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This week: my conversation with Helen and Dave Edwards of The Artificiality Institute on how AI affects your thinking, cognitive sovereignty, and staying the author of your own mind.
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On to the show!
Deep Dive
Today, I’m sharing my conversation with Dave and Helen Edwards, co-founders of The Artificiality Institute, which helps people stay human in the age of AI. They also happen to be happily married — a fact that mattered in our conversation. Because it starts with what Helen calls an unhappily married moment. She had spent hours generating frameworks with Claude, feeling productive and energized the whole time — until Dave asked where she’d gotten to, and she couldn’t explain any of it. What happened next anchors our entire conversation.
Along the way, we cover a lot of territory:
* Helen offers three changes to watch for in yourself: blending, bonding, and bending. Blending is when you can’t quite tell which ideas are yours. Bonding is when the tool starts shaping your identity. And bending is when your frameworks for meaning-making shift, when what you believe you can become starts to change. None of these is bad on its own, she argues. But bending governs the other two because when your meaning-making shifts, it starts deciding what you notice and choose before you’re aware anything happened.
* Cognitive sovereignty, in their telling, is three practices: noticing, choosing, and showing up. Noticing is real hard — “we’re wired to automate,” as Helen put it, and metacognition is “a devil to teach.” Her practical entry point, which resonates with my own, is to notice which role you’ve put the AI in: are you asking it to frame, to catalyze, to collaborate, to take something off your plate entirely? Choosing is about keeping the stakes in view — Helen’s point is that we choose more actively when the stakes stay front of mind, and drift when they fade -- and showing up is about remaining accountable to one another.
* People with intuition for each other can do what the machine cannot. Dave’s side of the opening story is my favorite part of it. He looked at Helen’s tangle of slides and saw, in minutes, that she’d already figured it out — three dimensions, each with a high and a low, “a two by two by two” — she just hadn’t assembled it. He could see that because he knows how her mind works, the context of the presentation, and the purpose of what they were there to do. The machine had none of that context.
* Frictionlessness erodes collective intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with friction. As Helen reminds us, synthesis is thesis plus antithesis — it requires struggle, turn-taking, and what she calls “mental maps of who knows what.” Dave adds the organizational history: decades of believing all the answers were in the data created organizations that value data and technology and devalue fundamentally human work. Put individual AI silos on top of that culture and you get summarization dressed as synthesis. Not great.
* The line that matters is reducible versus irreducible. A language model works on data that is already a representation of what humans do, so the real question is what parts of work can’t be turned into a representation without losing the thing itself. So they created a tool -- The Irreducible Complexity Index -- to help measure exactly this. I’ve been playing with it this weekend and have found it super interesting -- give it a look!
For all the frameworks in this conversation — and Dave and Helen are wonderful framework-makers — every one of them resolves, in the end, into other people. Helen’s story of losing her thinking begins with a machine but turns on Dave connecting the dots. The machine had the content; Dave had the context. Even their diagnosis of what’s breaking in organizations comes down to the same thing — synthesis needs people willing to struggle with each other’s ideas, not ten tabs of AI output waiting to be summarized. The risk may live in each of our heads but the safeguard, it seems, lives between us.
The other thing I appreciated is the spirit of their whole project: none of this is inevitable. So much AI commentary asks you to pick a lane — the machines are coming for everything, or the machines will save us all — and both lanes have the same flaw, which is that there’s nothing left for you to do in them. Dave and Helen are building a third thing: vocabulary, frameworks, and a community for people who want to stay the authors of their own minds while working with these tools, not despite them.
If you want somewhere to start, borrow the test from Helen’s story: the next time you finish a stretch of work with AI and you’re feeling productive, try explaining what you made to someone close to you. Whatever happens next will tell you whether you were doing the thinking — and noticing the difference is the whole practice, in miniature.
Helen’s book, Stay Human: Authoring Your Mind in the Age of AI, is free, you just have to register. And if you want to do this thinking in a room full of people doing the same, their summit is October 22–24 in Bend, Oregon. I went last year and it’s the good kind of mind-bending.
Until next time,
Charley
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