“Old systems of the past are collapsing, and new systems of the future are still to be born. I call this moment the great progression.”
Up next, We are living through a slowdown in human progress | Jason Crawford ► • We are living through a slowdown in human…
We are at a tipping point. In the next 25 years, technologies like AI, clean energy, and bioengineering are poised to reshape society on a scale few can imagine.
Peter Leyden draws on decades of observing technological revolutions and historical patterns to show how old systems collapse, new ones rise, and humanity faces both extraordinary risk and unprecedented opportunity.
Dr. Michael Levin is a professor in the Department of Biology at Tufts University and an associate faculty member at the Wyss Institute at Harvard. He directs the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts, where his team integrates biophysics, computational modeling, and behavioral science to study how cellular collectives make decisions during embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer.
Levin’s research centers on diverse forms of intelligence and unconventional embodied minds, bridging conceptual theory, experimental biology, and translational work aimed at regenerative medicine. His lab also pioneers efforts in artificial intelligence and the bioengineering of novel living machines.
📖 Let’s take our stories back. Check out our latest book in the Tales for Now and Ever series, Rapunzel and the Evil Witch: https://rapunzelbook.com/
Join Fr. Stephen De Young in his Jubilees and the Nephilim course, now streaming live on The Symbolic World: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/cour… 00:00 — Coming up 01:14 — Intro music 01:40 — Introduction 02:23 — What Michael does 06:19 — Example experiments 07:51 — Memories outside the brain 12:46 — Terminology: memory 13:59 — Communicate to biological cells 15:54 — Limitations? 17:39 — Platonic patterns 34:06 — Incarnation and constraints 39:26 — Causes 49:28 — New beings in new spaces 52:25 — What the Enlightenment dismissed 55:32 — Molecular medicine 57:36 — Subtle bodies 01:00:45 — Ethics 01:03:37 — Medical and meaning applications 01:11:42 — Frightening 01:14:31 — Against the status quo 01:19:03 — Should we dabble in this technology? 💻 Website and blog: http://www.thesymbolicworld.com 🔗 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanpageau 🔒 BECOME A PATRON: https://thesymbolicworld.com/subscribe Our website designers: https://www.resonancehq.io/ My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson: https://matthewwilkinson.net/
A conversation co-published by AI House Davos and Michael Levin’s Academic Content (@drmichaellevin)
In this conversation, we explore how intelligence exists across all scales of life, from cells to collectives, and what this means for our understanding of AI, minds, and what it means to be human.
Professor Michael Levin challenges the assumption that intelligence begins with brains, revealing how biological systems improvise, adapt, and solve problems in ways that go far beyond what our computational architectures attempt. From cognitive glue to the ethics of diverse intelligence, this interview questions the categories we’ve inherited and asks what truly matters as we enter an era of radically different embodiments.
Speaker. Michael Levin (Director at Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University)
Moderator. Louisa Hillegaart (Founder’s Associate, AI House Davos)
In this powerful opening session of the Strong AI Summit, moderator Dr. Mahault Albarracin brings together legendary thinkers redefining the boundaries between biology, cognition, active inference, and AGI.
00:00 Introduction by Dr. Mahault Albarracin. 00:42 Why study living systems when designing AI? 02:10 Dr. Michael Levin on biological intelligence and collective behavior. 04:25 Dr. Dalton on active inference foundations. 06:10 Prof. Stephen Grossberg on alignment and stable learning. 09:05 Limits of biological analogies in AI design. 11:45 Collective problem-solving and emergent goals. 13:30 Closing reflections.
Featuring:
Dr. Michael Levin, pioneer in morphogenesis, bioelectric signaling, and the xenobot project.
Prof. Stephen Grossberg, the most cited computational neuroscientist and creator of ART theory.
Dr. Dalton Sakadolsky, leading theoretician in Bayesian mechanics & active inference.
Biologist Michael Levin—creator of living robots—reveals a radical, evidence-based view of evolution driven by a fundamental mind, where agency emerges in unexpected places and what this means for humanity’s co-evolution with AI and AGI. This video is a compilation of interviews I conducted with Levin over the course of year for my Forbes reporting on his research.
Mathematics, like many other scientific endeavors, is increasingly using artificial intelligence. Of course, math is the backbone of AI, but mathematicians are also turning to these tools for tasks like literature searches and checking manuscripts for errors. But how well can AI perform when it comes to solving genuine, high-level research problems?
To date, there is still no widely accepted realistic methodology for assessing AI’s capabilities to solve math at this level. So a group of mathematicians decided to put the machines to the test as they detail in a study available on the arXiv preprint server.
Previous attempts at testing AI have used math contest problems and questions already found in textbooks. What makes this study different is that the questions the programs faced were drawn from mathematicians’ own research. They had never been posted or published online, which means AI couldn’t memorize answers from its training data.
