Michael Garfield

This read from @michaelgarfield.bsky.social unsettled me when I first came across it in 2020. Keeps on aging really well

michaelgarfield.medium.com/the-future-i...

🙏🏼

Maybe something like "for a large class of Markov decision processes q-function is exponentially difficult to compute even when the reward function is not" = "pragmatics has one up on causal theory building" or "we're not getting rid of the induction problem"

Chaim Gingold on Building Sim City & Simulation as Discourse We live in abstractions. What makes some better than others?

The story of #SimCity is the story of the world we live in—of the entanglement of computing, entertainment, design, & governance. And where it succeeded—and failed—teaches us how to navigate maps that become territories...

@chaimg.bsky.social on #HumansOnTheLoop:
michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-23

🌿 Foraging in High-Dimensional Data My talk from the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2025 on how we can draw from thinking in complex systems science and game design to heal our relationship to the Web.

Thinking a/b an AI-enriched world that actually benefits humans & how it'll help us explore, not just get tube-fed by algorithms. Here's my talk from @divintelligence.bsky.social on how complex systems science & game design inspired me to imagine this future:

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/foraging

YouTube video by Like Stories of Old This is Hollywood's Liberal Fantasy, and it's Falling Apart

Beautiful, and very well-timed. Reactionary preservation of the status quo is not enough. Conviction must be met with action. Are we afraid to dream of better futures? There is such a thing as good ambition.

youtu.be/sJjODY-PyJY?...

Of course that might come off as basically Thomas Pynchon

I would love to see an early 20th Century Lovecraftian prequel to Accelerando where the Vile Offspring are corporations, as implied by @cshalizi.bsky.social in this legendary blog post:

bactra.org/weblog/699.h...

In that sense, AI already kicked people out of most of the best jobs decades or centuries ago. Now everyone just serves the big machine, and we are fighting over who gets to keep working in some bunk industry instead of for the capacity to take care of ourselves without oppressive superstructures.

Definitely. And this has been going on for a long time. The only way this is an "AI unemployment" issue is if you consider the inhuman aggregations of industrial modernity a form of AI (which I do, and think people should, because it affords much clearer thinking about the alignment problem).

Thanks! And they had it going on.

Post deleted? Ah well.

I wish I had known that before writing this! Worth inclusion.

I’m not quite sure what to think about this conceptual, aesthetic and philosophical exploration of crab-ness, but it reminds me of how Le Corbusier was inspired to pioneer the development of brutalist architecture after looking at a crab shell.

<developing an inexplicable dread of drawn butter and Old Bay>

this rules

Have we considered the problem isn't impending loss of jobs but existing loss of availability for meaningful work because of jobs

The long-awaited (first draft written *last AUGUST*) debut at @aeon.co is here! Probably my most comprehensive and audacious statement on human-technology evolution published anywhere to date. Detours through sci-fi, memeology, military and natural history, and more.

Ah right on! Yeah, that was a good run. Sorry to miss you! Hit me up any time. Still in the game, just not there.

Indeed! 😇 But the bastards locked my QR code. Who are you and what are you doing in Santa Fe?

John Lilly's Reality Protocols, 1977, reproduced in Diana Reed Slattery’s Xenolinguistics, 2015, Chapter 5: Reality Reviewed (which alone is worth the price of the book)

William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth (1973) p151

Self-Actualization in the Global Brain with Cadell Last of Philosophy Portal A guide to staying human and becoming ungovernable in the midst of the Singularity

Jamming with Cadell Last on self-actualization and transformation in our age of magical technologies — how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity, a an argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value.

#HumansOnTheLoop

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-18

☯ Why Should "I Contain Multitudes"? On making peace with paradox as we turn and face the strangeness of AI.

If you’re attached to “being more than a machine”, consider that the difference between you and a next-token prediction algorithm might be 4B years of improv practice.

Then again, it’s very hard to pivot from a story that you think you are.

Part Two:

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/hotl-10

🦋 What Is "Being More Than A Machine"? On perspectives on perspectives, and why it matters to tech ethics.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” in Esquire (1936)

Part one of a new series on containing paradox:

michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/hotl-09

2025 be like

The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean Humans On The Loop Episode 17

The Architecture of The Next Creative Economy with Michael Dean

open.substack.com/pub/michaelg...

Determinism, Causality + Emergence in the Mesoscale

At Babel Blog is a summary of subthreads on implications for causality, determinism + emergence of spacetime, potentially following from the intersection of Wheeler’s it from bit, Jim’s common now and my work.

jessicaflack.wordpress.com/blog/

Fish rot from the head, but a snake eats from the tail up to keep the prey breathing and avoid getting bitten.

This is a political analogy.

"Science hides a not-knowing in a knowing."

New ep of #HumansOnTheLoop on #ScaleTheory and the tension between colonialism and mysticism in #science and #philosophy, the #magic of #computers, the #embodiment of information, and the wickedness of #complexsystems:

michaelgarfield.substack.com/h-15