🔮 Ask Future Fossils 🌱 Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I. 🎸 Three New A/V Journeys

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

Before we begin, hello! Thanks for slowing down a little bit to take this in.

Here’s me turning pro, now that “global weirding” has advanced enough to make my thoughts worth something to the c-suite:

Before the big shares let me add these two upcoming free events to your dance card:

3/29 — 🎸 Michael Garfield & Friends @ The Mystic Santa Fe (8-11 pm)

5/5 — 🦕 New Paintings @ Eye On The Mountain (Solo Show Opening Reception)

But since most of you live elsewhere, allow me to invite you to Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I. with The Emerald Podcast’s Joshua Schrei! More info down below.

And now, the main attraction…

🔮 Ask Future Fossils

My dreams came true last week when I found out about a rad new web page designed by Future Fossils Podcast listener Van Bettauer that allows you to ask MY ENTIRE PODCAST a question and get a cogent, legible short answer synthesized from over 200 episodes! Each response at AskFutureFossils.com includes numerous citations and embedded streaming clips from the most relevant moments of the show:

As most of you have learned the hard way, we can’t just replace conventional search with generative language models because LMs “hallucinate” — and because no model is a perfect representation of the real world, “hallucination is inevitable.” (In fact, we arguably don’t even want to try and eradicate hallucination from AI — it’s one of the most interesting characteristics of intelligence in any form.) But by anchoring machine-assisted summary and synthesis to auditable primary sources, we can make the most of both human expertise and automation to help us navigate the avalanche of new information that has made life in this century so incredibly confusing.

Ask Future Fossils is a dream come true — I’ve been wanting precisely this kind of tool for years, ever since a conversation with my friend Ken Adams made it clear that something had to change about how I curate my archived work. After over a decade of blogging, I found myself spending an insane amount of time just helping people find their way around on my website to the pages they’d find most interesting and relevant. “If trends continue,” the joke goes, then by 2030 I’d be spending ALL of my time acting as a tour guide through old work and NONE of my time making anything new! But this isn’t really a joke. Every one of us is dealing with this in one way or another, and as I talk about on Future Fossils all the time, it’s a huge part of why we can’t seem to harness collective intelligence to address our complex problems.

Another way of putting this is that the overproduction of Web-based content, like plastic and CO2 — and, long long before that, even oxygen and wood — demands new mechanisms for metabolizing these forms of industrial pollution and closing the feedback loops. Even this newsletter has felt like an imposition on your increasingly scarce attention for the last few years, and so I’ve been very keen on finding ways to help better structure and present my work to make it all that much more useful to you.

Well, here you have it. Does it work? Try it yourself and tell me how it goes:

The thing I love the most about this interface is how it “talks” the way I do — with rigorous hyperlinks back to source material. People often tell me that this is their favorite thing about how I think and talk and write essays and prepare show notes. It’s why I set up a Future Fossils Reading List and link diligently to all of my book mentions on the show.

But it’s not just me showing off my memory. It’s a demonstration of my commitment to a style of thinking and speaking I learned from the genius late historian William Irwin Thompson, a mode he called “Wissenskunst” — a.k.a. “knowledge art,” a rhetorical technique he described as “the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors.” Thompson believed that the 20th century’s twined, mutually reinforcing development of systems sciences and cheap computing made conventional university lectures obsolete. In its place, he saw an opportunity to embody and perform the emerging philosophy of networks by speaking in networks — dancing through what AI researchers now call the “semantic space” of correlated ideas and references. (And why not? According to neuroscientists like Dani Bassett, we think by traversing associative networks.)

Media theorist Doug Rushkoff, another major Future Fossils inspiration, uses the term “narrative collapse” to describe the effect of digital media’s information overproduction on society. Much like how the flood of dream-like imaginal experience unlocked by psychedelics can lead to ego death, connecting everything to everything else with communications networks confounds our habit of encoding information in linear sequences.

We still speak in sentences, of course…but also in GIFs, web memes, short video clips, body language, facial expressions, and now myriad other new varieties that together comprise a new syntax of transverbal, electronically-augmented language — what my friend Jamie Joyce calls “the Web-based portmanteau.” And so with spatial computing, natural language processing, gestural interfaces, data visualization and sonification, and so on we have circled back around to where we were on the prehistoric Savannah: grunting, pointing, dancing, communicating in pheromones and intense, meaningful looks. (Terence McKenna called it.)

Anyway, thank Van for somehow picking up on my intense desire for an AI oracle through which you can (FINALLY!) engage with my entire corpus. Digital archaeologists salute you, Van!

If playing with this interface inspires you, let me offer two suggestions:

1. Accept no substitutes! Hire me for consulting and advisory work. No matter how well this webpage works, it’s like listening to an mp3 instead of going to a concert. I’m glad that “I’m” accessible to wider audiences because “Michael Garfield doesn’t scale,” but — at least for now — direct engagement is by far the best (and easiest) way that you can benefit from everything I’ve learned.

2. Hire Van to build your own! Conversing with your own collected works is quite a revelation, and an awesome public good to offer other people. Last I checked, he is available to help you make one based on your own blog, etc. (Disclaimer: Your results may vary — “garbage in, garbage out,” etc. But please do try! I’d love to chat with everything you’ve ever published.)

Now that I’m done praying Machine Me doesn’t steal Meat Me’s lunch, here’s a bit about an awesome opportunity to go deep with a very insightful group of humans:

🌱 Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I.

An online co-learning journey with The Emerald Podcast’s Joshua Schrei plus me, Andrew Dunn (formerly of The Center for Humane Technology), Elena Lake Polozova (formerly of Meta), Turquoise Sound (Goodly Labs, Post Growth Institute), Mara Zapeda (co-founder, Zebras Unite), Sara Jolena Wolcott (founding director, Sequoia Samanvaya), and Evan Sharp (co-founder, Pinterest).

This course is for anyone — artists, teachers, engineers, leaders, coaches — interested in the relationship between myth, ritual, ethics, ecology, business, and technology.

Over five weeks (4/18-5/16) of talks, group discussion, and praxis sessions, you will:

• Study what diverse societies through history can teach us in the modern era about power, technology, responsibility, and living in right relation with non/human intelligences.

• Make connections and engage in stimulating discourse with dozens of kindred spirits.

• Work both alone and together to apply new insights to your life, organization, and projects.

• Develop a more grounded, curious, and proactive stance toward technological innovation.

• Exercise better solo and group sense-making for our era of exponential change.

Week 1: The Mythic Implications of AI

Week 2: Individual Initiation in the Age of AI

Week 3: Ecologies of Accountability

Week 4: Re-prioritizing Slow Growth

Week 5: Towards Embodied Intelligence

✨ Learn More & Enroll Here ✨

🎸 Three New A/V Journeys

And now, because I am insane enough to keep on making art in this economy, here are the latest offerings from the most sacred and illegible recesses of my soul! Enjoy these next three songs from my latest studio album, The Age of Reunion. I write music in the same spirit of “knowledge art” described above — as a way of encoding profound complexity, taking big ideas and even bigger feelings and compressing them down into haikus of themselves.

Here are three proggy psych-folk meditations on the longing to decelerate (Signal), the nature of time and mind (Always Catching Up), and the experience of awakening to a world of mystery and becoming (You Don’t Have To Move).

If you enjoy these, please please buy the album and leave your review.

New songs from this album coming every Wednesday until 4/24! Follow me wherever.

Thanks again for reading, listening, and caring for yourself. More soon…

“A commons demands participation, and exists as such only through the processes of its interaction.”
– Richard Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy