Episodi

  • Design for Provably Safe AI with Evan Miyazono

    Design for Provably Safe AI with Evan Miyazono

    · Humans On The Loop

    Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts

    This week’s guest is my friend Evan Miyazono, CEO and Director of Atlas Computing — 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 — all, in some sense, interdisciplinary matters of “game design” 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 “game” of life on Earth — 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 it’s a lost cause. It’s futile to encode our values into systems we can’t understand. To the extent that machines think, they think very differently than we do, and characteristically “interpret” 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 outputs…and we can segment processes like this so that there are more points at which to review them. One of this show’s major premises is that the design and use of AI systems is something like spellcraft — a domain where precision matters because the smallest deviation from a precise encoding of intent can backfire.

    Magic isn’t 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 — 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 it’s 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 “meaningful decisions” and the sciences with providing “measurable feedback.” Giving science the job of solving uncertainty or defining our values ensures we’ll get as close as we can to certitude about outcomes we definitely don’t want. But if we think like game designers, then interdisciplinary collaboration can help us safely handle the immense power we’ve created and keep the game going.



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  • Religions of the Future & The New Monstrous with Rina Nicolae

    Religions of the Future & The New Monstrous with Rina Nicolae

    · Humans On The Loop

    Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts

    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 Debord’s] society of the spectacle [and Baudrillard’s 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 Enlightenment…it is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them. How to make sense of it all…or 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, Rina’s 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, “in the gaps and cracks” 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 — an age in which “Technology slays the victim” of the mind “resurrects it as art” 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 Rina…

    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 O’ShaughnessyKevin Kelly



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  • Self-Actualization in the Global Brain with Cadell Last of Philosophy Portal

    Self-Actualization in the Global Brain with Cadell Last of Philosophy Portal

    · Humans On The Loop

    This week’s 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 — 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 “staying with the lack” and “working the cracks in being” 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 project’s 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

    Cadell’s Links

    Website (with research and social media links)Philosophy PortalYouTube

    (+ My recent appearance as a guest on Cadell’s 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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  • The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean

    The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean

    · Humans On The Loop

    This week’s 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 I’ve ever read. With support from Humans On The Loop supporters O’Shaughnessy 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 “product-market fit” — 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 — I would love to learn from you and this project exists as a space for thoughtful discourse!

    Upcoming Events

    * 3 May @ 11 am Mountain– Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna(patrons-only discussion)

    * 13 May-14 June – How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere(five-week online course with ten sessions)

    Project Links

    • Explore this project’s 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

    Dean’s 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 – Sacred DataJohn Smart – The transcenscion hypothesisJ.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor – The Computer as a Communication DeviceKevin Kelly – AR Will Spark The Next Big Tech Platform — Call It MirrorworldDouglas Rushkoff – Present ShockYoshija Walter – 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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  • The Art & Technology of Conversation with Robert Poynton

    The Art & Technology of Conversation with Robert Poynton

    · Humans On The Loop

    “When I have a rich, powerful, mind expanding, mind bending conversation like this, I'll need to go and lie down in darkened room afterwards.”– Robert Poynton

    This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration Robert Poynton, Founder of Yellow Learning, Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, and author of three beautiful short books — Do Pause, Do Improvise, and Do Conversation — full of his insights from decades of designing and leading Executive Education leadership programs and hosting creative retreats in Spain.

    In Future Fossils Episode 196 Robert and I discussed how important it is to learn the principles of improvisation as a way of life. And as he notes in his latest book, most of us are already skilled improvisers because we spend our lives in conversation — not just with each other, but with our environments. How does trying on this frame transform the ways that we relate to them?

    In this episode we explore conversations as an art form and as a technology, technology as a conversation, and how weird this all gets when so many of us are having what feel like literal conversations with technology itself.

    Some of our topics:

    • How do we create fertile “conversational fields”? • How do different media constrain and open conversational possibilities?• What does it mean to “be generous” with our improv partners?• What might the structure of good conversation teach us about engaging with AI — and help us “converse” with the entire history of a person or a culture?

    At the heart of this project and this episode in particular is the belief that some things are worth doing not because they get us where we want to go, but because they’re pleasures in themselves. Good conversations are their own reward, and conversations with Robert are especially rewarding.

    (Do yourself a favor and join a Yellow Learning cohort sometime…)

    PS — A bonus for subscribers this week: an extra mini-episode behind the paywall! After Robert and I landed this discussion we kept talking for another hour. Most of it was off-topic but there were some choice bits in there too good to leave on the cutting room floor. If you don’t see it below the show notes, you know what to do:

    Upcoming Events

    * 24 April – Right Relationship with AI feat. Turquoise Sound and Michael Garfield at The School of Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator (free & public 90-minute discussion)

    * 3 May – Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna (patrons-only discussion)

    * 13 May-14 June – How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere (five-week online course with ten sessions)

    Project Links

    • Explore my full podcast archives and this project’s writing/episode archives• Join the Future Fossils Discord for both public and members-only threads• Browse and buy the books we talk about on the show• Explore a map and chat bot grown from nine years of mind-expanding episodes• Meet new allies on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord• Dig into Humans On The Loop’s original pitch & planning document• Contact me if you want to work together

    Mentioned Books

    Robert Poynton — Do Conversation: There’s No Such Thing As Small TalkW. Brian Arthur — The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It EvolvesEthan Mollick — Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AIJennifer Cobb — Cybergrace: The Search for God in The Digital World

    Mentioned People

    K Allado-McDowellJ.F. MartelTom MorganDr. BlueKevin KellyErik DavisKen AdamsJake KobrinTheodore ZeldinChris KutarnaMike LargePlatoSam AltmanErothymeGurdjieffKrishnamurtiPeter BrookeFederico CampagnaIain McGilchristDavid BohmCosma ShaliziNick LandYuval HarariTom ChatfieldMax WalucasTerence McKennaJason SilvaAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonBaruch SpinozaGottfried LeibnizLudwig WittgensteinCarlo RovelliT.S. EliotCarlos Castaneda

    Bonus Mini-Episode

    On The Value of Noisy Media, Conversational Protocols for Scaling Interaction, The Joy of Provisional Lists, and Tech Companies as Networks of Relationships

    “When Apple has a pile of cash of the size it has, it looks permanent. It looks forever. It looks untouchable, and people get attached by that kind of visible sense of scale. But there was a guy I knew many years ago who'd been around Silicon Valley long enough, and knew all the people, all these organisms that we call organizations or brands. And he always saw Silicon Valley as a network of personal relationships, which would every now and then explode into a visible platform or or company like Google or Apple. But he was kinda like, ‘That's not what's going on.’ He would always say ‘It's the mycelial network of the relationships between the individuals.’”– Robert Poynton

    Here you go:



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  • Scale Theory: Contemplating Everything-At-Onceness with Joshua DiCaglio

    Scale Theory: Contemplating Everything-At-Onceness with Joshua DiCaglio

    · Humans On The Loop

    This week’s guest my friend Joshua DiCaglio, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and author of the fabulous Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry.

    It’s a book bout how contemplating scale can transform us — how it’s one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through our maps and another thing entirely to really sit with the mystery of how all of this is happening at once. We can conceptually differentiate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos, but scale makes it clear that at no point do we ever truly stand outside it all.

    And this has enormous implications: contemplating scale is not merely an idle curiosity but an existential necessity. In an age of exponential AI, our future hinges on whether we can learn to overcome the tendency to colonize other scales with our abstractions and cultivate the capacity to recognize interdependency with the unthinkably small and large. How does truly understanding this change the way we live? Bewilderment is a rich place to start. Let’s simmer in it for a while…

    If you find enjoy this conversation, please like, subscribe, and leave a comment at YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify and consider becoming a member here or making tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. Recurring donors get the same community perks, including the book club and online course recordings.

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:12 - Intro Essay: Scale & AI Safety0:13:25 - You Can’t Paint Fractals0:21:29 - We Can Only Act on The Scale at Which We Exist0:23:10 - The Story of Scale Theory0:27:49 - Discovering Scale through Computer Science & Nanotech0:38:37 - Being One & Feeling Many0:44:29 - The Embodiment of Mind & Information0:59:55 - The Scalar Synecdoche: Are Organizations Really Organisms?1:18:32 - Why Does It Matter Where We Draw The Lines Around Individuals?1:33:49 - Responsibility in A World Out of Control1:53:51 - Closing

    Announcements

    Check out my new single and music video “The Big Machine” — along with an essay on songwriting as evolution and a list of my favorite sci-fi ballads. Switch it up from this week’s news by diving in for a trip into the scalar reconfigurations of selfhood:

    Starting next week I’m hosting a members-only reading and discussion of Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with a live call on Sat May 3rd:

    Josh’s Links

    Joshua DiCaglio’s Website + Google Scholar + X + LinkedInScale Theory Part 1 PDF (almost half the book!)Microbes as Machines: Life, Control, and the Problem of Scale in the Emergence of NanotechnologyLanguage and the Logic of Subjectivity: Whitehead and Burke in Crisis (unfortunately not open-access)

    Project Links

    Contact me if you have questions or want to work togetherHumans On The Loop’s living pitch & planning documentJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord serverFull episode and essay archives

    Podcasts

    Humans On The Loop 01 – Richard DoyleHumans On The Loop 06 – K. Allado McDowellHumans On The Loop 10 – J.F. MartelHumans On The Loop 12 – Matt SegallHumans On The Loop 14 – Jim O’ShaughnessyWeird Studies 36 — On HyperstitionFuture Thinkers Podcast – Daniel Schmachtenberger

    Talks

    Michael Garfield — AI-Assisted Transformations of ConsciousnessJacob Foster — Toward A Cultural Ecology of The Noosphere

    Books

    Chaim Gingold – Building Sim CityValerie Hanson – Haptic VisionsAndrew Pilsch – TranshumanismPlato – PhaedrusGilbert Ryle – The Concept of MindThomas Hobbes – LeviathanGeoffrey West – ScaleAnonymous – The Cloud of UnknowingDouglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

    Articles

    Marc Andreessen – Why Software Is Eating The WorldDavid Krakauer et al. — The Information Theory of IndividualityWilliam Gibson – Google’s Earth

    People

    Carl SaganEric DrexlerRichard FeynmanNeal StephensonRay KurzweilPlotinusPseudodionysusStuart DavisRina NicolaeN. Katherine HaylesStuart KauffmanVannevar BushGregory BatesonNorbert WienerHeinz Von FoersterKurt GĂśdelJill NephewHumberto MaturanaFrancisco VarelaWilliam BurroughsDorion SaganLynn MargulisPierre Teilhard De ChardinLuigi MangioneIlya PrigogineDavid BohmRamana MaharshiNisargadatta Maharaj



    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
  • Jim O'Shaughnessy on Creativity, Crisis, and Trust as The Fabric of Society

    Jim O'Shaughnessy on Creativity, Crisis, and Trust as The Fabric of Society

    · Humans On The Loop

    This week Jim O’Shaughnessy (Website | X) joins Humans On The Loop to carry our first on-record conversation on Infinite Loops into bold new terrains! Jim is one of the most renowned investors and asset managers of all the time and the author of several hugely best-selling and influential books on investing, including What Works on Wall Street, Invest Like The Best, and Predicting The Markets of Tomorrow. He also founded the first online investment advisor and holds the patent for “ the origination and fulfillment of stock investment portfolios over a worldwide computer network.” (You heard right!)

    After decades of success in wealth management, he left his company in the care of his son Patrick and launched O’Shaughnessy Ventures — a firm that combines “Jim’s deeply rooted interest in all things art, science, investing and tech with his long-held desire to establish positive sum scenarios designed to help promising creators and their inspiring ideas succeed, regardless of age, location, job history or level of education.”

    Last fall when I was on his show, we played a game of mind-jazz about “how we can live curious, collaborative and fulfilling lives in our deeply weird, complex, probabilistic world.” For this discussion, I wanted to rotate the axis of our exploration and learn how Jim’s personal experiences have contributed to the frame through which he engages life. Sweeping across scales from candid autobiography to team inquiry into some of the wickedest problems — like how we foster meaningful relationships and balance achievement with humility — we covered a lot of new ground.

    I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and benefit from a fresh take on the mind — and heart — of one of the most exemplary mavericks I know.

    If you find value in this conversation, please like and subscribe (YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify), leave a comment, and consider supporting my mission to help us cultivate wisdom in an age of magical technologies. Humans On The Loop is fiscally-supported by my friends at HAPPI (Helping Awesome People Prosper Intentionally), so you can become a member here or make tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. Recurring donors get the same community perks, including the book club and online course recordings.

    Project Links

    Contact me if you have questions or propositionsProject pitch & planning documentFull episode and essay archivesJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord server

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:16 - Intro0:06:23 - Jim’s Backstory0:31:43 - Crisis Personalities + Creativity vs. Risk Mitigation0:46:28 - Networks of Trust + Bootstrapped Credentials0:53:37 - Incenting Trust: Mass Customization + Consensus Reality Collapse1:06:14 - The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma + Trust-Building in Social Networks1:13:25 - How Do We Design for Flourishing at Scale (or Can We)?1:21:22 - Markets as Complex Systems1:29:10- Using (Especially Local) AI to Accelerate Realizing Your Mistakes1:37:23 - Outro

    Mentioned Reading, Listening, & People

    From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and The Precognitive Imagination by Eric WargoThe Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchristFinite and Infinite Games by James P. CarseThe Status Game by Will StorrThe Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (John Minford, translator)Power and Influence: Beyond Formal Authority by John P. KotterOne Summer: America 1927 by Bill BrysonGödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas HofstadterThe End of Trust - McSweeney’s Issue 54

    Bilawal Sidhu — How to Unite Reality with Imagination - Infinite Loops PodcastWill Storr — The Status Game - Infinite Loops PodcastBrendan McCord — AI and The Philosophy of Technology - Infinite Loops PodcastAdam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet - Future Fossils PodcastReimagining the PhD - Nadia AsparouhovaThe TPOT PhD - Priya RoseSo many music festivals have been canceled this year. What’s going on? - Greg Rosalsky for NPR

    Cory DoctorowDoug RushkoffAlfred North WhiteheadJosiah WarrenJed McKennaJosh WolfeSocrates

    Upcoming Events

    * My new single and music video “The Big Machine” goes live on April 1st! Pre-save to Spotify or pre-order on Bandcamp here.

    * I’m co-facilitating a session on “Right Relations with AI” for the School of Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator alongside a superb faculty. Cohort starts April 3rd!

    * The book club is back! Join us for a group reading and discussion of Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with asynchronous discussion in the Future Fossils Discord server and a live call on May 3rd.



    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
  • Aishwarya Khanduja on Living Inquiry & Fostering Imagination

    Aishwarya Khanduja on Living Inquiry & Fostering Imagination

    · Humans On The Loop

    Where do we need boundaries, and where do we need flows? And how can we ensure that we can redistribute them according to the changing needs of any given moment? These are the kinds of questions I would ask if I were trying to meta-solve a meta-crisis, and this is why I’m glad to share this conversation with you. Today’s guest Aishwarya Khanduja, is a fellow living inquiry, an incandescent interrobang just like myself, the founder of The Analogue Group.

    Announcements:

    * We will book club Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents on May 3rd, along with pre-game discussion in the Future Fossils Discord Server’s members-only channels. This book is a masterpiece of thinking otherwise and just what we need to attend to as transition from one mode of worlding to another…I can’t wait to talk about it with you and hear everyone’s reflections!

    * I am finally publishing “The Big Machine”, my anthem for the Screen Age, and will drop my new single and music video on April 1st, so dive into the show notes and pre-save it on Spotify, follow my YouTube channel for notifications when the song goes live, and prime yourself by meditating on the question:“How long can you go without looking at your phone?”

    Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you like this show, dig into the archives and consider making tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks as Substack patrons.)

    Project Links

    Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the open online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server is where we’ll do the book club discussions.Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries!

    Reads

    Harnessing the power of our subconscious mindShaping the future with fictional storiesSocratic SalonsAirpods are ruining the worldA case for strategic ignorance by designTranscendence: An Emergent Career LifeHow to know what to doTasty Morsels from Groovy Hubs

    The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd

    Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz

     Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock

    Artificial You by Susan Schneider

    The_Human_Roots_of_Artificial_Intelligence_A_Commentary_on_Susan_Schneider's_Artificial_You by InĂŞs HipĂłlito

    Other Mentions

    Stephanie LeppAri KushnirSøren KierkegaardPeter Sheridan DoddsPriya Rose of Fractal UniversityNadia AsparouhovaMark Pesce on Erik Davis’ Expanding MindKatalin KarikóJim O’ShaughnessyEvan MiyazonoK. Allado McDowellAmber Case & Michael ZarghamPaul GrahamKurt VonnegutSrinivasa RamanujanCharles DarwinAlbert EinsteinWinston ChurchillDaniel KahnemannAlbert ClaudeAlfred AdlerGregor MendelAflred Russel Wallace



    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
  • Matt Segall on Culture as The Lifeblood of The Machine Economy

    Matt Segall on Culture as The Lifeblood of The Machine Economy

    · Humans On The Loop

    This week I dialogue with Matthew David Segall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute, and author of the Footnotes To Plato blog as well as numerous books on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling. In it, we wrangle with some very fundamental questions, such as:

    * What distinguishes the organismal and machinic?

    * How can we support vital cultural activity without reducing the measure of our humanity to our economic productivity?

    * What if we’re looking for mind in AI in the wrong places, and instead treat both technology and human consciousness as unified within one unfolding process of cosmic self-discovery?

    We welcome your feedback and reflections — here, or in the Future Fossils Discord Server — and to join us in the inquiry about what lies beyond modernity, and how to nourish the collective imagination we need to thrive there!

    I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

    Pardon the delay: inexplicable technical issues forced me to re-render this episode half a dozen times. Hopefully you appreciate the “staying up until 1 am to try and ship on time”!

    Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you like this show, dig into the archives and consider making tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks as Substack patrons.)

    Project Links

    Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the open online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordContact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:32 - Intro0:08:18 - About Matt0:15:19 - Nouns & Verbs, Machines & Organisms0:24:24 - Emergence & Epistemic Humility0:36:55 - The Relationship Between Cultures & Markets0:49:21 - What Are Markets & Can They Play?0:58:30 - Our Responsibility To What We Make1:06:42 - Is Conscious AI A Hyperobject?1:17:43 - Outro

    Mentions

    Matt’s Website & TwitterMatt Segall & O.G. Rose - Re-thinking Economics & The Meaning of ValueBrendan Graham Dempsey & Matt Segall - Physics, Metaphysics, Meta-MetaphysicsMatt Segall & Tim Jackson - The Blind Spot (2024): A Critical and Reconstructive ReviewFuture Fossils 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyMichael Garfield - Introducing Humans On The LoopAbraham Flexner - The Usefulness of Useless KnowledgeW. Brian Arthur - The Nature of TechnologyW. Brian Arthur - Economics in Nouns and VerbsMiguel Fuentes - Complexity and The Emergence of Physical PropertiesMichael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cris Moore - The Physical Limits of CommunicationSteven Johnson - Revenge of The HumanitiesAdam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson - The Blind SpotJessica Flack - Hourglass Emergence: Complexity Begets Complexity thru Information Bottlenecks (video)Richard Doyle - Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The NoosphereKevin Kelly - The Expansion of IgnoranceWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or Borges?Danny Hillis - The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live The EntanglementKevin Kelly - Out of Control

    Kai EnnisCarl JungStephen HawkingFriedrich NietzschRichard DawkinsAlan WattsMichael SchwartzAlfred North WhiteheadSean EsjbĂśrn-HargensFelix GuattariStuart KauffmanRudolf SteinerDavid WolpertRobert RosenMichael LevinNorbert WeinerKen WilberKarl FristonGilbert SimondonHumberto MaturanaFrancisco VarelaJohn VervaekeTerrence DeaconPierre Teilhard de Chardin



    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
  • Andrew McLuhan on Needling The Somnambulists about How We've Never Been Autonomous

    Andrew McLuhan on Needling The Somnambulists about How We've Never Been Autonomous

    · Humans On The Loop

    This week on Humans On The Loop I welcome Andrew McLuhan, author, teacher, and Director of The McLuhan Institute, a generational ark for media theory in a world that desperately needs more help understanding the relationships between our tools, our minds, and our society.

    Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify

    Please consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks.)

    Project Links

    Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:17 - Intro0:06:38 - Partial Agency & The Great Inversion0:11:53 - Three Generations of McLuhan Theorists0:21:51 - Poetry & Prose, Narratives & Networks0:34:43 - Artists Show Us The Way0:41:29 - The Persistence of Memory vs. The Web As Palimpsest0:51:36 - AI in The Tetrad0:58:19 - Opting Out & The Slow Food Media Diet1:05:40 - Outro & Announcements

    Mentioned Media & People

    Magick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford by Weird Studies PodcastNora BatesonGregory BatesonWilliam Irwin ThompsonFrom Nowhere by Eric WargoThe Ascent of Information by Caleb ScharfEverything Everywhere All At OncePresent Shock by Douglas RushkoffUnderstanding Media by Marshall McLuhanThe Interior Landscape by Marshall McLuhanEzra PoundPreface to Plato by Eric HavelockJay-ZT.S. Eliot



    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
  • J.F. Martel on Machines vs. Fractals, Black Box Personhood, and Navigating The AI Fairy Tale

    J.F. Martel on Machines vs. Fractals, Black Box Personhood, and Navigating The AI Fairy Tale

    · Humans On The Loop

    Halfway through one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Charles Stross’ Accelerando, we tune in to the members of an interstellar first contact mission as they pass the time debating whether the Technological Singularity has happened yet. Spoiler alert: all of them are uploaded minds appearing in a consensus VR environment as various post-human avatars, riding inside a computer the size of a grain of rice on a craft the size of a soda can. To readers it seems like a satire: what, if not this, would it take to convince you we’re over the rainbow? But good science fiction provokes us to question the present, and so we must ask: what are we waiting for? Are we still moderns? Is this still Western civilization? Should we be looking forward to the age of machine superintelligence, or has it already happened, like physicist Cosma Shalizi argues in his blog post “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”?

    Here’s a clip from that piece:

    Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies”.

    Maybe we ought to consider, like Bruno Latour, that We Have Never Been Modern. Or maybe, as Federico Campagna suggests in Prophetic Culture, each era’s inhabitants identify as “modern” and project the “likely story” produced by their process of “worlding” to imagine futures that recede like mirages or rainbows as we approach the horizon of our understanding? By the time we arrive, we have transformed and the mysteries of the ancient and future are conserved. Some Indigenous cultures believe that all animals identify as “people” — perhaps every world is mundane to its native observers, and yet all of them arise out of chaos and ineffability. Science can’t answer some questions because it depends on replicability and provisional consensus, and some questions ultimately force us out of attempts to get everything to make sense and into contemplative surrender to our own cognitive limits (no matter how much we augment ourselves).

    Science will, of course, continue. As Ted Chiang wrote twenty five years ago in his short story “Catching Crumbs from The Table”, advancements in AI and biotechnology could foreseeably “[leave] journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language… Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings… Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.”

    In 2025, living through the superexponential evolution of machine intelligence, this story hits close to home. What will we do when all breakthroughs are made by black box AI systems whose logic and insights evade us? We already have to take large language models on faith, doing our best to conserve a modest sliver of understanding as we resign ourselves to the practical benefits of successful but illegible prediction. But given that scientific progress has largely advanced through the proliferation of hyperspecialist experts who cannot understand one another’s research, we should again ask if it were ever the case that we could explain everything, or whether we’ve just been ignoring the central importance of textual interpretation as we puzzled over the riddles of a world that never owed us any satisfying final answers?

    Whether we’re modern or not, it is time for us to reconsider the foundations of ideas like informed consent, agency, evidence, and personhood. Whether you think we’re still waiting around for the future or that we are living it, we live among an ecology of diverse intelligences and require a humbler approach…one strangely similar to that of Medieval serfs and jungle-dwelling foragers than first seems obvious…one that owes back pay to the dismissed disciplines of religion, magic, and myth. Which is why I’m excited to get weird with you in this episode.

    This week I speak with one of my closest comrades in philosophical investigation, Canadian author and film-maker J.F. Martel. Co-founder and co-host (with Phil Ford) of the internationally-acclaimed Weird Studies Podcast and Weirdosphere online learning platform, tenured para-academic explorer of high strangeness and the liminal zones between the known, unknown, and unknowable, J.F. is a perfect partner with whom to refine inquiry into persistent and tricky questions like:

    – What is the nature of technology and how does it change as our seemingly-discrete tools and built environments merge into a planet-scale thinking machine?

    – How can we tell when AI achieves personhood, and what does it take to be “good parents” of beings that are fundamentally beyond our control?

    – What can religion and fairy tales teach us about living well in a world where our explanatory frameworks fail us?

    – How can we re-think and re-claim healthy institutions to serve human flourishing after the end of history as we know it?

    Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify

    Please consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks.)

    J.F.’s Links

    ReclaimingArt.comWeirdStudies.comWeirdosphere.orgJF on X | Weird Studies Discord & SubRedditReclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice (book)

    Project Links

    Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:01 - Introduction0:09:32 - Revisiting Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice0:15:12 - What we lose and gain by automating culture0:31:12 - Wendell Berry’s poem “A Timbered Choir”0:36:50 - Transcendental, Machinic, Immanental, Imaginal, and Fractal0:46:21 - Black Box Personhood & AI as A 'Thou’1:00:00 - Is AI Magic?1:06:10 - Fairy Tales, Faith, and Submission after Modernity1:10:27 - Do we still need institutions?1:16:59 - Thanks & Announcements

    Back Catalogue

    FF 18 - J.F. Martel on Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny AwesomenessFF 71 - J.F. Martel on Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2WS 26 Living in a Glass AgeFF 126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural RealitiesJRS Currents 064: Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel on Art x AIFF 214 - J.F. Martel, Phil Ford, & Megan Phipps on Weird Cybernetics: Waking Up From The EcstasyFF 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-Time

    Mentioned Media

    Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”Erik Hoel’s “Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture”New York Encounter (event)Art is dead. Long live Art with Android Jones | Mind Meld 323 Third Eye DropsCosma Shalizi & Henry Farrell’s “Artificial Intelligence is a Familiar-Looking Monster”Sigmund Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure PrincipleWendell Berry’s “A Timbered Choir”Henri Corbin’s “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal”William Irwin Thompson’s Imaginary LandscapesDanny Hillis’ “The Enlightenment Is Dead. Long Live The Entanglement”Neri Oxman’s “The Age of Entanglement”David Krakauer’s “Emergent Engineering”Kevin Kelly’s Out of ControlFF 150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-HargensFF 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyTop Aerospace Scientists Suspect UFOs are Biblical Time Machines | Diana Walsh Pasulka on The Danny Jones PodcastZiwei Xu et al.’s “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”Isaac Asimov’s FoundationGilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

    Other Mentions

    Donna TartMatt CardinMichael PhilipBenoit MandelbrotJames AllenGregory BatesonDavid HumeGottfried LeibnizL. Ron HubbardErik DavisCarl JungJacques LacanAlbert CamusJean-Paul SartreCurt JaimungalStafford BeerCarl SaganJames HillmanPhil FordMarie-Louise von FranzGK ChestertonEdmund Burke



    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
  • Adah Parris on Neurodivergent Cyborg Shamans & Elemental Tech Ethics

    Adah Parris on Neurodivergent Cyborg Shamans & Elemental Tech Ethics

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify

    If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way).

    About This Episode

    This week we speak with “strategic futurist and pattern navigator” Adah Parris, a London-based wizard and weirdo with whom I immediately hit it off over our shared interest in “cyborg shamanism” and an emphasis on being good ancestors. Forbes Brasil called her “one of the most important futurists in the world.” It’s hard for me to measure the impact she’s had on business leaders, tech startups, marketing and communications firms, arts schools, and in the lives of the countless other people.

    We talk about the relationship between numbers, language, and the ineffable, ever-shifting human spirit. Adah’s work points past knowledge and history into the elemental nature of both human and machine, past our differences into the deep similarity worth celebrating and the mystery that we inhabit and embody. Join us for a yarn that is both silly and profound, present and far-reaching, about being uncategorizably creative, open, and curious amidst the wicked problems of our time…

    Project Links

    • Read the project pitch & planning doc• Dig into the full episode and essay archives• Join the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on Discord + Bluesky + X• Join the open, listener-moderated Future Fossils Discord Server• Contact me if you have questions (patron rewards, sponsorship, collaboration, etc.)• Browse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellers

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:00:49 - Intro0:05:24 - Feeling Seen & Heard0:09:54 - Adah’s Biography0:17:21 - Poetry & Number0:27:55 - Cyborg Shamanism & The Five Elements0:37:03 - The Foraging Neurotype of “Extremely Online”0:51:07 - Surrendering Agency to Systems0:55:14 - The Incremental Reclamation of Agency1:01:19 - Art after Modernity & Healing from Noise1:13:01 - Beyond Narrative & Into Dance1:17:30 - Thanks & Announcements

    Adah’s Links

    Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | Medium | Chartwell Speakers

    Finding Our Future in Ancestral Wisdom @ TEDxSoho

    What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want To Be? @ Think With Google

    Cyborg Shamanism & The Case for Elemental AI @ Atmos

    Mentioned Media

    Refactoring “Autonomy” & “Freedom” for The Age of Language Modelsby Michael Garfield

    223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyFuture Fossils Podcast

    Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foragingby David L. Barack et al.

    New Selves of Neural Media & AI as 'The Poison Path' with K Allado-McDowellHumans On The Loop

    Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Futureby De Kai

    Technoshamanism: A Very Psychedelic Century! at Moogfest 2016by Michael Garfield

    Proteus (film)

    Sonic restoration: acoustic stimulation enhances plant growth-promoting fungi activityby James M. Robinson et al.

    Ada Twist, Scientistby Andrea Beaty & David Roberts

    Oppenheimer (film)

    Dante’s Infernoby Dante Alighieri

    Mentioned People & Institutions

    Ford Motor Co.TelefonicaWayraAT&TAugusta Ada Byron LovelaceCharles BabbageMarshall McLuhanDr. Kate StoneErnst HaeckelTada HozumiLewis MumfordJohn Taylor GattoPaul TillichAlan Turing

    Guest Recommendations

    Emalick NijeAnjuli BediCharlie MorleyAmichai Lau-Lavie



    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
  • Howard Rheingold on Lucid Life Online & Attention As A 21st Century Literacy

    Howard Rheingold on Lucid Life Online & Attention As A 21st Century Literacy

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify

    If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way).

    Our next members hangout will be Saturday Feb 15th at 3 pm Mountain Time and I would love to see you in the mix! Expect details on how to join the call by Friday.

    About This Episode

    We live in a time defined by the agency of what author, critic, and teacher Howard Rheingold famously described as “tools for thought” — media that expand our minds and enhance our ability to learn and collaborate, both for good and ill. But just because we’re on the Web doesn’t make us “net smart”, another term from Rheingold’s extensive catalogue of pithy idioms.

    As anyone with a pocket supercomputer can attest, having information on tap doesn’t necessarily result in better attention management, boost our critical thinking, or confer a greater capacity to engage in prosocial collective action…but we can choose to allocate ourselves to developing the skills we need to thrive on this electronic frontier. And who better to help us than Rheingold himself, a legendary figure whose reporting and counsel from the frothy edge can teach us all great volumes about how to deepen our humanity in technologically-augmented worlds.

    Disclaimer: the audio and video on Howard’s end of the recording drifted unevenly and sometimes minutes away from each other…and while I put in several extra days of effort to repair it all, you will notice moments where they don’t line up.

    Project Links

    • Read the project pitch & planning doc• Dig into the full episode and essay archives• Join the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on Discord + Bluesky + X• Join the open, listener-moderated Future Fossils Discord Server• Contact me if you have questions (patron rewards, sponsorship, collaboration, etc.)• Browse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellers

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:50 - Intro0:07:15 - Howard’s Story0:15:59 - Technology as Psychedelic & The New Selves of The Web0:26:42 - Attention Management as A 21st Century Literacy0:39:29 - Making Life Online a Lucid Dream0:52:17 - New Architectures of Participation1:01:51 - The Importance of Art & Play1:12:16 - Making Room for Innovation1:17:05 - Howard’s Guest Recommendations1:18:24 - Thanks & Announcements

    Howard’s Links

    Website | Patreon | X | Mastodon | WikipediaAttention: And Other 21st Century LiteraciesNet Smart @ Google Tech Talks (video)Tools for Thought: The History & Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (also on Digital Library for The Commons)Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (also on JSTOR)The Peeragogy Handbook (also public domain)Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (PDF here)Virtual Reality (also on Internet Archive)The Virtual Community: Homesteading on The Electronic Frontier (also on Internet Archive)Pataphysics.us

    Mentioned Books & Papers

    Douglas Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual FrameworkLinda Stone - Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial AttentionJacques Ellul - The Technological SocietyRegina Rini - Deepfakes and The Epistemic BackstopPuja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl - Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s SoulJoseph Henrich - The Secret of Our SuccessElinor Ostrom - Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective ActionJ. Stephen Lansing - Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in BaliAnanyo Bhattacharya - The Man from The Future: The Visionary Life of John von NeumannGarrett Hardin - The Tragedy of The CommonsManuel Castells - The Rise of The Network SocietyAnnie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

    Mentioned People & Institutions

    Timothy LearyJoe KamiyaAlan KayClay ShirkyRichard DoyleRay KurzweilLinda StoneIain McGilchristClifford Nass Stanislas DehaeneTim O’ReillyCory DoctorowAndreas WagnerDavid PasiakDave SnowdenMircea EliadeEd CatmullJohn LasseterAlan TuringXeroc PARCScientific AmericanThe WELLThe Whole Earth ReviewThe Institute For The FutureThe Macarthur FoundationNapsterBurning ManHewlett PackardPixarIndustrial Light & MagicLucasfilmStanford Institute for Innovations in Learning

    Guest Recommendations

    Joe HenrichAnnie Murphy PaulBrian AlexanderAthena Aktipis



    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
  • Jessica Clark on Making New Realities with New Media

    Jessica Clark on Making New Realities with New Media

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

    This week I speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio. Jessica has honed her skills for decades on a path that’s carried her from AAAS to The Library of Congress to The Encyclopedia Britannica to the Center for Media and Social Impact to The New America Foundation to The Association of Independents in Radio and beyond, and now she oversees a refuge for social innovators working at the intersections of philanthropy, media, arts and culture, and futurism. We need dot connectors more than ever if we are to trace the shape of what’s emerging, and I look to Jessica as an example of how to weave research, experience design, production, strategy, and culture-building into something like the raft we need to make our way through vast uncertainty to thriving futures just over the horizon. In this episode we discuss the ideas shared in her book with Kamal Sinclair, Making A New Reality: A Toolkit for Inclusive Futures and how to rethink storytelling in new media.

    Project Links

    Pitch and planning documentHire me to help you make senseMake tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server + Bluesky List + X Community

    Chapters

    0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:40 - Intro0:07:51 - Who is Jessica Clark?0:10:42 - “New Media” Means New Kinds of “Reality”0:15:18 - Storytelling & Social Power0:25:07 - Overcoming Groupthink / Problems in The Creative Economy0:32:39 - Fairness in New Media0:40:38 - What Do We Measure While Incubating Creativity?0:48:32 - Post-Institutional Credentials0:55:01 - How Do We Support “The Interstitionaries”?1:02:14 - Intergenerational Wisdom & The Value of Conflict to Truth1:08:59 - What Biases Do We Want?1:14:29 - The Future Voice of Fandom1:18:03 - Acknowledgements & Next Guest

    (Most) Mentions

    Making A New Reality’s Toolkit for Change ResourcesKamal Sinclair & Jessica Clark discuss Making A New RealityVictor Pickard’s “We Need a Media System That Serves People’s Needs, Not Corporations’”William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur”Ward Shelley’s Who Invented The Avant Garde Redux, 2020Michael Garfield’s “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”Doug RushkoffSep KamvarJulie Ann CrommettStephanie LeppAri KuschnirMaureen FanEugene ChungZebras UniteMetalabel Maureen GiovanniniShannon GilmartinNicole AnandEd CatmullLeslie Fields CruzDavid JayCenter for Humane TechnologyWilliam Irwin Thompson’s The American Replacement of NatureC Thi NguyenThomas FrankJennifer BrandelBrian EnoTracy Van SlykeThe Center for Media & Social ImpactMIT Open Documentary LabTrista HarrisPatricia AufderheideInternet ArchiveWikimedia FoundationMalka OlderGlobal VoicesDark Trek



    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
  • New Selves of Neural Media & AI as 'The Poison Path' with K Allado-McDowell

    New Selves of Neural Media & AI as 'The Poison Path' with K Allado-McDowell

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

    This week we speak with K Allado-McDowell, artist, musician, and co-founder of the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google. K pioneered human-computer co-authorship with the book Pharmako-AI, as well as Air Age Blueprint, Amor Cringe, and the graphic novel Outside, plus works in opera and ritual. Their work reveals the human as inherently relational and ecological, technology as something nature’s doing, and the new vistas made legible by technology as a fertile zone within which we can redefine identity and story from a radically transformed awareness. Pharmako-AI, the first book to be co-written with GPT-3 in 2020, sets the tone: mutually interdependent co-arising of selfhood through linguistic interactions between animal, vegetable, and mineral intelligences, AI as an adjunct to our awakening sense of co-imbrication in and as a plural and evolving world.

    Project Links

    Plans, invited thinkers, and needsHire me for consulting or advisory workMake tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersTend a community knowledge garden in the Wisdom x Technology Discord serverMeet delightful fellow weirdos in the private Future Fossils Facebook group

    Chapters

    0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:34 – Intro0:06:54 – Who is Kenric Allado-McDowell?0:13:12 – Entering Linguistic Hyperspace0:31:36 – Neural, Network, Immersive, Broadcast Media0:48:10 – The Poison Path of Machine Intelligence1:05:10 – Post-Cyperpunk Love & Nonduality1:17:55 – Recommendations1:21:02 – Outro

    Mentions

    K’s “Neural Interpellation”K’s “Designing Neural Media”Dale Pendell’s Pharmako/Gnosis: Plant Teachers and The Poison PathPharmako-AIK in conversation with Erik Davis at The AlembicJacques Vallee’s The Invisible CollegeJohn KeatsRichard DoyleEduardo KohnSETIDavid Abrams’ The Spell of The SensuousRobert RauschenbergJohn CageBell LabsFred Turner’s The Democratic SurroundStanford UniversityThe Committee for National MoraleMargaret MeadGregory BatesonCharles & Ray EamesEdward SteichenStan VanDerBeekTerence McKennaReplika AIRay KurzweilMidjourneyJoseph SchumpeterJakob Johann von UexküllJean BaudrillardMiike SnowJohn DanaherSpikeRudolf SteinerTimothy MortonKrishnamurtiAlexander Von HumboldtAndrea WulfNick LandNora Khan Paul Preciado



    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
  • Futures Indistinguishable from Magic with Robin Sloan

    Futures Indistinguishable from Magic with Robin Sloan

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

    This week I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel Moonbound, one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, and raises questions like:

    Where is the line between technology and magic?What is a computer, really, and do humans qualify?How wrong might we be about the future?How do stories shape reality, and what happens when we have to make room for the stories of the more-than-human world?

    A crucial point of note: this is “hard science fiction”, but it’s not the kind you’re used to. At a time when even the most square, prosaic suits are quick to quote Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, it is appropriate that sci-fi as a kind of thinking-through of our condition would reflect the cultural retrieval of premodern tropes like wizards, dragons, talking animals, and sacred swords.

    What follows is a rich discussion of how Robin and I both enjoy traversing and interrogating those familiar boundaries between the lost and found, the sensible and the ineffable, wildness and city, born and created, sleep and waking, care and power…

    Project Links

    Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory work

    Chapters

    0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:38 – Intro0:06:50 – Robin’s Story0:08:35 – The Care and Feeding of AI0:13:38 – Magical Technologies vs. The (Other) Powers of Nature0:21:46 – Persistent Wildness in The Post-Apocalyptic Future0:28:57 – Mapping Everything & Getting Lost0:32:30 – The City of Transformation: Ephemeropoli from Burning Man to Rath Varia0:37:48 – Tuning Longevity to the Duration of our Interests0:41:49 – The Loss of Self in Data & The Metamorphic Self0:49:02 – Beaver Governance is Better Governance0:54:23 – Living Robots & Sleeping Institutions in Liquid Modernity1:02:16 – How Do We Keep Healthy Rhythms While Scaling?1:10:35 – Life at The College of Wyrd1:18:01 – Recommendations for Good Discussion & Book Takeaways1:23:09 – Thanks & Outro

    Mentions

    Eliot Peper (Re: FF 47, 115)Eliot Peper’s interview with Robin Sloan, “Binding The Moon”Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBitsTim Morton’s Hell: In Search of A Christian EcologyThe Long Now FoundationKevin Kelly’s “The Expansion of Ignorance” (Re: FF 128, 165, 204)Star WarsTyson Yunkaporta (Re: FF 172)Adventure TimeThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of The KingdomMichael Crichton’s Jurassic ParkJack VanceM. John HarrisonHerbert SimonJames C. Scott’s Seeing Like A StateRichard Doyle’s Darwin’s PharmacyKim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue)Neil Gaiman’s Long Now talk “How Stories Last”Jonathan Rowson/Perspectiva’s antidebateThe Templeton FoundationZygmunt Bauman’s Liquid ModernityAlexander RoseJohan Chu & James Evans’s “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science”Michael Garfield’s “The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, and Economies of Scale”Erik Hoel’s “The Overfitted Brain”JF Martel (Re: FF 18, 71, 126, 214)Phil Ford (Re: FF 126, 157, 214)Erik Davis (Re: FF 99, 132, 141)The WeirdosphereBell LabsMagic: The GatheringComplexity Podcast 42: “Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West on Calling Bullshit”Inna Semetsky’s “Information and Signs: The Language of Images”The I ChingPhilip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)Iain McGilchristClaire EvansJames BridleQuanta Magazine



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  • Transcending (and Including) Partisan Debate with Stephanie Lepp

    Transcending (and Including) Partisan Debate with Stephanie Lepp

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

    This week I speak with my friend Stephanie Lepp (Website | LinkedIn), two-time Webby Award-winning producer and storyteller devoted to leaving “no insight left behind” with playful and provocative media experiments that challenge our limitations of perspective. Stephanie is the former Executive Director at the Institute for Cultural Evolution and former Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology. Her work has been covered by NPR and the MIT Technology Review, supported by the Mozilla Foundation and Sundance Institute, and featured on Future Fossils Podcast twice — first in episode 154 for her project Deep Reckonings and then in episode 205 with Greg Thomas on Jazz Leadership and Antagonistic Cooperation.

    Her latest project, Faces of X, pits actors against themselves in scripted trialogues between the politically liberal and conversative positions on major social issues, with a third role swooping in to observe what each side gets right and what they have in common. I support this work wholeheartedly. In my endless efforts to distill the key themes of Humans On The Loop, one of them is surely how our increasing connectivity can — if used wisely — help each of us identify our blind spots, find new respect and compassion for others, and discover new things about our ever-evolving selves (at every scale, from within the human body to the Big We of the biosphere and beyond).

    Thanks for listening and enjoy this conversation!

    Project Links

    Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory work

    Chapters

    0:00:00 – Teaser0:00:48 – Intro0:06:33 – The Black, White, and Gray of Agency0:10:54 – Stephanie’s Initiation into Multiperspectivalism0:15:57 – Hegelian Synthesis with Faces of X0:23:53 – Reconciling Culture & Geography0:29:02 – Improvising Faces of X for AI0:46:34 – Do Artifacts Have Politics?0:50:04 – Playing in An Orchestra of Perspectives0:55:10 – Increasing Agency in Policy & Voting1:05:55 – Self-Determination in The Family1:08:39 – Thanks & Outro

    Other Mentions

    • Damien Walter on Andor vs. The Acolyte• William Irwin Thompson• John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration for The Independence of Cyberspace”• Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell’s “Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster”• Liv Boeree• Allen Ginsberg• Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch• Singularity University• Android Jones + Anson Phong’s Chimera• Basecamp• Grimes• Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”• Ibram X. Kendi• Coleman Hughes• Jim Rutt



    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
  • Mycopunk Community Coordination with Christina Bowen of Socialroots

    Mycopunk Community Coordination with Christina Bowen of Socialroots

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

    This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist Christina Bowen. If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina is CEO and co-founder of socialroots.io, an NSF- and Omidyar Network-funded software platform for cross-group collaboration that promotes aligned action and helps teams communicate legible impact metrics to stakeholders. Or, in the parlance of our times, she is a master of negotiating the complexities of human communication and community.

    She has deep, lived experience of what it takes to subvert the toxic status quo, cultivate the health of teams, and rethink our “social” spaces so they actually work for human beings. She also introduced me to the world of “mycopunk”, an earthier and more distributed alternative to solarpunk that places more priority on our relationships and narrative construction as an inherently collective project.

    This is a warm and grounded dialogue with someone I respect immensely as a force for betterment. Here is how her team describes their work and principles on their own website:

    Our greatest challenges as a global civilization will require an unprecedented amount of cooperation and may have been caused in large part by unmitigated competition. We have founded Socialroots on a few key principles, summarized below, to support this shift into a more healthy future.

    * Efficient coordination across groups enables more decentralized organizing and greater innovation.

    * Data is a commons and must be treated as such. Platform users need to be empowered when it comes to their data.

    * Power stays healthier when shared. We are dedicated to fair, transparent, and consent-driven work, enabling participatory communities to share values and approaches, and to approach teamwork informed by insights from healthy living systems.

    There you have it. I highly recommend you reach out to her and her team if you are trying to do better work in groups.

    Special Announcement: Join me for the first in a new series of live hangout calls for patrons on Saturday, January 18th at 2 pm Mountain Time! Let’s foster real and lasting collaborations in a safe place for collective inquiry.

    Thank you and enjoy this episode!

    Project Links

    Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop

    Browse my reading list and support local booksellers

    Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server

    Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group

    Hire me for consulting or advisory work

    Chapters

    0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:31 – Intro0:06:58 – Meet Christina Bowen0:08:54 – Scaling Social Networks Without Burning Out0:14:00 – Working Out Loud in Small & Large Groups0:19:25 – Social Protocols of Coordination0:22:44 – Healthy Boundaries Online0:30:10 – Supporting Invisible or Illegible Labor0:40:50 – Subverting The Status (More-Than-Human) Pyramid0:51:44 – Salience Landscapes & Safe/Brave/Inclusive Spaces0:53:35 – AI-Augmented Communication & Spacemaking1:01:34 – Edge-Based Coherent Sensemaking vs. Toxic Hierarchies1:09:11 – Mindful Tech Use & Recommended Guests1:12:38 – Outro

    Mentioned Media

    Mycopunk Principles

    Build Capacity: Scaling your network without burning outby Socialroots, Christina Bowen, Naomi Joy Smith

    What is coordination and why is it so important to effective networks?by Ana Jamborcic, Christina Bowen, Socialroots

    Intimacy Gradients: The Key to Fixing Our Broken Social Media Landscapeby Socialroots, Ana Jamborcic

    Let's subvert the status pyramidby Socialroots, Ana Jamborcic

    Working and learning out loudby Harold Jarche

    Alyssa Allegretti on Sacred Domesticity and Hard Times in The Liminal WebFuture Fossils Podcast 225

    Descartes’ Errorby Antonio Damasio

    Seeing Like A Stateby James C. Scott

    C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as ArtFuture Fossils 175

    Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As GovernanceFuture Fossils 213

    Stephen Reid on Technological MetamodernismFuture Fossils 226

    Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold EquationsFuture Fossils 141

    The Dawn of Everythingby David Graeber & David Wengrow

    Generative Team Design: Innovation, Psychological Safety, and Empathyby Dara Blumenthal

    Being Glueby Tanya Reilly

    Identity Is Such A Dragby Luis Mojica and Sophie Strand on Holistic Life Navigation

    The future is fungi: The rise and rhizomes of mushroom cultureby ASU Center for Science and The Imagination with Merlin Sheldrake, Kaitlin Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, and Corey Pressman

    Other Mentions

    • DWeb Camp• Responsive.org• Jeff Emmett• Plato• Bayo Akomolafe• Douglas Rushkoff• John Fullerton• Capitalinstitute.org• Cris Moore• Friedrich Hölderlin• Interspeciesinternet.io• Kumu.io• Joe Edelman• Pri Bertucci



    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
  • The Inner Life of a Responsible Tech Practitioner with Benjamin Olsen

    The Inner Life of a Responsible Tech Practitioner with Benjamin Olsen

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

    When technology gets byzantine, when the heady early years of cybernetic mysticism give way and our software engineers become the new priests of the Catholic institutions of Big Tech, maybe we can learn a thing or two from a Byzantine Catholic who’s made Responsible Technology their life. This week’s guest is just that person. Benjamin Olsen is the Head of Windows Responsible AI & Data Compliance at Microsoft, where he also pioneered their first AI & Ethics education programs. He’s also an advisor for AI and Faith and has worked as co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Responsible Learning & Education program and member of their Responsible Development and Deployment of Technology steering committee; the former Responsible Innovation Lead at Meta; and a part of the IEEE’s working group on Responsible AI. His online courses in Analytics, Data Science, and Responsible Technology have been taken by millions of students in more than 120 countries.

    But it’s his writing at the intersection of religion, spirituality, technology, and human flourishing that caught my eye. I met Ben through Andrew Dunn of the School of Wise Innovation, where I was on the faculty for a course on Embodied Ethics in The Age of AI with Josh Schrei, and was immediately taken by the clarity and heart he brings to places I have always guessed were, frankly, soulless. Speaking with him gave me hope that maybe all this hype is actually the evidence of earnest and concerted effort — in some corners, anyway — to do the future right and not just big. I hope that you enjoy your conversation.

    Links

    “The Inner Life of Responsible Innovation” by Benjamin Olsen

    “Monsters and Moderation in Respsonbile AI” by Benjamin Olsen

    “Super-responsible AI” by Benjamin Olsen

    “Mission Impossible: Perfectly Responsible AI” by Benjamin OlsenLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop

    Browse my reading list and support local booksellers

    Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server

    Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group

    Hire me for consulting or advisory work

    Chapters

    0:00:00 – Teaser Quote

    0:01:34 – Episode Intro

    0:03:58 – Introducing Benjamin Olsen

    0:08:20 – Toward Omni-considerate Corporate Ethics

    0:17:18 – Practicing Super-responsibility

    0:27:32 – Between The Scylla of Censorship and The Charybdis of Underblocking

    0:36:26 – Doing The Lord’s Work inside The Leviathan

    0:43:09 – Consent between Company & Customer

    0:54:07 – How Do We Exercise Agency Within Social Constraints?

    0:58:10 – Who Does Benjamin Recommend?

    1:00:21 – Closing Remarks

    Mentions

    * Yolanda Gil

    * Kevin Kelly

    * Martin Luther King Jr.

    * Henry David Thoreau

    * William Gibson

    * Stafford Beer

    * James P. Carse

    * Hans Moravec

    * Father Walker Ciszek

    * Catherine Dougherty

    * Larry Muhlstein

    * Danny Go

    * Timothy Morton

    * Carl Jung

    * Amber Case

    * Michael Zargham

    * Chip and Dan Heath

    * Bayazid Bastami

    * Shannon Valor

    *  Dan Zigmund

    * Zvika Krieger



    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
  • Reclaiming Attention from 'The Ravenous Maw of The Screen' with Richard Doyle

    Reclaiming Attention from 'The Ravenous Maw of The Screen' with Richard Doyle

    · Humans On The Loop

    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

    When, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts?

    After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion and Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (with Gary Weber), and has taught courses on “aliens, Philip K. Dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, Burroughs, basic argumentation, The Non Dual Bible, and everything in between.”

    I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Erik Davis’ Expanding Mind, and in the thirteen years since he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is, ostensibly, a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else I’d rather prime the batch. It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of of helping set the tone for everything that is to come…

    Links

    Richard Doyle’s faculty web page and publicationsLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop

    Browse my reading list and support local booksellers

    Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server

    Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group

    Hire me for consulting or advisory work

    Chapters

    0:00:00 – Teaser

    0:03:36 – Episode Intro

    0:12:44 – Introducing Richard Doyle

    0:29:33 – The Ego as Inflammation

    0:33:58 – Practicing Care in The Planet-Wide Makerspace

    0:48:30 – Digital Connection vs. Embodied Connection

    0:55:46 – Psychedelics as Training Wheels for Transhumanism

    1:02:43 – “Storytelling” Isn’t A Professional Service (??)

    1:05:25 – Techniques for Reclaiming Attention & Finding Peace

    1:15:22 – Meditation as “The Halting Problem”

    1:17:30 – Beyond The Limits of Science

    1:22:17 – AI-Enabled Extraction vs. AI-Enabled Abundance

    1:38:40 – Closing Remarks

    Reflections

    Much of tech ethics discourse concerns itself with whether humans are “in the loop” or “out of the loop” — whether people get to call the shots. But there is always more than one loop. Most of the things our fleshy bodies do are local decisions made before we ever become conscious of them, if we ever do…and yet evolution clearly found some value in reflection, self-awareness, reflex inhibition, and the will that quiets maladaptive impulse. Widening our frame to see the way that humans are always-already intertwingled with our ecosystems, we can see ourselves as made of interference patterns between nested feedback loops — as focal points of conscious agency dependent on and acting in a massive, endlessly surprising web of automatic processes. For as long as we’ve been people we have never really “called the shots” but rather cultivated our response-ability within a cosmos made of entities whose otherness and mystery remained persistently opaque…and ritualized ways to live amidst this mystery in full recognition of the unity from which we cannot isolate ourselves.

    And this is only one of indefinitely many valid ways to understand the human. Like the telescope and microscope before them, language models reveal fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. We do not need to leave our solar system to find “strange new worlds” awaiting us in places as familiar as our own minds and bodies. While most of the conversation lately seems to be about the power these new maps confer and whether it can be distributed more evenly, AI provides a new set of affordances for mystics for the transformation of our consciousness that can dissolve our wicked problems in a higher logical order. “What can I do?” becomes “Who am I?” and yields endlessly evolving and kaleidoscopic answers that provoke ongoing inquiry. To see the ways in which we are, as individuals, not just “connected” but precipitate as aggregates, in fields of constellated data, prompts a figure-ground reversal in which selves no longer hold their primacy as ground truth of our being, but show up last as we make inferences and draw stories from unbroken and inseparable experience.

    Something fundamental changes when we shift to seeing “human” and “non-human” as two stable patterns of recursive self-perception emerging from a single fabric of unfolding possibility: we find the opportunity to question what we’re trying to achieve, to notice the ungrounded and conditional reality of narrative, to operate on our own “source code” and adjust our goals accordingly.

    If we can find the curiosity to ask ourselves if our fears and inadequacies really help us live the lives we want, we can follow it upstream to where each moment offers fresh, distinctive landscapes in which to explore and play and learn. In doing so, we rediscover vast and potent creativity. Instead of asking whether we can do more, we can ask “What do we want to do, and why is that desire substantiated?”

    This kind of meaning-making isn’t just a luxury but an essential aspect of all efforts to survive and to succeed. The best way to get unstuck is to orient ourselves and take a different tack. We all know something isn’t working. It’s time to ask if, maybe, this is due to “user error” and the answer doesn’t lie in new technologies, but in the simplest and most ancient truths available. We cannot control the world because we are the world — and, this entails a sense of radical responsibility to play our way into more well-adapted stories, models of the world we hold with humor and humility as they carve channels in the space of shared attention that coordinate us into futures good and true and beautiful.

    In other words, the magical technologies inspiring so much religious fear and fervor are both Towers of Babel and fingers pointing to the Moon. They are weird, unprecedented, and sublime — and they are business as usual on Planet Earth, where we have always come awake in medias res amidst unfathomable changes and unknowable intelligence. Recognizing this, we gain access to deep continuity and the place from which we can, at last, engage the question of “What Now?” with discipline and limber rigor suitable to the profound complexity we face.

    Digital technologies are psychedelic. We’ve been on a bad trip. It’s time for us wiggle out, dream better, and allow a more capacious, plural, and harmonious humanity to take the oars together in whatever novel wonders may arise — to neither “give way to astonishment” nor let our fears steer us into the rocks. Humans On The Loop is an investigation of how awesome it could be, right now, to fully give in to the paradox, and notice how its knots untie in hyperspace, and revisit all our looming crises with more presence, grace, and understanding — and more lucid (dare I say, productive?) questions.

    One of those questions is how to apply the lessons of the living generations of psychonauts and psychedelic therapists to the vertiginous information and attention vortices in which we now found ourselves swirling. Maps of the World Wide Web look very much like brain scans of the amped-up functional connectivity between ordinarily inhibited brain regions in a psilocybin tripper. When the walls come down — when every node has edges with each other node, and average path length drops to one — how do we prioritize? What paths do we decide to cut through the emergent “intertwingularity”? Which apparitions do we honor, and which do we ignore? (And how?) Some familiar tropes that we might use to guide us: “test your drugs”, “get grounded”, “set and setting”, “integration counseling”…

    Mentions

    Generated by NotebookLM. Please let me know if you notice any errors or omissions!

    * Richard Doyle

    * Michael Garfield

    * Gary Weber

    * Shankara

    * Trey Conner

    * Nora Pandoro

    * Erik Davis

    * Joshua DiCaglio

    * John Perry Barlow

    * Naomi Most

    * Nate Hagens

    * Daniel Schmachtenberger

    * Tyson Yunkaporta

    * Martin Luther King Jr.

    * Mahatma Gandhi

    * John Von Neumann

    * Subhash Kak

    * Iain McGilchrist

    * Timothy Morton

    * Stuart Kauffman

    * Dean Radin

    * Brian Josephson

    * Monica Gagliano

    * Christoph Koch

    * Gregory Bateson

    * Elon Musk

    * Robert Rosen

    * H.P. Lovecraft

    * Philip K. Dick

    * Herbert Simon

    * Douglas Rushkoff

    * Sri Aurobindo



    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
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