The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with J. Doyne Farmer about his book Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World. They discuss deterministic chaos & strange attractors, how chaos makes time possible, bounded rationality, economic equilibrium & Nash equilibrium, traditional economics' failures, standard economic theory basics

Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about the ideas in his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future. They discuss Sam's motivation for writing the book, the wondering vs. utilitarian stances toward computing, early personal computing experiences, scale in programming,

Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about the new Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church's evolving role in a digital age. They discuss Trump as an avatar of the digital paradigm shift, the significance of Leo XIV's name choice, Francis as a thug, Francis's background as chemical engineer and bouncer, Synodality & Church decent

Jim talks with Daniel Mezick on the theme of games and their relationship to governance. They discuss Jane McGonigal's four properties of games, the nature of authority, position-based vs role-based authority, formal vs. informal authority structures, finite & infinite games, mutable games, the paradox of self-amendmen

Jim talks with Zak Stein about the psychological and developmental risks of AI in K-12 education. They discuss education vs schooling, technology's role in human-to-human interaction, GPS & skill atrophy, prosthetic vs enhancement technologies, multipolar traps in AI, cognitive diminishment & skill development, teacher

Jim talks with Daniel Rodriguez about the state of AI software development and its implementation in industry. They discuss Daniel's background at Microsoft & Anaconda, transformer-based technologies, software engineering as hard vs soft science, vibe coding, barriers to entry in software engineering, cognitive styles