AI and Jobs Primer | Stay Human, Chapter 8 | The Irrational Decision by Benjamin Recht | Conversations on Software Brain and with Larry Irving
First, thank you to those who sent condolences this week after the death of Dave's dad at age
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
AI and Jobs—The Primer From Our Short Videos
If you've been watching the video series, here are five short pieces that lay out the economics. I should say clearly that I'm not an economist. I've spent a decade studying how people work with AI, and along the way I've had to teach myself the economics underneath it—the most helpful are here.
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.
How to Think About the AI Jobs Data Right Now
Studies on AI and jobs are confusing. Here's how we make sense of it
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.
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
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.