Jack Dorsey laid off 4,000 people and called it an AI strategy. But when AI creates time, the interesting question isn't whether to cut—it's what you choose to do with the time you've freed. Dorsey chose to give it away.
Dave: Helen's latest chapter introduces the three psychological shifts we have been tracking across thousands of people's experiences with AI: Blending (how AI mixes into your thinking), Bonding (how your identity gets tied to what AI lets you do), and Bending (how your frameworks for making sense of the world flex and change). This is an essential chapter to understand what we've discovered—and to be ready for the chapters to come.
We're thrilled to announce our first speakers for the Artificiality Summit 2026! We'll be announcing more each week for the next few weeks. Don't forget that Early pricing ends on March 31—jump in before the price goes up! More info & tickets here.
Caleb Scharf is an astrobiologist and writer of critically acclaimed popular science books and hundreds of articles. His research ranges from studies of the origins of life to the climate conditions of exoplanets and the quest to find evidence of other life in our solar system on worlds like Mars. In 2022 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal by the American Astronomical Society. (Read Helen's review of Caleb's his latest book below.)
David Wolpert is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, external professor at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, adjunct professor at ASU, and research associate at the ICTP in Trieste. He is the author of three books (and co-editor of several more), over 250 papers, has three patents, is an associate editor at over half a dozen journals, has received numerous awards, and is a fellow of the IEEE. He has 45,000 citations, with most of his papers in thermodynamics of computation, foundations of physics, dynamics of social organizations, machine learning, game theory, and distributed optimization / control. In particular his machine learning technique of stacking was instrumental in both winning entries for the Netflix competiton, and his papers on the no free lunch theorems have over 10,000 citations.
Kate Joyce is a photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of four books: Metamorphoses (2021) and Analogies (2023), published by the artist’s imprint Special Problems Press; and Metaphysics (2022) and Big Ears Knoxville (2019), published by Hat & Beard Press. Her work explores the ambiguities of things in the process of change. Indebted to the belief that constrained systems contain possibility, Joyce defamiliarizes everyday objects and experiences to reveal philosophical dimensions hidden within ordinary life. Joyce engages with language and images as interdependent tools for creating meaning and expanding the limits of what a photograph can do, whether collaborating on new translations of ancient texts, maintaining an image-based conversation exploring friendship and cognition, or using a modernist novel to see iconic architecture anew.
Taylor Black directs AI & Venture Ecosystems at Microsoft's Office of the CTO and serves as Inaugural Director of the Leonum Institute for AI & Emerging Technologies at the Catholic University of America. He teaches entrepreneurship both there and at UW's Foster School. His two decades of venture building—including corporate venture studios and deep tech incubation—inform his intellectual project: understanding how innovation actually happens and what AI means for human cognition and flourishing. A Byzantine Catholic in diaconal formation, he and his wife are foster and adoptive parents of a large Seattle family.
Dave: When AI leaders like Mustafa Suleyman and Dario Amodei promise that knowledge workers are about to be replaced, they're not just making a prediction—they're revealing how they see organizations: as collections of decomposable tasks performed by expensive humans. What they can't see from inside that frame is the complex human system that actually creates value. The trust, the judgment, the creative friction, the social fabric that holds everything together when the spreadsheet says it shouldn't. I argue that mass AI replacement isn't a competitive advantage—it's a confession that your business has no core. And I revisit the Dust Bowl metaphor: strip out the root system and you'll get a few good harvests. Then the drought comes.
Helen: I owe Caleb Scharf a debt. His earlier book, The Ascent of Information (2021), was a knowledge gate for me. I walked through it and never saw the world the same again. His argument—that the total body of human information is a living system, what he calls the "dataome," and that we may one day be mitochondria inside the data organism—sent me down the path of coevolution with AI.
So I follow Scharf wherever he goes next. This time he went to space. And you might wonder why I'd review that.
Right now the space exploration conversation is dominated by billionaires because there's nothing left to compete for that matters to them except a status race to Mars. Scharf pulls us completely away from that. He grounds the story in Darwin—and he had me at Darwin. I love anything about evolution. His argument is that space exploration is life's next great evolutionary transition, as fundamental as the move from sea to land. He calls this trajectory "Dispersal."
Rather than leading with big-rocket-energy and egos, Scharf writes about the sheer human achievement it has taken to reach the edge of the solar system. The planets, the moons, what we're searching for when we look for life. I've learned more about what we've achieved since my solar system science project at age seven than I ever expected from one book. You walk away thinking: humans are remarkable. We use these tools and we do extraordinary things. It's profoundly hopeful.
Does it connect to AI? Not much, and I don't care. Scharf uses machine learning in his own astrobiology work, and I think searching for life beyond our planet is one of the best use cases for AI there is—AI in service of the deepest human curiosities. But the real reason this book belongs in my stack is simpler. The instinct to explore and discover is what built AI in the first place. Sometimes the best way to understand what technology is for is to look at where humans have already taken it.
Don't miss the Artificiality Summit 2026!
October 22-24, 2026 in Bend, Oregon
Our theme will be Unknowing. Why? For centuries, humans believed we were the only species with reason, agency, self-improvement. Then came AI. We are no longer the only system that learns, adapts, or acts with agency. And when the boundary of intelligence moves, the boundary of humanity moves with it.
Something is happening to our thinking, our being, our becoming. If AI changes how we think, and how we think shapes who we become, then how might AI change what it means to be human?
Unknowing is how we stay conscious and make space for emergence.
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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.
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.
