Protecting Collective Intelligence | Stay Human Chapter 14 | Four New Summit Speakers | Artificial Intimacy
Protecting Collective Intelligence A couple of weeks ago Dave and I were giving a keynote in Venice and someone in
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
The intimacy economy is here, and Meta's Muse shows why agent design matters
In 2024, we said people would trade intimate knowledge of themselves for AI that makes life easier. Meta's Muse proves it. What matters now is design: whether an agent borrows your intimacy to help you, or keeps it.
The self in recursive self-improvement has to be human
Engineers say test it and ship it, or shut the lab down. Others imply everything will emerge from a society of agents. Both are partly right, but I think both make a deep error, and it's one that matters for designing Minds for Our Minds.
Hallucination was never the problem
Your brain hallucinates constantly—and that's the job. The real question about AI was never whether it guesses wrong. It's who's the executive, and who's the sensor.
Research
IRX: Irreducible complexity index as the work of humans
Rethinking what AI does to human work—and the index behind it
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.
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
Creativity, AI, and Why Creatives Lead What Comes Next
Creativity is our lifeblood. AI can recombine the past at speed. It cannot generate the new. From slop and squeeze to sovereignty—how we see it.
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.
Conversations
Chris Summerfield: These Strange New Minds
A conversation with Chris Summerfield about his new book, These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
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
Stay Human: Authoring Your Mind in the AI Age
1. Our Story
This is the story of how I kept the AI and dropped the humans, what it taught me, and how you can stay the author of your own mind with AI.
2. The Right to a Future Tense
AI fills the gap when you don't know what you want. Most of us are still working that out — and that's okay.
4. The Journey People Take
We move through five different places with AI: The Wake Up, The Groove, The Merge, The Breaking, The Rebuild.
The Artificiality: AI, Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution
Bibliography
Agüera y Arcas, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Blaise. What Is Life? Evolution as Computation. MIT Press, 2025. Ball, Philip Ball,
11. From Here
Staying author of your own mind turns out to be a practice, not a position. It requires noticing when you've stopped thinking and started accepting.
10. The Last Human Boundary
We've always lived inside larger cognitive systems. We've always been, in some sense, their components. What differs now is speed—and that the coupling is cognitive in a way corporations and cities never were.
9. The Intimacy Surface
The intimacy surface is where human cognition and machine capability meet. What crosses that boundary—information, intention, trust, meaning—shapes what both sides become.
Newsletter
The intimacy economy and Muse | What conversation changes | Summit speaker: Taylor Black | The Artificial State
The intimacy economy is here, and Meta's Muse shows why agent design matters The intimacy economy is here.
The Self in Recursive Self-Improvement Has To Be Human | Stay Human 12, 13 | Artificiality Summit Speaker profile: Ricky Bloomfield
The Self in Recursive Self-Improvement Has To Be Human It's been a week. On Tuesday the Australian
The Pause | ARIA Fellows | The Briefing | Chapter 11: Feelings | How We Use AI | Summit: Chris Messina
The Pause on Frontier AI By now you’ve likely caught up on the call for slowing AI development. ICYMI,
The instability is a choice | Summit speaker profile: Josh Lovejoy | What the safety folks really think | The laws of thought
The Instability Is a Choice By Dave We've all become accustomed to variability in AI responses. Sometimes it