Humans On The Loop

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis week I speak with Rufus Pollock (Website | Twitter | Wikipedia), former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies, RSA Fellow, and co-founder of Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, Datopian, and Second Renaissance. Rufus is a key player in the so-called “Liminal Web” and active mapper of the ecosystem of emerging changemaking organizations who, along with his wife Sylvie Barbier and an extensive network of brilliant allies, strives to promote the shifts in consciousness and culture that we need to safely navigate our age of accelerating technology with wiser, weller ways of living together.Together we get into the good, bad, and ugly of our nascent planetary culture — the tension between ecological consciousness and economic force, the demands placed on us to reclaim time-tested strategies for community and meaning in a brave new world, the intertwingling of religion and science, and why technological solutions alone are woefully inadequate (however necessary) as we face our crises of collective action. It’s an earnest, soul-searching, thoughtful, and far-reaching extra-long conversation and I hope that you find as much value in it as we did.If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives.Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future at Weirdosphere.Show Links• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodes• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Hire me for speaking or consultingDiscussedFour Types of ProblemSecond Renaissance Whitepaper & Theory of ChangeTechnology as GodGetting over our Allergy to ReligionThe Primacy of BeingDavid Sloan Wilson - Darwin’s CathedralWilliam Irwin Thompson - Imaginary Landscape, The Digital Economy of W. Brian ArthurFederico Campagna - Prophetic CultureAlex Shakar - LuminariumArthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other DaysJoe Henrich - The WEIRDest People in the WorldJessica Flack - Coarse-Graining as a Downward Causation MechanismMentionedBayo AkomolafeSylvie BarbierLiam KavanaughBret Easton EllisJohn StewartCarl JungDoug RushloffKarl MarxGoetheJamie WhealSteven KotlerKen WilberRobert KeganSuzanne Cook-GreuterPaul LevyGeorge W. BushUrsula K. LeGuinIain McGilchristJim O’ShaughnessyNaval RavikantThich Nhat HanhW. Brian ArthurHazel HendersonJim RuttChristopher AlexanderJamie CurcioJordan PetersonW. B. Yeats This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple PodcastsThis week’s guest is my friend Evan Miyazono, CEO and Director of Atlas Computing — a tech non-profit committed not to the false god of perfect alignment but to plausible strategy of provable safety. Focusing on community building, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, Evan and his colleagues are working to advance a new AI architecture that constrains and formally specifies AI outputs, with reviewable intermediary results, collaborating across sectors to promote this radically different and more empirical approach to applied machine intelligence.After completing his PhD in Applied Physics at Caltech, Evan led research at Protocol Labs, creating their research grants program, and led the special projects team that created Hypercerts, Funding the Commons, gov4git, and key parts of Discourse Graphs and the initial Open Agency Architecture proposal.In our conversation we talk about a wide swath of topics including regulatory scaling problems, specifying formal organizational charters, the spectre of opacity, and the quantification of trust — all, in some sense, interdisciplinary matters of “game design” in our entanglement with magical technologies and fundamental uncertainty.If you enjoy this conversation, join the Wisdom x Technology Discord server and consider becoming a member for access to our study groups, community calls, and complete archives. Founding members also get access to the entire twenty hours of lecture and discussion from my recent course, How to Live in the Future.Links• Hire me for speaking or consulting• Explore the Humans On The Loop archives• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding podcasts• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org• Explore the interactive knowledge garden grown from over 250 episodesDiscussed• Atlas Computing Summary Slides• Atlas Computing Institute Talks (YouTube Playlist)• A Toolchain for AI-Assisted Code Specification, Synthesis and Verification• Also, a relevant paper from Max Tegmark:Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGIMentionedGregory BatesonDavid DalrympleK. Allado-McDowellTerence McKennaYuval Noah HarariCosma ShaliziHenry FarrellHakim BeyNatalie DeprazFrancisco VarelaPierre VermerschPlurality InstitutePuja OhlhaverSean Esbjörn-HargensAlfred North WhiteheadDe KaiPrimer RiffAre we doing AI alignment wrong? Game designers Forrest Imel and Gavin Valentine define games as having meaningful decisions, uncertain outcomes, and measurable feedback. If any one of these breaks, the game breaks. And we can think about tech ethics through this lens as well. Much of tech discourse is about how one or more of these dimensions has broken the “game” of life on Earth — the removal of meaningful decisions, the mathematical guarantee of self-termination through unsustainable practices, and/or the decoupling of feedback loops.AI alignment approaches tend to converge on restoring meaningful decisions by getting rid of uncertainty, but it’s a lost cause. It’s futile to encode our values into systems we can’t understand. To the extent that machines think, they think very differently than we do, and characteristically “interpret” our requests in ways that reveal the assumptions we are used to making based on shared context and understanding with other people.We may not know how a black box AI model arrives at its outputs, but we can evaluate those outputs…and we can segment processes like this so that there are more points at which to review them. One of this show’s major premises is that the design and use of AI systems is something like spellcraft — a domain where precision matters because the smallest deviation from a precise encoding of intent can backfire.Magic isn’t science in as much as we can say that for spellcraft, mechanistic understanding is, frankly, beside the point. Whatever you may think of it, spellcraft evolved as a practical approach for operating in a mysterious cosmos. Westernized Modernity dismisses magic because Enlightenment era thinking is predicated on the knowability of nature and the conceit that everything can and will eventually bend to principled, rigorous investigation. But this confused accounting just reshuffled its uneradicable remainder of fundamental uncertainty back into a stubbornly persistent Real that continues to exist in excess of language, mathematics, and mechanistic frameworks. Economies, AI, and living systems guarantee uncertain outcomes — and in accepting this, we have to re-engage with magic in the form of our machines. The more alike they become, the more our mystery and open-ended co-improvisation loom back over any goals of final knowledge and control.In a 2016 essay, Danny Hillis called this The Age of Entanglement. It is a time that calls for an evolutionary approach to technology. Tinkering and re-evaluating, we find ourselves one turn up the helix in which quantitative precision helps us reckon with the new built wilderness of technology. When we cannot fully explain the inner workings of large language models, we have to step back and ask:What are our values, and how do we translate them into measurable outputs?How can we break down the wicked problem of AI controllability into chunks on which it’s possible to operate?How can adaptive oversight and steering fit with existing governance processes?In other words, how can we properly task the humanities with helping us identify “meaningful decisions” and the sciences with providing “measurable feedback.” Giving science the job of solving uncertainty or defining our values ensures we’ll get as close as we can to certitude about outcomes we definitely don’t want. But if we think like game designers, then interdisciplinary collaboration can help us safely handle the immense power we’ve created and keep the game going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is Cadell Last, the creator of Philosophy Portal, author of Global Brain Singularity and Real Speculations, and organizer of myriad conferences, anthologies, and collaborative volumes exploring biocultural evolution, the mind-matter relation, and speculative futures. Cadell has been the director of psychedelic research at Psirenity, a researcher at the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, a science writer on primatology and paleoanthropology for Scientific American, and the founder, writer, and researcher for The Advanced Apes at PBS Digital Studios.In this episode, we discuss self-actualization and self-transformation in our age of magical technologies — the domestication of the human being by AI and institutions, how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, navigating hybrid physical-virtual relationships, the importance of intergenerational learning, and how we can make a better argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value. In the climax of this conversation, Cadell makes a case for “staying with the lack” and “working the cracks in being” as ways of cultivating our agency in a highly-automated world.Become a member to join our hangouts, salons, and study groups:Project Links• Explore this project’s essay and episode archives• Make tax-deductible donations (recurring pledges grant membership)• Join the Wisdom x Technology & Future Fossils Discord servers• Browse the books we discuss on the show• Explore the interactive model grown from over 250 episodes• Book me for speaking or consultingCadell’s LinksWebsite (with research and social media links)Philosophy PortalYouTube(+ My recent appearance as a guest on Cadell’s Philosophy Portal show)Relevant PapersHuman Evolution: Life History Theory and the End of Biological ReproductionSelf Actualization in the CommonsGlobal Commons in the Global BrainGlobal Brain and the Future of Human SocietyInformation-Energy Metasystem ModelAbstraction, mimesis and the evolution of deep learningLandian Exit and Hegelian LoveSystems & Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science & PhilosophyLogic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect OppositionMentionsKevin KellyLawrence SteinbergNick LandNora BatesonJessica FlackThomas PicketyMichel BauwensLayman PascalDavid JayPhilip K. DickYanis VaroufakisChris CutroneAndrew TateBenjamin StudebakerGordon BranderAlan TuringKate RaworthRelated Episodes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

“When I have a rich, powerful, mind expanding, mind bending conversation like this, I'll need to go and lie down in darkened room afterwards.”– Robert PoyntonThis week’s guest is my friend and inspiration Robert Poynton, Founder of Yellow Learning, Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, and author of three beautiful short books — Do Pause, Do Improvise, and Do Conversation — full of his insights from decades of designing and leading Executive Education leadership programs and hosting creative retreats in Spain.In Future Fossils Episode 196 Robert and I discussed how important it is to learn the principles of improvisation as a way of life. And as he notes in his latest book, most of us are already skilled improvisers because we spend our lives in conversation — not just with each other, but with our environments. How does trying on this frame transform the ways that we relate to them?In this episode we explore conversations as an art form and as a technology, technology as a conversation, and how weird this all gets when so many of us are having what feel like literal conversations with technology itself. Some of our topics:• How do we create fertile “conversational fields”? • How do different media constrain and open conversational possibilities?• What does it mean to “be generous” with our improv partners?• What might the structure of good conversation teach us about engaging with AI — and help us “converse” with the entire history of a person or a culture?At the heart of this project and this episode in particular is the belief that some things are worth doing not because they get us where we want to go, but because they’re pleasures in themselves. Good conversations are their own reward, and conversations with Robert are especially rewarding.(Do yourself a favor and join a Yellow Learning cohort sometime…)PS — A bonus for subscribers this week: an extra mini-episode behind the paywall! After Robert and I landed this discussion we kept talking for another hour. Most of it was off-topic but there were some choice bits in there too good to leave on the cutting room floor. If you don’t see it below the show notes, you know what to do:Upcoming Events* 24 April – Right Relationship with AI feat. Turquoise Sound and Michael Garfield at The School of Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator (free & public 90-minute discussion)* 3 May – Book Club: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna (patrons-only discussion)* 13 May-14 June – How To Live In The Future at Weirdosphere (five-week online course with ten sessions)Project Links• Explore my full podcast archives and this project’s writing/episode archives• Join the Future Fossils Discord for both public and members-only threads• Browse and buy the books we talk about on the show• Explore a map and chat bot grown from nine years of mind-expanding episodes• Meet new allies on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord• Dig into Humans On The Loop’s original pitch & planning document• Contact me if you want to work togetherMentioned BooksRobert Poynton — Do Conversation: There’s No Such Thing As Small TalkW. Brian Arthur — The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It EvolvesEthan Mollick — Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AIJennifer Cobb — Cybergrace: The Search for God in The Digital World Mentioned PeopleK Allado-McDowellJ.F. MartelTom MorganDr. BlueKevin KellyErik DavisKen AdamsJake KobrinTheodore ZeldinChris KutarnaMike LargePlatoSam AltmanErothymeGurdjieffKrishnamurtiPeter BrookeFederico CampagnaIain McGilchristDavid BohmCosma ShaliziNick LandYuval HarariTom ChatfieldMax WalucasTerence McKennaJason SilvaAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonBaruch SpinozaGottfried LeibnizLudwig WittgensteinCarlo RovelliT.S. EliotCarlos CastanedaBonus Mini-EpisodeOn The Value of Noisy Media, Conversational Protocols for Scaling Interaction, The Joy of Provisional Lists, and Tech Companies as Networks of Relationships“When Apple has a pile of cash of the size it has, it looks permanent. It looks forever. It looks untouchable, and people get attached by that kind of visible sense of scale. But there was a guy I knew many years ago who'd been around Silicon Valley long enough, and knew all the people, all these organisms that we call organizations or brands. And he always saw Silicon Valley as a network of personal relationships, which would every now and then explode into a visible platform or or company like Google or Apple. But he was kinda like, ‘That's not what's going on.’ He would always say ‘It's the mycelial network of the relationships between the individuals.’”– Robert PoyntonHere you go: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week Jim O’Shaughnessy (Website | X) joins Humans On The Loop to carry our first on-record conversation on Infinite Loops into bold new terrains! Jim is one of the most renowned investors and asset managers of all the time and the author of several hugely best-selling and influential books on investing, including What Works on Wall Street, Invest Like The Best, and Predicting The Markets of Tomorrow. He also founded the first online investment advisor and holds the patent for “ the origination and fulfillment of stock investment portfolios over a worldwide computer network.” (You heard right!)After decades of success in wealth management, he left his company in the care of his son Patrick and launched O’Shaughnessy Ventures — a firm that combines “Jim’s deeply rooted interest in all things art, science, investing and tech with his long-held desire to establish positive sum scenarios designed to help promising creators and their inspiring ideas succeed, regardless of age, location, job history or level of education.”Last fall when I was on his show, we played a game of mind-jazz about “how we can live curious, collaborative and fulfilling lives in our deeply weird, complex, probabilistic world.” For this discussion, I wanted to rotate the axis of our exploration and learn how Jim’s personal experiences have contributed to the frame through which he engages life. Sweeping across scales from candid autobiography to team inquiry into some of the wickedest problems — like how we foster meaningful relationships and balance achievement with humility — we covered a lot of new ground.I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and benefit from a fresh take on the mind — and heart — of one of the most exemplary mavericks I know.If you find value in this conversation, please like and subscribe (YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify), leave a comment, and consider supporting my mission to help us cultivate wisdom in an age of magical technologies. Humans On The Loop is fiscally-supported by my friends at HAPPI (Helping Awesome People Prosper Intentionally), so you can become a member here or make tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. Recurring donors get the same community perks, including the book club and online course recordings.Project LinksContact me if you have questions or propositionsProject pitch & planning documentFull episode and essay archivesJoin the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threadsMeet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord serverChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:16 - Intro0:06:23 - Jim’s Backstory0:31:43 - Crisis Personalities + Creativity vs. Risk Mitigation0:46:28 - Networks of Trust + Bootstrapped Credentials0:53:37 - Incenting Trust: Mass Customization + Consensus Reality Collapse1:06:14 - The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma + Trust-Building in Social Networks1:13:25 - How Do We Design for Flourishing at Scale (or Can We)?1:21:22 - Markets as Complex Systems1:29:10- Using (Especially Local) AI to Accelerate Realizing Your Mistakes1:37:23 - OutroMentioned Reading, Listening, & PeopleFrom Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and The Precognitive Imagination by Eric WargoThe Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchristFinite and Infinite Games by James P. CarseThe Status Game by Will StorrThe Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (John Minford, translator)Power and Influence: Beyond Formal Authority by John P. KotterOne Summer: America 1927 by Bill BrysonGödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas HofstadterThe End of Trust - McSweeney’s Issue 54Bilawal Sidhu — How to Unite Reality with Imagination - Infinite Loops PodcastWill Storr — The Status Game - Infinite Loops PodcastBrendan McCord — AI and The Philosophy of Technology - Infinite Loops PodcastAdam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet - Future Fossils PodcastReimagining the PhD - Nadia AsparouhovaThe TPOT PhD - Priya RoseSo many music festivals have been canceled this year. What’s going on? - Greg Rosalsky for NPRCory DoctorowDoug RushkoffAlfred North WhiteheadJosiah WarrenJed McKennaJosh WolfeSocratesUpcoming Events* My new single and music video “The Big Machine” goes live on April 1st! Pre-save to Spotify or pre-order on Bandcamp here.* I’m co-facilitating a session on “Right Relations with AI” for the School of Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator alongside a superb faculty. Cohort starts April 3rd!* The book club is back! Join us for a group reading and discussion of Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with asynchronous discussion in the Future Fossils Discord server and a live call on May 3rd. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week I dialogue with Matthew David Segall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute, and author of the Footnotes To Plato blog as well as numerous books on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling. In it, we wrangle with some very fundamental questions, such as:* What distinguishes the organismal and machinic?* How can we support vital cultural activity without reducing the measure of our humanity to our economic productivity?* What if we’re looking for mind in AI in the wrong places, and instead treat both technology and human consciousness as unified within one unfolding process of cosmic self-discovery?We welcome your feedback and reflections — here, or in the Future Fossils Discord Server — and to join us in the inquiry about what lies beyond modernity, and how to nourish the collective imagination we need to thrive there! I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.Pardon the delay: inexplicable technical issues forced me to re-render this episode half a dozen times. Hopefully you appreciate the “staying up until 1 am to try and ship on time”!Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyIf you like this show, dig into the archives and consider making tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop. (You’ll get all the same perks as Substack patrons.)Project LinksRead the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the open online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordContact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteriesChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:32 - Intro0:08:18 - About Matt0:15:19 - Nouns & Verbs, Machines & Organisms0:24:24 - Emergence & Epistemic Humility0:36:55 - The Relationship Between Cultures & Markets0:49:21 - What Are Markets & Can They Play?0:58:30 - Our Responsibility To What We Make1:06:42 - Is Conscious AI A Hyperobject?1:17:43 - OutroMentionsMatt’s Website & TwitterMatt Segall & O.G. Rose - Re-thinking Economics & The Meaning of ValueBrendan Graham Dempsey & Matt Segall - Physics, Metaphysics, Meta-MetaphysicsMatt Segall & Tim Jackson - The Blind Spot (2024): A Critical and Reconstructive ReviewFuture Fossils 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyMichael Garfield - Introducing Humans On The LoopAbraham Flexner - The Usefulness of Useless KnowledgeW. Brian Arthur - The Nature of TechnologyW. Brian Arthur - Economics in Nouns and VerbsMiguel Fuentes - Complexity and The Emergence of Physical PropertiesMichael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cris Moore - The Physical Limits of CommunicationSteven Johnson - Revenge of The HumanitiesAdam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson - The Blind SpotJessica Flack - Hourglass Emergence: Complexity Begets Complexity thru Information Bottlenecks (video)Richard Doyle - Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The NoosphereKevin Kelly - The Expansion of IgnoranceWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or Borges?Danny Hillis - The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live The EntanglementKevin Kelly - Out of ControlKai EnnisCarl JungStephen HawkingFriedrich NietzschRichard DawkinsAlan WattsMichael SchwartzAlfred North WhiteheadSean Esjbörn-HargensFelix GuattariStuart KauffmanRudolf SteinerDavid WolpertRobert RosenMichael LevinNorbert WeinerKen WilberKarl FristonGilbert SimondonHumberto MaturanaFrancisco VarelaJohn VervaekeTerrence DeaconPierre Teilhard de Chardin This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe