Protecting Collective Intelligence | Stay Human Chapter 14 | Four New Summit Speakers | Artificial Intimacy
Protecting Collective Intelligence A couple of weeks ago Dave and I were giving a keynote in Venice and someone in
Recent Publications (Page 5)
Steven Sloman: The Cost of Conviction
A conversation with Steven Sloman about his new book, The Cost of Conviction
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.
Another Book: Stay Human | Ellie Pavlick | Saaspocalypse
Stay Human: Chapter 1 Last week, Helen published The Artificiality: AI, Culture, and Why the Future Will Be Co-Evolution.
The SaaS Apocalypse Is a Category Error
Why Wall Street's panic over AI agents misunderstands what makes enterprise software valuable—and what makes AI useful
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
Two maps of the mind are coming apart. One says minds are only biological and machines are tools. The other says minds are only software and biology is an implementation. Cells solve problems, machines learn without brains, and the word both maps depend on is starting to give way.
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.