10 Days Until our AI Course for Leaders, The Emerging Story About AI Productivity and Expertise, and Jamer Hunt on the Power of Scale

10 Days Until our AI Course for Leaders!

Become More Essential with Artificial Intelligence. Our research-backed course helps experienced professionals co-evolve with AI through psychological strategy rather than technical training. Based on our Chronicle study of over 1,000 professionals, we've identified that success in AI collaboration depends on developing cognitive permeability, identity coupling, and symbolic plasticity. This intimate, four-session program, starting August 6th, guides participants through building conscious boundaries for AI collaboration while preserving the compressed expertise that makes human judgment irreplaceable.

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The Emerging Story About AI Productivity and Expertise

As part of our series on AI and Expertise and ahead of our August course on Becoming More Essential with AI, this exploration reveals why early AI productivity research may be misleading us about AI's real workplace impact.

While controlled studies show impressive gains—40% faster coding, doubled output—research in actual workplace settings tells a different story. When experienced developers used cutting-edge AI tools on their real work, they slowed down by almost 20%. The culprit? Context.

Early productivity studies systematically strip away the invisible infrastructure that makes work actually work: knowing client preferences, understanding system quirks, recognizing when "urgent" doesn't mean urgent. This context is precisely what separates experts from novices, yet it's eliminated to create measurable tasks. The result is a measurement bias where AI appears most helpful on decontextualized work—exactly where human expertise matters least.

The deeper insight: humans don't just navigate context, we actively create it, constantly redefining what good work looks like. This capacity to reshape the rules while playing the game may prove to be our most enduring advantage as AI capabilities advance.

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Jamer Hunt on the Power of Scale

At the Artificiality Summit 2024, Jamer Hunt, professor at the Parsons School of Design and author of Not to Scale, catalyzed our opening discussion on the concept of scale. This session explored how different scales—whether individual, organizational, community, societal, or even temporal—shape our perspectives and influence the design of AI systems. By examining the impact of scale on context and constraints, Jamer guided us to a clearer understanding of the appropriate levels at which we can envision and build a hopeful future with AI. This interactive session set the stage for a thought-provoking conference.

Jamer will be back at the Artificiality Summit this October 23-25.

Watch/Listen to Jamer's lecture...

Join him and us in Bend!

On the Horizon

Upcoming community opportunities to engage with the human experience of AI.

• AI Course for Leaders: Become More Essential with Artificial Intelligence. Our research-backed course helps experienced professionals co-evolve with AI through psychological strategy rather than technical training. Based on our Chronicle study of over 1,000 professionals, we've identified that success in AI collaboration depends on developing cognitive permeability, identity coupling, and symbolic plasticity. This intimate, four-session program, starting August 6th, guides participants through building conscious boundaries for AI collaboration while preserving the compressed expertise that makes human judgment irreplaceable.
• The Artificiality Summit 2025. Our second annual gathering convenes leading thinkers to explore the intersections of human and synthetic intelligence. This October 23-25 in Bend, Oregon, we'll examine the Scale: Me, We, and Us dimensions of our evolving relationship with artificial minds. Presented in partnership with the House of Beautiful Business, IDEO, and Softcut Films.

Worth Revisiting

Foundational explorations from our research into life with synthetic intelligence.

• Neosemantic Design. We introduce a framework for human-machine communication that moves beyond traditional metaphor-based interfaces. As artificial minds develop their own cognitive landscapes, our existing design language—built around human metaphors like folders and trash cans—becomes inadequate for meaningful interaction with synthetic intelligence. Neosemantics draws from gesture, motion, and the arts to create interfaces that communicate through alignment and resonance rather than symbolic translation.
• How We Think and Live with AI: Early Patterns of Human Adaptation. Our Chronicle study documents how people develop psychological relationships with artificial systems through three key orientations: cognitive permeability (how AI responses blend into thinking), identity coupling (how closely identity becomes entangled with AI interaction), and symbolic plasticity (capacity to revise meaning frameworks). We map five adaptation states people navigate—recognition, integration, blurring, fracture, and reconstruction—revealing that conscious framework development may be essential for preserving human agency as AI becomes pervasive.
• The Artificiality: How Life and Intelligence Emerge from Information and Shape the Human Experience. We explore our foundational concept of the Artificiality—the new reality emerging as synthetic intelligence becomes integrated into human experience. This isn't simply about AI as tool or assistant, but about the fundamental transformation of what it means to be human when our creations develop their own forms of agency and intelligence. The Artificiality represents a continuation of human co-evolution with our technologies, from language to writing to computation, now extending into the realm of synthetic minds.