Afleveringen
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Todayâs guest is William Morgan, the co-founder of Restless Egg, a London-based incubator and accelerator designed specifically for a new class of âartist-foundersâ whose work synthesizes art, technology, and commercial product design.
His thesis: The tech sectorâs obsession with optimization canât help us discover the genuinely novel forms of human experience that this intelligent substrate makes possible. If we want something truly better, we need to cultivate the taste and discernment to know which futures are worth living in â and radically expand our imagination regarding what human-machine relationships can actually look like.
⨠Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future
⨠Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org
⨠Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm
⨠Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence.
Chapters
00:00 Teaser: Taste & Sovereign Choice
02:46 Intro
06:41 Meet William Morgan
08:05 The Origins of The Avant-Garde
10:09 Taste and Abundance
12:12 Luxury Tech and Experience
15:57 Why Experiment?
20:21 Venture Models and Niches
25:20 The Sense Organs of Society
30:51 Rethinking Venture Incentives
38:54 Slop and Subculture Rebellion
47:13 Beyond âInâ or âOutâ
50:51 Founder Experiments Showcase
57:03 Scenius is Real Value
Mentioned
Restless Eggâs Half Dozen Newsletter
Art Is Everything You Donât Have To Do by Cory Doctorow
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner
This collective is radically rethinking what it means to make art by Thom Waite at Dazed Digital
The Dimensions of Experience by Andrew P. Smith
Mount Analogue âby RenĂŠ Daumal
The Nerves of Government âby Karl Deutsch
Why Software is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen
Y Combinatorâs Simple Agreement for Future Equity
Common As Airby Lewis Hyde
Standing by Wordsby Wendell Berry
Right Story, Wrong Storyby Tyson Yunkaporta
Fall by Neal Stephenson
The Politics of Visionby Lydia Nochlin
The Key to Science Fictionby Damien Walter
Flora Weil
Antithykera
CCRU
Luciana Parisi
George Bataille
Matthew David Segall
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
⨠Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future
⨠Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org
⨠Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm
⨠Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence
In the last episode, my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen explored âvalue captureâ: his term for what happens when our scoring systems define what we care about and ultimately our identities. In this episode, we ask what it means to reverse this process â what you might call âvalue emancipationâ â with Andrea Farias (LinkedIn), a Barcelona-based researcher and builder whose guiding mission to is to support the transition to a regenerative civilization aligned with the flows of our planet.
Andrea investigates how digital technologies can accelerate this transition, crafting information ecosystems that reimagine knowledge creation and resource allocation. But her path to this life required some serious unlearning and a rocky road out of her prior incarnation as a healthcare tech product strategist.
We invite you to ask the same questions she did, and which we ask in this converstion:
⢠When I decouple from the desires Iâve identified with, what is worth taking their place?⢠How do we design and adopt technologies from this new, more spacious identity?⢠How does the local determination of plural value help us restore necessary context to human-scale decision-making?⢠How do we navigate the tensions between the place-ful realm of community and the placeless realm of global coordination?⢠Where do we need friction in our digital lives, and how can ecology and bioregionalism inspire visions for a better Web?⢠What does it mean to be âlocal to an idea or a narrativeâ and how does that cyber-locality interface with geographic locality?⢠Where do we still want abstraction for coordination at scale?
Tune in for a deep dialogue on how to care for the processes that actually create life â and what it means to enact regenerative principles to personal and collective health, technology and economy.
(Fun fact: although she wasnât at the time of this recording, Andrea is now a member of Atlas Research Group! So we will definitely be doing more togetherâŚ)
Special Announcement
Join me at the Weirdosphere online learning platform for âTranscendence in the Age of AIâ â where weâre hosting an interactive screening of Steven Spielbergâs A.I. (2001) on June 23rd and chasing it on June 25th with a deep-cut conversation between myself and two wonderful writers and film-makers: Weird Studies co-host JF Martel and Joel Gunz of Macguffin Media. Fresh ideas guaranteed! The viewing party is free to all; the follow-up dialogue and group discussion is $20 USD.
Register here. Founding Members on Substack and Patreon can join for free, as always! Reach out if you are one and would like the free registration link.
Chapters
00:00 Replacing Habits With Values01:47 Introduction05:39 Job Creation vs. Job Destruction08:04 Enoughness & Bigger Desires Than âMoreâ11:00 Andreaâs Story of Crisis & Transformation23:04 Limits, Care, & Post-Growth30:44 Bioregionalism, Currency, And Web340:40 Tokenization Tradeoffs42:09 Governance Starts Local44:42 Rewilding Digital Biomes49:42 The Fractal Cozy Web55:29 AI Translation And Legibility01:04:48 Bioregional Finance Experiments01:11:16 Protocols, Enforcement, & Values01:25:18 Closing & Thanks
Mentions
Andreaâs Website (which may not work; sheâs extremely busy doing real stuff)
Andreaâs Substack (which is fallow due to aforementioned real stuff but maybe a surge of new followers will inspire her to publish more of her excellent writing here)
Kate Raworth - Doughnut EconomicsJack D. Forbes - Indigenous Spirituality & EthosYancey Strickler - Postcapitalism for RealistsThe Consilience Project - Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic DesignHenryâs Zoo - The Limits and âGoodâ of Public GoodsJames Bridle - Ways of Being
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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⨠Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future
⨠Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
⨠Stream and download my music at artist-owned Subvert.fm
⨠Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team on a mission to build sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence
About This Episode
This weekâs guest is C. Thi Nguyen (Website | Wikipedia | X), associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value. In our first conversation on Future Fossils, we explored his writing on games as an art form in which agency is the medium. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Elseâs Game, takes that logic further and reveals the games that bind society together with institutional metrics â one of the most powerful, pervasive, and invisible technologies of all time.
Thiâs thesis hinges on the observation that a metric is never just a number. Itâs a value judgment dressed up in the costume of objectivity, a down-sampling of our richly multidimensional world into proxies that can travel efficiently between strangers. And with every subsequent compression of meaning into portable, scalable, decontextualized form, our metrics progressively displace place itself â the nuance of our singular, non-fungible lives â and define what we can even aspire to be.
Thi calls this kind of cognitive enclosure âvalue captureâ: when an institution uses metrics to coordinate across distance and difference, it engineers a context-invariant kernel that can travel between strangers without requiring shared background, history, or care. The power of these abstractions is real. So is their violence.
We can use metrics instrumentally, holding them lightly as useful fictions. But more often than not we forget things like GPA, GDP, or KPIs started life as somebody elseâs choices â that someone, somewhere, decided what to count and what to ignore â and we begin to inhabit the metric as if it were reality itself: optimizing our lives, desires, and identities for a scoring system we didnât author and may never have consciously accepted.
Games show us another way. By Thiâs account, games are a medium for the transmission of different kinds of agency, a technology for practicing the very awareness that metrics erode: that metrics are cultural constructs, and we still have some choice in what to value. When youâre playing, you know youâre playing. The magic circle of the game space is a low-stakes laboratory for inhabiting a different set of values, and therefore different selves. Therein lies a whole philosophy of freedom, and in a moment when the infrastructure of meaning-making is being rebuilt from the ground up, recovering our capacity to see the game of modern life as a game may be the most important skill we have.
But thereâs a twist that takes us beyond the scope of Thiâs book and into the question thatâs been keeping me up at night for the last two years. With AI, weâve tunneled so far into abstraction that we may have come out the other side. Large language models now allow us to translate between different perspectives, to ground insights from our aggregate intelligence in personal detail. If youâve ever used a chatbot to explain physics to you as a specific human being, based on your own data vault, and in the style of a specific author, you know what I mean. Socratesâ critique of written language in Phaedrus â that it couldnât âread the roomâ or know its audience â feels somewhat less relevant in an age when the generation of text is powered by systems with such a high-dimensional and granular view of things that we are no longer bound to one canonical version of anything. Is AI the apotheosis of our enclosure by institutional metrics, or is it the medium through which we are finally able to take a post-ironic stance on the constraints of modern life?
Itâs starting to look like a world in which everything is a metric and everything is a game. And just maybe, that means we can renegotiate these tradeoffsâŚas long as we donât take ourselves too seriously.
And with this, we circle back around to the core question of this project: As we approach the horizon where anything is possible, what should be? Who do you want to be, and what games will make you that person?
Chapters
00:00 Episode Teaser03:50 Intro Monologue09:11 Meet C. Thi Nguyen17:43 Value Capture Explained23:48 The Gap between Measured & Valued35:29 Recognition vs. Perception42:48 Games vs. Institutions46:43 Is Meaning Control an Interface Problem?49:09 How Rules Became Algorithms54:17 Fungibility & Monocropping56:38 Is Coordination at Scale a Red Herring?01:03:14 Art Provides Hope01:16:17 AI Futures & Values01:32:27 Thanks & Announcements
Mentioned Resources
Are humans destined to evolve into crabs? by Michael Garfield
Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism by Jessica Flack
The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems with Value Metrics & Governance at Scale (EPE 06) for Complexity Podcast
The natural selection of bad science by Paul Smaldino & Richard McElreath
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science by Johan Chu & James Evans
Jargon is a Moat by Second Voice
Trust in Numbers by Theodore Porter
Rules by Lorraine Dastin
Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott
The Power of Maps by Dennis Woods
Dilla Time by Dan Charmas
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
Marshall McLuhan
Reiner Knizia
Langdon Winner
Samantha Matherne
Iain McGilchrist
Kevin Kelly
đ§ Ideas That Matter: Discussing Against Identity & Standing by Words
đ Prophetic Culture Book Club Recording
194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions
175 - C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as Art
42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)
Suggested Additional Listening
Co-Evolving with Magical Technologies feat. Sam Arbesman
Chaim Gingold on Building SimCity & Simulation as Discourse
The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean
Scale Theory: Contemplating Everything-At-Onceness with Joshua DiCaglio
Aishwarya Khanduja on Living Inquiry & Fostering Imagination
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
⨠Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube ⢠Spotify ⢠Apple Podcasts
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This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) â a self-described âEarthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and Kamay clans of the Dharawal Nation, in Sydney, Australia.â
Mat is a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Cofounder (with Alja Isakovic) of the the inquiry-driven social venture Tethix and mission steward (with Gemma Palmer) of Collective Futurecrafting, Mat has over twenty yearsâ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. He also makes delightfully weird code-as-art projects like The Ministry of Futility, a bureaucratic adventure game where players navigate a maze of pointless decisions.
In short, heâs precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness.
Mat and I met in 2024 in the group chat that spawned the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server and immediately realized a common thread ran through both our lives: a commitment to fostering our collective imagination aimed at ecologically-grounded, mutualistic, more-than-human futures.
In todayâs episode we riff on themes from the Tethix blog and podcast, including:
⢠How do we embrace the lunacy of tech?⢠What should we do with the time that new technologies save? (if they even do) and⢠How do we nuture weird online communal gardens where we can play together?
We also draw from the Tethix codesign principles, product ethos, and elemental ethics documents.
Along the way we explore the fundamental problems of scale and institutional misalignment, the value of ritual, and the return to embodiment.
⨠Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future.
⨠Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
⨠Music: âScalar Reconfigurationsâ
Chapters
00:00 Intro
06:02 Starting Over With Play
08:05 Matâs Origin Story
13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety
18:24 How Tethix Began
40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care
46:26 Collective Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions
47:05 Start With What Exists
48:34 Pivot Beyond Tech Ethics
50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community
57:42 Composting The Leviathan
01:01:48 Trauma, Empathy, Care
01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing
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In this episode we join pioneering psychedelic neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore (Website | X | Instagram | Substack) to probe the bewildering high-dimensional horizons of DMT research and their implications for our understanding of consciousness and the structure of reality.
In his book Death by Astonishment, Gallimore argues DMT expands the brainâs ârepresentational reach,â enabling perception of high-dimensional structures and apparent interaction with non-human âintelligent agents,â challenging standard accounts that treat the experience as mere hallucination, dreams, or Jungian archetypes. What new shapes will weâand our sciencesâtake as we integrate the intense strangeness of these experiences? How do we even begin to practice âtruly psychedelicâ science? And what insights might we be able to bring âhomeâ to the Flatland where we spend most of our waking lives?
Andrew has talked about this work in many, many other venues (his conversations with Jesse Michels and Danny Jones were especially good), so I wanted to carry the conversation into fresh terrain. Consider this episode the â200 level courseâ, or at least my best attempt ask a brilliant and provocative researcher some very complicated questions.
Over our two hours together we discussed neuroimaging findings that challenge the âdreamâ and âarchetypeâ interpretations of DMT phenomenology, how criticality and noise in complex systems inform our understanding of the psychedelic experience, and the methodological problems inherent in studying ontologically shocking experiences while maintaining scientific rigor. We also probed the philosophical implications of DMT researchâsuch as the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than matterâand the possible connections between DMT hyperspace and life in an era of advanced technology. Andrew also gave some context on the Noonautics research non-profit its partnership with the newly-launched Eleusis facility, a carefully-crafted venue for extended-state DMT work. But perhaps my favorite part of this conversation was spent in speculation, about how science and even language might evolve to meet the challenges presented by the ineffable high-dimensional reality that DMT reveals to us.
⨠Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube ⢠Spotify ⢠Apple Podcasts
⨠Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings â including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.
⨠Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future.
⨠Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
⨠Music: âScalar Reconfigurationsâ & âCity of Jewelsâ
⨠Contact me to collaborate or hire me as a consultant
Chapters
00:00:00 Intro00:08:15 Gallimoreâs Origin Story00:13:00 DMT as a Technology00:20:01 âEntitiesâ & Methodological Problems00:29:06 World Models and EEG Clues00:36:57 Why The Psychedelic State is Not a Dream00:44:11 Noise, Criticality, and New Order00:47:50 The Temperature-Noise Motif00:52:47 Metabolism & Dimensionality00:53:47 The Cortex & Representational Reach00:57:44 Do We Need New Language to Study The DMT Realm?01:00:45 Is There Only The Subject?01:09:31 Psychedelic Science As Altered Observation01:17:34 DMTx & Eleusis Plans01:21:55 The Future of Transdimensional Research01:31:44 A Call for Humility
Cited Works
Neural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEGby Christopher Timmerman et al.
The Overfitted Brainby Erik Hoel
The evolution of syntactic communicationby Martin Nowak et al.
The Transcension Hypothesisby John Smart
Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Societyfor Complexity Podcast
Ancient Extinction Events, Apocalyptic Cults, and DMT Entitieswith Michael on The Danny Jones Podcast
Other Mentions
Stephen SzĂĄraNick SandDonald HoffmanKarl FristonJordi RibaDavid ChalmersWilliam BurroughsJohn LillyPhil DickTerence McKennaRobert Anton WilsonJohn D. Barrow
Mentioned & Related Podcast Episodes
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Todayâs very overdue conversation is with AI ethicist and organizational trust expert Nathan Kinch of Trustworthy By Design (Website | LinkedIn), asking questions like: How do institutions made of decent, well-meaning people continue to behave out of alignment with their stated values? How do we dig ourselves out of a catastrophic collapse in trust? How can we design practical, participatory âliving labsâ for organizational reflection and facilitate convivial, playful environments for working together?
âCertainly one of the worldâs leading figures on ethics in practical applications.ââ Fionn Delahunty, NLP Lab at University of Galway
As we frequently observe on this show, we need to rework our ideas of agency and identity to adapt them to advances in our understanding of complex systems. Decisions emerge within a nexus of nested, multi-scale dynamics, and our species flourishes or fumbles in intricate symbiotic relationships with the collective intelligences embodied in cultural technologies like states, markets, corporations, and social clubs â beings that, by any reasonable account, live in worlds alien to our own lived experience and demonstrate their own goals and values. Getting them to behave in ways that nourish us requires a much more nuanced theory of change than that which created them in the first place, perhaps even a radically different vision of the links between biology, psychology, society, and environment. And given that AI is a beast of a similar order to these other âegregoresâ â the entities of collective computation that arise from our efforts to coordinate at scale and then impose their own top-down causal influence on our thoughts and actions â learning how to align individual and organizational purpose can give us profound insight into how to live well alongside (or in the proverbial guts of) newer, more obvious forms of non-human intelligence like LLMs that amplify our biases through lossy compression and feedback, and shape both our desires and view of adjacent possibility.
In other words, the âintent-to-actionâ gap in corporate ethics and the âpaperclip machineâ problem in our built wilderness of black box super-machines are structurally identical. And if we can âtameâ the secular gods of the modern industrial era , our self-domesticated species may actually still get a chance at living in a zoo of our own choosing.
If you are caught in a system of technologically mediated social dilemmas â and who isnât? â this will speak to you, and Iâm excited to share it.
⨠If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube ⢠Spotify ⢠Apple Podcasts ⢠Etc.
⨠Become a member for access to our study group and community calls, and for those recordings â including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.
⨠Become a founding member for access my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)
This is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a member:
⨠Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
⨠Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant
Referenced & Related
Whatâs trust got to do with it?Nathan Kinch
Three reasons why AI ethics is strugglingNathan Kinch
If âTrust is a mustâ for AI governance â here are 3 things regulators should doHilary Sutcliffe
Bluesky and enshittificationCory Doctorow
Environmentally Mediated Social DilemmasSylvie Estrela et al.
FLD On Navigating Complexity in Education: A Conversation with Dave SnowdenTim Logan
The corporate cultivation of digital resignationNora Draper & Joseph Turow
William GibsonJohn VervaekeRajiv SethiMat MytkaNadia LeeBarronness Onora OâNeill
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
This week go deep with Alex Komoroske, CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked.
The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around youâprivate, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chromeâs web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld.
Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality.
We canât take a reasonable principled stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. Iâm grateful that I get to share it with you and help light the way for promising alternatives to what many of us have come to accept as âthe way things are.â
Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!
⨠If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube ⢠Spotify ⢠Apple Podcasts ⢠Etc.
⨠Become a member to support the show and score myriad perks, like our book club: our next call is on Wendell Berryâs Standing by Words this Sunday, Feb 15th!
⨠Become a founding member for access to my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)
⨠Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
⨠Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant
Referenced & Related
⢠The FLUX Collective (team project w/ several people mentioned in this episode)
⢠Bits and Bobs (Alexâs long-running archive of weekly notes)⢠Common Ground (Alexâs dialogues w/ Aishwarya Khanduja of The Analogue Group)
⢠The Iterative Adjacent Possible (Alex on Medium)
⢠The Runaway Engine of Society (Alex on Medium)
⢠Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice (podcast w/ Lenny Rachitsky)
⢠Media and Machines by Anu Atluru at Working Theorys
⢠Accelerando & Glasshouse & Halting State (three books) by Charles Stross
⢠The Transparent Society by David Brin
⢠The evolution of Covert Signaling by Paul Smaldino
⢠Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul by Stefani Crabtree et al.
⢠The Tyranny of the Marginal User by Ivan Vendrov
⢠1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
⢠Blindsight & Echopraxia (two books) by Peter Watts
⢠The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor
⢠Silicon Valleyâs quest to remove friction from our lives by Rohit Krishnan
⢠The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by Kyla Scanlon
⢠Bernhard Seefeld
⢠Situated Software by Clay Shirky
⢠Das Rad (animated short)
⢠Geoffrey West
⢠Mark Pesce
⢠Fred Turner
⢠Robert David Steele
Explore hundreds of related podcast episodes in the archives!
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The world is getting weirder every day⌠We need weirdness specialists. Maybe the best guy for the job is my friend, the brilliant âmetashamanâ (and possible octopus) Layman Pascal.
In his own words, Layman âused to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory but heâs feeling much better now.â He leads the Metamodern Spirituality Labs, hosts The Integral Stage, Soulmakers+, and (forthcoming) Untegral Stage podcasts, and provides unique online courses. He is also a founding member of several think tanks in the developmental psychology and spirituality space, senior editor of Emerge online & is allied to numerous institutes across the field. In addition to many journal and anthology articles, he is the author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, Sex, Death & the Occult, as well as an upcoming book about Nietzsche.
Layman is known for his philosophical work on the metaphysics of adjacency, complex nonduality, coaxial developmental stage theories, sacred naturalism, archaic futurism, embodied spirituality & the âintegration-surplus model of religion and spiritualityâ for a post-postmodern civilization facing numerous accelerating and converging crises.
In this conversation we cover a lot of ground in a very short time, including: the nature of futurity and how humankindâs relationship to the future is changing; how to surf intense peculiarity'; the abiding sociocultural role of âshamanoidâ personalities and other useful weirdos; âwartimeâ mobilization for The Big Us; and other deep and delightful subjects. Itâs my honor to finally decant this year-old recording, now more pertinent than everâŚ
⨠If you enjoy this conversation, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting on your favorite podcast provider to help this work (and you!) find new allies: YouTube ⢠Spotify ⢠Apple Podcasts ⢠Etc.
⨠Our next Humans On The Loop book club discussion is for Wendell Berryâs Standing by Words on Sunday February 15th! Become a member to participate in these calls, exclusive Discord members channels, and our monthly hangouts.
⨠All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.
More links
⢠Explore the archives for nine years of mind-expanding conversations⢠Browse (nearly!) all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.orgâ˘Dig into the Humans On The Loop pitch deck⢠Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere⢠Contact me if you have burning questions!
Cited pieces by Layman
⢠The Soul of AI w/ Lee Chazen (YouTube)⢠The MetaModern Business Bureau (MMBB) (Substack)⢠Apocalyptarians (Substack)⢠The Society of Partial Deterritorialization (Substack)⢠The Two-Handed Demons (Substack)
Cited pieces by others
⢠Wendell Berry - Standing by Words⢠Hakim Bey - Temporary Autonomous Zone⢠Steven Johnson - The Revenge of the Humanities⢠Carol Dweck - Mindset⢠William James - On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake
Mentioned people with dialogues on my show
⢠Jim Rutt (181)⢠William Irwin Thompson (42, 43)⢠Erik Davis (99, 132, 140)⢠Timothy Morton (223)
Mentioned people without dialogues on my show
⢠Terence McKenna (although Iâve interviewed Terenceâs brilliant close friends Ken Adams and Bruce Damer multiple times; check the archives for episodes 4, 109, 209)⢠Alexander Bard⢠Andrew Huberman⢠Harry S. Truman⢠Jacques Lacan⢠H.P. Lovecraft⢠Doug Irwin⢠Nassim Taleb⢠Friedrich Nietzsche
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This week we come at technology sideways with help from hyperspace explorer Carl Hayden Smith, Associate Professor of Media at the University of East London (Talks & Papers), Founder of The Museum of Consciousness at New College, University of Oxford , co-founder of the Cyberdelic Nexus, Director at Noonautics and head of Context Engineering at Eleusis.
⨠Carl is currently teaching a course on Apocalyptic Hyperhumanism with Layman Pascal at Cadell Lastâs Philosophy Portal! More info and enrollment here.
⨠Our next Humans On The Loop members hangout is this Sunday January 18th at 10:00 am Mountain Time! Calendar invite coming soon for subscribers.
⨠All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.
⨠Show Links
⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals⢠Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere⢠Contact me if you have burning questions
⨠Mentions
Max CooperHunter S. ThompsonDoug RushkoffâFriedrich NietzscheAndrew GallimoreJohn VervaekeK. Allado-McDowellDale PendellJoĂŤl de RosnayJoshua DiCaglioCharles EisensteinFred TurnerMark ZuckerbergMichael DouglasRichard BartlettGordon White
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This week (actually, April) I speak with Rimma Boshernitsan (Website | LinkedIn), a speaker, interviewer, facilitator, and advisor who has partnered with senior leadership at Fortune 500 companiesâincluding Google, Kaiser Permanente, Roche, TATA, and Aesopâguiding them through transformation and growth. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, Tech Crunch and Forbes.
She began her career in management consulting at Deloitte, focusing on M&A and large-scale transformation, before moving into industry advising across healthcare, consumer business, and telecommunications. Later work in the art world taught her how cultural and political insights could drive innovation and transformation in business, leading her to found DIALOGUE in 2016.
She now combines strategic foresight, human-centered innovation, and interdisciplinary thinking to help her clients reframe challenges, identify opportunities, and lead with intention. She sits on the board of trustees at Headlands Center for the Arts and on the SECA Council Board at SFMOMA, and is also an advisor to Stanfordâs Women in Design Program.
Her most recent focus is in co-intelligence: integrating human, machine, and planetary intelligence to build future-facing organizations.
Iâm glad to have such an excellent partner in conversation to, as the Taoists say, âFeel our way across the river stone by stoneâ in a discussion about all of this and more: the re-emergence of nomadic populations and intentional communities, fumbling toward an idea of planetary culture, the role of intuition in leadership and biophilia in the design of our work spaces...itâs a marvelously nondisciplinary co-exploration.
There are well over a dozen episodes in the editing queue and founding members can access the entire trove of unedited conversations before theyâre released:
⨠Show Links
⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations⢠Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve⢠Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes⢠Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere
⨠Mentioned Media & People
In Threadsâ dwindling engagement, social mediaâs flawed hypothesis is laid bare
In a Time of Stress, Neuroaesthetic Spaces and Places Create a Path to Healing and Hope
The Triad of Intelligences: Harnessing Machine, Planetary, and Human Intuition in The Age of AI
DIALOGUE Interviews: Ivy Ross
DIALOGUE Interviews: Susan Magsamen
DIALOGUE Interviews: Kevin Kelly
More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science
Nikki SilvaBruce LiptonEd BernaysKen Wilber
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⨠About This Episode
This week I talk to Sam Arbesman, scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital, Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation, and host of The Orthogonal Bet, weaving together and plucking at the ideas in his delightful new book, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connected Our WorldâŚand Shapes Our Future. Sam is a brilliant scholar, a maverick mind, and a good friendâso even though we donât see perfectly eye-to-eye about just where the analogy of code as magic works and where it falls apart, that tiny bit of friction makes for a fascinating joint exploration into the liminal zones where our categories fray and their distinctions are constantly rewritten.
In this episode, we discuss:⢠Samâs origin story as a code-lover (00:10:20)⢠Code as âalgebra and fireâ (00:14:17)⢠If code is magic, what is magic? (00:20:10)⢠Open-source development and open-ended innovation (00:25:48)⢠Rethinking the nature of âfailureâ in the so-called Technocene (00:32:12)⢠Navigating simplicity and complexity (00:38:44)⢠Acceptable and unacceptable sacrifices to the incomprehensibility of our technologies (00:45:02)⢠The squishy overlap between tech and biology (00:54:03)⢠The co-domestication of software bugs and people (01:03:22)⢠And the emerging age of ephemerality (01:15:55)
It was, as it always is with Sam, a joy. I hope you get as much out of it as we did.
This Saturday at 10 am PDT is the return of our monthly members hangouts. Join us!
⨠Show Links
⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations⢠Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Contact me if you have a problem you think I can help you solve⢠Explore the interactive knowledge graph grown from over 250 episodes⢠Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere
⨠Mentioned Reading & People
Steven Johnson - Everything Bad Is Good For YouWilliam Alonso - âPredicting Best with Imperfect DataâDanny Hillis - âThe Enlightenment Is Dead, Long Live The EntanglementâMoses Maimonides - The Guide To The PerplexedRichard Brautigan - âAll Watched Over by Machines of Loving GraceâStewart Brand - The Clock of The Long Now
Lawrence Lundy-BryanClive ThompsonKevin KellyJose Luis BorgesLionel Snell (Ramsey Dukes)Nadia AsparouhovaUrsula K LeGuinWilliam GibsonDavid KrakauerMichael LevinChris LangtonJim LovelockLynn MargulisAlan MooreJessica FlackMonica AndersonJeremy UtleyAlan PerlisSteve Jobs
⨠Mentioned Episodes
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This week we hear from Larry Muhlstein, who worked on Responsible AI at Google and DeepMind before leaving to found the Holistic Technology Project.
In Larryâs words:
âCare is crafted from understanding, respect, and will. Once care is deep enough and in a generative reciprocal relationship, it gives rise to self-expanding love. My work focuses on creating such systems of care by constructing a holistic sociotechnical tree with roots of philosophical orientation, a trunk of theoretical structure, and technological leaves and fruit that offer nourishment and support to all parts of our world. I believe that we can grow love through technologies of togetherness that help us to understand, respect, and care for each other. I am committed to supporting the responsible development of such technologies so that we can move through these trying times towards a world where we are all well together.â
In this episode, Larry and I explore the âroots of philosophical orientationâ and âtrunk of theoretical structureâ as he lays them out in his Technological Love knowledge garden, asking how technologies for reality, perspectives, and karma can help us grow a world in love. What is just enough abstraction? When is autonomy desirable and when is it a false god? What do property and selfhood look like in a future where the ground truths of our interbeing shape design and governance?
Itâs a long, deep conversation on fundamentals we need to reckon with if we are to live in futures we actually want. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Our next dialogue is with Sam Arbesman, resident researcher at Lux Capital and author of The Magic of Code. Weâll interrogate the distinctions between software and spellcraft, explore the unique blessings and challenges of a world defined by advanced computing, and probe the good, bad, and ugly of futures that move at the speed of thoughtâŚ
⨠Show Links
⢠Hire me for speaking or consulting⢠Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes⢠Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts
⨠Additional Resources
âGrowing A World In Loveâ â Larry Muhlstein at Hurry Up, Weâre Dreaming
âThe Future Is Both True & Falseâ â Michael Garfield on Medium
âSacred Dataâ â Michael Garfield at Hurry Up, Weâre Dreaming
âThe Right To Destroyâ â Lior Strahilevitz at Chicago Unbound
âDecentralized Society: Finding Web3âs Soulâ â Puja Ohlhaver, E. Glen Weyl, and Vitalik Buterin at SSRN
⨠Mentions
Karl Schroederâs âDegrees of FreedomâJoshua DiCaglioâs Scale TheoryGeoffrey Westâs ScaleHannah ArendtKen WilberDoug Rushkoffâs Survival of the RichestManda Scottâs Any Human PowerâTorey HaydenChaim Gingoldâs Building SimCityJames P. Carseâs Finite & Infinite GamesJohn C. Wrightâs The Golden OecumeneEckhart Tolleâs The Power of Now
⨠Related Episodes
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Todayâs guest Taryn Southern is someone I consider a master surfer of technological change: a fellow elder millennial, artist, creative technologist, strategist, and dancer in the liminal zones of high chop. Sheâs better than I am at finding the pocket, has made a name for herself for riding some serious bombs, and seems to know precisely when to bail. Starting as an actor, Internet famous for being an early YouTube influencer and her album I Am AI, the first LP composed and produced with an LLM, she caught air at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 with the premier of her documentary I Am Human (co-directed with Elena Gaby), an intimate look at the lives of three people with implantable brain interfaces and the medical, ethical and societal implications.
Sheâs also produced an award-winning musical VR series for Google using Tiltbrush and Blocks, worked as Chief Storyteller for Blackrock Neurotech, minted the first song token on the Ethereum blockchain, spoken and consulted all over the world, operated as an angel investor, and survived breast cancer. In other words, sheâs just the person to teach you how to hang ten instead of duck diving under the next pounder. Letâs drop in and grab the rail. Thanks for listening!
If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.
Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.
Show Links
⢠Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts⢠Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Hire me for speaking or consulting
Chapters
00:00 Introduction: The Promise and Perils of Technology 01:07 Welcome to Humans On the Loop 05:57 Taryn's Early Fascination with Technology 08:55 Living with Constraints and The Spirit of Exploration 31:06 AI in Personal Growth and Communication 38:52 AI as a New Religion and Therapy Tool 42:04 The Ethical Dilemmas of AI and Big Tech 47:58 The Future of AI in Governance and Society 57:42 Empowering Individuals with AI and Community Involvement
Mentions
Moon RibasRolf Pottsâ VagabondingDamien Walterâs âModernity is DoneâJim OâShaughnessySolo: A Star Wars StoryMichael Davis on Exploring the Intersection of AI & RomanceThe Evolution of SurveillanceCory Doctorowâs âenshittificationâHoward Rheingold
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We live in simulated worlds of our own making, detecting patterns in the chaos and complexity of raw experience and boiling them down into operable categories and generalizations. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimesâŚ
This weekâs guest, computer scientist and game designer Chaim Gingold, wrote what I consider the best book available on the history and sociality of simulations: Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press) takes readers from the prehistory of modern computing through the post-war development of cybernetics and systems thinking and into the entangled relationship of video games, military info-tech, civil engineering, software-based education, and complexity science that forms todayâs âinvisible environment.â
Sim City is more than a legendary video game. It is case study in how the digital revolution reshaped the ways we think, teach, design, and governâŚand how what simulation as a mode of discourse can hide and reveal, oppress and empower us. In this dialogue we explore the the tensions between games and play, the analog and digital, abstraction and tactility, and mysticism and colonialism in simulation-induced experiences. We investigate the rise and fall of Sim City game developer MAXIS, weave threads through the history of computing and software development, systems science, and the philosophy of technology, and ask:
What makes some abstractions better than others?
If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to the complete archives, study groups, and community calls.
Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.
Show Links
⢠Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts⢠Explore the Humans On The Loop dialogue and essay archives⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Hire me for speaking or consulting
Mentions
Will WrightJohn Conwayâs Game of LifeVannevar BushAlan Kay & Xerox PARCEd Catmull - Creativity, Inc.James Clerk MaxwellEthan MollickBrian Sutton-SmithGottfried LiebnizLarry OwensJay ForresterLauren F. KleinEdgar MitchellRusty SchweickertJulian of NorwichChris LangtonKen ForbisMark ZuckerbergElon MuskSam AltmanSam Arbesman - The Magic of CodeTimothy MortonDonna HarawayNick BostromJoshua DiCaglio - Scale TheoryStanislaw Lem - The CyberiadKevin Kelly - Out of ControlStewart Brand & The Whole Earth CatalogFred Turner - From Counterculture to CybercultureDe Kai - Raising AI
And in case you missed it:
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This week I speak with Rufus Pollock (Website | Twitter | Wikipedia), former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies, RSA Fellow, and co-founder of Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, Datopian, and Second Renaissance. Rufus is a key player in the so-called âLiminal Webâ and active mapper of the ecosystem of emerging changemaking organizations who, along with his wife Sylvie Barbier and an extensive network of brilliant allies, strives to promote the shifts in consciousness and culture that we need to safely navigate our age of accelerating technology with wiser, weller ways of living together.
Together we get into the good, bad, and ugly of our nascent planetary culture â the tension between ecological consciousness and economic force, the demands placed on us to reclaim time-tested strategies for community and meaning in a brave new world, the intertwingling of religion and science, and why technological solutions alone are woefully inadequate (however necessary) as we face our crises of collective action. Itâs an earnest, soul-searching, thoughtful, and far-reaching extra-long conversation and I hope that you find as much value in it as we did.
If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives.
Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.
Show Links
⢠Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts⢠Explore the Humans On The Loop archives⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Hire me for speaking or consulting
Discussed
Four Types of Problem
Second Renaissance Whitepaper & Theory of Change
Technology as God
Getting over our Allergy to Religion
The Primacy of Being
David Sloan Wilson - Darwinâs Cathedral
William Irwin Thompson - Imaginary Landscape, The Digital Economy of W. Brian Arthur
Federico Campagna - Prophetic Culture
Alex Shakar - Luminarium
Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other Days
Joe Henrich - The WEIRDest People in the World
Jessica Flack - Coarse-Graining as a Downward Causation Mechanism
Mentioned
Bayo AkomolafeSylvie BarbierLiam KavanaughBret Easton EllisJohn StewartCarl JungDoug RushloffKarl MarxGoetheJamie WhealSteven KotlerKen WilberRobert KeganSuzanne Cook-GreuterPaul LevyGeorge W. BushUrsula K. LeGuinIain McGilchristJim OâShaughnessyNaval RavikantThich Nhat HanhW. Brian ArthurHazel HendersonJim RuttChristopher AlexanderJamie CurcioJordan PetersonW. B. Yeats
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This week we speak with George PĂłr, mentee of Doug Englebart, Founder of Future HOW, Enlivening Edge, and Campus Co-Evolve, independent scholar with past academic posts at the London School of Economics, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Integral Studies, and UniversitĂŠ de Paris, wisdom-guided AI advisor at River, and consultant who has worked with clients including the UN Development Programme, HP, Greenpeace, Intel, Ford, and the World Wildlife Foundation.
George has played vital roles our emerging understanding of collective intelligence, knowledge gardening, and online community. In this episode we explore his latest iteration as a Metamodern AI Shaman â what that means, why heâs promoting this approach for the cultivation of hybrid human-machine wisdom, and his theory of change for a reimagined human being in an age of collaborative planet-scale intelligence.
Links
⢠Hire me for speaking or consulting⢠Explore the Humans On The Loop archives⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes
Discussed
Extensive context and background summary provided by George here
Radio evolve #568 - Collective Wisdom and ChatGPT with George PĂłr
Prelude to the Rise of the Compassionate AI - George PĂłr
AI and Wisdom - George PĂłr
A Future of our Interactions with AI - George PĂłr
Nobel Prize in economics awarded to trio for explaining why some nations are rich and others poor (CNN)
Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA - Elisa Heinrich Mora, Cate Heine, Jacob J. Jackson, Geoffrey B. West, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, and Christopher P. Kempes
AI Attending Human Attending AI
Relationality - David Jay
Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott
Mentioned People & Episodes
Layman PascalFrederic LalouxTimothy MortonAri KushnerStephanie LeppDavid SauvageRoss DawsonStephen ReidTurquoise SoundKate RaworthMatt SegallFrancisco Varela
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This weekâs guest is my friend Evan Miyazono, CEO and Director of Atlas Computing â a tech non-profit committed not to the false god of perfect alignment but to plausible strategy of provable safety. Focusing on community building, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, Evan and his colleagues are working to advance a new AI architecture that constrains and formally specifies AI outputs, with reviewable intermediary results, collaborating across sectors to promote this radically different and more empirical approach to applied machine intelligence.
After completing his PhD in Applied Physics at Caltech, Evan led research at Protocol Labs, creating their research grants program, and led the special projects team that created Hypercerts, Funding the Commons, gov4git, and key parts of Discourse Graphs and the initial Open Agency Architecture proposal.
In our conversation we talk about a wide swath of topics including regulatory scaling problems, specifying formal organizational charters, the spectre of opacity, and the quantification of trust â all, in some sense, interdisciplinary matters of âgame designâ in our entanglement with magical technologies and fundamental uncertainty.
If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives.
Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future.
Links
⢠Hire me for speaking or consulting⢠Explore the Humans On The Loop archives⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes
Discussed
⢠Atlas Computing Summary Slides⢠Atlas Computing Institute Talks (YouTube Playlist)⢠A Toolchain for AI-Assisted Code Specification, Synthesis and Verification⢠Also, a relevant paper from Max Tegmark:Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGI
Mentioned
Gregory BatesonDavid DalrympleK. Allado-McDowellTerence McKennaYuval Noah HarariCosma ShaliziHenry FarrellHakim BeyNatalie DeprazFrancisco VarelaPierre VermerschPlurality InstitutePuja OhlhaverSean EsbjĂśrn-HargensAlfred North WhiteheadDe Kai
Primer Riff
Are we doing AI alignment wrong? Game designers Forrest Imel and Gavin Valentine define games as having meaningful decisions, uncertain outcomes, and measurable feedback. If any one of these breaks, the game breaks. And we can think about tech ethics through this lens as well. Much of tech discourse is about how one or more of these dimensions has broken the âgameâ of life on Earth â the removal of meaningful decisions, the mathematical guarantee of self-termination through unsustainable practices, and/or the decoupling of feedback loops.
AI alignment approaches tend to converge on restoring meaningful decisions by getting rid of uncertainty, but itâs a lost cause. Itâs futile to encode our values into systems we canât understand. To the extent that machines think, they think very differently than we do, and characteristically âinterpretâ our requests in ways that reveal the assumptions we are used to making based on shared context and understanding with other people.
We may not know how a black box AI model arrives at its outputs, but we can evaluate those outputsâŚand we can segment processes like this so that there are more points at which to review them. One of this showâs major premises is that the design and use of AI systems is something like spellcraft â a domain where precision matters because the smallest deviation from a precise encoding of intent can backfire.
Magic isnât science in as much as we can say that for spellcraft, mechanistic understanding is, frankly, beside the point. Whatever you may think of it, spellcraft evolved as a practical approach for operating in a mysterious cosmos. Westernized Modernity dismisses magic because Enlightenment era thinking is predicated on the knowability of nature and the conceit that everything can and will eventually bend to principled, rigorous investigation. But this confused accounting just reshuffled its uneradicable remainder of fundamental uncertainty back into a stubbornly persistent Real that continues to exist in excess of language, mathematics, and mechanistic frameworks. Economies, AI, and living systems guarantee uncertain outcomes â and in accepting this, we have to re-engage with magic in the form of our machines. The more alike they become, the more our mystery and open-ended co-improvisation loom back over any goals of final knowledge and control.
In a 2016 essay, Danny Hillis called this The Age of Entanglement. It is a time that calls for an evolutionary approach to technology. Tinkering and re-evaluating, we find ourselves one turn up the helix in which quantitative precision helps us reckon with the new built wilderness of technology. When we cannot fully explain the inner workings of large language models, we have to step back and ask:
What are our values, and how do we translate them into measurable outputs?
How can we break down the wicked problem of AI controllability into chunks on which itâs possible to operate?
How can adaptive oversight and steering fit with existing governance processes?
In other words, how can we properly task the humanities with helping us identify âmeaningful decisionsâ and the sciences with providing âmeasurable feedback.â Giving science the job of solving uncertainty or defining our values ensures weâll get as close as we can to certitude about outcomes we definitely donât want. But if we think like game designers, then interdisciplinary collaboration can help us safely handle the immense power weâve created and keep the game going.
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What the hell is going on with culture right now? The Web is running evolution in fast-forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic, post-human, post-truth meme-play that reminds me of nothing more than the porous networked selfhood of bacterial in a molten wash of horizontal gene transfer. RIP the genre and all hail the hyper-real individual as institution, the self-fulfilling prophecies of [EDIT: Guy Debordâs] society of the spectacle [and Baudrillardâs simulation], the revenge of religion as our accelerating techno-social evolution prompts a kind of reversal as the movement of the Tao that challenges the dreams and ideals of the EnlightenmentâŚit is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them. How to make sense of it allâŚor is making sense even a viable strategy when rifts and ruptures are the name of the game?
Amidst the chaos of pop culture and mainstream news, my friend Rina Nicolae of Incognita swims comfortably as a thoughtful commentator. Riffing philosophically on network society and its discontents, the emergent spiritual traditions of digital natives, and the posthuman bestiary of our AI- and biotech-saturated century, Rinaâs Substack is a handbook to the cyborg aesthetic, the imagistic/algorithmic complex of online identity, our entanglement with capital and the possession by and performance of meme-space.
How do we not become caricatures of ourselves in the world-creating and -destroying flood of remix culture? How do we cultivate roughness, fractality, wildness, illegigility? How do we stay, as Cadell Last put it in the previous episode, âin the gaps and cracksâ instead of becoming prey to the new monsters of the unleashed imagination? How do we *befriend* those monsters?
William Irwin Thompson said noise characterizes the emergence of planetary culture â an age in which âTechnology slays the victimâ of the mind âresurrects it as artâ in a new ecology of consciousness. If, then, the only way through is up and out, then join me as, once more, we dive into the noise and make music together with RinaâŚ
Links
⢠Hire me for speaking or consulting⢠Explore the Humans On The Loop archives⢠Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org⢠Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes⢠Join the Wisdom x Technology (open) & Future Fossils (legacy) Discord servers
Discussed
Prophets Of A Machine FutureWhat Is Posthumanism?The New MonstrousMilady Infiltrates The VaticanKim Kardashan Was Never HumanThe AI That Can Change Your Mind
Mentioned
Priya RoseDonna HarawayBobby AzarianDavid DeutschJack HalberstamJulia ChristevaTimothy MortonK. Allado-McDowellMary ShelleyBenjamin BrattonCharlotte FangMarshall McLuhanJimi HendrixTaryn SouthernJim OâShaughnessyKevin Kelly
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This weekâs guest is Cadell Last, the creator of Philosophy Portal, author of Global Brain Singularity and Real Speculations, and organizer of myriad conferences, anthologies, and collaborative volumes exploring biocultural evolution, the mind-matter relation, and speculative futures. Cadell has been the director of psychedelic research at Psirenity, a researcher at the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, a science writer on primatology and paleoanthropology for Scientific American, and the founder, writer, and researcher for The Advanced Apes at PBS Digital Studios.
In this episode, we discuss self-actualization and self-transformation in our age of magical technologies â the domestication of the human being by AI and institutions, how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, navigating hybrid physical-virtual relationships, the importance of intergenerational learning, and how we can make a better argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value. In the climax of this conversation, Cadell makes a case for âstaying with the lackâ and âworking the cracks in beingâ as ways of cultivating our agency in a highly-automated world.
Become a member to join our hangouts, salons, and study groups:
Project Links
⢠Explore this projectâs essay and episode archives⢠Make tax-deductible donations (recurring pledges grant membership)⢠Join the Wisdom x Technology & Future Fossils Discord servers⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show⢠Explore the interactive model grown from over 250 episodes⢠Book me for speaking or consulting
Cadellâs Links
Website (with research and social media links)Philosophy PortalYouTube
(+ My recent appearance as a guest on Cadellâs Philosophy Portal show)
Relevant Papers
Human Evolution: Life History Theory and the End of Biological ReproductionSelf Actualization in the CommonsGlobal Commons in the Global BrainGlobal Brain and the Future of Human SocietyInformation-Energy Metasystem ModelAbstraction, mimesis and the evolution of deep learningLandian Exit and Hegelian LoveSystems & Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science & PhilosophyLogic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition
Mentions
Kevin KellyLawrence SteinbergNick LandNora BatesonJessica FlackThomas PicketyMichel BauwensLayman PascalDavid JayPhilip K. DickYanis VaroufakisChris CutroneAndrew TateBenjamin StudebakerGordon BranderAlan TuringKate Raworth
Related Episodes
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This weekâs guest is the singular Michael Dean, who graduated from architecture school and played in a band before spending years in tech working on virtual reality, only to metamorphose into one of the best essayists Iâve ever read. With support from Humans On The Loop supporters OâShaughnessy Ventures and Cosmos Institute, Dean is now decoding the structure of great essays and translating his framework into both a textbook and an AI-powered editing tool.
In this conversation, we explore how to cultivate human agency at the frontiers where physical reality and the metaverse fold into one another and entangled human and machine intelligences unleash radical new possibilities for reflection and creativity. By the end of our discussion we start to trace the contours of a world in which everyone has a better chance to pursue their passions without having to worry about âproduct-market fitâ â a future in culture stages a glorious insurrection against the dehumanizing division between passion and paid work.
If this episode stimulates or triggers you, please leave a comment here or on YouTube â I would love to learn from you and this project exists as a space for thoughtful discourse!
Upcoming Events
* 3 May @ 11 am Mountainâ Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna(patrons-only discussion)
* 13 May-14 June â How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere(five-week online course with ten sessions)
Project Links
⢠Explore this projectâs essay and episode archives⢠Join the Discord server⢠Browse the books we discuss on the show⢠Explore the conversational mind-map grown from nine years of conversations⢠Book me for speaking or consulting
Deanâs Links
The Secret Architecture of Great EssaysTeleportation, $97/month, coming soonLas Vegas & the MetaverseA change of heartPrepping for the Editor G*dsMega-updateSungazerLucy in the Sky of Large Language Models4 Types of Material in Every Essay
Mentioned Books & Articles
Michael Garfield â Sacred DataJohn Smart â The transcenscion hypothesisJ.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor â The Computer as a Communication DeviceKevin Kelly â AR Will Spark The Next Big Tech Platform â Call It MirrorworldDouglas Rushkoff â Present ShockYoshija Walter â Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory
Mentioned People & Podcasts
J.F. MartelK. Allado McDowellDanielle BassettTyson YunkaportaMitch MignanoJaron LanierPeter DiamandisWilliam Irwin ThompsonBenjamin OlsenThe BeatlesTerence McKennaGrimesHolly HerndonTimothy LearyJake KobrinSara PhinnThe Ungoogleable MichaelangeloErik HoelMichael Crichton
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