they're gifted in some other way that may not be linguistic? And one of them could be surgery. Right. Imagine. And this goes back to the old version of, of expert systems in artificial intelligence, which was, you know, we're going to sit down and we're going to interview a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of people who are an expert in an area and we're going to try to suck out their knowledge. But you still had a human kind of in that loop mediating between the expert and the, in the AI. We're very rapidly approaching the point where an AI could be watching a surgeon and literally feeling the tools and the tissues and the. Right. So it's, it's not just the visual or the linguistics or the surgery planning or any of that. It's actually collecting all of the information and data that a surgeon would collect to learn. Right. How do the best surgeons actually do this? Now, there's a discovery part to that, which is you could imagine clinical medicine saying, you know, so what is it about what the most successful surgeons do? And you brought up mistakes, right? You know, which ones make more mistakes, which are the most common mistakes. Right. So this gets into databases and all these other things. But yeah, I think the day is coming when you're exactly right. You'd say, do I want the person to do it who's probably done a thousand surgeries, or do I want the AI who's to, to do a surgery that actually has the experience of millions of those same surgery? Right. And there's not enough time in the world for a human to actually do those millions of surgeries. So it, we're entering a fascinating era. And I can tell you there are surgeon colleagues of mine who are on both sides of the fence of this. Right. Some are saying there's no way. There's certain aspects of my position in my role that will never be taken over by an AI. This is something that can't be touched by that. There are others that are imagining and going with it and thinking about their careers as the people who are going to be at front of a next revolution in their discipline. And you know, again, I, I, there's no necessarily value judgment there. I think both are, are probably right in some ways and, and not in others. But, but yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And it goes back to your point before about how science is done, right? How do we discover new knowledge and what does that look like you have folks in the scientific world who are 100% adopting this and saying, sure, absolutely. If I can collaborate with an artificial intelligence to do what I do and discover knowledge better, faster, discover realms of knowledge that may be unreachable right now without that, absolutely, it's just another tool. It's like having a centrifuge right, right in there or something. It's another tool and I'm going to use it. There are others that are saying, whoa, wait a minute. This, this feels like it's, it's infringing upon the domain where I'm the expert. And, and that's, that's a dangerous place to tread.

You know, See, now this is, it's making me think of similar situations across multiple disciplines. First, let me say it gets very personal probably for a lot of people when you talk about surgeries. I did in my family, there was a young family member at just a month old needed surgery. And when the surgeon said that he has done thousands of this kind of surgery, it just.

You kind of, kind of relax a little bit. Okay. They know what they're doing now, but if they had screwed up a bunch of time, they wouldn't let them keep practicing, right?

That's right, yeah. Now, 40 years from now, when people are facing a similar situation, are they going to say, look, I don't want some old geezer. I want the reliable way. I want the AI to do this.

And so, you know, I, and I, and I think this is where that emergent component is really fascinating because there is the possibility that there's, again, that a collaboration. Right. So surgeons, you know, especially if it's any surgery, is not. We talk about the surgeon. Right. As if there's one person in that room. There's not. I mean, there's. Depending on the complexity of surgery, there's multiple people and there are often multiple surgeons in the room because it's just the way the surgery is structured. There may be a head surgeon or, you know, like a person who's actually the main person, but they have other people working with them. And so I think just like the mathematician who has a team of people and an artificial intelligence happens to be part of that team. Yeah, you could imagine that the AI, going back to one of your earlier points, could be there mostly just to sort of ask the question, are you sure you want to do that? Here. Here are some other options of ways that you could approach this particular situation. There's also the, the version of the airplane pilot who has an autopilot. Right. This is a part of the surgery. You know, we actually did a project at one point in time with obese patients who needed to be. After this surgery, which takes place really deep in the body, needed to be stitched up. And the actual core part of the surgery takes about 15 minutes. The actual duration of the surgery on an obese patient can take six hours, but most of that is opening the patient and then closing the patient back up. Because in an obese patient, you just have to put in lots more stitches. You have to actually carefully go through multiple different layers. Imagine that you have an artificial intelligence that can do the opening and closing, and now the surgeon can come in to do the 10 or 15 minutes that they need to do. So again, I think there's a lot of different variations in there. The other variation I'll mention is robotic surgery. So there are a bunch of companies, there's the da Vinci robots and all these other things that do robotic surgery, sometimes remotely. So you have a surgeon who's in one place and you have the. The robot in another, and there's haptic feedback. So you can actually even feel, as a surgeon resistance that would be related to the tissue giving you some more information. But built into all of those robots are some safety features. So there's certain things that you can't make the robot do for safety for the patient. You could imagine that becoming far more smart. And they. They are. I mean, these robots already have some intelligence built into them for the protection of the patient. And one of the really cool things about talking to surgeons who, who have used these robots, and I've actually gotten a chance to play around with these, and I'm not good, right. I'm not a surgeon. I'm not trained at all. Is just like, I, I don't want to make this a trivial thing, because it's not a video game. Just for anybody who's listening. This is not a video game. Right. Obviously. But like a video game, especially the really immersive ones, you can get completely immersed in these, These. This world, right? And so you. You really do feel like you're there with the tools in your hand over time. So it's like driving, right? You know, you just, you're. You. You're kind of one with the car sort of thing. Physicians can kind of become one with these, These surgical robots and where that goes. I think I had mentioned that I started off in philosophy. I still read plenty of philosophy out there. An article, I think it came out in 1999 by Andy Chalmer and I'm trying to remember the other guy's name. There was another guy's name. It's two philosophers wrote an article called the Extended Mind. And what they were arguing is that the thing that is set humans apart is that we actually can create tools that then becomes extensions of us. And this could be a right, you can punch someone with your fist, but you could also pick up a stick and you now have a longer reach, right? So this is the 2001 classic scene, but that we use our tools to often extend things that we could do maybe, right. We build a car because we don't want to run there or walk there. And so again, it's just an extension of our ability to transport. But that we then at some point in time began extending the. Our minds. Not just our bodies, but our minds. And this is, you know, the calcular, the abacus, even writing, right. To some degree. And that's actually the example they give is, you know, a lot of writing is extending your memory, right? It's, it's saying rather than have to remember this, I'm going to write it down so that I don't forget it. We do this now with our phones and all of that. Again, if you go study philosophy. The ancient Greeks were pissed off, frankly, at, at writing because, you know, these are, these are some of the greats because he said it's going to cause a weakening of the mind, right. You know, you're not going to remember these long epic poems or anything. You're going to write them down. And that ruins the point, right? So there's been thousands of years of, of humans pushing out mental functions into our tools and what Chalmers and totally blanking on his other name. I'm sure folks have probably already looked it up by this.

I'll find it and I'll put it in our show notes.

Yeah, it's the extended my. It's actually a very readable article. It's. And it's. And it's fascinating and still relevant. But you know, their point is we, we then just incorporate those tools into who we are. And the terrifying implication they don't use this example of a cell phone, but I will. Is at what point does. Does this cell phone become a part of you? How much of who you are is actually embedded in that cell phone or embedded out in your social profile or embedded in that. And part of their argument is this is you just extended out into the world. And we've been doing this for a long, long, long, long time. And so the really, to me fascinating Part about artificial intelligence is we're thinking about it as an other. There's us, the humans, and there's the artificial intelligence, which is out there. And, you know, you all probably know where I'm going with this, but. But is there going to be a merger of those two to the point where once we have a good enough, seamless enough interface, we don't really even talk about the difference between those two? I've been thinking about this in the educational world and, you know, I don't know how much more time we have, but I. I have a whole series of. Of entertaining scenarios. On many of our phones. We have a health app. And that health app is. Right, maybe connected all these other biomarkers and it can at least track our steps. But if you let it, you got to watch or something, it can do heart rate, rate and sleeping and all those other things. In my world, in the educational world, could you imagine doing something like that, having right next to it a little education app which is listening to who you're talking to, hearing what experiences you're having, listening to the tone of your voice and the emotions that are coming up. You could imagine it through Internet of things, being connected to cameras and being able to see pupil dilation. Right. All these other different things to see what is it that interests you and lights you up? Could it then make recommendations to you of what things might be interesting and exciting to you? And can it learn about how you learn? Do you learn better by reading? Do you learn better by talking to people through a mix? Right. So it's basically creating internally a little model of you as a learner, and it can then meet you where you are. Well, if you followed me so far, what's the point of me then as a professor? Right. Like, why. Why wouldn't you just have your app guide you through this learning experience? And any of us who are parents know that kids are getting electronics now in schools at like age five. Right. So again, there, you could be terrified by that. And I could. Or I could say, you know what, maybe I want to be one of the disruptors who's thinking about how to responsibly build that future. Yeah.

You know, there's a very common phrase in the AI community now. People hear it so many times, they roll their eyes in the back of their head, which is, AI will not take your job. A human with AI will take your job. And I think it is something to think about, and maybe we need is the mix of people like you who are getting the technology and understanding it needs to be used and then find the right balance. We do need tools like that, but we need humans who can help us contextualize and implement and build these tools and.

Sure, yeah, I, I think, you know, we're, we're in for an interesting ride. And, you know, you always say you live in interesting times. We, we live in interesting times. You know, I think everyone could say that, but I'm glad that I'm around right now to see some of it and, and be, you know, in some ways, at least a small part of that. Yeah.

Let me mention a couple other things and get your reaction, because you reminded me of aircraft. And first of all, in the mid to late 90s, I was in the Navy as an intelligence officer, and we were bringing in drones into the military, and some people were really pushing hard, and you had to push to get those things in because the bureaucracy doesn't want things like that. But eventually we got drones in that could do reconnaissance. And then still a lot of bureaucracy to fight. We got a few that could do reconnaissance close in or launch from an aircraft carrier. As the, the war started, people started realizing that, well, we can put a weapon on here, so we weaponize drones. And all throughout this, people are writing papers at the military colleges about, you know, one day we won't need pilots. One day it will all be robotics. And of course, the pilots get all angry about this and say, no, no, no, it's always got to be a human in the cockpit. But if you look at the science of it, those aircraft are so capable, you know, it can kill the humans with its maximum G forces and all this other stuff. Now, we're not at the point today where you can replace all humans in the air Force, but 10, 20 years from now, you know, it's coming, and we are at the point where humans can be augmented with flights, where there's a human flight leader and there's drones as their wingman. So there's a lot of innovation there.

Sure.

But one other thing before I get your reaction, there was.

Yeah. So, you know, getting my. You. Anybody who's listening realizes that my brain goes usually in lots of different nonlinear directions. But the, the way it went with this was there's a term, it's from robotics, called the uncanny valley. So I don't know if you've heard that, that term before. It's like a creep factor. Yeah, it's a creep factor. So it's this idea that, like a robot that looks like a robot, we're not creeped out about but as it gets closer and closer to trying to look at more and more and more like a human, there's just things not right about it. Right. It's not blinking right. It's facial expressions aren't acting the right way or it's not responding quite right. And it's, it's creepy. It's really, really freaky. It's. Folks say it's the same reason why, you know, horror movies like to have these, you know, these lifelike dolls, right, that are kind of like sort of human, but not really. And it's like, it's freaky, right? I, I think that we're entering into that uncanny valley in many of the same ways, just not with the robotic side of things. And, and what I mean by that is our, our worries are right now you can still tell that it's an artificial intelligence and you question whether its intelligence is just book smarts, right? And it can fly the plane faster. And if you tell it to go through this valley, it can probably do it better than the human can do it. Right? But that, that's a very technical task. And I think what we're concerned about is if it doesn't know why it's flying through that valley or it doesn't know why it's actually doing something, it can be totally blinded and be unethical, right? All of these other things. And so without it, without a why, without a, without a clear sense of purpose, will it make decisions that are, that just don't make sense? Why the heck did you do that? Right? Why did you snip that artery? Right? Like that's, that's terrible. Artery to snip, right? It's like, well, it was in my way, right? So, you know, I snipped it and went through. Obviously the artificial intelligence aren't going to be that, that bad. But I, I think this is where, going back full circle, this biological sort of way of thinking is. We're still thinking about how do we program the ethics or the emotions or the sense of purpose or. Right. We're thinking about that very top down is we're going to impose upon these intelligences those things which we think are lacking, and we're going to try to program them in. There is another path which you could argue is the path that biology followed, which was to ask, so where did those things come from in us? And there's actually kind of a terrifying component of that is how long do we think in the history of evolution did it take for ethics to arise? It took a long time Right. And, and you know, there are some, there are ethicists that will say, oh, well, you know, this is this right thing that's out there, that this, this abstract thing of the right thing to do or whatever, the biological folks, evolutionary folks, would still go back to a. Ethics exist because without them, the human species wouldn't survive. Right. We would never have been able to get to this point without some of these core principles that allow us to cooperate and to work together. And, and at some core, you had to do that. So the question becomes, you know, can you really force emotion or ethics or, or are there some things or sense of purpose or are those things that, that, you know, you could, for any people who are parents, right. You could watch this happening with your kids, right, as they sort of grow. Is, are they ethical beings when they're born? Are they emotional beings when they're born? Right. But, but it emerges and sort of. Right. Based on the environment, based on the input that it has. And so, you know, my question would be if we want artificial intelligences or other things to display some of these things and not kill the pilot, not snip the artery, right? Know when is the right thing to do in the right moment, it's very likely that that kind of judgment and wisdom is not something that can only be achieved through experience after experience after experience after experience. It's something that's going to need to sort of emerge bottom up, maybe with us as a guide, as a teacher, but not trying to program it in from the beginning.

Well, I think it depends on who the US Is. And let me give you another example that just happened this last week. This made news around the world. A U.S. air Force colonel said that a U.S. air Force simulation of AI had given the AI a task. And in order for the AI to conduct that task, it needed to kill its human operator. So in the simulation, it killed its human operator. Well, that sounded just too bizarre. And as you dig into it, people started pushing back and saying that didn't sound like a simulation. And it turns out the guy made up the story. He lied. He lied. Now as he got called out on the lie, he backpedaled and issued a statement and said, I misspoke. It was a hypothetical thought experiment. But he also then took the opportunity to lecture all of us about ethics and said, you know, this is why the Air Force has to be committed to ethics. And my thought was, in that situation, he lied more than any AI has ever lied to me.

Yeah, right, right.

Charge of ethics.

How do we do this? But, you know, this actually brings up a great point is who would be qualified to actually program the ethics actually into the, into the AI to begin with. So, yeah, I, I think there, there, there are so many fascinating questions here. And I, I, you know, I, we're, we're not going to give any answers. We're, we're not going to come, you know, the two of us just chatting here. I, I think that that's also going to need to be emergent. But you do have folks saying, you know, we need to put some guardrails on it. Luckily, I think that some of the folks who are at the forefront of this are the ones speaking out and saying, whoa, right. We need to think about some of the things that we're doing before we're doing them. You know, this happened in the biological world with crispr. So, you know, it was a thing that any biologist who looked at that thing was like, locations of this are, are really wild. And we can imagine some fantastic, wonderful ways this could go. We also could imagine in. Right. The hands of somebody who's looking to use it in some not so great ways where this could go. And, you know, this, this was the, the, the story of the, you know, the, the babies that were cloned, humans that were cloned to have resistance to aids. Now.

Right.

It's like, well, that was for a good purpose, but it also showed the path of how possible this actually was. Yeah. For anybody who wants to read it, Walter Isaacson has a great book out called the Code breakers that's all about the, the origin of crispr, and it brings up some of these topics. But like many of his books, fascinating book about a, a topic that's still, still unraveling.

Right. So let me mention another thing from biology since you. We brought it up. The way life evolved on this planet was the first complex animals had these little organelles. The first one apparently was giving motion, so if you can move, it gives you advantage. The second one was light detection, and that evolved to be eyes, but at first it was just light detection. So now you can see something and move to it and eat it. So on this planet, it's very much about moving places and eating things. It's like in our biology, and we see this as we get more advanced too. And you mentioned ethics. That's very much a human thing, but everywhere else it seems to be, we're resource constrained. Let's kill whatever we need to and eat whatever is out there. And now we're building AI systems. And I'm wondering maybe we don't want our AI to have that piece of human ethics in there.

Yeah, I think there's. There's so many different threads and pieces to that. There's actually a fascinating book called Life's Ratchet, which talks about. I'm forgetting the author's name, but again, we can probably look it up. Who speculates on, you know, if we had to guess, right, in sort of some probabilistic way, how did, how did life actually get started? And there's a couple of different scenarios in there, but it kind of follows this, like, logical way of thinking, right, which is life is going to require some source of energy from somewhere. And it was a. Okay, well, if you look around at a place like the Earth or most other planets, you can say, all right, well, there. There are a variety of different places you can begin looking for sources of energy directly from the sun. You could imagine wind, you could imagine fluid flow patterns. You could imagine geothermal. You could imagine vents coming up from the ocean, right? So kind of these. These different ways that you could imagine it and very quickly kind of narrows it down to. It was probably either thermal vents or, or the sun. If you look at the timing, it was a. Well, the. Right. So you begin kind of narrowing things down based on the, on the constraints kind of thinking about this from a. From a design perspective. And this particular author says, you know, it's very likely it was hydrothermal vents. And to your point, it was a. Well, the problem with that is that anytime you. You have energy, you need to have a gradient of something. So this was a. There was a gradient of like, he. And some minerals and things like that, but it didn't expect. Expand too far off of that vent. So it was a very narrow kind of range in terms of where life could survive. And there's. There's folks talking about moons and things of. Maybe there are these sort of, you know, the pond scum, right? There's kind of this, like, little thin layer on which you can actually have life sustained because the conditions are right. But to your point, through evolution, the question becomes, how far can you actually begin straying from that energy source? And to do that, you got to be able to store some energy inside you. You have to have a way to move. You have to write. So you begin building. Need to go, you know what, I can wait for the hydrothermal vent or I can just eat one of my neighbors who has energy inside that, right? So again, there, there's. And again, these are just those stories. I mean, you know, obviously There was no recorders back then to go and. Right. Kind of, kind of figure out what's happening. But you can, you can begin speculating a scenario. And the cool part is this way of, of thinking is what astrobiologists do, right. And imagine are there ways of having life forms that are nothing like us, that could actually survive in some place like the sun and use, use magnetic gradients, right? That's, that's an energy source. Could you imagine a being made of plasma in a complex way that's put together that, that a million degrees, no problem. Right? Like that, that's, that's their habitat. Right. And that's what it's required to have plasma to exist and to have the magnetic properties. Right. And the question is, can something complex emerge in that? You know, there are astrophysicists that do the calculations and say under the right conditions. Yeah, absolutely. Could intelligence arise in those systems? Well, maybe the fascinating part, I know we've gotten into science fiction now and all of that is it's caused a number of complex systems folks to question. So when we say the word life and something's actually alive, what do we actually mean by that? And it can't just be organic and it can't just be, right, that it happens to need water or it happens to need this or it happens to need that. And now what we come back to is the full circle artificial intelligence argument, which is, is there a point at which we would stop saying that this is artificially intelligent but that it's alive, that it actually is a, is a, is a living being? And there are ethicists talking about the rights and privileges and right things. So again, I know we've gone in some, some pretty funky directions here, but, but going back to that complex systems way of thinking, it's all about the patterns that you have. And so if you admit there's a pattern of life or a pattern of intelligence, you're now no longer constrained to. It has to look like this or be in this particular function. It just needs to have some of the same patterns.

Well, Joe, you bring up a good point. I'd like to segue into discussion of complex systems.

More.

More, because the place I met you was in Chicago at a conference of the Digital Directors Network. Bob Zuckas brought you there where you gave a presentation to a room full of corporate directors and a corporate technologist and people in the corporate world where you spoke in very plain English about the importance of understanding complex systems. And I think you're the perfect guy to do it because Biological systems are extremely complex. Maybe, maybe the only thing more complex are things that humans have built because now we're a biological system and adding complexity on top of it. And I found your plain spoken explanation of what a complex system is and what we should know about it was important and I wanted to ask if you could recount that for us now, like starting with what is a complex system?

Oh boy. Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm glad that you, that you got something out of that talk. It was, it was a lot of fun. And you know, the, the fun part about being in a discipline and going and talking to folks outside of your discipline is forces you to think about your discipline more deeply. Right. At a, at in some ways a more fundamental level than just throwing off jargon in terms and things that, you know, the folks in your field go, yeah, yeah, we know what you mean. So I'm honestly going to be the first to admit that depending on who you talk to, you're going to get a big range of what the definition is of a complex system. And we've talked about some of the various pieces of this. To some it's about emergence. To some, it's about the ability to adapt, to learn, to heal. Right. Your body can do that, ecosystems can do that, political and economic systems can do all of these things. There's also those who would say this is a revolution that is meant to flip the paradigm away from this reductionistic way of thinking that sort of the scientific method has gotten us into. Right. Reduce everything down to its finest parts. Complex systems. Folks are saying there's actually a lot that's important in how things are actually connected and put back in coherent ways. And they're, you're, you're missing it, right? This is nonlinear effects, is domino effects. All that things about self stabilization and perturbation and feedback and all that. So the, the book that I wrote on complex systems, I, I would say was pointing out that this whole field is kind of in like this pre Newtonian state right now where, you know, you, you figure, right, Newton was around, people would drop things and they would fall. And then you saw that there were planets in the sky and they followed some patterns and there were, you know, oceans would undergo regular tides and there were all these different patterns out there. And it took someone like a Newton to go, you know, like, yes, but those could all potentially be related by this centralizing concept of gravity. We don't have that in complex systems. At least not yet. There hasn't. And again, there's even speculation on Whether there is such a thing. But all of those things I mentioned are sort of these pieces and observations out there. We don't have that yet. And so I, I think to try to define exactly what it, what it is would be like somebody trying to define why do tides work the way they do and why does this work the way it does and why does things drop and fall. Right. You know, all that. So again, there are folks who would adamantly disagree with me about that in the field, probably many of them, and say, no, no, no, we got it all figured out. I, I personally don't think so yet. I. Okay, well, it seems like for that person. Yep.

But if you can't really define it other than say, well, it's complex, but you can make observations. And you gave us several observations. And I want to make sure that I got this right. Just going off memory, you tell me if I got this wrong. You said that most complex systems, they will have structure, they will have nodes, and they will have flows. Is that. Am I close?

Yeah, absolutely. And. And I think that, you know, the, the big piece of it, and again, this is my own personal take on it, is that what, that it's not just having nodes and flows, but that they actually have some coherence pattern to them. It's not just random, because you could imagine having a whole series of nodes and they're connected together randomly, and you put a flow in and it flows through the thing kind of randomly. That's usually not what we think of as a complex system, because that can't do anything. Right. There's nothing coherent that it can do. So there has to be some kind of deeper pattern. And during the talk, I gave the example of Jen, the systems thinker. And Jen noticed a spiral in her coffee when she put some milk in later that day, was going up a spiral staircase. So architecturally, there was a. There was a spiral and got her curious about other spirals. So she ended up right. On her way up to her office, thinking about hurricanes and tornadoes and. And other forms of spirals, and then started googling and found out that, you know, cardiac arrhythmias are spirals in the heart. Right. Dangerous spirals that form a secondary pacemaker that competes with your pacemaker. Right. And that's not a good situation. And so, you know, the point was that Jen didn't really care that those spirals took place in totally different arenas with different materials on different space and time scales. She was interested in the. The concept, the pattern of. Of a spiral. And so I Think that way of thinking allows you to say, you know, I'm over here looking at the flows of electricity of ions in the brain through neurons and kind of how they're connected and all of that. But then I'm noticing that the same way that you would store a memory in that neural circuit is really similar to the way we actually make laws and we have them self reinforce one another and store and encode a law and a political system system. And again, it's not a perfect match, right? But you begin seeing these patterns of a memory is typically stored in some sort of a, a snake eating its own tail sort of, sort of format. There's got to be some self sustaining loop there that stores it in some way. And again, I'm oversimplifying that there's, there's, there's more to it than that. But you begin looking at and, and even, even your, your, your concept of motion that you talked about earlier. How does an organism build a little actuator inside of it that can actually create motion? And there are some basic concepts and basic patterns of how you would do that in the claim would be that that pattern wouldn't care if you were a little speck on a thermal vent or if you were that, that being that was made of plasma living in that sun, that you'd be relying on the same set of flows and the same set of patterns that would allow you to actually create movement. So again, I, to me that is, that is infinitely fascinating. And you know, you mentioned, you know, my talk and kind of boiling things down to plain language, being a systems thinker allows you to do that because they can say, okay, well I'm talking to a whole group of folks that think about technology, think about digital systems. This is what they know. Can I find things within their domain that are like this complex systems piece that I want to talk about. And I'm not going to talk about galaxies or biomedical engineering, I'm going to talk about that pattern in their field. And so it, it's, it's fun, it's actually really fascinating and it keeps me entertained and always learning a new to a new area.

Well, you connected to me and you connected to a room full of business leaders when you started talking about how complex systems, they adapt, they must adapt. If they don't adapt, they die. And as you're saying that I'm thinking of every great military strategist I've ever learned from, every great business leader who's created a company that endures beyond the current founding generation and There were just so many lessons like that that were totally relevant.

Well, I'm glad again that you, that you got something out of it. I, I know nothing about military history and you know, I, well, not nothing. I mean, I've, I've read things, but I haven't really truly studied. But being with a, with that, with, with the group that was at the, the, the Domino conference. Yeah, there were all sorts of things that I heard and I was frantically taking notes during that conference because there was so many great, like stories that were. I need to follow up on this. I need to actually learn a little bit more about this because there's a, there, there's a nugget there that, that I needed, I can learn from as a person in the complex systems world.

Oh, well, Joe, we're almost out of time. I have a couple more questions for you if that's okay. One, any advice on what a business executive should do to keep learning about complex systems? I'm going to link to your book, but I want to ask for any context you have on what should a business executive do to keep learning about complex systems.

So I, I think there's a couple things. One, obviously, you know, there's plenty of reading out there that you can do. There's a, I, I would say, you know, the, the book that I wrote is, is, has some math in it. Don't get bogged down in that. It even says right in the intro chapter you can skip the math and just read the descriptions. But it is, it, it is. I, I would say it's an academic book. It's heavy going. Go ahead and get it. If you want to, want to, you know, dig into that. Hopefully, hopefully it's, it's readable enough. But there is a great book out there called Thinking in Systems, which we could probably also link to. That is a really nice introduction to kind of some of the concepts and it boils it down to, you know, 10 sort of different concepts that you can use. There's also a whole variety of literature out there. If you go look up the Santa Fe Institute, where they do talk about complex systems thinking for people who are in leadership roles, but I, I think that's all academic. You all live in the real world. So I, I think that looking for those patterns, wherever you might find them, you know, I, I brought up a spiral, I brought up a couple of other different ideas of patterns. Be on the lookout. Right? Where, where do you see spirals in your, in your, your company, in your business? Are they vicious spirals or Are they virtuous spirals? Right. I mean they, it can kind of go either way, but just beginning to think that way can be really powerful. And the other piece as a leader is often if you're a leader, especially of a big and multi dimensional group and team is you're going to have folks who do marketing speak and folks who do finance and folks who do that. Right. Like they're in all these different groups. And as a leader, the question is how do you begin reaching all of them? So I think, you know, to me there's a lot of things that it means to be a leader in an area, but, but one of them is being able to communicate in a way that everyone can sort of understand what the direction actually is and what's expected. Setting the tone, getting everyone on the same page. Right. If you follow the McKinsey stuff, having sort of shared vision, shared goals. And I think that being steeped in some of this ability to find patterns that can be hooks for others to really understand what the mission is other than just words on a page, it is, is important. It can be a really, really, really powerful thing to have. You know, the, the word I would use from the systems language have those motifs, right? Those motifs that are built into your, your company that can be enduring patterns that have a story behind them. So I, I know I've done that and things I've, I've led is to have kind of an interesting, like a spiral, right? I didn't use a spiral. But having something like that that everybody can attach to can be really powerful, right?

So that leads to my final question, I think, and that is.

Every board.

That I have ever met and interacted with are different. But I find something so common among all the board leaders. Most of them are readers. They're either reading non fiction or they're reading short stories or they're reading, you know, their favorite chapter of history or they're reading the best business books. And I find being a reader, avid reader, helps in communication with corporate directors and with technologists too. And I personally am always on the hunt for the next best book and wanted to ask you, what are you reading now that we should be aware of?

Oh boy. There, there's. I'm, I, I'm up. I am absolutely an avid reader. My nightstand is full of books that are either. Well, actually my nightstand has the ones that are partially finished and then there's, there's my bookshelves at home and at work. Oh boy. Off the top of my head, things that I'm Currently reading one, believe it or not, is Walden. I actually haven't read Walden and I enjoy going out and hiking and so it's one of those books says like that that's on the bucket list. I got to read that at some point during my life I mentioned Science magazine. I always have a stack of science magazines on there and I kind of read, read through stuff. I'm also reading a book called Belonging, which is kind of an interesting take on the importance of, of feeling like you belong to something. This is kind of, I'm reading it partially for work, but it also is just a, just a fun book and working with students. And one of the big things that our students are really struggling with, you know, coming out of the Pandemic is, is the, the connections and the ties that they had. Most specifically, what does that look like in the non digital realm. Right. How do you actually connect to another person in, in a real and authentic way? And then the other one that I'm reading is called the Map Thief, which is really interesting. I, I love reading these kinds of books. It, it's a real story of a, of a map curator. So these are like ancient maps and, and with somebody that was in this sort of world where they had access to all these maps and was basically over the course of, I think it was like at least like 15 years, was actually stealing them and selling them on the black market. And you know, spoiler alert, obviously they wouldn't have written the book if, if this person hadn't gotten caught, but basically got caught. And so it was one of these odd stories of someone stealing something that was super valuable. I mean these were like ancient maps, some of them. So yeah, it's just an interesting, it's almost reads like a, I would say a detective story, but it kind of is like that. So yeah, a bunch of different things.

Thanks. I'm going to look for all those and make sure to link those in our show notes. And as I do thinking about that last one, the Map Thief, I'm thinking there's another guy we don't want writing the ethics of AI for us.

Yes, that's exactly right.

Hey Joe, thanks for all this today. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Bob. This was a real treat and thanks for the invite and I know that our paths will cross again. Thanks for listening to this Ooda Loop production. For the latest analysis on cybersecurity, technology and global risks, please visit www.ooda loop.com.