Humans On The Loop: Wisdom for an Age of Magical Technologies

For Part Two in our Continual Learning mini-series, Dr. Nadav Amir of The University of Ottowa joins me and guest co-host Dr. Adam Safron of Tufts University for a trialogue on the fundamental role of goals in intelligence.

Nadav draws on behavioral neuroscience, Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, control and information theory, and John Vervaeke’s work on “relevance realization” to formally articulate what many wisdom traditions have argued for millennia: what you take to be “reality” — your world and self — is a function of goal-based representations, state descriptions and reward functions create each other, and “what is” and “what do I care about” are two sides of the same thing.

You can’t separate what you want from what you experience and what you are capable of. But this means that if you change your goals your reality will shift, and your sense of self with it. The opposite is also true: change the way you organize the the ineffable structure of reality into a conceptual framework, and you’ll care about very different things. Thanks to the pace of change we’re living through this kind of transformative experience now, so it’s a good time to ask:

If selves are a kind of falsification, why do we have them in the first place?

Does AI need goals of its own in order to be truly intelligent?

And perhaps the deepest question we ask in this episode:

How if at all can we develop better frameworks for deciding what we want our intelligent machines to become — and who we want to become alongside them?

Thanks to the Survival and Flourishing Fund for their support of this mini-series. If you’d like more of this kind of work in the world:✨ Support my research, writing, and podcast with a tax-deductible donation✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future✨ Hire me for public speaking or advisory work with your organization✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Stream and download my tunes at artist-owned music co-op Subvert.fm✨ Continual Learning theme song: “Substrate Dynamics” by Neon Chameleon✨ Learn more about how we’re applying these ideas at Atlas Research Group, my team building sovereign infrastructure for collective intelligence

Chapters

0:00:00 Teaser

0:01:48 Intro

0:05:42 Who is Nadav Amir?

0:08:15 Why we can’t separate goals from descriptions

0:15:32 The Ugly Duckling Theorem & why taxonomy is not reality

0:25:07 Evolution, karma, and non-conceptual awareness

0:31:04 If selfhood is wrong, when is it practical?

0:34:14 Suffering without a self & the value of wrong descriptions

0:38:14 Non-conceptual experience & active inference

0:41:07 Multiple nested hierarchical descriptions in minds & economies

0:46:07 What’s missing from current approaches?

0:50:09 Does greater agency mean better optimization or greater adaptability?

0:57:04 Empowerment-based causal learning without a ground truth

0:59:06 Intermission

0:59:58 Transformative experiences & multiple levels of granularity

1:05:19 No fixed models, no fixed environments

1:10:55 Fundamental tradeoffs

1:16:57 Reverse-engineering the centered self

1:19:54 Does AI need goals to be intelligent and can we control AI if it has them?

1:26:47 Does Nadav’s framework pertain for all possible minds?

1:32:37 Mind as a property of collectives & goals as embedded in environments

1:41:33 How can Nadav’s framework improve AI governance discourse?

1:48:59 Outro

Mentioned Resources

A Dharmakīrtian Model of Relevance Realization in Cognitive Agentsby Nadav Amir & John Dunne

An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligenceby Daniel Kahneman et al.Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligenceby Michael Levin & Benjamin Lyons

Reverse-Engineering The Centered Selfby L.A. Paul et al.

Agency and Experience: Buddhist and Cognitive Perspectivesa Yin Cheng Conference @ Princeton

Knowing and Guessingby Satosi Watanabe

Ontological Laughter: Comedy as Experimental Possibility Spaceby Timothy Morton

Selves as Perspectives: From Biological Life to Superintelligence and a Bodhisattva Projectby Thomas Doctor et al.

What The Frog’s Eye Tells The Frog’s Brainby J. Y. Lettvin et al.

The Center for the Study of Apparent Selves

Explore the entire open-access special issue here:

And whether you read the papers or not, be sure to check out this illuminating interactive discourse map by Van Bettauer of Ideoscopic to help you navigate where these researchers agree, disagree, and point toward future study:

(Long-time fans will also want to check out his re-imagined interface for AskFutureFossils.com, complete with simulated debates between my guests!)

What does it actually mean for a machine to “understand” the world? Are today’s auto-regressive LLMs truly reasoning, or is statistical text prediction fundamentally distinct from genuine deliberative agency and causal inference? And how do we move away from brittle, post-hoc safety patches toward intrinsic, system-level alignment?

This week begins Continual Learning, a new mini-series co-hosted with my friend and colleague, cognitive scientist Dr. Adam Safron of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and the Active Inference Institute. For the last year, we’ve been working together with the support of Survival and Flourishing Fund to advance scientific understanding and silo-crossing conversation around AI capabilities, alignment, and regulation—centered on a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A on World models in natural and artificial intelligence co-edited by Adam and Michael Levin. The next several episodes are a meaningful detour into this work.

Over the coming season, we’ll dive deep into cognitive neuroscience, complex systems science, the study of narratives, and Buddhist epistemology to explore what true world modeling entails. This episodes launches that investigation by identifying major major themes from the special issue and connecting dots between its papers. (Strap in, because we move a million miles an hour.) Some of the questions we raise include:

* How do we rigorously define what a world model is—and isn’t?

* Do machines need goals, intrinsic motivation, and deliberation to truly think?

* What is the relationship between world-modeling and agency?

* Where can we look for evidence of emergent structure in scaling LLMs, and what does it mean if we don’t find it?

* How can we structure scientific collaboration to ask better questions about the future of human-machine co-evolution…and what might it take for machines to actively participate in that inquiry?

Explore the entire open-access special issue here.

And whether you read the papers or not, be sure to check out this illuminating interactive discourse map by Van Bettauer of Ideoscopic to help you navigate where these researchers agree, disagree, and point toward future study.

(Long-time fans will also want to check out his re-imagined interface for AskFutureFossils.com, complete with simulated debates between my guests!)

Subscribe for amazing conversations with Nadav Amir, John Krakauer, Fritz Breithaupt, Michael Levin, and many more!

✨ Hire me to help you and your team identify your blind spots and make better sense

✨ Support my research, writing, and community work with a tax-deductible donation

✨ 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 tunes at artist-owned music co-op Subvert.fm

✨ Continual Learning theme song: “Substrate Dynamics” by Neon Chameleon

✨ Learn more about how we’re applying these ideas at Atlas Research Group, my team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:58 Intro

06:04 We’re finally doing this

06:35 Adam’s context on this series

11:38 Michael’s context on this series

16:09 Bringing together this special issue

20:34 The cognitive equivalent of an airplane wing?

26:56 Connecting goals and intrinsic motivation

31:29 Requisite diversity in scientific and machine intelligences

38:41 Is there an “I” in AI, and does it need constraints?

41:48 Does consciousness emerge, and how is it not capability?

47:45 Misattributing mind vs. missing mind

55:28 Why is it so hard to make an AI scientist?

1:02:43 The promise of a new economy

1:08:52 Embodiment and alternative architectures

1:13:45 Where do we go from here?

1:17:34 Outro

Other Mentions

Active Inference Symposium 2025 roundtable discussion with Karl J Friston, Michael Garfield, Adam Safron, Alexander Ororbia, Hongju Pae:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTivWre-8Kk

Ray Kurzweil — The Singularity is Near

Erik Hoel — The Overfitted Brain: Dreams Evolved to Assist Generalization

W. Brian Arthur — The Nature of Technology

Nicholas Carr — The Glass Cage

Kevin Kelly — The Handoff to Bots

Steven Johnson — Revenge of The Humanities

Humans On The Loop is committed to better collective sensemaking and the production of public goods. Thank you for your support! Learn more here.

Today’s guest is William Morgan, the co-founder of Restless Egg, a London-based incubator and accelerator designed specifically for a new class of “artist-founders” whose work synthesizes art, technology, and commercial product design.

His thesis: The tech sector’s obsession with optimization can’t 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 — 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 “In” or “Out”

50:51 Founder Experiments Showcase

57:03 Scenius is Real Value

Mentioned

Restless Egg’s Half Dozen Newsletter

Art Is Everything You Don’t 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  by René Daumal

The Nerves of Government  by Karl Deutsch

Why Software is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen

Y Combinator’s 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

✨ 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 “value capture”: 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 — what you might call “value emancipation” — 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 I’ve 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 “local to an idea or a narrative” 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 — and what it means to enact regenerative principles to personal and collective health, technology and economy.

(Fun fact: although she wasn’t at the time of this recording, Andrea is now a member of Atlas Research Group! So we will definitely be doing more together…)

Special Announcement

Join me at the Weirdosphere online learning platform for “Transcendence in the Age of AI” — where we’re hosting an interactive screening of Steven Spielberg’s 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 “More”11:00 Andrea’s 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

Andrea’s Website (which may not work; she’s extremely busy doing real stuff)

Andrea’s 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 DesignHenry’s Zoo - The Limits and “Good” of Public GoodsJames Bridle - Ways of Being

✨ 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 week’s 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 Else’s Game, takes that logic further and reveals the games that bind society together with institutional metrics — one of the most powerful, pervasive, and invisible technologies of all time.

Thi’s thesis hinges on the observation that a metric is never just a number. It’s 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 — the nuance of our singular, non-fungible lives — and define what we can even aspire to be.

Thi calls this kind of cognitive enclosure “value capture”: 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 else’s choices — that someone, somewhere, decided what to count and what to ignore — and we begin to inhabit the metric as if it were reality itself: optimizing our lives, desires, and identities for a scoring system we didn’t author and may never have consciously accepted.

Games show us another way. By Thi’s 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 you’re playing, you know you’re 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 there’s a twist that takes us beyond the scope of Thi’s book and into the question that’s been keeping me up at night for the last two years. With AI, we’ve 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 you’ve 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. Socrates’ critique of written language in Phaedrus — that it couldn’t “read the room” or know its audience — 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?

It’s 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 tradeoffs…as long as we don’t 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

🎧 Ideas That Matter: Discussing Against Identity & Standing by Words

📖 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

✨ 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 — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry. Our next call is this weekend, May 2, at 2 pm MDT!

This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) — a self-described “Earthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and Kamay clans of the Dharawal Nation, in Sydney, Australia.”

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 years’ 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, he’s 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 today’s 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: “Scalar Reconfigurations”

Chapters

00:00 Intro

06:02 Starting Over With Play

08:05 Mat’s 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

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 brain’s “representational reach,” enabling perception of high-dimensional structures and apparent interaction with non-human “intelligent agents,” challenging standard accounts that treat the experience as mere hallucination, dreams, or Jungian archetypes. What new shapes will we—and our sciences—take as we integrate the intense strangeness of these experiences? How do we even begin to practice “truly psychedelic” science? And what insights might we be able to bring “home” 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 “200 level course”, 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 “dream” and “archetype” 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 research—such as the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than matter—and 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 — 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: “Scalar Reconfigurations” & “City of Jewels”

✨ Contact me to collaborate or hire me as a consultant

Chapters

00:00:00 Intro00:08:15 Gallimore’s Origin Story00:13:00 DMT as a Technology00:20:01 “Entities” & 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 SzáraNick SandDonald HoffmanKarl FristonJordi RibaDavid ChalmersWilliam BurroughsJohn LillyPhil DickTerence McKennaRobert Anton WilsonJohn D. Barrow

Mentioned & Related Podcast Episodes

Today’s 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 “living labs” for organizational reflection and facilitate convivial, playful environments for working together?

“Certainly one of the world’s leading figures on ethics in practical applications.”— 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 — 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 “egregores” — 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 — 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 “intent-to-action” gap in corporate ethics and the “paperclip machine” problem in our built wilderness of black box super-machines are structurally identical. And if we can “tame” 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 — and who isn’t? — this will speak to you, and I’m excited to share it.

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Referenced & Related

What’s trust got to do with it?Nathan Kinch

Three reasons why AI ethics is strugglingNathan Kinch

If ‘Trust is a must’ for AI governance — 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 O’Neill

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 you—private, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s 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 can’t 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. I’m 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 “the way things are.”

Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!

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✨ 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 (Alex’s long-running archive of weekly notes)• Common Ground (Alex’s 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 Valley’s 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!

The world is getting weirder every day… We need weirdness specialists. Maybe the best guy for the job is my friend, the brilliant “metashaman” (and possible octopus) Layman Pascal.

In his own words, Layman “used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory but he’s feeling much better now.” 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 “integration-surplus model of religion and spirituality” 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 humankind’s relationship to the future is changing; how to surf intense peculiarity'; the abiding sociocultural role of “shamanoid” personalities and other useful weirdos; “wartime” mobilization for The Big Us; and other deep and delightful subjects. It’s my honor to finally decant this year-old recording, now more pertinent than ever…

✨ 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 Berry’s 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.org•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 I’ve interviewed Terence’s 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