Eddie Lee
Complexity Science Hub Vienna
Thu, Nov 2, 2023
7:30 PM UTC
Thu, Nov 2, 2023
7:30 PM UTC
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Boston, MA 02115
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
Innovation and obsolescence describe dynamics of ever-churning and adapting social and biological systems. We formalize the connection with a reduced model of the dynamics of the “space of the possible” (e.g. technologies, mutations, theories) to which agents (e.g. firms, organisms, scientists) couple as they grow, die, and replicate. We predict three regimes: the space is finite, ever growing, or a Schumpeterian dystopia in which obsolescence drives the system to collapse. We reveal a critical boundary at which the space of the possible fluctuates dramatically in size, displaying recurrent periods of minimal and of veritable diversity. When the space is finite, corresponding to physically realizable systems, we find surprising structure. As one prediction, we consider the density of agents near and away from the innovative frontier that we compare with distributions of firm productivity, covid diversity, and citation rates for scientific publications. Remarkably, our minimal model derived from first principles aligns with empirical examples. In more recent work, we extend the model to consider more general structures to the space of the possible and big data on the information footprint of firms. The extensions put to empirical test our framework for unifying innovation and obsolescence across fields.
About the speaker
Eddie Lee is an Austrian Science Fund ESPRIT Fellow at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. After earning a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cornell University in 2019, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute before moving to Vienna. His work is highly interdisciplinary, and he studies the role of information in bio-social systems such as in the neural connectome, social cascades, niche construction, voting, and innovation/obsolescence dynamics.
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