The Soft
<p>We’re joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from <em>Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials</em> (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles.</p> <p>Tripaldi’s work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy of computation: that intelligence is substrate-indifferent, that it can scale and migrate independent of what carries it. She argues the opposite, that you cannot separate intelligence from the materials through which it is conveyed.</p> <p>This becomes experimentally clear in her recent essay “Substrates Unbound” (Antikythera, 2025), where she tracks biocomputing systems like DishBrain — living neuronal cultures interfaced with silicon chips that don’t execute pre-given code but reorganize, learn, and adapt. Mouse neurons and human neurons perform differently under the same training conditions. This reframes a central question of the moment: not ‘can we scale intelligence,’ but which matter are we asking to think, under what energy regime, and at what cost?</p>
Host: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo
Guest: Laura Tripaldi
Part of: Disintegrator Podcast