This past week we gave a talk and led a discussion at Caldera, a nonprofit in Oregon that provides free arts programs for underserved youth. If you don't know Caldera, go look them up.
I've published an expanded version of that evening. Dave's introduction is included as he delivered it. The discussion also included Heather Crank, an award-winning motion designer and visual artist based in Bend whose work has been shown at the Guggenheim and Meow Wolf—she brought the perspective of a working creative navigating AI in her practice every day.
Creativity is the lifeblood. We are creative because we are alive. Every living system is a sensemaking system—building models of the world, updating them, seeking novelty, making meaning from mess. This is deep. This is wired in. This is what we are.
I think about creativity very broadly. Scientists, engineers, strategists, mathematicians—creativity runs through all of it. But here I've wanted to focus on the creative arts, because something is happening to creative professionals right now that matters to all of us.
We study how people work with AI and the most creative people in our data—even the ones using AI the heaviest—are the most emphatic that creativity belongs to them. They love the tools. They use them constantly. And they will fight you if you suggest the tools are doing the creative work.
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.
C. Thi Nguyen boulders, fly fishes, plays Tetris, and is attempting to become a master of the yo-yo. We had him on our podcast years ago (when the academic work behind this book was published) and I've been using his ideas ever since.
His new book is The Score. The argument is simple but it gets me every time. Scoring systems in games liberate you. The same systems imposed by institutions destroy you. Same structure, opposite effect. The difference is who chose the score. In a game, you did. In your job, your school, your platform—you didn't. And over time you stop noticing and just start chasing.
He calls it value capture. The metric replaces the thing you actually cared about. Metrics are forced top down and designed to centralize, to make us easier to swap out. It's inescapable in some ways because metrics work so well and they provide authority and the promise of objectivity. Someone who points to a metric will always displace someone who waves at a value.
I've been writing about this for three years in the context of AI because AI is the most powerful value capture machine ever built. Everything becomes optimized for good enough and eventually we are subsumed by metrics. He writes about the assymtery of all this and how powerful the metrification of our world. He doesn't mention AI once because he doesn't need to. Any codified system of human culture is implicitly included.
He ends the book with two futures—a "choose your own adventure" which I guess is fitting for a book about games. He calls one the Cynical Sad One. The other: The One with a Little Measure of Hope. It's a playful rebellion, individual by individual, that might change something collective. He's an upbeat guy. You get to choose.
In this conversation, we explore machine intelligence and human understanding with Christopher Summerfield, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford and author of "These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means." Chris offers a "third way" of thinking about AI—neither irrational exuberance nor dismissive skepticism, but a view grounded in cognitive science that takes both capabilities and limitations seriously.
Chris wrote the book because AI discourse had become polarized like Marmite—love it or hate it (Helen hates Marmite but loves Vegemite, Dave hates both!). His goal: provide a centrist perspective informed by how brains actually work, examining what these systems genuinely are beyond partisan positions.
Chris's gift for reframing shines throughout. Universities as "repositories of human ideas with dissemination systems" makes academic anxiety less about status, more about institutional purpose. The distinction between interests (what we want, motivation-driven) and outputs (what LLMs generate without purpose) clarifies why these systems merit cognitive terms yet remain fundamentally different from people.
Our second Instagram live. Helen talks with Sir Geoff Mulgan about our upcoming AI and Democracy Marathon at the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, May 7-10, 2026, in partnership with the House of Beautiful Business.
They discuss why democracy is better than autocracy or technocracy, why it's going backwards right now, what AI can do to help us recover the promise of democracy. They also touch on Palantir and its role in shaping perceptions of conflict and war. Geoff's work gives us hope for recovering what we've lost by rebuilding new, agile, 21st century-ready institutions that deliver to people.
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.
Dave Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality. He previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Atlantic Media) and worked at Apple, CRV, Macromedia, Morgan Stanley, Quartz, and ThinkEquity.
