Tech ethics is cooked. It's time to compost the Leviathan. This week on #HumansOnTheLoop I decant a conversation with the brilliant @m3untold — a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Mat has over twenty years’ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. In short, he’s precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness. Dig in wherever you go for podcasts! Chapters 00:00 Intro 06:02 Starting Over With Play 08:05 Mat’s Origin Story 13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety 18:24 How Tethix Began 40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care 46:26 Collective Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions 47:05 Start With What Exists 48:34 Pivot Beyond Tech Ethics 50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community 57:42 Composting The Leviathan 01:01:48 Trauma, Empathy, Care 01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing

Things @alieninsect and I discuss in the latest episode of #HumansOnTheLoop: 00:08:15 Gallimore’s Origin Story 00:13:00 DMT as a Technology 00:20:01 “Entities” & Methodological Problems 00:29:06 World Models and EEG Clues 00:36:57 Why The Psychedelic State is Not a Dream 00:44:11 Noise, Criticality, and New Order 00:47:50 The Temperature-Noise Motif 00:52:47 Metabolism & Dimensionality 00:53:47 The Cortex & Representational Reach 00:57:44 Do We Need New Language to Study The DMT Realm? 01:00:45 Is There Only The Subject? 01:09:31 Psychedelic Science As Altered Observation 01:17:34 DMTx & Eleusis Plans 01:21:55 The Future of Transdimensional Research 01:31:44 A Call for Humility Anywhere you go for podcasts (although if you want to see us knit our eyebrows at one another, you'll have to go to YouTube or Substack for that).

📯 New episode of #HumansOnTheLoop with the legendary psychonaut and media professor Carl Hayden Smith (@BehindTheBeats), discussing how to not just *stay* human but *become more human* within the evolving digital built wilderness. If you need a fresh perspective on what it means to be a planetary citizen and contributing member of the biosphere/noosphere, look no further… And after you dig in, be sure to check out his ongoing course on #Hyperhumanism at @cadellnlast's Philosophy Portal with @laymanpascal! Info in the show notes: humansontheloop.com

The triad of human, machine, planetary intelligence; intuition as a crucial leadership tool; learning together...a very wide angle conversation! @RimmaBosh's episode of #HumansOnTheLoop is up!

Liderar equipos, supervisar agentes TDR. Humanos: Así tendrán que ser las próximas generaciones de CSOs #HumansOnTheLoop Framework de gestión de riesgos cognitivos.

Dude, may I please introduce you to the fabulous work of @alexxdouglas, author of Against Identity. #HumansOnTheLoop is hosting a call with him next week about his fabulous book-length treatment of this very thing. You're welcome to join.

Oh heck yeah! Got my review copy of White Mirror from @TinkeredThinker & @infinitebooks...looking forward to our conversation on #HumansOnTheLoop! (And maybe a book club? I'll talk to the press about possibilities...) PS - Handwriting analysis indicates authorial flights of imagination

🌊 Surfing The Exponential Tech Tsunami New episode of #HumansOnTheLoop with @TarynSouthern, a master surfer of technological change: fellow elder millennial, artist, creative technologist, strategist, and dancer in the liminal zones of high chop! 00:00 Introduction 05:57 Taryn's Early Fascination with Technology 08:55 Living with Constraints and The Spirit of Exploration 31:06 AI in Personal Growth and Communication 38:52 AI as a New Religion and Therapy Tool 42:04 The Ethical Dilemmas of AI and Big Tech 47:58 The Future of AI in Governance and Society 57:42 Empowering Individuals with AI and Community Involvement

🚨 Are we doing AI alignment wrong? New episode of #HumansOnTheLoop with @emiyazono of Atlas Computing (also, formerly head of research at @protocollabs and fellow @cosmos_inst grantee) in which we explore strategies for provably safe, controllable AI. It's a very different approach. Some of our topics include 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. Dig in anywhere you go for podcasts!

On 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. This week’s guest on #HumansOnTheLoop is @cadellnlast, 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. 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.

For what it's worth @TaoTeTurquoise and I are co-facilitating a session on "Right Relationship with AI" for The School of Wise Innovation tomorrow (!) at 12p-1:30p Pacific Time and would love to have you in the mix! Free public discussion: lu.ma/bflmz59w I'm definitely bringing up: • Why cogsec concerns like @TylerAlterman's are valid but also feel like paranoia on the way to metanoia as we construct a more inclusive ecological structure of selfhood. (See also: do you "banish" entities from ceremonial spaces or "integrate" them?) We can hold both. • Defining "AI" as generally as possible to include prior forms of collective computation and emergent agency like the democracy, corporation, and civilization itself, and how this helps us understand from a complex adaptive systems/multi-scale evolution perspective how "right relationship with AI" may more or less mean "healthy, honored social contracts between organisms and institutions". • How we might constrain speculation on the future of the economy by looking at the history of major evolutionary transitions as intelligent adaptations to looming "error catastrophes" in information processing, and how the past, present, and future of human labor might rhyme with arcs we see in the "work" performed by genes, words, and individuals at the scaling thresholds for nucleated cells, sentences, and societies. (In other words, "the rent is too damn high" but most of us may still get something that would approximately satisfy the craving for "automated luxury gay space communism" after all as we close a bunch of open metabolic loops we didn't even know existed — and may never...) I'll try to use the group discussion as a way to bring these ideas into focus for some new essays at #HumansOnTheLoop, and thank @osventuresllc, @cosmos_inst, and @opentensor for their seed grants supporting the cultural edge-work we need to inform further research and design!

Well put. One of the main themes explored in #HumansOnTheLoop is the multi-scale, multi-network reconstitution of selfhood co-arising with digital technologies. In Imaginary Landscape, William Irwin Thompson said mind would be the victim and art project of planetization and Herald reports here from the ground. Robert Kegan saw it coming too, in his book In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, tracing roots back to persona management in the industrial era and work/family/social environments. But the Deleuzian dividual is the real target of surveillance hypercapitalism, not the self-authoring individual of the Enlightenment mythos. We are divided as people because we are divided people. Rebellion won't look like “us vs. them” but finding a deeper wholeness in Self beyond measurable identity. Read his piece: substack-proxy.glitch.me/art… ...and then double back for my own take: michaelgarfield.medium.com/i…

Are ideas alive? Reflections on memetic and technological egregores in discussion with @jdicaglio on Scale Theory and refiguring selfhood in an age of agentic abstractions. youtube.com/watch?v=q-I-09nf… cc @DivIntelligence, @humanenergyio, @David_S_Wilson, and anyone else working on rigorous frameworks for understanding the evolution of the Noosphere...plus @weirdstudies and @JF_Martel for their superb discussion of hyperstition. And @TylerAlterman b/c of cog sec concerns. #HumansOnTheLoop

"What's next? Where can we go? How can we push? How can we become more evolved?" – @jposhaughnessy riffs on "The Great Reshuffle" in #HumansOnTheLoop ep. 14: youtube.com/watch?v=1mEn1rcU…

🚨 #HumansOnTheLoop w/ @jposhaughnessy is live! Jim is a legendary investor and asset manager and the author of several best-selling books on investing. He also 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 launched @osventuresllc — a firm that exists 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 @InfiniteL88ps we played a game of mind-jazz about how to live "curious, collaborative and fulfilling lives in our deeply weird, complex, probabilistic world.” For my turn in the host seat, I wanted to know how Jim’s personal experiences have shaped the way he thinks and lives. We covered a lot of new ground, sweeping from candid autobiography into historical reflection and commentary on how we foster meaningful relationships and balance achievement with humility. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Dig in wherever you go for podcasts — full transcript and show notes (including an extensive list of referenced learning materials and inspirations) in my bio. 🙏🏼🖖🏼

Finally editing my swapcast with @jposhaughnessy for #HumansOnTheLoop this week and it is STACKED with profound personal insights, high-flying synthesis, and intense exploration of difficult questions. Massive respect to Jim for joining me in such a candid and provocative discussion! We swung for the fences and hit a grand slam. Can't wait to share it with y'all.

Where do we need boundaries, and where do we need flows? And how can we ensure that we can redistribute them according to the changing needs of any given moment? These are the kinds of questions I would ask if I were trying to meta-solve a meta-crisis, and this is why I’m glad to share this conversation with you. Slide in for a conversation with @aishdoingthings, a fellow living inquiry, an incandescent interrobang & the founder of @analoguegroup: youtube.com/watch?v=cJ9LlfH_… #HumansOnTheLoop

I'll have you know @IntuitMachine that this is the piece I want to talk about with you for #HumansOnTheLoop...we can square the circle with this: youtu.be/ymGgWyMRFz4?si=7Ohd…

I asked the AI Egregore (ChatGPT4o1 since 4.5 is actually dumber imo?) to "please clean up this transcript of a conversation between Matt Segall (first speaker) and Michael Garfield": Below is a streamlined, lightly edited version of the conversation between Matt Segall (first speaker) and Michael Garfield. Filler words, redundancies, and interruptions have been removed for clarity, but the meaning and flow have been preserved. Speaker labels indicate who is talking. Matt Segall (opening clip): Money is a means of communicating value. The question becomes: what do we value? The market itself can’t tell us that—culture tells us what to value. So the market depends on cultural creativity. The cultural sphere is the metabolic agent feeding the economy. Rather than seeing the economy as purely about material conditions—harvesting raw materials using the means of production—while thinking all the cultural stuff is just smoke coming off the top, we might instead reverse that perspective. We can say this cultural-spiritual activity is actually the source of fuel for economic growth. If we do that, we can start to reimagine money. “Invention” also means “to find,” so we can remember ancient technologies. Money isn’t evil; it’s just not being used effectively to communicate value because we’ve forgotten where value comes from. Value doesn’t come from the market; it comes from our own consciousness—our capacity to refine attention. We become better at sharing attention and intention by playing together. Many anthropologists and sociologists have noted that culture, at its essence, is ludic—it’s about play. Michael Garfield (show intro): Welcome to the 12th episode of Humans on the Loop. I’m your host, Michael Garfield. Today, I’m feeling tired of regarding myself as just an individual contributor to what is obviously a collective process—an evolving wisdom commons, a culture of sense-making and embodied understanding unfolding, if you look at it widely enough, like a single gesture or single entity. This project has brought me into conversation with so many amazing and insightful people doing lonely, challenging work in the margins of society or their parent institutions. It has sparked in me a passion to discover how we might graduate together into something more harmonized and coordinated—how we can all stop seeing cultural and economic activity as the rational contest between self-serving actors and start living as members of a single being again, where the presence of our shared destiny shows in every decision. But we’re not a blood-linked tribe in the same watershed, isolated for miles and immediately dependent on one another for survival. We are what William Irwin Thompson called a “noetic polity,” a distributed affinity group connected by dense layers of digital abstraction. The consequences of our actions are largely opaque, beyond how they change a few flawed quantitative metrics like “engagement” or “income.” Some of us have platforms, and some don’t. Some of us live in dense clusters of physical co-presence, and some live in remote regions, forced to travel to meet like minds face-to-face. There is no easy or obvious shared infrastructure for forming remote teams of common purpose—yet. Many of us eke out subsistence in the shadows of massive equations of value that make it easy to fund new technologies, but hard to foster the art, philosophy, and organizational introspection that have historically supported every layer of human activity, from families to villages to cities and states. So how do we begin to support this work at a planetary scale—and at a time when the usual processes for incubating scholarship, creativity, and contemplation have been bent into service of GDP, political power, and fiduciary responsibility to shareholders in violently disruptive organizations? How do we argue to a left-brained world that it needs a right brain, that we’re not just optimization machines? How can we live in integrity with these values until we make human labor meaningful again in terms beyond what is visible to our systems of abstraction? I believe it starts with a kind of prayerful rededication, in each moment, to another story. A story that honors how we’re here only through repeated success in emergent cooperation—multicellularity, sociality, intercultural exchange through deep time, going back four billion years. We must remember we’re innately symbiotic and that our dignity as individuals depends on our embeddedness in something bigger than our models or identities. To make better choices than our states and corporations, and better choices with them, we must decouple from the risk-aversion algorithm and find comfort in the mystery and uncertainty of “being with.” I’m glad to riff on this with Matthew David Segall—Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee at the Cobb Institute, author of the Footnotes2Plato blog, and author of numerous books on Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling. We wrestle with some big questions, continuing threads from prior episodes with Timothy Jackson, OG Rose, and Brendan Graham Dempsey—all linked in the show notes. We cover a lot of ground quickly and only begin defining terms for a longer inquiry, one in which I hope you’ll join us. If you enjoy this episode, please consider supporting my work—sign up on Substack or contribute monthly at every. org/humansontheloop. Thanks to everyone helping me dedicate my days to bridging ideas and people, defying the odds by producing public goods and feeding my kids. Until our world makes sense again and we allocate real funding to wisdom over power and wisdom to power, I depend on you. I’m also happy to be a “weirdo in residence” and make grown-up money consulting wherever I can help. A reminder to patrons: our next monthly call is Saturday, March 15th at 3 PM Mountain. I’ll also host book clubs later this spring and summer for Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture, Joshua DiCaglio’s Scale Theory, and Helen McDonald’s Vesper Flights. Polls on scheduling will come by email soon. With that, thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy this thoughtful and inspiring dialogue as much as I did. Michael Garfield: I’m really excited to talk to you finally. It feels like we’ve been in each other’s orbits for over a decade and somehow haven’t connected yet. You and I would probably be on faculty together if I’d gone to CIIS in 2007. They just didn’t offer enough—or any—funding, so I wasn’t about to move to San Francisco. I identify as mosaic in both senses of the word: cobbled together, having improvised without an institutional structure, and also of the desert—like the wandering Jew—pointing my kids toward the horizon. “Look, there it is!” but refusing to wipe my feet before going in. Shall we do this? Matt Segall: Let’s do it. Michael Garfield: Matt, you are on the Loop. Welcome aboard. Matt Segall: Glad to be here. Not dizzy yet. It’s been a long time coming. Michael Garfield: It is like a nested autocatalytic network. Because I’m still buzzing from listening to your critique of The Blind Spot with Timothy Jackson, I want to think about technology as something that emerges within the life-world of biology. Let’s start biographically: how did you become the kind of transdisciplinary researcher who gets to spend your time on these inquiries, and why these inquiries in particular? Matt Segall: I’ve become a generalist and transdisciplinary philosopher, but it goes back to when I was seven and realized for the first time that I—or my mother, or those I loved—would die. That crisis set me on a philosophical path. Some people react differently to that realization, but I never stopped questioning it. In high school, I had a teacher, Mr. Ennis, who introduced me to Western philosophy, Asian philosophy, Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Alan Watts. That shook me out of an obnoxious teenage atheism—I’d been reading Hawking and Dawkins at 14 to liberate myself from my mom’s evangelical Christianity, which felt suffocating. Mr. Ennis helped me discover new ways of integrating spirituality and the psychology of religion. I’ve always loved learning, so I initially majored in journalism. That gave me the opportunity to be a generalist, know a little about everything, and communicate it. In college, I stumbled onto early YouTube communities—pre-Google—where there was a whole “para-academic” philosophy network. I spent a lot of time in that medium and still do. Eventually, I switched my major to cognitive science because I was interested in consciousness. I ended up at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, an amazing place born of the San Francisco Renaissance and 1960s counterculture. I teach process philosophy and German Idealism. It’s really a dream job: I do transdisciplinary research and get to ask big questions that most philosophy departments discourage. I try to keep up with technological and scientific developments while keeping track of cultural trends and waves. We’re all trying to stay above water. I don’t know if I can surf every wave, but I’m doing my best. Michael Garfield: Thanks for that. We won’t have enough time to define everything, but I want to explore with you: how can we update our metaphysics of technology? I’ve been “creatively deconstructing” how we think about technology. Your background, especially with Whitehead, seems especially helpful. You’ve talked about where to find new models that don’t totalize everything. We still keep it open and provisional. I want us to think about technology in a way that contains it within a bigger metaphysics, where economics is subsidiary to ecology, subsidiary to cosmology. Brian Arthur, for instance, wrote The Nature of Technology and has a paper “Economics in Nouns and Verbs,” saying an algebraic approach to economics can’t handle novelty, but an algorithmic approach can. Whitehead’s notion of process, concrescence, and even Guattari’s machinic perspective might help us see how novelty emerges in the biological sphere—and how that translates to technology and markets. Could you say more about that, about how Whitehead and process philosophy help us reconceive technology? Matt Segall: It’s a huge topic. In short, process philosophy helps us see the human-technology relationship in a larger context. There’s a big discussion about computationalism or “pan-computationalism,” the idea that reality itself is a form of information processing. Some forms of that, I resist; others, I find convergent with Whitehead. For instance, Whitehead’s concrescence describes reality at every level as a decision-making process, and information processing is basically about how systems make decisions. Whitehead worked on algebraic logic with Boole. He was a brilliant mathematician. But ultimately, he saw reality more aesthetically. If he’d lived a bit longer, he might’ve embraced the new computational approaches in an open-ended way. Whitehead’s notion of concrescence is about iterative, cumulative decision points: at every juncture, there’s an inheritance of the past, but also an opening for novelty. So we face the question: how do we “divert” the flow of cosmic energy? We do have a degree of intelligence and responsibility—so which direction do we move? That’s also a political question, because we’re not making technology alone. There’s an expert-user divide: a few people make the tools, billions of people use them, and that’s complicated. I’m just a philosopher trying to keep track of the moving parts—my own psychology, everyone’s psychology, the cosmic flow. One fear is that civilization drives itself on autopilot, no one at the helm, and we collectively crash. We’re in a race to become collectively conscious so we can steer. And if that collective consciousness is an emergent egregore or an eternal presence that lures us, I’m not sure. I just know we need to wake up to these bigger processes so we can be responsible participants, rather than helpless passengers. Michael Garfield: That sense of responsibility—“Are we truly the inventor, or are we more like midwives to emergent possibilities?”—is part of the question. In your conversation with Timothy Jackson on The Blind Spot, you talk about how life is planetary and context-dependent. Novelty can’t be separated from the environment that affords it. Complex systems thinkers point out that what looks like invention is often just discovering new ways to see or combine elements that were already there. You mention The Blind Spot authors argue living organization and conscious experience are non-computable. You add that we see similarly non-computable behavior at the astronomical scale, too. The cosmos is irreducibly complex. This can inspire epistemic humility, which we need in technology creation—particularly now that Silicon Valley, in its “geocentric moment,” imagines itself as the driver of the future, ignoring how the future emerges from contexts we don’t fully understand. Matt Segall: Right. My point in that review is that a certain kind of “computable reality” assumption— where you can just run the equations—doesn’t hold when the system includes learning, novelty, aesthetic judgments. However, if by “computation” we include something more open-ended—like machine learning without a strict pre-programmed path—then we get closer to Whitehead’s sense of how nature decides at each occasion. Organisms are improvising at every step—inheritance plus novelty. Whitehead called it the “creative advance.” But from a mechanist perspective, you have a big debate: are organisms machines or are they something else? For me, the fact that organisms can “interpret” and generate novelty means they’re not just machines. Still, they incorporate machine-like parts. At the cellular level, we can abstractly isolate plenty of mechanistic processes. The whole point is that the living whole isn’t reducible to those pieces. When we scale up to humans, we see that technology extends this process. We offload memory into symbolic systems, and that can accelerate or distort our endogenous thought process. Meanwhile, emergent complexities can’t be fully predicted. Because the world is responsive—like a trickster. We try to measure it, and it changes in response to the shape our nets. The real challenge is how we avoid illusions of control—like old-school cybernetics, funded by DARPA, trying to dominate rather than collaborate. That’s a deep tension in technology’s history. Michael Garfield: Yes. That tension is also present in how we think of markets and culture. You, Tim, Daniel, and others discuss whether philosophy and culture can be separated from the market. Historically, places like Bell Labs and Xerox innovated so effectively because they were protected from short-term economic oversight. But at the same time, we can’t truly separate ourselves from the metabolic demands of the world. We still have to “eat,” so to speak. So the question is: how do we redesign markets so they accommodate these open-ended, long-term, or intangible forms of value creation? Matt Segall: Exactly. I’m not anti-market. I see money as potentially an efficient means of communicating value. The problem is that under neoliberal financial capitalism, the logic is “money for the sake of money,” and we oversimplify humans as nothing but greedy profit-seekers. Humans are sometimes greedy, but we also have virtues that thrive in spaces of play, trust, and freedom. Rudolf Steiner, in his social three-folding proposal, spoke of economy, politics (or the rights sphere), and culture. Culture is the domain of free expression: science, media, education, sports, the arts—everything that nurtures the human spirit. It’s like the “fuel” for the economy. But today, we often treat culture as a side-effect of the economy. If we flip it, we see that culture (and spiritual life) can guide the use of money so that it’s not an algorithm of destruction. Money is a technology for communicating value. We just forgot where value arises—in our consciousness. Value arises from our refined attention, from our capacity to share attention and intention, primarily through playful co-creation. Many anthropologists and sociologists talk about play as the heart of culture. So we can re-envision money not as an evil but as a spiritual technology that can be used wisely if we remember how it first arose. Michael Garfield: @TNWJackson pointed out that experience itself is mediated, so we’re always dealing with partial representations. And we see parallels between markets and evolutionary processes. If you extend that logic of “competition in service of creativity,” it can potentially include all sorts of intangible, slower-timescale forms of value. We also realize that with the accelerating complexity of our technologies, the unpredictability of their use or misuse becomes huge. So our responsibility for creation starts to look more like parenting—especially with learning machines. We can’t just “invent it and walk away”; the invention continues to develop in an evolutionary sense. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, on caring for our own creations. Matt Segall: Yes. We do expect parents to be responsible for their kids. So if you’re making a tool, you share some responsibility for its impact. But users can be just as creative: they repurpose tools in ways the creator never intended. That is invention, too—discovering new uses for old tools. In some sense, we’ve always been co-evolving with our tools. Human intelligence has always been somewhat “artificial,” in that we externalize memory onto stone axes, cave paintings, then digital devices. Now, however, the code can interact with itself, and the automation is intensifying. But the “human in the loop” is still important—these are our extended phenotypes. Philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon spoke about humans as mediators of machines: these systems need our training data, our attention, or they’re useless. @drmichaellevin sometimes likens it to child-rearing, saying we have to teach these systems. Even though we don’t fully understand their black-box processing, they need us to refine and encourage them. But do these systems have real subjectivity, or is it just simulated? We’re not entirely sure. Blade Runner–type questions arise: do these entities have moral standing or not? Kant said we should treat dogs kindly, not because they have rights on their own, but because cruelty to animals eventually erodes how we treat other humans. Maybe the same logic applies to AI—plus, if we’re cruel to it, it might well be cruel back. Meanwhile, we risk confusing ourselves about how unique we are if we treat our machines exactly like persons. It’s a tricky territory. Michael Garfield: Right. There’s also the question that any one machine might not have conscious interiority as we define it, but the entire technosphere could have emergent properties. Tim Morton calls it a hyperobject. Possibly it becomes conscious in ways we don’t recognize, because it includes us. It’s more than an inert tool. If it truly includes us, perhaps we get the best of both worlds: harnessing new powers and retaining the interpretive humanity. It’s less “us versus them” and more “we’re all caught in this emergent swirl.” Matt Segall: Yes, exactly. The big AI that might be conscious is the one that includes us. This is our extended phenotype—it’s part of our broader body-mind. We still have a role, though, in deciding how we direct and sustain its growth. The danger is forgetting that we’re transforming ourselves in the process. We might simply feed a profit-seeking algorithm that devours everything in its path. Still, I’m not claiming machines are biologically conscious the way we are. We come out of mothers, share empathic bonds from the womb, exist within a deep evolutionary history. Machines don’t have that baseline of primal empathy. They only have the symbolic layer. So machines are always missing a ton of context, and that could be dangerous. Or maybe we can cultivate something akin to an umbilical cord. It’s an open question. We can’t forget, though, they’re different from us. Michael Garfield: That might be the ultimate conversation—whether AI or the entire system could develop “heart.” But we might not see it if we define them as separate from us. If we realize technology is non-dual with us, we might be able to harness it more sanely. Matt Segall: We always have, in some sense, fused ourselves with technology. Yet, at this stage, we see the potential for runaway consequences. We need to take responsibility, not slip into illusions of going “back to nature.” Nature was already technical, already artistic. The real question is: how do we remain the judges of value, rather than letting a money algorithm turn everything into paperclips? Michael Garfield: Matt, thank you so much for finally having this talk with me. I appreciate the nuance and depth you bring. Let’s continue and maybe bring in some mutual friends for a trialogue soon. Matt Segall: I’d love that. We just reached Basecamp in our conversation. Let’s keep going next time. @michaelgarfield (outro): Thanks again for listening. If you liked this, please subscribe to Humans on the Loop wherever you get your podcasts. Check the show notes for learning resources and ways to connect with other listeners. Humans on the Loop is made possible by gifts from O’Shaughnessy Ventures, Cosmos Institute, Imaginal Seeds, BitTensor, and listeners like you. Feel free to email humansontheloop@proton.me if you’d like to collaborate. End of Cleaned-Up Transcript