Angel Acosta: Contemplation, Healing, and AI

Angel Acosta: Contemplation, Healing, and AI

Author: Helen and Dave Edwards March 2, 2024 Duration: 43:22

We’re excited to welcome to the podcast Dr. Angel Acosta, an expert on healing-centered education and leadership. Angel runs the Acosta Institute which helps communities process trauma and build environments for people to thrive.

He also facilitates leadership programs at the Garrison Institute that support the next generation of contemplative leaders. With his background in social sciences, curriculum design, and adult education, Angel has been thinking deeply about how artificial intelligence intersects with mindfulness, social justice and education.

In our conversation, we explore how AI can help or hinder our capacity for contemplation and healing. For example, does offloading cognitive tasks to AI tools like GPT create more mental space for mindfulness? How do we ensure these technologies don’t increase anxiety and threaten our sense of self?

We also discuss the promise and perils of AI for transforming education. What roles might AI assistants play in helping educators be more present with students? How can we design assignments that account for AI without compromising learning? What would a decolonized curriculum enabled by AI look like?

And we envision more grounded, humanistic uses of rapidly evolving AI—from thinking of it as "ecological technology" interdependent with the natural world, to leveraging its pattern recognition in service of collective healing and wisdom. What guiding principles do we need for AI that enhances both efficiency and humanity? How can we consciously harness it to create the conditions for people and communities to thrive holistically?

We’d like to thank our friends at the House of Beautiful Business for sparking our relationship with Angel—we highly recommend you check out their events and join their community.

Let’s dive into our conversation with Angel Acosta.


About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards:

Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world.

We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives. 

Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world.

If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds.

Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠

Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email

Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠

Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world.

#ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 




Hosted by Helen and Dave Edwards, Stay Human, from the Artificiality Institute is a conversation that lives in the messy, human space between our tools and our selves. Each episode digs into the subtle ways artificial intelligence is reshaping our daily decisions, our creative impulses, and even our sense of identity. This isn't a technical manual or a series of futuristic predictions; it's a grounded exploration of how we maintain our agency in a world increasingly mediated by algorithms. The podcast operates from a core belief: that our engagement with AI should be about more than just safety or efficiency-it needs to be meaningful and worthwhile. You'll hear discussions rooted in story-based research, where complex ideas about cognition and ethics are unpacked through relatable narratives and real-world examples. The goal is to provide a framework for thoughtful choice, helping each of us consciously design the relationship we want with the machines in our lives. Tuning in offers a chance to step back from the hype and consider how we can actively remain the authors of our own minds, preserving what makes us uniquely human even as the technology evolves. It's an essential listen for anyone curious about the personal and philosophical dimensions of our digital age.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Stay Human, from the Artificiality Institute
Podcast Episodes
Chris Summerfield: These Strange New Minds [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:31
In this conversation, we explore machine intelligence and human understanding with Christopher Summerfield, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford and author of "These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and…
Nina Beguš: Artificial Humanities [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:07
In this conversation, we explore the cultural foundations of artificial intelligence with Nina Beguš, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and author of "Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI." N…
Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What Is Intelligence? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:05
In this conversation, we explore the nature of intelligence and life itself with Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google and head of the Paradigms of Intelligence Lab. Blaise discusses his ambitious new book "What…
Steven Sloman: The Cost of Conviction [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:46
In this conversation, we explore the psychology of conviction with Steve Sloman, Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University and advisor to the Artificiality Institute. Returning to…
Ellie Pavlick: The AI Paradigm Shift [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:49
In this conversation, we explore the foundations of artificial intelligence with Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, a Research Scientist at Google Deepmind, and Director of ARIA,…
Helen & Dave Edwards: Becoming Synthetic [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 25:04
We enjoyed giving a virtual keynote for the Autonomous Summit on December 4, 2025, titled Becoming Synthetic: What AI Is Doing To Us, Not Just For Us. We talked about our research on how to maintain human agency & cognit…
Tess Posner: AI, Creativity, and Education [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:15
In this conversation recorded on the 1,000th day since ChatGPT's launch, we explore education, creativity, and transformation with Tess Posner, founding CEO of AI4ALL. For nearly a decade—long before the current AI surge…
Eric Schwitzgebel: The Weirdness of the World [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:16
In this conversation, we explore the philosophical art of embracing uncertainty with Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at UC Riverside and author of "The Weirdness of the World." Eric's work celebrates what he c…
John Pasmore: Inclusive AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:31
In this conversation, we explore the challenges of building more inclusive AI systems with John Pasmore, founder and CEO of Latimer AI and advisor to the Artificiality Institute. Latimer represents a fundamentally differ…
De Kai: Raising AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:57
In this conversation, we explore how humans can better navigate the AI era with De Kai, pioneering researcher who built the web's first machine translation systems and whose work spawned Google Translate. Drawing on four…