Designing AI to be like us is wildly unimaginative
Dave Edwards co-founded the Artificiality Institute and is a Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI. He co-founded Intelligentsia.ai with Helen, acquired by Atlantic Media in 2017.
Before that he spent years on creative tools at Apple, running software application marketing, and years on the money side as a partner at CRV, a lead technology analyst at Morgan Stanley and ThinkEquity, and head of consumer strategy at SunPower. He read history at Yale. He describes his own brain as split between designing consumer experiences and finding the right thing to measure, which is an unusual combination and the reason he can talk to both the researchers and the builders in the room.
You'll take away: a read on where this is going from someone who has spent a career spotting technology waves early, and who is more interested in what they do to people than in what they do to valuations.
Summit 2026
Saturday ·
9:00am – 10:00am
Fireside duo
The Couch (main auditorium)
What should we be designing for as technology becomes increasingly embedded in our bodies, decisions and everyday lives? A conversation across health, technology and design.
Thursday ·
7:00pm – 7:30pm
Keynote (traditional)
The Couch (main auditorium)
Friday ·
10:30am – 11:15am
Fireside solo
The Couch (main auditorium)
An Ubuntu scholar on personhood as a relation rather than a property, and what changes when you ask what a system does to relationships instead of which values it aligns to.
Thursday ·
7:30pm – 8:00pm
Fireside duo
The Couch (main auditorium)
Two of the people who helped start the modern push for human-centered AI design compare notes on what the field has learned, and what it got wrong, since they wrote the first playbook.
Thursday ·
8:00pm – 9:00pm
Panel
The Couch (main auditorium)
Whether humans and machines can ever converge on shared meaning, taken up by researchers who study how conventions form between people, between species, and now between agents.
Saturday ·
3:15pm – 4:15pm
Fireside duo
Three researchers on convention, communication and constraint, and what coordination costs when some of the participants are machines.
Friday ·
8:00pm – 8:45pm
Fireside duo
The Couch (main auditorium)
A designer, a writer and two researchers on what it takes to stay in the question when everything around you is optimized for answers.
Saturday ·
7:00pm – 7:45pm
Panel
The Couch (main auditorium)
Researchers working on representation, multi-agent systems and evaluation on the experiments that would move the field, and the ones nobody is running.
Saturday ·
7:45pm – 8:30pm
Panel
The Couch (main auditorium)
Jamer Hunt’s challenge from last year’s Summit, taken seriously, landed.
Summit 2025
Thursday ·
7:30pm
What if we told you that AI is already changing your consciousness? What begins as me using a tool quickly becomes we making sense together, and in time us dwelling in new symbolic spaces. This keynote explores what it means when consciousness itself becomes collaborative, and why today’s design choices will shape how human awareness evolves.
Watch the session
Saturday ·
7:30pm
Scaling shapes the world we share, spreading patterns of thought, design, and culture across systems and societies. Jamer Hunt and Adam Cutler join Helen and Dave to explore how scaling can become an act of imagination: what values, practices, and forms of care we choose to amplify, and how human-synthetic creativity might point toward new kinds of growth worth multiplying.
Watch the session
Summit 2024
Saturday ·
5:00pm
Enjoy some of Bend’s local food scene, get to know each other, and get started on imagining.
Watch the session