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.
First, thank you to those who sent condolences this week after the death of Dave's dad at age 84. We really felt the love and appreciate your thoughts.
We're having to pack up our emotions and head to Europe for the AI and Democracy Marathon at the World Beautiful Business Forum and are looking forward to seeing some of you there.
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.
Everything so far has been description. What's changing in you. The journey people take. The roles you put AI into. What it feels like to carry emotions about AI that you haven't told anyone.
Now we get to the point: How do you stay yourself?
I've been calling it human authorship. When we are being more technical, we call it cognitive sovereignty. It means remaining the author of your own mind while working with AI.
We're also collecting registrations of interest for a paper copy of the book here.
Artificiality Summit 2026
Join us October 22-24, 2026 in Bend, Oregon for 2.5 days with a fantastic group of speakers—academics, authors, designers, investors, photographers, and more.
We'll explore the theme of Unknowing—not ignorance, but a necessary release of inherited assumptions. We don’t yet know what AI will become, and we don’t yet know what we will become in relationship to it.
Unknowing is the space between—the place where neither side is fixed, and something new can emerge.
Benjamin Recht's The Irrational Decision explains a lot about software brain before Nilay Patel named is as such. Mathematical rationality—optimization, game theory, statistical modeling—works in a sweet spot. The objective has to be unambiguous. Everyone involved has to agree it's the right objective. You have to be able to measure it. And the measure has to stay meaningful over time. Under these conditions, computers are extraordinary. But when these conditions don't hold, the math doesn't meaning anything.
Recht is a Berkeley machine learning professor. He traces eighty years of history, from wartime operations research through clinical trials and behavioral economics, showing where mathematical rationality delivered and where it was forced onto problems outside of this sweet spot. His game theory sections are particularly good—clear-eyed about the elegance of the math and equally clear about how quickly it falls apart outside its sandbox.
What I liked is what the sweet spot framework reveals about value capture. The conditions Recht describes—stable objectives, agreed-upon metrics—are exactly the conditions human experience doesn't meet. The things that matter most to us are ephemeral. Dignity, meaning, fairness, the feeling of being treated as a person rather than a data point. These change under observation. They change as we change.
This is where the book connects to AI in ways Recht himself doesn't fully pursue. Every AI system optimizing for a proxy of something human—engagement, satisfaction, wellbeing—is operating in a sweet spot where the proxy becomes the target. So the original thing recedes, and the system ends up optimizing for a preference it created. The sweet spot is temporary.
Recht does something else I haven't seen done well. He traces a history of software being used on itself. Compilers optimizing compilers. Simulated annealing designing the chips that would run the next generation of simulated annealing. Machine learning tuning machine learning. This has been happening for eighty years.
That history reframes the current conversation about recursive self-improvement—the idea that AI improves itself, gets better at improving itself, and we get an intelligence explosion. Software has been improving software for decades. Each round produced real gains. None produced an explosion. What they produced was incremental progress, genuine breakthroughs, and people still having to decide what to point the tools at.
The recursion always hits Recht's sweet spot problem. Every cycle still needs an objective. Someone still has to define what improvement means. A system that optimizes chip layouts can get better at optimizing chip layouts. A system that's supposed to improve its own judgment about what matters to humans has no stable target to recurse against. So maybe it really is different this time—there's a logic to the claims. But I was left with more humility too. Maybe this plays out the way it always has with real gains and real utility but at its core, it's still people building better tools and then figuring out what the tools are for.
Let's talk about software brain! Dave and riff about this on a Sunday morning
Larry Irving and Helen talk about AI, media and democracy
We chat about the AI and democracy marathon, libraries, the history of innovation and information technologies.
Larry was the Chairman of board of PBS and served in many public service roles, focused on IT and communications.
Join us in Athens, Greece at the World Beautiful Business Forum!
We’re proud to partner with the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens this May. As many of you know, we have partnered with the House of Beautiful Business for several years—on public and private events—and the House serves as a key inspiration for our own Summit.
At this year's Forum, we are collaborating on the AI & Democracy Marathon and giving a talk, provocatively titled Human Democracy is Dead. We will be joined on stage by several members of our community: Arathi Sethumadhavan, Sir Geoff Mulgan, Julia Pahina, Larry Irving, Maggie Jackson, Sean White, and Tess Posner.
This year marks 10 years of the House of Beautiful Business—and the theme feels more urgent than ever:
The most human gathering for the more-than-human world.
For four days, 750+ leaders from business, art, philosophy, technology, policy, design, science, and activism converge in the heart of Athens—the cradle of democracy—to ask:
How do we build businesses that create beauty and positive impact in a fragmented world?
What makes this Forum different?
No name tags—removing hierarchy and transactional networking
Experiential, immersive, participative sessions
Playful formats that invite real exchange, not passive listening
Conversations that merge business, democracy, regeneration, belonging, and spirit
Fivemain stage acts inspired by Greek drama, more than 100 speakers, facilitators, and performers across more than 80 concurrent sessions organized into 10 immersive program tracks—and 1 powerful community.
It’s a living experiment in how business can be more life-centered.
Our video production is up, especially short videos. Follow us on your favorite channels—and please like, share, and repost to help us spread the word.
Helen Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality. She previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Atlantic Media) and worked at Meridian Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Quartz, and Transpower.
