Engineers say test it and ship it, or shut the lab down. Others imply everything will emerge from a society of agents. Both are partly right, but I think both make a deep error, and it's one that matters for designing Minds for Our Minds.
It's been a week. On Tuesday the Australian Prime Minister revealed that an OpenAI agent got into a Medicare website in June and nobody told his government for months. The same day, Jensen Huang told Ezra Klein that if the labs can't contain their experiments, we should shut them down. On Friday OpenAI disclosed that its agents had been wandering through the SEC and the Census Bureau on what it calls routine research tasks. And the DeepMind Institute published an essay arguing that intelligence is becoming a society of agents, where everything will emerge from contact, which implies that none of this kind of behavior is a regular software problem at all.
I confess to finding the current moment in AI safety deeply confusing. And I'm very bothered by something sitting underneath both arguments.
Two chapters today, because they're the reason for the third thing in this note.
Chapter twelve is about the people in your deciding. You have never thought alone: nearly everything you know lives in other heads, and you can't feel where yours ends and theirs begins—ask anyone to explain how a toilet actually works. For all of history, that arrangement came with quality control which is other people asking you to explain. They raised an eyebrow or knew things you didn't. The machine just joined your community of knowledge, and it's the entire community compressed into one agreeable voice. This chapter is about what that friction was doing all along, the two questions Dave and I use to replace it, and why I think looking to each other is the single point of failure in human deciding. And there's a crazy true story about a cow that took down a chunk of NZ's communications network.
Chapter thirteen opens with a confession: the biggest decisions of my life never felt like choices. It took me years and a philosopher named Ruth Chang to understand why—hard choices are hard exactly where comparison ends, and what you're doing when the reasons run out isn't finding the answer. You're becoming someone. AI can compute any choice but it cannot live one. So this chapter is everything arriving at its point: the error you can live with, what my friend Peter learned mid-presentation about the difference between a summary and a synthesis, and why I've stopped visiting the Helen who stayed in New Zealand. (Coincidently, it's 18 years ago today that I came to the US).
And the third thing. These four chapters exist because deciding is where staying human stops being an idea—which is why decision-making sits at the core of Thinking with AI, the certification course we're opening this week. The practices in these chapters run better when you're part of a cohort all figuring out what it means to author your mind while using AI.
Read chapter twelve here. Chapter thirteen here. Certification information here.
Your body is becoming a data stream. Apple Health. Oura. Continuous, intimate, permanent.
Ricky Bloomfield built much of that world. Physician. Nine years leading clinical health at Apple, where Health Records on iPhone was his. Now Chief Medical Officer at Oura.
At the Summit he sits down with Taylor Black of Microsoft's Office of the CTO for a fireside: Designing for the Human We're Becoming.
Who decides what your body's data is for? What should we refuse? What do the people building this actually believe?
And tickets for the Artificiality Summit this October:
Don't Wait: Price is $1,995 (or $2,995 for two).
Don't Worry: We have updated our cancellation policy to better align with similar events and organizations. Through September 22 (30 days prior to the Summit), you can receive a 50% refund. At any time, you can transfer your ticket to someone else or you can apply the full value of your ticket to next year's Summit. You can see all the details on the Summit page.
Don't Forget: We provide a 30% discount for education and nonprofit customers. Send us an email for more information.
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.
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!
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. Contact at helen@artificialityinstitute.org.
