Technology at the Limits of Comprehension

Date: 1/31/2018
Time: 8:00 AM TO 9:00 AM

Johnson County Library
9875 W. 87th St.
Overland Park, KS 66212

---

Event Description: Today’s technological systems have become so complicated that even those who design them sometimes don’t fully understand how they work anymore. Join Samuel Arbesman, author of Overcomplicated, for a lecture on grappling with our new world of incomprehensible technologies, followed by Q&A. Samuel Arbesman is a complexity scientist, whose work focuses on the nature of scientific and technological change. He is currently Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital, a venture capital firm focused on ideas at the frontier of science and technology. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Boulder and Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation. Arbesman’s training is in complexity science, computational biology, and applied mathematics. His scientific research has been cited widely and has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His essays about science, mathematics, and technology have appeared in such places as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired, where he was previously a contributing writer, and he has been featured in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010. Arbesman is the author of two award-winning books, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension (Current/Penguin, 2016) and The Half-Life of Facts (Current/Penguin, 2012). Previously, Arbesman was a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University in 2008, and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University in 2004.


Directions:
Johnson County Library, 9875 W. 87th St. Overland Park, KS 66212

---