Humans On The Loop: Wisdom for an Age of Magical Technologies
by Michael Garfield
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 www.humansontheloop.com
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Episodes
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What Buddhist Epistemology Teaches Us about The Future of AI
For Part Two in our Continual Learning mini-series, Dr. Nadav Amir of The University of Ottowa joins me and guest co-host Dr. Adam Safron of Tufts University for a trialogue on the fundamental role of goals in intelligence. Nadav draws on behavioral neuroscience, Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti,...
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Continual Learning: World Models in Natural & Artificial Intelligence with Adam Safron
What does it actually mean for a machine to “understand” the world? Are today’s auto-regressive LLMs truly reasoning, or is statistical text prediction fundamentally distinct from genuine deliberative agency and causal inference? And how do we move away from brittle, post-hoc safety patches…
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Visionary Ventures & The AI-Native Avant-Garde with William Morgan of Restless Egg
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…
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Rewilding Collective Attention: Bioregional Design for Life Online with Andrea Farias
✨ 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…
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Games & Metrics: Agency as Art & Artifice with C. Thi Nguyen
✨ 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...
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Collective Futurecrafting: Play, Trauma, and The Duty of Care with Mathew Mytka
✨ 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,...
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Neuroscience in Hyperspace with Andrew Gallimore
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...
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(Re)Building Trustworthy Institutions with Nathan Kinch
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...
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AI Doesn't Have To Be This Way feat. Alex Komoroske
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…
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Fostering "Prodigies of Uncertainty" with Layman Pascal
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...
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Becoming Hyperhuman with Carl Hayden Smith
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...
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Co-Intelligence & Planetary Perspectives with Rimma Boshernitsan of DIALOGUE
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Discord | FB Group 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,...
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Co-Evolving with Magical Technologies feat. Sam Arbesman
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts ✨ 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...
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Holistic Technology for Growing a World in Love with Larry Muhlstein
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts 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...
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Taryn Southern on Surfing the Exponential Tech Tsunami
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts 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...
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Chaim Gingold on Building SimCity & Simulation as Discourse
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts 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...
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Culture, Consciousness, and the Second Renaissance with Rufus Pollock
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts 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…
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Lessons from a Metamodern AI Shaman with George Pór
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts 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...
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Design for Provably Safe AI with Evan Miyazono
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts 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,...
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Religions of the Future & The New Monstrous with Rina Nicolae
Membership | Donations | Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts 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...
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Self-Actualization in the Global Brain with Cadell Last of Philosophy Portal
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...
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The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean
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...
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The Art & Technology of Conversation with Robert Poynton
“When I have a rich, powerful, mind expanding, mind bending conversation like this, I'll need to go and lie down in darkened room afterwards.”– Robert Poynton This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration Robert Poynton, Founder of Yellow Learning, Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at...
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Scale Theory: Contemplating Everything-At-Onceness with Joshua DiCaglio
This week’s guest my friend Joshua DiCaglio, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and author of the fabulous Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry. It’s a book bout how contemplating scale can transform us — how it’s one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through...
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Jim O'Shaughnessy on Creativity, Crisis, and Trust as The Fabric of Society
This week Jim O’Shaughnessy (Website | X) joins Humans On The Loop to carry our first on-record conversation on Infinite Loops into bold new terrains! Jim is one of the most renowned investors and asset managers of all the time and the author of several hugely best-selling and influential books…
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Aishwarya Khanduja on Living Inquiry & Fostering Imagination
Where do we need boundaries, and where do we need flows? And how can we ensure that we can redistribute them according to the changing needs of any given moment? These are the kinds of questions I would ask if I were trying to meta-solve a meta-crisis, and this is why I’m glad to share this...
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Matt Segall on Culture as The Lifeblood of The Machine Economy
This week I dialogue with Matthew David Segall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute, and author of the Footnotes To Plato blog as well as numerous books on…
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Andrew McLuhan on Needling The Somnambulists about How We've Never Been Autonomous
This week on Humans On The Loop I welcome Andrew McLuhan, author, teacher, and Director of The McLuhan Institute, a generational ark for media theory in a world that desperately needs more help understanding the relationships between our tools, our minds, and our society. Subscribe, Rate, &…
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J.F. Martel on Machines vs. Fractals, Black Box Personhood, and Navigating The AI Fairy Tale
Halfway through one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Charles Stross’ Accelerando, we tune in to the members of an interstellar first contact mission as they pass the time debating whether the Technological Singularity has happened yet. Spoiler alert: all of them are uploaded minds appearing in a...
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Adah Parris on Neurodivergent Cyborg Shamans & Elemental Tech Ethics
Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way). About This Episode This week we speak with “strategic futurist...
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Howard Rheingold on Lucid Life Online & Attention As A 21st Century Literacy
Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • Spotify If you value this series, please consider becoming a patron here on Substack or with tax-deductible donations at every.org/humansontheloop (you’ll get perks either way). Our next members hangout will be Saturday Feb 15th at 3 pm...
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Jessica Clark on Making New Realities with New Media
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week I speak with author, futurist, and strategist Jessica Clark of Dot Connector Studio. Jessica has honed her skills for decades on a path that’s carried her from AAAS to The Library of Congress to The Encyclopedia Britannica…
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New Selves of Neural Media & AI as 'The Poison Path' with K Allado-McDowell
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week we speak with K Allado-McDowell, artist, musician, and co-founder of the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google. K pioneered human-computer co-authorship with the book Pharmako-AI, as well as Air Age Blueprint…
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Futures Indistinguishable from Magic with Robin Sloan
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel Moonbound, one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, and…
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Transcending (and Including) Partisan Debate with Stephanie Lepp
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week I speak with my friend Stephanie Lepp (Website | LinkedIn), two-time Webby Award-winning producer and storyteller devoted to leaving “no insight left behind” with playful and provocative media experiments that challenge our...
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Mycopunk Community Coordination with Christina Bowen of Socialroots
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist Christina Bowen. If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina is CEO and co-founder of socialroots.io, an NSF- and Omidyar Network-funded...
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The Inner Life of a Responsible Tech Practitioner with Benjamin Olsen
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts When technology gets byzantine, when the heady early years of cybernetic mysticism give way and our software engineers become the new priests of the Catholic institutions of Big Tech, maybe we can learn a thing or two from a…
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Reclaiming Attention from 'The Ravenous Maw of The Screen' with Richard Doyle
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts When, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course...
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📚🧙🏼♂️🦾 232 - Myth & Magic in Technological Metamodernism
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ About This Episode “The best academic lecture/slam poetry/sermon/magical invocation/attunement and invitation to engage I’ve experienced in a long while.”– Daniel Lindenbarger Next week, after nearly nine years of development, this...
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⏳🎨🔮 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-Time
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ Support & Participate ✨ About This Episode In this penultimate episode of Future Fossils before we transform into Humans On The Loop, I bring two of my favorite guests and comrades in the so-called “Weirdosphere” back for their...
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🐦⬛🐙🖤 230 - Jamie Curcio on Living in Mythpunk, Eldritch Complexity, and Finding The Bright Side of Dark Ages
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week I talk with Jamie Curcio to ask, whom do we serve? Who gives us power, and to whom do we give ours? Where does that power come from? To whom do we sell our stories? We explore the world behind the world, linking Jamie’s...
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👾🖼️🏯 229 - Sara Phinn Huntley on Making A Field Guide to DMT Entities
Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts This week on Future Fossils I welcome back Sara Phinn Huntley (help her fight cancer!), a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher who has spent the last two decades exploring the intersection of psychedelics,...
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🧬🕰️⚗️ 228 - William Sarill on Intuition in Science & The Physics of Philip K. Dick
This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I’m stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the…
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🎙️🖇️🕸️ 227 - MG + Tim Adalin of Voicecraft: Network Philosophy, Caring Organizations, & Wiser Innovation
This week on Future Fossils, I meet with the wonderful Tim Adalin of Voicecraft. Watch us get to know each other a little bit better on a swapcast (his edit here) that throws a long loop around the world. Tim is precisely the kind of thoughtful investigator I love to encounter in conversation....
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📚🧐🦾 226 - Stephen Reid on Technological Metamodernism
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ About This Episode How can we design virtuous technologies while acknowledging the complexity and unintended consequences of technological innovation? How can we foster curiosity, playfulness, and wonder in a world increasingly...
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🤰🏽🧐🕸️ 225 - Alyssa Allegretti on Sacred Domesticity and Hard Times in The Liminal Web
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ About This Episode If you’re wondering why this episode came later than I promised, well…look no further than the text and subtext of this very rich discussion: it ain’t easy being a scholar when your kids keep banging down the…
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🔍👁️🔮 224 - Helané Wahbeh of IONS on Arguments against Materialism and for New Theories of Consciousness
Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ About This Episode This week on Future Fossils we speak with Helané Wahbeh (LinkedIn), Director of Research at The Institute of Noetic Sciences, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon...
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🔥🌎💒 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking Blasphemy
Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ About This Episode The world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do…
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👾🍄🧮 222 - Andrés Goméz Emilsson on Psychedelic Computer Science & The Mathematics of Consciousness
Now also on YouTube! In this episode we’re joined by Andrés Goméz Emilsson, President and Director of Research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), with whom we go deep on their computational approach to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the psychedelic experience — and thereby…
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📯💗🌌 221 - Tom Morgan on Answering The Call of Destiny & Love As An Attractor
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really…
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About this show
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
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