Michael Garfield
Michael Garfield is a writer and artist focused on transdisciplinary research into the evolutionary history and future of intelligence. He is a co-founder at Atlas Research Group — which builds high-dimensional sensemaking tools on sovereign, commons-oriented infrastructure — and the award-winning host of Humans on the Loop. He has worked with the Santa Fe Institute, Long Now Foundation, Mozilla, and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Session
Research on the transition from bacterial to nucleated life reveals a universal pattern: as systems grow complex enough, the sensemaking layer stops being overhead and becomes the majority of the organism. This talk argues that the same inversion is now underway in the economy, and that the DWeb ecosystem is constructing the infrastructure through which we can reward meaningful work and prevent model collapse at civilizational scale.