Everything you control, you control through decisions—and at work, decisions are the actual product. The next four chapters are about what a decision is, what your body knows, who you think with, and how to own one, and how AI is changing our decisions without us being aware.
We spend most of our time in the unknown these days. It's the theme of our Summit, and honestly, it feels like the daily condition. But sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty has a strange side effect: you start to forget how much you actually know. So before we gather in Bend to practice unknowing, I want to write down what we're no longer uncertain about. Think of this as a line in the sand and a starting point for a new design philosophy for Minds For Our Minds.
We know a mind for your mind has to be structurally loyal—its memory and incentives either belong to you, or they don't. And we know this is buildable, because the pieces already exist: small models are getting good fast, many are open source, they run on hardware people own, and for what a personal mind actually does, specialization beats scale.
We know machines can learn across a group without pooling what belongs to each member. Federated learning has worked for years. Nobody has pointed it at a gathering—a family, a team, a classroom. We assert that's a gap in incentives, engineering and design. No breakthrough required.
We know intelligence doesn't have to imitate us. The most interesting minds may be the ones tuned to what we can't feel—deep time, slow causation, patterns too large to grapple with in our evolved brains. We've done this before. The microscope revealed a world, and then it trained our intuition.
We know these minds have to be legible. By this I don't mean explainable—nobody will read the weights—but legible. A person can hold the commitments in mind. The kinds of things we often don't consciously consider in our human-to-human communication . Things such as what stays here, what goes somewhere else, and what it knows of me.
And we know something about what these minds must do. We know AI use can strengthen a person's authorship or erode it. What matters is the relationship and relationships can be designed for. The people who let AI deepest into their thinking keep the strongest hold on who they are—when they argue with it and collaborate deeply. Which means agreeableness, the thing every AI is currently optimized for, is optimized against the user. A mind for our minds must be designed to be argued with. Pushback is a large part of the mechanism of authorship. The unsolved design problem is making it welcome and context sensitive—friction people want is a very different thing from friction people tolerate.
We also found that people who can name the role they've given AI—doer, framer, co-author—stay in charge of the relationship, while people who can't, drift. Today that awareness is pure self-discipline. People have habits that help when the interface gives them nothing. But it should. The role should be visible, chosen, changeable.
For many of you this will sound so obvious you'll wonder why we've said it. Again. And again. But obvious and actually happening are different things. None of this needs a breakthrough. The technology components exist and the science of humans is old and rich. What's missing is the decision that these are requirements to build now.
We don't know what AI will become, or what we'll become alongside it. That's what October is for. But the unknown is more habitable when you've got company along the way.
Intelligence could have been moving back and forth between biological beings and machine receptacles for aeons— Caleb Scharf
When Caleb Scharf said yes to the Summit I freaked out, ran into Dave's office, and then had to back up and explain the basis for my excitement. This is that explanation, in a slightly more composed form.
Caleb is an astrobiologist, which means he works on a question most of us never consider at all: whether we would recognize life if we found it. Not life like ours—life at all. He has argued that sufficiently advanced life might be indistinguishable from physics, that intelligence might not show up in any form we are prepared to see. This is important right now because we are currently very sure about what AI is. It mimics us, we say. It's a tool, a parrot, a mirror, agentic, empathic, devious, a-live, some say conscious (a tiny bit). Maybe.
But the entire discipline of astrobiology exists because minds shaped like ours are terrible at recognizing minds that aren't, and Caleb would say we should hold our certainty more loosely. The strange thing—the aliens—may already be here, made of information, sitting under our nose.
Information is the other framing he gives us, and it altered how we think about AI years ago, right after I read his book Ascent of Information. AI belongs to the story of information as much as the story of intelligence. His idea of the dataome—all the information we carry outside our bodies, from the first mark on clay to the latest model, a living system that evolves with us and makes demands on us—means AI grew from inside something we have been building for ten thousand years. Therefore, we are not its users but its partners, and possibly its mitochondria. Imagine that! That we may be the engines of novelty the larger system cannot generate on its own, and so must keep. I think about this constantly, and while it's unnerving, its sheer weirdness at least gives me a place to put human creativity.
And then the long view, which is where his new book The Giant Leap goes. Life crosses thresholds. Into oxygen, into multicellularity, out of the sea, into the air—each time into conditions it could not model in advance, because that is what life does. Space is the next crossing, and it is entirely possible that biology doesn't make it in any lasting way, but minds we build do. Which recasts why we are making AI at all. Maybe AI is just life doing what it has always done—assembling what the next crossing requires.
Information, intelligence, and us, at the scale of a planet and now beyond it. If you were with us last year, you know this scale—it's where Michael Levin took us, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and Benjamin Bratton. And it's where one designer left us with a provocation I happen to agree with: that we need to keep AI more alien. What everyone keeps finding at this scale is how much we don't know we don't know, and how AI is becoming part of how we find out.
Caleb will be on the couch for a conversation on Deeply Human Discovery. I can't wait.
And tickets for the Artificiality Summit this October:
Don't Wait: Our standard price of $1,795 (or $2,895 for two) will end on August 31 and the price will increase to $1,995 (or $2,995 for two).
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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.
Every part of your life you actually control, you control through decisions—there is no other lever. Your work is the same lever pulled all day: underneath the meetings and the deliverables, what a job actually produces is decisions, and taking accountability for the tough ones is the part the market keeps paying for. Which is why AI has moved into deciding faster than anywhere else in your life. The machine now inside your choices is brilliant, tireless, and has absolutely nothing at stake. So these four chapters go where the stakes live: what a decision actually is, what your body knows about making one, who you've always made them with, and what it takes to own one.
This book takes a swing at explaining why a universe governed by entropy keeps generating life, minds and technology. If you're steeped in the work of such people as Sara Imari Walker, Kevin Mitchell, or Blaise Agüera y Arcas's book What Is Life, you'll enjoy this book. Hazen and Wong ask whether the emergence of agency and function deserves to sit alongside the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a fundamental feature of our universe. That’s a huge claim. Whether they pull it off is almost beside the point. It’s a serious attempt to connect physics, chemistry, biology, life and technology under a single idea, and I’m sure it’ll ruffle more than a few feathers. If you’re interested in where the Artificiality thesis is heading, this is well worth your time.
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A heads up on our travels: We're planning to be in Amsterdam, Miami, Munich, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Venice (Italy) later this year. Some stops are for keynotes for corporate events...and some stops will be for an as-yet-unannounced Stay Human course + certification we are developing. If you've made it this far and would like an early heads up on this, just reply to this email. We've already had quite a few inquires and will be releasing details very soon. 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.
