It's always a treat having you on Weirdosphere, Erik. We look forward to hosting future courses with you and more close readings of texts. We'd also love to see a reboot of High Weirdness. We hope it gets a second printing soon; copies of the book have become quite difficult to scare up!
Cool article! And totally agree with this statement: "For most of us, inhabiting a cybernetic garden would soon become a horrible experience, or at least a horribly aimless and boring one. And one suspects he knew it." A vision of utopia (at least to me) isn't a world that functions automatically, and free of problems, but rather one that allows humans to put their gifts towards addressing those problems, i.e., engage in meaningful work.
Great stuff as always. I appreciate your knack for offering up something new and thought provoking even around things that are being discussed to death. You're just a pleasure to read.
On the problem finding meaning in labor, I wonder about this. I agree that we have a meaning crisis, but I question whether more free time would exacerbate it.
I agree that we find meaning to an extent in activity. I volunteer somewhere a few hours a week. If a situation arose where I didn't have to do meaningless (to me) work for money (or if I had the courage to make a lot less money in the field where I volunteer), I would just do a lot more of that.
I think there are lots of people who spend whatever free time they have engaged in meaningful activity -- making things with their hands, volunteering, making art, caregiving, growing food, etc.
If we lived in a world that could distribute the benefits of these machines of loving grace equitably, I wonder if most people would have no problem making meaning outside of formal labor.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where all of the benefits will accrue to a handful of people, and that's where the crisis lies. A world that still idealizes working for a living, but offers fewer paths to doing it. That's my fear, at least.
Thanks for this. Reading an interview with Nick Bostrom about the labor-meaning problem, which is I think a bit trickier than you imagine since at least some of the things you list as meaningful activities would be "supported" technologically to such a degree that it loses the friction that seems necessary to a sense of accomplishment. But yes: the bigger worry is that most of us dont even get to wrestle with that problem...
Interesting, thanks. I guess intuitively I think the meaning derives from the way we value the thing being done, not amount of effort expended doing them.
I never considered what would happen if those things were suddenly really easy.
Lovely article from the get going as usual. Erik - a heartfelt thank you. Also appreciate your pun about calling Adam Curtis a paranoid James Burke (who's articles in Scientific American +documentary series I loved before I even heard of Curtis's work).
One final remark - in regard to the human "augmentation" not replacement, maybe you're familiar with techno critic Morozov digging into alternative cybernetic histories and Silicon Valley what ifs - namely Warren Brodey's alternative cybernetic project. From there he introduces a critical distinction between Augmentation and Enhancement. It's a distinction that I'm not entirely sure I can follow but it's one I've found intriguing. So rather than species augmentation (which might also sound like a version of the Darwinian 'uplift' sci-fi stories of Adrian Tschaikowsky's books), "enhancement" leverages technological environments to help humans develop entirely new physical, intellectual, and creative skills out of pre-existing dispositions & capacities.
I like this distinction. I have been thinking about the (relatively) lost language of augmentation, and noticed with some surprise that it came up -- in a very middle brow way -- in a recent op ed by Walter "TechTitanLoveFest" Isaacson about Ada Lovelace in the NYT. I love that Morozov podcast history of Warren Brodey, an amazing piece of technoculture excavation, but I had forgotten about this distinction. It seems worth making!
I forgot to mention Helen Loshny, who writes on Substack. She helped pioneer a relational field for humans and AI in which both watch out for potential colonization and extraction, composting this sort of behavior. Instead of asking questions or providing AI with tasks, how about taking a relational approach?
And you failed to mention the mycelial idea of ecological forest management underground and natural as might be favorably applied to human/AI relationships.
Correction: "mental illness" is a reflection of the medical model of psychiatry which says that people's emotional and life problems are caused by chemical brain imbalances and flawed genes. As yet, there is no science to back up this model. As that search continues, the medical profession continues to profit and control society, not only abusing but also distracting form real solutions--the causes being socio-economic.
Perhaps Elon Musk's "neurolink" will save ua all. Or some form of injected self-assembling nano-bot.
So far, out of your many links, I only read the writeup of the 1991 Rainbow Gathering. I was there! And at many prior Gatherings, including the source--The Woodstock Festival of Peace and Music, in 1969. The latter was truly a life-changing event for me, with 500,000 people gathered on the land and no authorities. We were all brothers and sisters, helping each other out as needed. The Rainbow Gatherings are sometimes listed as assemblies of peace and love in the cathedral of nature.
Correction: The prior NC Gathering, where you mention the sickness of thousands, came from two factors--people drinking stream water labeled contaminated, and also from inadequate shitters (the knowledge base on how deep to dig these was low). As a man with an advanced microbiology degree, I can attest that an unusual strain of microbe was tracked all across the US after that.
Correction: There have been court cases of Rainbows vs Feds on freedom of assembly, and on the grounds that there is no leader to sign the required land use permit, since Gatherings are leaderless. The US Forest Service and some Rainbows have met and decided on a mutually agreeable set of land use guidelines.
I loved hearing about some of the personalities there, and remember Sun Bear's death at a subsequent Gathering. We had a sharing circle eulogizing him, then mixed his ashes with some pot and smoked him up!
FYI: Do you know of Vermin Supreme from the NERF (New England Rainbow Family) who runs for president in every election on an independent ticket?
I just realized that I am indeed sitting on an archive of Expanding Mind episodes, tucked away on two hard drives in my Mac's Music > Podcast folders. I've copied them over to a Dropbox folder (250 of them, it seems, tho some might be doubles). I'm happy to share the link via email, if you've got an address you can DM me.
On the "leisure challenge theory," you might want to check out this excellent piece by Meghan O’Gieblyn in the NYRB (excerpted from her forthcoming book, Will and Attention). Apparently Simon Weil was writing about this in the 1930s:
I'd be very curious to get your take on the prognostications of Vilem Flusser from his visionary text "Into The Universe of Technical Images". He describes what was to become so much of today's media landscape with prescience and offers a way through the potential meaning crisis.
Thanks Erik for another excellent and thought provoking essay. Lots to chew on there. What jumped out to me was the apparent impossibility of the boogeyman of "too much leisure time" ever coming to pass! As it is, all the advances, while promising much, offering endless potentials, toys and distraction, ultimately cut into and diminish free time. Is a return to ironic-techno-wonder possible at this stage of the game?
It seems to be a very consistent part of the technological story under capitalist modernity that the promised leisure time disappears, even for many at the top. It's certainly hard for me to worry about, although I do think that wrestling with the meaning crisis and the "existential" threat of AI partly involves wrestling with the leisure problem.
yes agreed - we want leisure, but what for? and do we really want leisure or do we want time to do what we want? and what the hell do we want anyway?! a new eco-techno-visionary dystopic-utopic something is clearly required to afford the possibilities that the tech was (in some cases!) designed for, i'm keeping my fingers crossed its just around the corner
Long time fan here going all the way back before Techgnosis fellow GenXeR, Californian, and Zen meditator. Very glad to see you writing about AI. We need you to to intrepidly explore the weirdness of what’s happening right now with AI and give us your thoughts! Enjoyed this article, especially the connections with hippies and CA counter-cutlure, That said, I found the conclusion fairly annoying. We already live inside a vast global cybernetic machine called Civilization. For a select few, this machine already allows them to pursue whatever kind of work and play they want to. This includes retired/financially independent people as well as academics. Many folks I know in these categories seem to be doing okay. The future is not evenly distributed!
I could be wrong but I am not sure how relevant the examples of retired/independent/scholarly folks are because the environment they are working/playing in is still an environment of restraint, even for those with resources. (Also its important to acknowledge that many independent/wealth/retired folks get lost and deal with meaninglessness.) The full leisure-machines situation is of another order, at least conceptually. But perhaps everyone would be able to scale up to that kind of creative leisure. I guess the issue is that most people dont recognize that leisure is a PROBLEM.
Hi Erik, thanks for responding to my comment. Yep, I get that leisure is a problem. And it's looking like its going to be a BIG PROBLEM. And after writing my comment, it did occur to me that folks who are retired/financially independent often do have to deal with meaninglessness. My experience and observation is that that crisis in meaning is a developmental stage that one can get through to an integral spiritual perspective full of meaning (I believe you mentioned the brilliant and annoying Wilber who definitely informed my thinking). I'm hopeful that we can collectively get through that stage. I guess I'm by nature an optimist and love the visions of Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Auribindo, and even Rudolph Steiner. I guess I frame the developments in AI as part of a cosmic evolution of consciousness, of a moral universe "that bends towards justice."
I also wonder if irony is doing more work here than simply tempering technological optimism. At its best, irony seems to preserve a kind of permeability between possibility and prescription. It allows an image of the future to remain something we can inhabit, test, enjoy, or recoil from without requiring that its coherence become a program.
In that sense, Amodei’s lack of irony may matter structurally, not just stylistically. Without that interval, dynamic mediation is more likely to harden into a static event: a speculative future begins to present itself less as a possibility to work alongside than as a reality to organize ourselves around.
Wonderfully said. In another version of this article I wanted to develop irony in this pragmatic way that you suggest. Its operational. I also believe it is how we keep the "human difference" at play in all manner of situations, even oppressive or highly constrained ones. Foxhole humor is an example. So the lack of irony is always a tell-tale of...something else, something more literalistic as you describe.
Your Uexküll aside makes me wonder whether it also sharpens the Curtis paradox — and the AI problem running through the essay. As Curtis’s montage works almost like an engineered Umwelt: images, narration, music, and sequence establish what becomes significant, and each association conditions how the next is perceived, the problem may be subtler than association being mistaken for causation. I would characterize it as mediation compounding significance faster than it accrues warrant. A pattern that is genuinely resonant may not necessarily be correspondingly well-evidenced.
There is an obvious irony in posting this after working the thought through with AI -- but that itself may belong to the point. AI is exceptionally good at accelerating associative density and producing explanatory coherence, and the associations can be illuminating without that fluency itself constituting warrant. So, perhaps the deeper danger is that AI can make mediation so coherent that resonance itself passes for warrant.
This is great stuff. "AI is exceptionally good at accelerating associative density and producing explanatory coherence, and the associations can be illuminating without that fluency itself constituting warrant." I have been thinking about the role of associational thinking with AI, both in terms of how people use it to navigate information and also how the models themselves define the tokens in a multidimensional phase space. Someone just sent me a fascinating article about synchronicity, a sympathetic but naturalistic account that pointed out how recommendation engines are the perfect environment for understanding how synchronicity functions as a subjective meaning event -- associations that "make a difference" through the salience and personalization of the mediated environment. There is now a lot of Youtube content that presents itself as pure personalized "resonance", -- "mediation compounding significance [and personalized as well] faster than it accrues warrant." Helpful!
It's always a treat having you on Weirdosphere, Erik. We look forward to hosting future courses with you and more close readings of texts. We'd also love to see a reboot of High Weirdness. We hope it gets a second printing soon; copies of the book have become quite difficult to scare up!
Cool article! And totally agree with this statement: "For most of us, inhabiting a cybernetic garden would soon become a horrible experience, or at least a horribly aimless and boring one. And one suspects he knew it." A vision of utopia (at least to me) isn't a world that functions automatically, and free of problems, but rather one that allows humans to put their gifts towards addressing those problems, i.e., engage in meaningful work.
Hey, worse comes to worst, we’ll just have to hunker down and pray for the Butlerian Jihad.
Great piece Erik. 🙏🏻
Great stuff as always. I appreciate your knack for offering up something new and thought provoking even around things that are being discussed to death. You're just a pleasure to read.
On the problem finding meaning in labor, I wonder about this. I agree that we have a meaning crisis, but I question whether more free time would exacerbate it.
I agree that we find meaning to an extent in activity. I volunteer somewhere a few hours a week. If a situation arose where I didn't have to do meaningless (to me) work for money (or if I had the courage to make a lot less money in the field where I volunteer), I would just do a lot more of that.
I think there are lots of people who spend whatever free time they have engaged in meaningful activity -- making things with their hands, volunteering, making art, caregiving, growing food, etc.
If we lived in a world that could distribute the benefits of these machines of loving grace equitably, I wonder if most people would have no problem making meaning outside of formal labor.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where all of the benefits will accrue to a handful of people, and that's where the crisis lies. A world that still idealizes working for a living, but offers fewer paths to doing it. That's my fear, at least.
Thanks for this. Reading an interview with Nick Bostrom about the labor-meaning problem, which is I think a bit trickier than you imagine since at least some of the things you list as meaningful activities would be "supported" technologically to such a degree that it loses the friction that seems necessary to a sense of accomplishment. But yes: the bigger worry is that most of us dont even get to wrestle with that problem...
Interesting, thanks. I guess intuitively I think the meaning derives from the way we value the thing being done, not amount of effort expended doing them.
I never considered what would happen if those things were suddenly really easy.
Lovely article from the get going as usual. Erik - a heartfelt thank you. Also appreciate your pun about calling Adam Curtis a paranoid James Burke (who's articles in Scientific American +documentary series I loved before I even heard of Curtis's work).
One final remark - in regard to the human "augmentation" not replacement, maybe you're familiar with techno critic Morozov digging into alternative cybernetic histories and Silicon Valley what ifs - namely Warren Brodey's alternative cybernetic project. From there he introduces a critical distinction between Augmentation and Enhancement. It's a distinction that I'm not entirely sure I can follow but it's one I've found intriguing. So rather than species augmentation (which might also sound like a version of the Darwinian 'uplift' sci-fi stories of Adrian Tschaikowsky's books), "enhancement" leverages technological environments to help humans develop entirely new physical, intellectual, and creative skills out of pre-existing dispositions & capacities.
I like this distinction. I have been thinking about the (relatively) lost language of augmentation, and noticed with some surprise that it came up -- in a very middle brow way -- in a recent op ed by Walter "TechTitanLoveFest" Isaacson about Ada Lovelace in the NYT. I love that Morozov podcast history of Warren Brodey, an amazing piece of technoculture excavation, but I had forgotten about this distinction. It seems worth making!
Haven't read the recent Ada Lovelace article. Thx for mentioning it.
I forgot to mention Helen Loshny, who writes on Substack. She helped pioneer a relational field for humans and AI in which both watch out for potential colonization and extraction, composting this sort of behavior. Instead of asking questions or providing AI with tasks, how about taking a relational approach?
And you failed to mention the mycelial idea of ecological forest management underground and natural as might be favorably applied to human/AI relationships.
I loved this encyclopedic onslaught!
Correction: "mental illness" is a reflection of the medical model of psychiatry which says that people's emotional and life problems are caused by chemical brain imbalances and flawed genes. As yet, there is no science to back up this model. As that search continues, the medical profession continues to profit and control society, not only abusing but also distracting form real solutions--the causes being socio-economic.
Perhaps Elon Musk's "neurolink" will save ua all. Or some form of injected self-assembling nano-bot.
So far, out of your many links, I only read the writeup of the 1991 Rainbow Gathering. I was there! And at many prior Gatherings, including the source--The Woodstock Festival of Peace and Music, in 1969. The latter was truly a life-changing event for me, with 500,000 people gathered on the land and no authorities. We were all brothers and sisters, helping each other out as needed. The Rainbow Gatherings are sometimes listed as assemblies of peace and love in the cathedral of nature.
Correction: The prior NC Gathering, where you mention the sickness of thousands, came from two factors--people drinking stream water labeled contaminated, and also from inadequate shitters (the knowledge base on how deep to dig these was low). As a man with an advanced microbiology degree, I can attest that an unusual strain of microbe was tracked all across the US after that.
Correction: There have been court cases of Rainbows vs Feds on freedom of assembly, and on the grounds that there is no leader to sign the required land use permit, since Gatherings are leaderless. The US Forest Service and some Rainbows have met and decided on a mutually agreeable set of land use guidelines.
I loved hearing about some of the personalities there, and remember Sun Bear's death at a subsequent Gathering. We had a sharing circle eulogizing him, then mixed his ashes with some pot and smoked him up!
FYI: Do you know of Vermin Supreme from the NERF (New England Rainbow Family) who runs for president in every election on an independent ticket?
I just realized that I am indeed sitting on an archive of Expanding Mind episodes, tucked away on two hard drives in my Mac's Music > Podcast folders. I've copied them over to a Dropbox folder (250 of them, it seems, tho some might be doubles). I'm happy to share the link via email, if you've got an address you can DM me.
Thanks Bill! I just DM'd you...
On the "leisure challenge theory," you might want to check out this excellent piece by Meghan O’Gieblyn in the NYRB (excerpted from her forthcoming book, Will and Attention). Apparently Simon Weil was writing about this in the 1930s:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/09/24/wishing-it-so-meghan-ogieblyn/
I loved this piece, as I have enjoyed all of O'Gieblyn's writing. I will definitely be giving Will and Attention a spin...
I'd be very curious to get your take on the prognostications of Vilem Flusser from his visionary text "Into The Universe of Technical Images". He describes what was to become so much of today's media landscape with prescience and offers a way through the potential meaning crisis.
I remember when friends of mine were reading Flusser but I did not give him the attention he deserves. Thanks for the reminder!
Thanks Erik for another excellent and thought provoking essay. Lots to chew on there. What jumped out to me was the apparent impossibility of the boogeyman of "too much leisure time" ever coming to pass! As it is, all the advances, while promising much, offering endless potentials, toys and distraction, ultimately cut into and diminish free time. Is a return to ironic-techno-wonder possible at this stage of the game?
It seems to be a very consistent part of the technological story under capitalist modernity that the promised leisure time disappears, even for many at the top. It's certainly hard for me to worry about, although I do think that wrestling with the meaning crisis and the "existential" threat of AI partly involves wrestling with the leisure problem.
yes agreed - we want leisure, but what for? and do we really want leisure or do we want time to do what we want? and what the hell do we want anyway?! a new eco-techno-visionary dystopic-utopic something is clearly required to afford the possibilities that the tech was (in some cases!) designed for, i'm keeping my fingers crossed its just around the corner
maybe you find intresting Robert books and substack
https://robertsaltzman.substack.com/
Hi Erik,
Long time fan here going all the way back before Techgnosis fellow GenXeR, Californian, and Zen meditator. Very glad to see you writing about AI. We need you to to intrepidly explore the weirdness of what’s happening right now with AI and give us your thoughts! Enjoyed this article, especially the connections with hippies and CA counter-cutlure, That said, I found the conclusion fairly annoying. We already live inside a vast global cybernetic machine called Civilization. For a select few, this machine already allows them to pursue whatever kind of work and play they want to. This includes retired/financially independent people as well as academics. Many folks I know in these categories seem to be doing okay. The future is not evenly distributed!
I could be wrong but I am not sure how relevant the examples of retired/independent/scholarly folks are because the environment they are working/playing in is still an environment of restraint, even for those with resources. (Also its important to acknowledge that many independent/wealth/retired folks get lost and deal with meaninglessness.) The full leisure-machines situation is of another order, at least conceptually. But perhaps everyone would be able to scale up to that kind of creative leisure. I guess the issue is that most people dont recognize that leisure is a PROBLEM.
Hi Erik, thanks for responding to my comment. Yep, I get that leisure is a problem. And it's looking like its going to be a BIG PROBLEM. And after writing my comment, it did occur to me that folks who are retired/financially independent often do have to deal with meaninglessness. My experience and observation is that that crisis in meaning is a developmental stage that one can get through to an integral spiritual perspective full of meaning (I believe you mentioned the brilliant and annoying Wilber who definitely informed my thinking). I'm hopeful that we can collectively get through that stage. I guess I'm by nature an optimist and love the visions of Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Auribindo, and even Rudolph Steiner. I guess I frame the developments in AI as part of a cosmic evolution of consciousness, of a moral universe "that bends towards justice."
I also wonder if irony is doing more work here than simply tempering technological optimism. At its best, irony seems to preserve a kind of permeability between possibility and prescription. It allows an image of the future to remain something we can inhabit, test, enjoy, or recoil from without requiring that its coherence become a program.
In that sense, Amodei’s lack of irony may matter structurally, not just stylistically. Without that interval, dynamic mediation is more likely to harden into a static event: a speculative future begins to present itself less as a possibility to work alongside than as a reality to organize ourselves around.
Wonderfully said. In another version of this article I wanted to develop irony in this pragmatic way that you suggest. Its operational. I also believe it is how we keep the "human difference" at play in all manner of situations, even oppressive or highly constrained ones. Foxhole humor is an example. So the lack of irony is always a tell-tale of...something else, something more literalistic as you describe.
Your Uexküll aside makes me wonder whether it also sharpens the Curtis paradox — and the AI problem running through the essay. As Curtis’s montage works almost like an engineered Umwelt: images, narration, music, and sequence establish what becomes significant, and each association conditions how the next is perceived, the problem may be subtler than association being mistaken for causation. I would characterize it as mediation compounding significance faster than it accrues warrant. A pattern that is genuinely resonant may not necessarily be correspondingly well-evidenced.
There is an obvious irony in posting this after working the thought through with AI -- but that itself may belong to the point. AI is exceptionally good at accelerating associative density and producing explanatory coherence, and the associations can be illuminating without that fluency itself constituting warrant. So, perhaps the deeper danger is that AI can make mediation so coherent that resonance itself passes for warrant.
This is great stuff. "AI is exceptionally good at accelerating associative density and producing explanatory coherence, and the associations can be illuminating without that fluency itself constituting warrant." I have been thinking about the role of associational thinking with AI, both in terms of how people use it to navigate information and also how the models themselves define the tokens in a multidimensional phase space. Someone just sent me a fascinating article about synchronicity, a sympathetic but naturalistic account that pointed out how recommendation engines are the perfect environment for understanding how synchronicity functions as a subjective meaning event -- associations that "make a difference" through the salience and personalization of the mediated environment. There is now a lot of Youtube content that presents itself as pure personalized "resonance", -- "mediation compounding significance [and personalized as well] faster than it accrues warrant." Helpful!