#21 – Melanie Moses: From Cells to Algorithms
From Scaling Theory by Thibault Schrepel
July 29, 2025 · 51 min
About this episode
Thibault Schrepel interviews Melanie Moses about the implications of scaling theory across various disciplines.
My guest today is Melanie Moses , a Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, an External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and Chair of the New Mexico AI Consortium . Melanie's work spans a wide range of disciplines all unified by her deep understanding of complexity theory. In our conversation, Melanie and I explore how scaling theory reveals surprising patterns across nature, technology, and society. We discuss what decentralized systems like ant colonies can teach us about building more robust AI, and what the immune system tells us about information networks. We also delve into the costs of building scalable infrastructure, and why we might need new approaches to governance that can scale with our global challenges. Finally, we explore whether there could ever be a universal scaling law and what young researchers should know about pursuing interdisciplinary paths. I hope you enjoy our discussion. You can follow me on X (@ ProfSchrepel ) and BlueSky (@ ProfSchrepel ). References: Melanie Moses’ Biological Computation Lab https://moseslab.cs.unm.edu Metabolic Scaling From Individuals to Societies (PhD, 1993)…
People in this episode
Host: Thibault Schrepel
Guest: Melanie Moses
Topics covered
- complexity theory
- scaling theory
- decentralized systems
- artificial intelligence
- governance
- interdisciplinary research
Keywords
- scaling theory
- complexity theory
- decentralized systems
- AI
- governance
- interdisciplinary research
- biological computation
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of New Mexico, Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico AI Consortium
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