Luís M. A. Bettencourt

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816 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Luís M. A. Bettencourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

So they're made out of...

Things that we can identify more as individuals, the ants, the neurons, the people, perhaps, the places, the buildings.

But then these are in interaction with each other, right?

The whole thing doesn't make sense if you're just thinking a neuron alone is a pitiful thing, right?

But a brain, my gosh, glorious thing.

Same thing.

You can say that about humans.

I'm not going to go there.

But, you know, it's.

It's more interesting when we come together.

And probably the same thing for the ant.

It's a very simple thing, but the ant colony, wow, right?

So ants, as that happens, you have this differentiation of roles, have always this, again, division of labor, division of knowledge thing that creates a differing functioning whole, something that works differently from what the individual would do.

So in all these systems have a certain metabolism, a certain rate of energy harvesting and throughput, which is the physical part, the physics-y part.

But then also what they have, which is less visible, at least if you don't look for it at first, but it's kind of the main focus of a lot of research, including mine, is the informational part.

The informational part, both structural, how each piece is orchestrated with the others, how they're interdependent,

But it's also the information they contain that enables new behaviors, their model of the world, if you will.

And that is the scope of what they can do.

And in some systems, but not others, or at least not others easily at the same speed, the adaptation to create a new model of the world, a better model of the world, is very fast.

So cities are very good at that.

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