True expertise has a nested architecture where each layer builds on previous understanding, but AI can produce seemingly sophisticated outputs without this foundational structure. The professionals who become more valuable with AI develop "Symbolic Plasticity"—the ability to use AI to reveal new connections across their expertise layers while preserving the deep structural integrity that makes their knowledge genuinely adaptable.
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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. 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.
