Humans On The Loop: Wisdom for an Age of Magical Technologies
Join artist and philosopher Michael Garfield for bold, transdisciplinary explorations at the edge of the knowable — deep-cut dialogues on the future of science, art, and political economy, agency in the age of automation, and the psychedelic horizons of human-technology co-evolution. Building on over twenty years of independent research and Michael's stints in major zones of scenius (including at The Santa Fe Institute, The Long Now Foundation, and The Mozilla Internet Ecosystem), Humans On The Loop will help you ask better questions, shift your view of the possible, and cultivate the curiosity and play you need to navigate our age of accelerating weirdness. Dive into extensive show notes, read mind-expanding essays, and join the members community at https://michaelgarfield.substack.com michaelgarfield.substack.com
Episodes
Today’s guest is William Morgan, the co-founder of Restless Egg, a London-based incubator and accelerator designed specifically for a new class of “artist-founders” whose work synthesizes art, technology, and commercial product design.
His thesis: The tech sector’s obsession with optimization can’t help us discover the genuinely novel forms of human experience that this intelligent substrate makes possi...
✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future
✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org
✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned (!) Subvert.fm
✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team building sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence
In the last episode, my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen explored &...
✨Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future
✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
✨ Stream and download my music at artist-owned Subvert.fm
✨ Learn about Atlas Research Group, my new team on a mission to build sovereign infrastructure for social coherence and collective intelligence
About This Episode
✨ Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts
✨Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry. Our next call is this weekend, May 2, at 2 pm MDT!
This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) — a self-described “Ea...
In this episode we join pioneering psychedelic neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore (Website | X | Instagram | Substack) to probe the bewildering high-dimensional horizons of DMT research and their implications for our understanding of consciousness and the structure of reality.
In his book Death by Astonishment, Gallimore argues DMT expands the brain’s “representational reach,” enabling perception of high-dimensional ...
Today’s very overdue conversation is with AI ethicist and organizational trust expert Nathan Kinch of Trustworthy By Design (Website | LinkedIn), asking questions like: How do institutions made of decent, well-meaning people continue to behave out of alignment with their stated values? How do we dig ourselves out of a catastrophic collapse in trust? How can we design practical, participatory “living labs” for orga...
This week go deep with Alex Komoroske, CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked.
The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where ...
The world is getting weirder every day… We need weirdness specialists. Maybe the best guy for the job is my friend, the brilliant “metashaman” (and possible octopus) Layman Pascal.
In his own words, Layman “used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory but he’s feeling much better now.” He leads the Metamodern Spirituality Labs, hosts The Inte...
This week we come at technology sideways with help from hyperspace explorer Carl Hayden Smith, Associate Professor of Media at the University of East London (Talks & Papers), Founder of The Museum of Consciousness at New College, University of Oxford , co-founder of the Cyberdelic Nexus, Director at Noonautics and head of Context Engineering at Eleusis.
✨ Carl is currently teaching a course on Apocalyptic Hyperhumanism with Laym...
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This week (actually, April) I speak with Rimma Boshernitsan (Website | LinkedIn), a speaker, interviewer, facilitator, and advisor who has partnered with senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies—including Google, Kaiser Permanente, Roche, TATA, and Aesop—guiding them through transformation and growth. Her writing has appeared in Fast Compa...
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✨ About This Episode
This week I talk to Sam Arbesman, scientist-in-residence at Lux Capital, Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation, and host of The Orthogonal Bet, weaving together and plucking at the ideas in his delightful new book, The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connected Our World…and Shapes Our Future. Sam is a brilliant scholar, a mave...
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This week we hear from Larry Muhlstein, who worked on Responsible AI at Google and DeepMind before leaving to found the Holistic Technology Project.
In Larry’s words:
“Care is crafted from understanding, respect, and will. Once care is deep enough and in a generative reciprocal relationship, it gives rise to self-expanding love. My work focuses on creating such s...
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Today’s guest Taryn Southern is someone I consider a master surfer of technological change: a fellow elder millennial, artist, creative technologist, strategist, and dancer in the liminal zones of high chop. She’s better than I am at finding the pocket, has made a name for herself for riding some serious bombs, and seems to know precisely when to bail. Starting ...
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We live in simulated worlds of our own making, detecting patterns in the chaos and complexity of raw experience and boiling them down into operable categories and generalizations. Sometimes we do this well, and sometimes…
This week’s guest, computer scientist and game designer Chaim Gingold, wrote what I consider the best book available on the history and social...
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This week I speak with Rufus Pollock (Website | Twitter | Wikipedia), former Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge, entrepreneur, activist, author of Open Revolution and Wiser Societies, RSA Fellow, and co-founder of Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, Datopian, and Second Renaissance. Rufus is a key player in the so-called “Liminal Web” an...
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This week we speak with George Pór, mentee of Doug Englebart, Founder of Future HOW, Enlivening Edge, and Campus Co-Evolve, independent scholar with past academic posts at the London School of Economics, INSEAD, UC Berkeley, California Institute of Integral Studies, and Université de Paris, wisdom-guided AI advisor at River, and consultant who has worked with clients includ...
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This week’s guest is my friend Evan Miyazono, CEO and Director of Atlas Computing — a tech non-profit committed not to the false god of perfect alignment but to plausible strategy of provable safety. Focusing on community building, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, Evan and his colleagues are working to advance a new AI architecture that constrains and formally sp...
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What the hell is going on with culture right now? The Web is running evolution in fast-forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic, post-human, post-truth meme-play that reminds me of nothing more than the porous networked selfhood of bacterial in a molten wash of horizontal gene transfer. RIP the genre and all hail the ...
This week’s guest is Cadell Last, 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. Cadell has been the director of psychedelic research at Psirenity, a researcher at the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, a s...
This week’s guest is the singular Michael Dean, who graduated from architecture school and played in a band before spending years in tech working on virtual reality, only to metamorphose into one of the best essayists I’ve ever read. With support from Humans On The Loop supporters O’Shaughnessy Ventures and Cosmos Institute, Dean is now decoding the structure of great essays and translating his framework into both...
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