Episode 24: Melanie Mitchell - The nature of intelligence and following your curiosity

Melanie Mitchell delights in the curiosity, complexity, and intelligence of the world and her brilliance and spaciousness spread to everyone around her. She shares her wonder at the world in this expansive conversation.

This is a conversation that I have wanted to have for a very long time - our guest is Melanie Mitchell, a pioneer in the world of natural and artificial intelligence, leading complexity thinker, and an individual who has for decades and continues each day to push the boundaries of human thought. 

Melanie is a professor of computer science at Portland State University and the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute where she has contributed work since the early 1990s. She has helped make the institute perhaps one of the most important places for deep, spacious, and novel scientific research and one of the most fascinating locations on the planet in my humble opinion.

Dr. Mitchell is the author of six books and a long list of influential papers on artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her 2009 book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009 and is a must read. She published her latest book titled Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019 and has made waves in the AI and science communities since. 

She was just awarded the Herbert A. Simon Award for her prolific contributions to complex systems science and artificial intelligence from the New England Complex Systems Institute. 

She received her PhD in computer science in 1990 from the University of Michigan.

Melanie is one of the original thinkers in the deeply alluring, terrifying, and beautiful field of AI and I’m excited to bring you a conversation in which we dive into the origins of her life.