A lot was published in March on AI and the labor market. If you read it all, you probably came away more confused than when you started. It's because the thing being measured is likely changing faster than the traditional instruments can track.
We've been picking apart these studies for years. Every time a new wave of exposure charts and risk scores circulates, we see the same pattern: real data, useful in parts, but organized around a question that doesn't quite match what people actually need to know. The charts measure whether AI can do pieces of your job. They don't measure whether that changes your employment, your income, your leverage, or your trajectory. Those are different questions with different answers.
There is a reason this feels confusing. Everything is changing at the task level — inside roles, inside teams — and the standard economic data wasn't built to see that. We explain why, and where the measurement breaks down.
Then we offer something more useful than a risk score: six questions you can ask about your own work that will tell you more about your actual position than an aggregate study.
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.
There are two books about mattering out right now. One is self-help. If that one is chewing gum, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's book is slow-cooked meat — rich, umami, with bite and chew. You pull it off the bone and keep gnawing. I loved this book.
Goldstein is a philosopher with a PhD from Princeton, a MacArthur "Genius" grant, and a National Humanities Medal from President Obama. She has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. And her central claim is grounded in physics: that we matter because of the second law of thermodynamics. To be alive is to resist entropy. In creatures without self-reflection, that resistance is just biology. In us, it became something conscious — an instinct to prove we deserve all the attention we must give ourselves to stay alive. The mattering instinct evolved as life's local resistance to entropy. I find this a fascinating way to anchor something so deeply felt in something so fundamentally physical.
She traces this instinct through extraordinary lives: Scott Joplin, William James, a Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns, a neo-Nazi skinhead who renounced violence after realising mattering isn't zero-sum. Same instinct, radically different outcomes. The complexity is the point.
Goldstein maps several mattering strategies — transcendence, sociality, pursuit of excellence, competitiveness — and I tried applying them to people I know deeply. I looked at my husband Dave, someone I know as well as anyone, and I still had to scratch my head about where he'd sit on this map. That difficulty isn't a failure of the framework. It's a reflection of how internal and layered these drives are. The fact that I can't easily categorize someone I love tells me this is doing something real. I had to do just as work on myself and, as a result, gained far more insight than any self-help version of the same ideas.
It's an important message now because AI disruption threatens to destabilise people's mattering projects, and different people feel they matter in fundamentally different ways. We're not all competing for the same kind of significance. Any conversation about AI and jobs that treats humans as interchangeable is going to miss what's actually at stake.
Recent Videos
Our first Instagram live! Not with perfect polish but we'll get there. Watch if you want to know how we got into this in the first place and what's next.
Helen & Dave: Instagram Live
Julian Yocum: Is Optimization Enough?
Alan Eyzaguirre: What Language Should Humans and AI Share?
Aekta Shah: Will AI Build or Break Our Communities?
Nina Beguš: Artificial Humanities
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.
