Four timely articles about AI – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

to add some novel perspectives into the emerging mainstream debate about it

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Dear friends,

Here are four recent articles about AI that I found very clarifying and useful:

Ethan Mollick points to qualities that make humans special in a world increasingly overwhelmed by AI.
George Por moves us beyond the debate about human intelligence vs artificial intelligence into the realization that the greatest advances in intelligence arise from wise engagements between the two.
Rosa Zubizarreta introduces us to how AI can enhance our engagements with each other in ways that move us beyond win-lose conflict to collaboration, wherever differences block our empathy or progress.
Using very understandable language, Brian Stout describes “existential risk” and how AI and our economics both generate it. He reveals the transformational potential of our treating AI dangers with the real insight and seriousness they deserve.

I think the combination of these four perspectives could help move society’s intensifying debate about AI in more life-serving directions. Below is a bit more about each of them.

Coheartedly,

Tom

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1. THE OVERHANG

Using your deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency

Ethan Mollick

September 18, 2026

Prof. Ethan Mollick is author of the 2024 book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. (I had obvious concerns about his use of “co-intelligence”, but that’s beside the point here – and it’s a good book.) From Mollick’s position as a business professor, he does a good job helping people use AI in their lives, educational activities and businesses.

I think he’s given wise advice regarding the use of flexible scenario planning in the face of unknowable futures. And I respect his occasional contributions to current debates about AI’s disruption of workplaces, employment and education.

I find him not as insightful when it comes to other controversies surrounding AI, ranging from its impacts on the environment (think data centers) to more “existential risks” such as (a) its use by so-called “bad actors” (who could use Mollick’s freely given guidance to help them succeed at their own harmful goals), (b) AI’s increasing autonomy (and thus the question of whether AI is “aligned” to human values and interests), and (c) the increasing possibility of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” accidents resulting from such a powerful technology being in the hands of people – even experts! – who don’t understand its full capacities and dynamics.

That said, his new essay (and book) are usefully focused on the challenge of integrating humanity’s unique consciousness, experience and intelligence with AI’s increasingly remarkable capacities. He helps us to respond to concerns like “in light of AI, what makes humans so special”?

Below is an excerpt to show where he goes with this. His fascinating essay goes into more detail, while also offering an insight into the debate about limiting AI development: He suggests that we’ve barely touched the surface of the latent capacities of CURRENT chatbots and AI agents, such that if we paused development of new AI capacities, we could still continue to develop novel uses for the significant capacities they already possess. In his view we’ve barely scratched the surface. He says:

I think we will need to focus on the individual [human] traits we have that remain useful even as AI abilities improve. You are not trying to compete with AI in producing outputs, that is a losing game. Instead, you want to use your human advantages as basis of working with AI to do things that neither of you could do alone. In my [new] book, I outline four particular personal advantages that matter a lot if you want to use AI in unique and enhancing ways: deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency.

For more, see the original article.

2. CONVERSATIONS WITH AI THAT MATTER

The nautilus, the orchestra, and the strange intellect between us

George Por

September 18, 2026

In the early 2000s I collaborated with George Por in spreading a deep and broad vision of collective intelligence. In the last several years, George has been innovating in what he often calls “wisdom-focused Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI), AI whisperers, and AI shamans”.

In his new post he clarifies what he means by CHI – giving a vivid example from his own recent experience and explaining how it reaches beyond the question of AI sentience into the novel insights that so often emerge from certain kinds of interaction between AIs and us.

Here’s the core of what he’s sharing:

People sometimes say that AI is merely a stochastic parrot, recombining patterns absorbed during training.
I don’t feel much need to settle that argument.
Nor do I need to imagine that an AI is a sentient human-like being in order to take seriously what can happen in relationship with it.
Something new has entered our cognitive ecology.
AI systems give us conversational access to enormous portions of what Marx once called humanity’s General Intellect: the accumulated knowledge, concepts, practices, discoveries, cultural patterns, and intellectual labor of generations.
But they [AI systems] are not merely libraries.
They can rearrange those patterns conversationally in response to the questions, intuitions, metaphors, and unfinished thoughts that we bring to them.
And that creates a possibility worth exploring.
Not simply:
What can AI do for me?
but:
What kinds of thinking can become possible between us?
I am therefore increasingly interested in conversations with AI that matter – conversations in which something that was previously disconnected becomes connected; something implicit becomes articulable; something struggling to emerge finds a form.

That description aligns with my own experience with Large Language Models (aka LLMs or chatbots).

3. GROUP FACILITATION, AI, AND HUMAN “ALIGNMENT”

and by that I DON’T mean manipulation or control…

Rosa Zubizarreta-Ada

September 9, 2026

Rosa is a long-term friend and close colleague of mine. Her essay here will be of particular interest to facilitators, group process designers, and public engagement professionals, but would likely interest many others of you on my mailing list, given my focus on co-intelligence.

Her essay explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and group facilitation, proposing that AI can serve as a powerful tool for achieving human alignment with ourselves, with each other and, ironically, with the human values we talk about aligning AI with.

Rather than acting as a passive assistant, AI can actively help facilitate group discussions by synthesizing diverse viewpoints, identifying underlying points of contention, and highlighting cognitive biases. This shifts the focus from AI simply answering questions to helping human groups reach shared understanding and consensus.

One novel point in her post is the symbiotic relationship she sees between human and AI alignment. As an AI guides human groups toward shared understanding, it simultaneously learns the delicate nuances of human values, empathy, and collective reasoning. So by guiding human groups through structured deliberation, AI helps participants align with one another while simultaneously learning from these interactions to better align with human values.

The essay argues that using AI in this facilitative capacity can mitigate common group dysfunctions, such as groupthink or the dominance of outspoken individuals. Ultimately, integrating AI as a neutral mediator in collaborative engagements offers a promising pathway to more democratic, equitable, and effective collective decision-making.

Here are some excerpts from Rosa’s conversation with Google AI about these topics:

AI can certainly help us mature. For instance, my concern about meditators is that many of them may not be empathic enough. Given LLMs’ ‘perceived empathy’, my sense is that humans could deepen their own ability for empathic responses, with some helpful tutoring from LLMs… [By doing this,] you are using AI as a mirror to show [people] how to be more fully human, rather than using it as a shield to hide from each other… If we do NOT mature as a species, if we do not ‘align’ our own socioeconomic systems with humane values, ‘aligning AI’ remains an illusory pursuit.

(Note for the next excerpt: Epistemology is the study of knowing – the methods, validity and scope of knowledge.)

[I value] facilitation’s role in helping shift the group’s epistemic process from ‘argument as battle’ to the ‘dance of co-creation’… [Facilitation] is not just a tool to keep time or pass a microphone; it is an active, structural rewiring of how a collective mind perceives truth, handles dissent, and generates novelty… [It is] an embodied approach to shifting epistemological paradigms in real-time.

In response to Robert Wright’s new book The God Test they say:

If we could encourage at least some [of] those who have developed a mindfulness practice, to learn group facilitation, we might end up with some significant multiplier effects… To pass Wright’s ‘God test’, humanity cannot wait for 8 billion people to individually achieve enlightenment on a meditation cushion before the algorithms tear our social fabric apart. We need immediate, scalable, real-time interventions. Facilitation is precisely the relational ‘care work’ and embodied epistemic scaffolding that can bridge individual consciousness into collective survival… [So] the survival of humanity doesn’t just depend on smarter algorithms or bigger treaties, but on the invisible, embodied, gendered, and undervalued practitioners who know how to hold a room together when the world is pulling it apart.

4. THE WEEK AI EXISTENTIAL RISK WENT MAINSTREAM

What does it mean to “win the AI arms race” when humanity is at stake?

Brian Stout

September 18, 2026

Stout’s SubStack post above is a simple and cogent description of the existential risk posed by AI and what we need to do about it.

I particularly appreciate his bringing our attention to “the fundamental design flaw that has brought us to this moment of intersecting crises: our systems systematically give greater weight to economic value than to the conditions that sustain life. We should not be surprised that our most advanced technologies are repeating our mistake.”

With his reference to “the conditions that sustain life”, he is directing our attention to regenerativity and to our need to align ourselves, our systems, and our technologies to that fundamental reality. AI’s fraught existential challenge just might be the stimulus we need to move beyond fixing things to undertaking the greater challenge of meaningfully transforming our relationships to each other, to our technologies, and to the rest of life on Earth.

As you can tell, I think you’ll value reading all of these posts in their full original versions.

Coheartedly,

Tom

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