In 2024, we said people would trade intimate knowledge of themselves for AI that makes life easier. Meta's Muse proves it. What matters now is design: whether an agent borrows your intimacy to help you, or keeps it.
The intimacy economy is here. In 2024, we argued that people would trade an intimate understanding of themselves for AI that makes their lives easier. Meta's Muse shows that trade happening at scale. Millions of people have connected it to their messages, finances, and health records, and it keeps an hourly file on the people in their lives, who never agreed to any of it.
The trade itself is rational. The question is which designs we accept. Dave compares Muse with Apple's Siri: one keeps your intimacy in its cloud, and the other takes a better approach.
Josh Lovejoy is an advisor to the Artificiality Institute and a speaker at our Summit, and his latest piece will change how you think about your conversations with AI. He gets into something I find particularly interesting: what changes in a conversation when the participants have a history together—and what happens when one of those participants is an AI. His ideas about memory, context, and the way our own understanding of the system changes how we talk to it made me look differently at my own conversations with AI.
Microsoft, Office of the CTO; founding director, AI institute at The Catholic University of America
Taylor directs AI and Venture Ecosystems in Microsoft's Office of the CTO, where his job is to bet money and people on breakthroughs with no way to know which will pay. Incubation is professionalized unknowing. He trained in philosophy and cognitional theory, and now also leads a new AI institute at Catholic University.
He joins Ricky Bloomfield on stage for Designing for the Human We're Becoming and leads a salon where you bring your hard problem.
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Artificiality Summit 2026
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.
I've followed Jill Lepore's work for years, so a lot of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial Statewas familiar—that strange American marriage of technology, utopianism, libertarianism, and computation. What I hadn't seen before was how far back she takes it. Some of it is old politics. She traces Silicon Valley's techno-libertarianism to the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, which held that democracy had failed—and Elon Musk's grandfather was one of its leaders.
The part I found best is older still. Lepore reads our fear that robots will wipe us out, or reduce us to the status of animals, as grief over what we've done to the natural world, and especially to animals. She calls the Artificial State the factory farming of humans. This makes the AI moment just the latest turn in a very old project of setting ourselves apart from nature. Silicon Valley didn't invent the artificial. We've been at it for a long time. And maybe that's the hopeful part of Lepore's book. She argues the Artificial State will fall, the way states like it always have. Nothing about it was inevitable, and all that power piling up doesn't make it permanent.
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A heads up on our travels: We're planning to be in Miami, Munich, New York, and Providence later this year. Some stops are for keynotes for corporate events...and some stops will be for the Thinking With AI course + certification. If you want to talk about this for your whole team, get in touch!
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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. Contact at helen@artificialityinstitute.org.
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. Contact at dave@artificialityinstitute.org.
