We enjoyed giving a virtual keynote for the Autonomous Summit on December 4, 2025, titled Becoming Synthetic: What AI Is Doing To Us, Not Just For Us.

We talked about our research on how to maintain human agency & cognitive sovereignty, the philosophical question of what it means to be human, and our new(ish) approach to create better AI tools called unDesign.

unDesign is not the absence of design nor is it anti-design. It's design oriented differently. The history of design has been a project of reducing uncertainty. Making things legible. Signaling affordances. Good design means you never have to wonder what to do.

Undesign inverts this and uses "uns" as design material. The unknown. The unpredictable. The unplanned. These aren't bugs. They're the medium where value actually lives. Because uncertainty is the condition of genuine encounter.

unDesign doesn't design outcomes—it designs the space where outcomes can emerge.

You can watch the full keynote below. Check it out!

In this conversation recorded on the 1,000th day since ChatGPT's launch, we explore education, creativity, and transformation with Tess Posner, founding CEO of AI4ALL. For nearly a decade—long before the current AI surge—Tess has led efforts to broaden access to AI education, starting from a 2016 summer camp at Stanford that demonstrated how exposure to hands-on AI projects could inspire high school students, particularly young women, to pursue careers in the field.

What began as exposing students to "the magic" of AI possibilities has evolved into something more complex: helping young people navigate a moment of radical uncertainty while developing both technical capabilities and critical thinking about implications. As Tess observes, we're recording at a time when universities are simultaneously banning ChatGPT and embracing it, when the job market for graduates is sobering, and when the entire structure of work is being "reinvented from the ground up."

Key themes we explore:

• Living the Questions: How Tess's team adopted Rilke's concept of "living the questions" as their guiding principle for navigating unprecedented change—recognizing that answers won't come easily and that cultivating wisdom matters more than chasing certainty
• The Diverse Pain Point: Why students from varied backgrounds gravitate toward different AI applications—from predicting droughts for farm worker families to detecting Alzheimer's based on personal experience—and how this diversity of lived experience shapes what problems get attention
• Project-Based Learning as Anchor: How hands-on making and building creates the kind of applied learning that both reveals AI's possibilities and exposes its limitations, while fostering the critical thinking skills that pure consumption of AI outputs cannot develop
• The Educational Reckoning: Why this moment is forcing fundamental questions about the purpose of schooling—moving beyond detection tools and honor codes toward reimagining how learning happens when instant answers are always available
• The Worst Job Market in Decades: Sobering realities facing graduates alongside surprising opportunities—some companies doubling down on "AI native" early career talent while others fundamentally restructure work around managing AI agents rather than doing tasks directly
• Music and the Soul Question: Tess's personal wrestling with AI-generated music that can mimic human emotional expression so convincingly it gets stuck in your head—forcing questions about whether something deeper than output quality matters in art

The conversation reveals someone committed to equity and access while refusing easy optimism about technology's trajectory. Tess acknowledges that "nobody really knows" what the future of work looks like or how education should adapt, yet maintains that the response cannot be paralysis. Instead, AI4ALL's approach emphasizes building community, developing genuine technical skills, and threading ethical considerations through every project—equipping students not with certainty but with agency.

About Tess Posner: Tess Posner is founding and interim CEO of AI4ALL, a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in AI education, research, development, and policy. Since 2017, she has led the organization's expansion from a single summer program at Stanford to a nationwide initiative serving students from over 150 universities. A graduate of St. John's College with its Great Books curriculum, Tess is also an accomplished musician who brings both technical expertise and humanistic perspective to questions about AI's role in creativity and human flourishing.

Our Theme Music:

• Solid State (Reprise)
• Written & performed by Jonathan Coulton
• License: Perpetual, worldwide licence for podcast theme usage granted to Artificiality Institute by songwriter and publisher

In this conversation, we explore the philosophical art of embracing uncertainty with Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside and author of "The Weirdness of the World." Eric's work celebrates what he calls "the philosophy of opening"—not rushing to close off possibilities, but instead revealing how many more viable alternatives exist than we typically recognize. As he observes, learning that the world is less comprehensible than you thought, that more possibilities remain open, constitutes a valuable form of knowledge in itself.

The conversation centers on one of Eric's most provocative arguments: that if we take mainstream scientific theories of consciousness seriously and apply them consistently, the United States might qualify as a conscious entity. Not in some fascist "absorb yourself into the group mind" sense, but perhaps at the level of a rabbit—possessing massive internal information processing, sophisticated environmental responsiveness, self-monitoring capabilities, and all the neural substrate you could want (just distributed across individual skulls rather than contained in one).

Key themes we explore:

• The United States Consciousness Thought Experiment: How standard materialist theories that attribute consciousness to animals based on information processing and behavioral complexity would, if applied consistently, suggest large-scale collective entities might be conscious too—and why every attempt to wiggle out of this conclusion commits you to other forms of weirdness
• Philosophy of Opening vs. Closing: Eric's distinction between philosophical work that narrows possibilities to find definitive answers versus work that reveals previously unconsidered alternatives, expanding rather than contracting the space of viable theories
• The AI Consciousness Crisis Ahead: Why we'll face social decisions about how to treat AI systems before we have scientific consensus on whether they're conscious—with respectable theories supporting radically different conclusions and people's investments (emotional, religious, economic) driving which theories they embrace
• Mimicry and Mistrust: Why we're justified in being more skeptical about AI consciousness than human consciousness—not because similarity proves anything definitively, but because AI systems trained to mimic human linguistic patterns raise the same concerns as parrots saying "hoist the flag"
• The Design Policy of the Excluded Middle: Eric's recommendation (which he doubts the world will follow) to avoid creating systems whose moral status we cannot determine—because making mistakes in either direction could be catastrophic at scale
• Strange Intelligence Over Superintelligence: Why the linear conception of AI as "subhuman, then human, then superhuman" fundamentally misunderstands what's likely to emerge—we should expect radically different cognitive architectures with cross-cutting capacities and incapacities rather than human-like minds that are simply "better"

About Eric Schwitzgebel: Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, specializing in philosophy of mind and moral psychology. His work spans consciousness, introspection, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Author of "The Weirdness of the World" and a forthcoming book on AI consciousness and moral status, Eric maintains an active blog (The Splintered Mind) where he explores philosophical questions with clarity and wit. His scholarship consistently challenges comfortable assumptions while remaining remarkably accessible to readers beyond academic philosophy.

In this conversation, we explore the challenges of building more inclusive AI systems with John Pasmore, founder and CEO of Latimer AI and advisor to the Artificiality Institute. Latimer represents a fundamentally different approach to large language models—one built from the ground up to address the systematic gaps in how AI systems represent Black and Brown cultures, histories, and perspectives that have been largely absent from mainstream training data.

John brings a practical founder's perspective to questions that often remain abstract in AI discourse. With over 400 educational institutions now using Latimer, he's witnessing firsthand how students, faculty, and administrators are navigating the integration of AI into learning—from universities licensing 40+ different LLMs to schools still grappling with whether AI represents a cheating risk or a pedagogical opportunity.

Key themes we explore:

• The Data Gap: Why mainstream LLMs reflect a narrow "Western culture bias" and what's missing when AI claims to "know everything"—from 15 million unscanned pages in Howard University's library to oral traditions across thousands of indigenous tribes.
• Critical Thinking vs. Convenience: How universities are struggling to preserve deep learning and intellectual rigor when AI makes it trivially easy to get instant answers, and whether requiring students to bring their prompts to class represents a viable path forward.
• The GPS Analogy: John's insight that AI's effect on cognitive skills mirrors what happened with navigation—we've gained efficiency but lost the embodied knowledge that comes from building mental maps through direct experience.
• Multiple Models, Multiple Perspectives: Why the future likely involves domain-specific and culturally-situated LLMs rather than a single "universal" system, and how this parallels the reality that different cultures tell different stories about the same events.
• Excavating Hidden Knowledge: Latimer's ambitious project to digitize and make accessible vast archives of cultural material—from church records to small museum collections—that never made it onto the internet and therefore don't exist in mainstream AI systems.
• An eBay for Data: John's vision for creating a marketplace where content owners can license their data to AI companies, establishing both proper compensation and a mechanism for filling the systematic gaps in training corpora.

The conversation shows that AI bias goes beyond removing offensive outputs. We need to rethink which data sources we treat as authoritative and whose perspectives shape these influential systems. When AI presents itself as an oracle that has "read everything on the internet," it claims omniscience while excluding vast amounts of human knowledge and experience.

The discussion raises questions about expertise and process in an era of instant answers—in debugging code, navigating cities, or writing essays. John notes that we may be "working against evolution" by preserving slower, more effortful learning when our brains naturally seek efficiency. But what do we lose when we eliminate the struggle that builds deeper understanding?

About John Pasmore: John Pasmore is founder and CEO of Latimer AI, a large language model built to provide accurate historical information and bias-free interaction for Black and Brown audiences and anyone who values precision in their data. Previously a partner at TRS Capital and Movita Organics, John serves on the Board of Directors of Outward Bound USA and holds degrees in Business Administration from SUNY and Computer Science from Columbia University. He is also an advisor to the Artificiality Institute.

In this conversation, we explore how humans can better navigate the AI era with De Kai, pioneering researcher who built the web's first machine translation systems and whose work spawned Google Translate. Drawing on four decades of AI research experience, De Kai offers a different framework for understanding our relationship with artificial intelligence—moving beyond outdated metaphors toward more constructive approaches.

De Kai's perspective was shaped by observing how AI technologies are being deployed in ways that increase rather than decrease human understanding. While AI has tremendous potential to help people communicate across cultural and linguistic differences—as his translation work demonstrated—current implementations often amplify polarization and misunderstanding instead.

Key themes we explore:

• Beyond Machine Metaphors: Why thinking of AI as "tools" or "machines" is dangerously outdated—AI systems are fundamentally artificial psychological entities that learn, adapt, and influence human behavior in ways no coffee maker ever could
• The Parenting Framework: De Kai's central insight that we're all currently "parenting" roughly 100 artificial intelligences daily through our smartphones, tablets, and devices—AIs that are watching, learning, and imitating our attitudes, behaviors, and belief systems
• System One vs. System Two Intelligence: How current large language models operate primarily through "artificial autism"—brilliant pattern matching without the reflective, critical thinking capacities that characterize mature human intelligence
• Translation as Understanding: Moving beyond simple language translation toward what De Kai calls a "translation mindset"—using AI to help humans understand different cultural framings and perspectives rather than enforcing singular universal truths
• The Reframing Superpower: How AI's capacity for rapid perspective-shifting and metaphorical reasoning represents one of humanity's best hopes for breaking out of polarized narratives and finding common ground
• Social Fabric Transformation: Understanding how 800 billion artificial minds embedded in our social networks are already reshaping how cultures and civilizations evolve—often in ways that increase rather than decrease mutual understanding

Drawing on insights from developmental psychology and complex systems, De Kai's "Raising AI" framework emphasizes conscious human responsibility in shaping how these artificial minds develop. Rather than viewing this as an overwhelming burden, he frames it as an opportunity for humans to become more intentional about the values and behaviors they model—both for AI systems and for each other.

About De Kai: De Kai is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST and Distinguished Research Scholar at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. He is Independent Director of AI ethics think tank The Future Society, and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI ethics council. De Kai invented and built the world’s first global-scale online language translator that spawned Google Translate, Yahoo Translate, and Microsoft Bing Translator. For his pioneering contributions in AI, natural language processing, and machine learning, De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of only seventeen Founding Fellows and by Debrett’s as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong.

In this conversation, we sit down with Adam Cutler, Distinguished Designer at IBM and pioneer in human-centered AI design, to explore how generative AI is reshaping creativity, reliance, and human experience. Adam reflects on the parallels between today’s AI moment and past technology shifts—from the rise of Web 2.0 to the early days of the internet—and why we may be living through a “mini singularity.” We discuss the risks of over-reliance, the importance of intentional design, and the opportunities for AI to augment curiosity, creativity, and community.

As always, a conversation with Adam provides a thoughtful and caring view of possible futures with AI. And it's heartening to spend time with someone who is so central to the future of AI who consistenly thinks about humans first.

Adam will be speaking (again) at the Artificiality Summit in Bend, Oregon on Oct 23-25, 2025. More info: https://artificialityinstitute.org/summit

In this episode, we bring you a lecture from the Artificiality Summit in October 2024 given by Joscha Bach. Joscha is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher known for his work on cognitive architectures, artificial intelligence, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, multi-agent systems, and philosophy of mind. His research aims to bridge cognitive science and AI by studying how human intelligence and consciousness can be modeled computationally.

In his lecture, Joscha explores the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and reality. Drawing from philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Joscha examines how minds emerge, how consciousness functions as the “conductor” of our mental orchestra, and why software and self-organization may hold the key to understanding life itself. He also reflects on animism, the possibility of machine consciousness, and the cultural meaning of large language models. A provocative talk that blends science, philosophy, and speculation on the future of minds—both human and artificial.

In this conversation, we explore the shifts in human experience with Christine Rosen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World." As a member of the "hybrid generation" of Gen X, Christine (like us) brings the perspective of having lived through the transition from an analog to a digital world and witnessed firsthand what we've gained and lost in the process.

Christine frames our current moment through the lens of what naturalist Robert Michael Pyle called "the extinction of experience"—the idea that when something disappears from our environment, subsequent generations don't even know to mourn its absence. Drawing on over 20 years of studying technology's impact on human behavior, she argues that we're experiencing a mass migration from direct to mediated experience, often without recognizing the qualitative differences between them.

Key themes we explore:

• The Archaeology of Lost Skills: How the abandonment of handwriting reveals the broader pattern of discarding embodied cognition—the physical practices that shape how we think, remember, and process the world around us
• Mediation as Default: Why our increasing reliance on screens to understand experience is fundamentally different from direct engagement, and how this shift affects our ability to read emotions, tolerate friction, and navigate uncomfortable social situations
• The Machine Logic of Relationships: How technology companies treat our emotions "like the law used to treat wives as property"—as something to be controlled, optimized, and made efficient rather than experienced in their full complexity
• Embodied Resistance: Why skills like cursive handwriting, face-to-face conversation, and the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions aren't nostalgic indulgences but essential human capacities that require active preservation
• The Keyboard Metaphor: How our technological interfaces—with their control buttons, delete keys, and escape commands—are reshaping our expectations for human relationships and emotional experiences

Christine challenges the Silicon Valley orthodoxy that frames every technological advancement as inevitable progress, instead advocating for what she calls "defending the human." This isn't a Luddite rejection of technology but a call for conscious choice about what we preserve, what we abandon, and what we allow machines to optimize out of existence.

The conversation reveals how seemingly small decisions—choosing to handwrite a letter, putting phones in the center of the table during dinner, or learning to read cursive—become acts of resistance against a broader cultural shift toward treating humans as inefficient machines in need of optimization. As Christine observes, we're creating a world where the people designing our technological future live with "human nannies and human tutors and human massage therapists" while prescribing AI substitutes for everyone else.

What emerges is both a warning and a manifesto: that preserving human experience requires actively choosing friction, inefficiency, and the irreducible messiness of being embodied creatures in a physical world. Christine's work serves as an essential field guide for navigating the tension between technological capability and human flourishing—showing us how to embrace useful innovations while defending the experiences that make us most fully human.

About Christine Rosen: Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on the intersection of technology, culture, and society. Previously the managing editor of The New Republic and founding editor of The Hedgehog Review, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. "The Extinction of Experience" represents over two decades of research into how digital technologies are reshaping human behavior and social relationships.

Join Beth Rudden at the Artificiality Summit in Bend, Oregon—October 23-25, 2025—to imagine a meaningful life with synthetic intelligence for me, we and us. Learn more here: www.artificialityinstitute.org/summit

In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore the intersection of archaeological thinking and artificial intelligence with Beth Rudden, former IBM Distinguished Engineer and CEO of Bast AI. Beth brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective—combining her training as an archaeologist with over 20 years of enterprise AI experience—to challenge fundamental assumptions about how we build and deploy artificial intelligence systems.

Beth describes her work as creating "the trust layer for civilization," arguing that current AI systems reflect what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil"—not malicious intent, but thoughtlessness embedded at scale. As she puts it, "AI is an excavation tool, not a villain," surfacing patterns and biases that humanity has already normalized in our data and language.

Key themes we explore:

• Archaeological AI: How treating AI as an excavation tool reveals embedded human thoughtlessness, and why scraping random internet data fundamentally misunderstands the nature of knowledge and context
• Ontological Scaffolding: Beth's approach to building AI systems using formal knowledge graphs and ontologies—giving AI the scaffolding to understand context rather than relying on statistical pattern matching divorced from meaning
• Data Sovereignty in Healthcare: A detailed exploration of Bast AI's platform for explainable healthcare AI, where patients control their data and can trace every decision back to its source—from emergency logistics to clinical communication
• The Economics of Expertise: Moving beyond the "humans as resources" paradigm to imagine economic models that compete to support and amplify human expertise rather than eliminate it
• Embodied Knowledge and Community: Why certain forms of knowledge—surgical skill, caregiving, craftsmanship—are irreducibly embodied, and how AI should scale this expertise rather than replace it
• Hopeful Rage: Beth's vision for reclaiming humanist spaces and community healing as essential infrastructure for navigating technological transformation

Beth challenges the dominant narrative that AI will simply replace human workers, instead proposing systems designed to "augment and amplify human expertise." Her work at Bast AI demonstrates how explainable AI can maintain full provenance and transparency while reducing cognitive load—allowing healthcare providers to spend more time truly listening to patients rather than wrestling with bureaucratic systems.

The conversation reveals how archaeological thinking—with its attention to context, layers of meaning, and long-term patterns—offers essential insights for building trustworthy AI systems. As Beth notes, "You can fake reading. You cannot fake swimming"—certain forms of embodied knowledge remain irreplaceable and should be the foundation for human-AI collaboration.

About Beth Rudden: Beth Rudden is CEO and Chairwoman of Bast AI, building explainable artificial intelligence systems with full provenance and data sovereignty. A former IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Data Officer, she's been recognized as one of the 100 most brilliant leaders in AI Ethics. With her background spanning archaeology, cognitive science, and decades of enterprise AI development, Beth offers a grounded perspective on technology that serves human flourishing rather than replacing it.

This interview was recorded as part of the lead-up to the Artificiality Summit 2025 (October 23-25 in Bend, Oregon), where Beth will be speaking about the future of trustworthy AI.

At the Artificiality Summit in October 2024, Steve Sloman, professor at Brown University and author of The Knowledge Illusion and The Cost of Conviction, catalyzed a conversation about how we perceive knowledge in ourselves, others, and now in machines. What happens when our collective knowledge includes a community of machines? Steve challenged us to think about the dynamics of knowledge and understanding in an AI-driven world, about the evolving landscape of narratives, and ask the question can AI make us believe in ways that humans make us believe? What would it take for AI to construct a compelling ideology and belief system that humans would want to follow?

Bio: Steven Sloman has taught at Brown since 1992. He studies higher-level cognition. He is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Society, the Eastern Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society. Along with scientific papers and editorials, his published work includes a 2005 book Causal Models: How We Think about the World and Its Alternatives, a 2017 book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone co-authored with Phil Fernbach, and the forthcoming Righteousness: How Humans Decide from MIT Press. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition, Chair of the Brown University faculty, and created Brown’s concentration in Behavioral Decision Sciences.