Schrödinger, Life & Interdisciplinary Problem Solving
Crossing lines between disciplines is the only way we are going to make it
A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects and, therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master. This is regarded as a matter of noblesse oblige. For the present purpose I beg to renounce the noblesse, if any, and to be freed of the ensuing obligation. . . . the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than small specialized portion of it.
I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them, and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.
I mentioned in the past we would have a lot more to say about the tag line of Taos Research: “AI Accelerated Interdisciplinary Science” and I wanted to get that process started. At a very basic level, this is the motivating idea that led to the creation of Taos Research. Many of our most important problems that we face as society are very clearly going to require expertise and participation from many different areas to tackle, and yet research, business, engineering and technology are all marching us towards greater and greater specialization … towards deeper and deeper silos. The pace of the advancements in today’s world in so many areas makes it challenging to keep pace with developments inside one’s own area of specialization. This leaves scant time to branch out and consider developments in either adjacent or father away domains.
The goal we are setting for Taos Research therefore is to build an organization (and tools and technologies) that leverages AI to push against these silos, an organization that helps humans to both see the connections between rapidly moving fields, and build the meta insights that can spawn the right projects capable of impacting our most challenging problems.
Schrödinger’s classic and inspirational work in 1944 sets the stage perfectly. For those who have not read it, it is in my mind one of the most inspiring books of the last 100 years. Actually it is three very short books in one volume! Each one deeply insightful, personal, and mind opening. All three in fields well outside of theoretical physics where of course Schrödinger earned his well deserved fame. For those interested I strongly encourage reading it in full (here is a link): What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical sketches. The number of authors who have referenced Schrödinger’s book since is testament not only to its ability to inspire but also its enduring scientific and philosophical contribution.
Are we fools to go here?
Let’s be clear, as Schrödinger notes, scientists and non scientists alike do risk “making fools” of ourselves from time to time when we wade into ponds away from the places where we are specialists. Erwin Schrödinger was certainly no fool, but he is is equally not an easy act to follow! How can mere mortals follow in his footsteps? If you do take part of your time and devote it to going deeper into fields outside of your core domain, you will occasionally be rebuffed, you may feel overwhelmed by the depth of fields you haven’t touched since high school. Not every step of the journey will be easy or without criticism. How can Taos Research and AI potentially contribute to making this less daunting and more doable?
Let’s tackle this in parts. One step is organizational at Taos as I mentioned. We are building a loose affiliation of researchers from many different fields. If you are interested in being an affiliated researcher, or engineer or project manager and working with Taos Research please reach out to us.
Erwin Schrödinger was certainly no fool, but he is is equally not an easy act to follow! How can mere mortals follow in his footsteps?
Since we tackle projects in a wide variety of domains of science, business, and technology we rely heavily on our affiliated researchers. Please let us know both where you have expertise, but also where your interests and passions lie. We do not require you to be a PhD or even to hold any particular credentials. We take on both for profit and not for profit projects in roughly equal proportions. A common theme is the use of frontier AI techniques, and the multiple domain perspectives, to accelerate progress on hard problems. Our main ask it that you be deeply curious, committed to learn, and committed to our shared human need to solve problems.
A second crucial strategy is education. We will be publishing both here and in other forms (research papers, open source, books, etc.) works of different forms aimed at helping to bridge domains, and bring high quality understanding in an accessible way to as many people as possible. We equally invite your ideas for what areas you believe warrant focus as we go? And we welcome participation both on this blog as well as on the other forms we may publish. The learning section of the Taos website is an excellent place to start. We are very open to suggestions of great books or papers to add there as well, and even happier if you care to write a review of one that has inspired you.
AI helps in both of these dimensions. We are actively building platform technologies and tools to help in both of these parts of the problem. If you are a builder or AI engineer we welcome your contributions as well. If you are interested in any of these ways of contributing please use the ‘Join Us’ section on the Taos Research website https://taosresearch.ai/ .
I hope we all can commit to be open to the possibility that by venturing into domains were we are not experts, we can accept when any of us occasionally “makes a fool of ourselves” as I have certainly done at times. I liken it to learning a foreign language, when you are learning to speak you have to make many many mistakes. You often feel a stranger in a strange land. Native speakers can find your stilted speech a bit tiresome to say the least. But you have to press on or you will never learn. So let us all also be welcoming in our areas of expertise when new people come with genuine interest, and desire to solve problems, but who lack our language, formalisms, and culture.
What I can guarantee to those brave enough to take the risks, the rewards of continuously reaching deep into new areas are immense. You meet tremendous people. You learn amazing things that most people will never encounter, and you connect the dots in powerful ways to your own life and goals. Staying in your lane is very overrated.
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