The Next Dust Bowl

Driven by economic opportunity in the 1920s, American farmers expanded to the Great Plains. They replaced the diverse native prairie grasses with monoculture cash crops, perhaps unaware that the rich soil they wished to exploit depended on the complex root systems they destroyed. Repeated droughts in the 1930s literally unearthed the fragility of single crop farming, scattering the once fertile soil as far as the east coast. We recently visited a University of Wisconsin-Madison prairie restoration project, learning that full recovery of the prairie biome will take more than 1,000 years. 

AI leaders are the farmers of today. They aim to replace human labor with monoculture AI systems, plowing under the complex “root systems” of human connection from which our economy and society emerge. As with the farmers 100 years ago, the initial plowing will likely bring short-term prosperity for AI companies as their capital-fueled data centers replace human labor. But, as with the prairie, our economy relies on irreplaceable human complexity: the social fabric of workplaces, the development of expertise, the connection from unpredictable interchanges, the identity that comes from contribution, the collective problem-solving capacity of human creativity. 

The Dust Bowl revealed the brittleness of monocultures. When the drought hit, there was no resilient, complex system to carry the land through. An AI monoculture society will likely face the same systemic fragility. Without the rich, complex system of human connection, how will we weather the next storm? Put simply: if we lose the human connection that comes from work, will we be able to withstand the current drought of connection from political discord?

Fortunately, unlike the farmers 100 years ago, we understand much more about the complex system that is now at risk. We can prevent an AI Dust Bowl as long as the AI leaders recognize the value of the economic ecosystem they are attempting to harvest. There is no need to plow under the complex system of human connection that supports our society. While doing so might create short-term economic gains from monoculture AI, the result will almost certainly be a brittle system that will cast to the winds the economic value they attempt to harvest, just like the fertile soil a century ago. 

We can prevent this by weaving AI into human systems rather than replacing. As with native horticulture, developing symbiotic human-AI systems may seem more difficult. But they will, no doubt, be more resilient.

Our mission is to understand the human system so that we might design AI systems with which we can co-evolve. Join our community at the Artificiality Summit to explore these ideas. And reach out if you are interested in collaborating, supporting, or investing in a symbiotic future. 

Note: Credit to Helen for coming up with the Dust Bowl metaphor. I grabbed it but it was her idea!

The New Metric of the Intimacy Economy

In this essay, Helen describes why Identity Coupling is a measurable, scalable force reshaping how we work, how we relate, and who we become. For years, the metrics of the attention economy have measured daily active users, time spent—increasingly measuring success by the minute-by-minute monetization of our attention.

But, now, something different is happening. As Helen describes, the scarce resource is no longer our attention but our intimacy. And the way we measure this intimacy is Identity Coupling: the degree to which AI fuses with your sense of self.

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