A Co-Created Manifesto, Conscious Resistance to Seamless AI, and Christopher Summerfield's These Strange New Minds

A Co-Created Manifesto for a Future with AI

We are delighted to announce that we will be partnering with IDEO at this year's Artificiality Summit to co-create a vision for AI that is neither utopian nor dystopian—a genuine alternative path.

Jenna Fizel, Managing Director and Global Head of Emerging Technology, will work with us to articulate shared principles for AI development, using AI itself as a "humble mediator" that amplifies collective intelligence while remaining transparent about its limitations. The AI won't write our manifesto—it will help us hear each other across diverse perspectives, synthesize viewpoints in real time, and occasionally misinterpret our ideas in ways that spark unexpected clarity.

We hope this process will demonstrate how democratic participation and technological assistance can coexist without the AI pretending to infallibility.

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Why Conscious Resistance to Seamless AI May Save Your Career

As part of our series on AI and Expertise and ahead of our August course on Becoming More Essential with AI (more on this below), this exploration of professional identity and artificial intelligence draws on philosopher Bernard Stiegler's distinction between "long circuits" and "short circuits" of cognitive development to examine how AI integration may undermine the very processes that generate authentic expertise.

A central tension emerges between efficiency and development where AI promises to eliminate the developmental resistance that creates professional judgment, yet this very resistance remains the source of irreplaceable human cognitive value. Success requires conscious frameworks for distinguishing which cognitive processes to preserve versus delegate.

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Christoper Summerfield: These Strange New Minds

Christopher Summerfield's These Strange New Minds fundamentally reframes our understanding of language's relationship to cognition and reality. Summerfield reveals that large language models have uncovered something unexpected about linguistic structure itself: its capacity to function as a comprehensive world-model sufficiently rich for machines to extract meaning from textual patterns alone.

This is the book for people who want to know how we know that LLMs are not actually stochastic parrots after all.

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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. Rather than typical conference presentations, we create an immersive, participatory experience where attendees become collaborative contributors to emerging questions about consciousness, agency, and meaning in an increasingly synthetic world.

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.