What Can't We Know About AI? | Knowing the Mind You're Working With | The Infinity Machine | and more...
Artificiality Summit 2026: What Can't We Know About AI? In the first of a series about our speakers
Stay Human: Authoring Your Mind in the AI Age
A practical guide to remaining the author of your own mind. How to use AI without losing the capacities that make you human — your judgment, your creativity, your sense of self.
Read the Book Here
Stay in the Loop on Staying Human
AI is changing how you think. Get the ideas and research to keep you the author of your own mind.
Ideas
Artificiality Summit 2026: What Can't We Know About AI?
The theme of the Artificiality Summit 2026 is Unknowing. We start with five speakers—David Wolpert, Caleb Scharf, Wakanyi Macharia-Hoffman, Gašper Beguš, and Nina Beguš—whose work converges on a single finding: the uncertainty surrounding AI is permanent, not a phase.
The Coming Jackpocalypse?
Jack Dorsey laid off 4,000 people and called it an AI strategy. But when AI creates time, the interesting question isn't whether to cut—it's what you choose to do with the time you've freed. Dorsey chose to give it away.
If Your People Are Replaceable, Your Business Might Be Too
When a CEO announces that AI can replace their workforce, they're not making a bold bet on the future. They're telling you their business has no core.
The SaaS Apocalypse Is a Category Error
Why Wall Street's panic over AI agents misunderstands what makes enterprise software valuable—and what makes AI useful
Research
Cognitive Sovereignty: Authoring Your Mind in the AI Age
How professionals are integrating AI into their thinking— and what it means for the future of human cognition
Why AI Requires Universities to Do What They Were Built For
The skills that can be taught quickly can be automated quickly. What's left is the slow work universities were built for: helping people become who they are.
The Roles We Give AI: Trust, Presence, and Culture in a Symbiotic Age
The AI Adaptation Cube maps, in three dimensions, the roles we put AI in based on the three traits: Cognitive Permeability, Symbolic Plasticity, and Identity Coupling.
How to Read AI Usage Studies: A Guide to Three Different Lenses
AI usage is too complex for any single research approach to capture completely. We summarize and compare three recent studies: Anthropic's Economic Index Report, OpenAI's How People Use ChatGPT, and the Artificiality Institute's Chronicle project.
Foundations
Neosemantic Design: Beyond Metaphor in Human-Machine Communication
The medium isn’t just the message anymore. The medium is now the meaning.
How We Think and Live With AI: Early Patterns of Human Adaptation
People are forming psychological relationships with AI systems that feel unprecedented to them. The Chronicle maps the psychological changes happening as people incorporate AI into their thinking, creativity, and daily relationships.
Consciousness in a Synthetic World
We are not just spectators of the world. We are participants in its unfolding. Consciousness matters because it changes how possibility becomes reality, even if we don’t fully understand how.
The Artificiality: How Life and Intelligence Emerge from Information and Shape the Human Experience
Explore how synthetic systems merge with organic experience in The Artificiality. Follow the journey from information to consciousness, where AI evolves from passive tools to active participants, reshaping reality, redefining intelligence, and challenging the boundaries of human experience.
Lectures
Helen & Dave Edwards: Becoming Synthetic
A lecture on Becoming Synthetic: What AI Is Doing To Us, Not Just For Us.
Steve Sloman: Information to Bits at the Artificiality Summit 2024
A lecture by Steve Sloman, professor at Brown University on Information to Bits at the Artificiality Summit 2024 in Bend, Oregon
Jamer Hunt on the Power of Scale
A lecture by Jamer Hunt, professor at the Parsons School of Design and author of Not to Scale, at the Artificiality Summit 2024.
Michael Levin on Diverse Intelligence & Synthbiosis
A lecture by Michael Levin, distinguished professor of biology at Tufts University and associate at Harvard's Wyss Institute
Conversations
Steven Sloman: The Cost of Conviction
A conversation with Steven Sloman about his new book, The Cost of Conviction
Ellie Pavlick: The AI Paradigm Shift
A conversation with Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University
Tess Posner: AI, Creativity, and Education
A conversation with musician and AI4ALL board member, Tess Posner.
The Artificiality: AI, Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution
Prologue: A Strange Mix of Cells and Computers
A visit to a lab where biology and computation dissolve into each other. The paradigm is shifting—not toward silicon rapture, but toward understanding what life actually does.
1. The Clean Categories
Intelligence keeps appearing where the old categories say it can't. Cells that solve problems. Systems that learn without brains. The neat divisions between biological and computational are coming apart.
2. What Computation Promised
Life is computational. But biological computation has properties that Turing's model doesn't capture and that current AI systems don't share.
3. Minds Without Brains
Intelligence shows up in places we weren't supposed to find it. Algae prefer predictable light patterns. Flatworms retain memories after decapitation. These aren't metaphors for human cognition—they're systems that already learn, remember, and pursue goals.