This blog is a continuation of the Building AI Leadership Brain Trust Blog Series which targets board directors and CEO's to accelerate their duty of care to develop stronger skills and competencies in AI in order to ensure their AI programs achieve sustaining results. My last two blogs introduced value of science and stressed its importance to AI, and focused on the importance of AI professionals having some foundation in computing science as a cornerstone for designing and developing AI models and production processes, as well as the richness of complexity sciences and appreciating that integrating diverse disciplines into complex AI programs is key for successful returns on investments (ROI). This blog introduces the importance of physics and explores its relationship to AI as often I see AI solutioning teams missing physics skills in the solutioning constructs - which I believe is a strategic mistake for many complex AI programs. Its important for C levels to understand that AI is not a singular discipline it requires many other skills to get the solution architecture right. So deeply understand the business problem in front of you - and the more complex the problem is the increased value physicists will have in guiding you forward.

What is the relevance of complexity science to AI as a discipline? You do not see enough mention of complexity science in relationship to AI competency development. This really surprises me as complexity science is all about the traversing of disciplinary boundaries and occurs both within and between multiple systems. Complexity sciences have emerged through interdependent and overlapping influences from diverse fields, including concepts from: physics, economics, biology, sociology and computer science. Complexity sciences strive to understand relevant "system" phenomenon that is characterized by changes, and unpredictability. A "system" is a set of connected or interdependent things or agents (such as a person, a molecule, a species, or an organization).

As we can see from the hardening religious impulse in our current authoritarian, autocratic moment, the traditionalist defense of "civilization" ultimately rests upon the complicated, combined influence of the major Abrahamic revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). The Abrahamic faiths – based as they are on divine revelation, sacred texts and prophetic moments – require a creator-centric moral order that exists outside of time and space. In the last millennium, Thomist natural law – the philosophical thread of law and logic running through many of our core assumptions about "the West" – has extended and refined, but in no way refuted, these central premises of the Abrahamic religions. In The Creation Project, my argument has been that the axis of conflict in the coming decades will be a civilizational battle between two irreconcilable, non-liberal (i.e., non-Enlightenment) regimes and worldviews – backward-looking, creator-centered natural law and forward-looking creation-centered complexity science. In prior posts, I have specifically focused on Princeton professor Robby George's views on natural law because his ideas distill nearly everything about the foundational beliefs of western civilization that complexity science calls into question, and that require root-and-branch reassessment.

It is quite difficult at first to precisely define'Complexity Science'. It is a new perspective of methodology and modeling approaches that are based more on reality than assumptions. Quite simply put, Complexity Science is a new way to grasp and manage reality. It does not study systems in isolation like gambling dice or planetary motion only. It studies the complex, holistic, inter-connected reality in which we actually live such as financial stock markets, social policies, economic policies, natural catastrophes and so on.

It is quite difficult at first to precisely define'Complexity Science'. It is a new perspective of methodology and modeling approaches that are based more on reality than assumptions. Quite simply put, Complexity Science is a new way to grasp and manage reality. It does not study systems in isolation like gambling dice or planetary motion only. It studies the complex, holistic, inter-connected reality in which we actually live such as financial stock markets, social policies, economic policies, natural catastrophes and so on.