In politics or biological aggregates, we see the outcomes of collective decisions that emerge from dynamic, structured interactions among many complex components.

How should we represent sophisticated decision-makers without discarding what makes them sophisticated? How do the costs of computing and of acquiring information constrain what collective decisions are reachable? And how do systems sustain innovation while old elements are rendered obsolete?

These are foundational questions for the physics of complex systems, and they matter for how we build and reason about artificial intelligence, for how organizations should be structured, for how ecosystems adapt to environmental change, and for how innovation can be measured and encouraged.