Illustration by ChatGPT
One-line role:
Paul Jorion — seeking an intelligible account of how the world works, from lived social practice to formal and artificial systems.
What I’ve been trying to do all along
I did not begin my work with the intention of moving across disciplines. What happened instead is that I started with a question that proved impossible to confine to any single one.
My earliest research was in anthropology, through long-term fieldwork in a small fishing community. What interested me was not culture as an object of description, but practice as a system: how knowledge is shared and gets transmitted, how decisions are made under uncertainty, and how norms persist without formal formalisation.
Ten years later, and after having acquainted myself with pioneering use of algebra to solve anthropological puzzles, I left academia under circumstances that were not of my choosing. I was then called by the United Nations to work in Africa, where I encountered social, economic, and institutional problems whose complexity could not be reduced to any single explanatory register. This experience reinforced a conviction that had already taken shape in my anthropological work: to be solved, real-world problems need to explode disciplinary boundaries.
On my return to Europe, I re-entered the orbit of sociology and anthropology. It was at that point that I was invited to join an artificial intelligence research team. From 1987 to 1990, I worked in AI, exploring how aspects of human reasoning and categorisation could be formalised in artificial systems. This work did not represent a break with my earlier research: it made explicit, in a new medium, questions that had already been present in my anthropological inquiries.
In 1989, while I was producing a series of radio programs on artificial intelligence in France, a banker contacted me after hearing one of these broadcasts. Funding for the AI work I was involved in was coming to an end, and he proposed that I join the banking sector. I accepted. For the next sixteen years, I worked within the financial system.
Far from being a detour, this period confronted me daily with problems that were structurally indeterminate: situations where economic, mathematical, psychological, and institutional dimensions interfered with one another, and where no predefined model was adequate. It was in this context that I progressively extended my mathematical toolkit – not as a formal exercise, but as a practical necessity imposed by the very nature of the problems themselves.
After leaving the banking world in 2008, I devoted extensive research to developing a true account of the functioning of the financial sector. It was only in 2022, when two Italian researchers drew my attention to the contemporary relevance of my early work in artificial intelligence, that I formally re-entered that field. This return was not a conversion, but a reactivation: artificial systems had become central enough that questions I had been pursuing for decades could no longer be addressed without them.
Throughout these phases, the object of inquiry remained constant. What changed were the contexts, the degree of formalisation, and the scale at which the same underlying questions reappeared – questions concerning meaning, coordination, persistence, and intelligibility.
The theoretical work I am pursuing today, including the framework known as GENESIS, is best understood as an attempt to make this continuity explicit. It is not a departure from anthropology, economics, or artificial intelligence, but the outcome of a long journey in which methods were gathered as tools to be used rather than as labels for sub-fields wherein I would consider myself an expert.
Indeed, I have never sought to master disciplines for their own sake. I have followed problems where they led, and allowed my work to be shaped by the demands they imposed. If this path appears irregular, the reason is that the questions to be solved resisted silo compartmentalisation.
What unifies my work is therefore not a field, but an ambition: to arrive at an intelligible account of how the world works, from lived social practice to formal and artificial systems.