Stay Human Chapter 4 | Summit Speakers, Part 2 | The Coming Jackpocalypse? | Blaise Week | The Infinity Machine
Chapter 4 of Stay Human: The Journey People Take Helen's new chapter maps the territory that isn'
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Ellie Pavlick: The AI Paradigm Shift
A conversation with Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University
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.
Book Release: The Artificiality | We're a 501(c)(3)
Happy February! From our home to the broader world, January 2026 is a month we'd rather not repeat.
Prologue: A Strange Mix of Cells and Computers
A visit to a lab where biology and computation dissolve into each other. The paradigm is shifting—not toward silicon rapture, but toward understanding what life actually does.
1. The Clean Categories
Intelligence keeps appearing where the old categories say it can't. Cells that solve problems. Systems that learn without brains. The neat divisions between biological and computational are coming apart.
2. What Computation Promised
Life is computational. But biological computation has properties that Turing's model doesn't capture and that current AI systems don't share.
3. Minds Without Brains
Intelligence shows up in places we weren't supposed to find it. Algae prefer predictable light patterns. Flatworms retain memories after decapitation. These aren't metaphors for human cognition—they're systems that already learn, remember, and pursue goals.
4. What the Machines Learned
AI systems learned something real from biological data. They internalized patterns that life developed over billions of years. But they learned by observation, not participation—absorbing the shape of biological intelligence without inhabiting the conditions that made the shape necessary.
5. What Makes Life Distinctive
Life does not merely respond to the world. It works, continuously, to keep itself going—maintaining form against disturbance, repairing damage, resisting the pull toward equilibrium that governs nonliving systems.
6. Coevolution Is Already Happening
If culture now drives human adaptation faster than genes, then cultural technologies are part of the evolutionary process. And AI may be the most powerful cultural technology we've ever built.
7. What We Want to Preserve
These capacities matter more, not less, as other forms of cognitive labor get automated. Staying human doesn't mean doing everything ourselves. It means becoming deliberate about what we off-load, what we retain, and how we remain accountable for the whole.
8. Finitude and the Shape of a Human Life
The finite nature of life isn't a limitation to be overcome. It's the condition that makes a life into a life rather than an endless accumulation of experiences.