In this engaging conversation, K Allado-McDowell, an artist and musician who co-founded the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google, dives deep into the intersections of technology, consciousness, and identity. They discuss how AI can transform selfhood, likening its impact to psychedelics. The conversation highlights the role of community in ethical tech and creativity, while examining how neural media shapes our identity and storytelling. K reflects on their esoteric journey, urging a holistic understanding of existence in our increasingly technological world.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Focus Attention
Pay attention to where your attention is directed to understand your growth and identity. This self-observation is crucial for personal development and awareness of external influences.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Personal Journey
K Allado-McDowell shares their early life, marked by a premature birth and subsequent spiritual awakening. This shaped their creative practice and understanding of identity and existence.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Engage Intentionally with Media
Approach media ecosystems with intention and care, akin to consuming poisons in a structured ritual. This helps maintain agency and health amidst overwhelming influences.
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Jacques Vallée's "The Invisible College" explores the connections between UFOs and other unexplained phenomena, suggesting a pattern of deception and manipulation. The book challenges conventional explanations and proposes a more complex, multi-faceted interpretation of UFO sightings. Vallée's work emphasizes the need for rigorous investigation and critical thinking, questioning the assumptions underlying many UFO investigations. He argues that the phenomenon is far more intricate than simply extraterrestrial visitation, encompassing a range of social, psychological, and even occult elements. The book remains a significant contribution to the field of UFO studies, prompting further research and debate.
The Spell of the Sensuous
Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
David Abram
In this major work of ecological philosophy, David Abram draws on diverse sources including the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as a magician to reveal the intricate relationship between human perception and the natural world. The book delves into the character of perception and the sensual foundations of language, highlighting how even abstract language echoes the natural world. Abram argues that humans have severed their ancient reciprocity with nature and explores what it would take to recover a sustaining relation with the earth.
One River
Wade Davis
This book combines history, politics, science, botany, and culture through a biographical account of Wade Davis' own travels and as a memoir to his late mentor, Richard Evans Schultes. It documents their journeys and discoveries in the Amazon, focusing on the botanical secrets of coca and the cultural significance of the region. The narrative intertwines Davis' experiences in the 1970s with Schultes' adventures in the 1940s, highlighting their immersion in the lives of Amazonian tribes and the extraordinary plants that sustain life in the forest.
Moonbound
Robin Sloan
Pharmako-AI
Pharmako-AI
K Allado-McDowell
Pharmako-AI is a book that delves into the realms of human-machine interaction, technological animism, and entheogenic futurism. It is the first book published in collaboration with the large language model GPT-3 and serves as a follow-up to the author's subsequent work, Air Age Blueprint. The book reflects on the entanglement of multiple systems and hybrid environments, inviting readers to consider the implications of advanced technologies on human society and creativity.
This week we speak with K Allado-McDowell, artist, musician, and co-founder of the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google. K pioneered human-computer co-authorship with the book Pharmako-AI, as well as Air Age Blueprint, Amor Cringe, and the graphic novel Outside, plus works in opera and ritual. Their work reveals the human as inherently relational and ecological, technology as something nature’s doing, and the new vistas made legible by technology as a fertile zone within which we can redefine identity and story from a radically transformed awareness. Pharmako-AI, the first book to be co-written with GPT-3 in 2020, sets the tone: mutually interdependent co-arising of selfhood through linguistic interactions between animal, vegetable, and mineral intelligences, AI as an adjunct to our awakening sense of co-imbrication in and as a plural and evolving world.
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Humans On The Loop 
