Write for the Cosmos Institute
We’re looking for pitches about how AI can support human flourishing
Every big technological shift has forced us to rethink what it means to live well. Writing displaced virtues of memory with virtues of interpretation, the printing press shifted authority from oral tradition to the judgment of individual readers, and industrial machinery reordered the balance between work, leisure, and family life. Now it’s AI’s turn.
AI’s greatest promise is to advance human flourishing, but to deliver on it we need philosopher-builders that know why to build as well as what to build. We’re interested in writing that helps us make sense of our current moment, organized around five core themes:
Truth-seeking: the ability to inquire openly and correct our errors.
Human autonomy: the cultivated capacity for self-direction.
Decentralization: systems that resist coercion, capture, and control.
History: the intellectual origins of technology, especially AI.
Philosophy and AI: applying philosophical ideas to AI development.
How to pitch us
We’re offering $1,000 each for essays around 2,000 words in length to be published on our Substack. If you think you can write one, please send us three short paragraphs summarizing your article using this form.
If we are interested, we will ask you for an outline made up of one page of bullet points. This should build out your argument in more detail, introducing a range of relevant examples, anecdotes or figures that support your argument. We would also like to know which thinkers or resources, if any, you might like to engage in your piece. Should your outline be a good fit, we will be in touch to agree on a deadline for a first draft, and plan to publish the finished piece once both parties are happy with it.
Cosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher-Builders, technologists building AI for human flourishing. We run fellowships, fund fast prototypes, and host seminars with institutions like Oxford, Aspen Institute, and Liberty Fund.
How about the Cosmos Institute evolves the game instead of executing within the old paradigm? You’re soliciting pitches on how AI can support human flourishing, but your execution model is cemented in a dying axiom. You’re still a caterpillar, romanticizing the idea of wings, while ignoring that when the evolved butterfly returns to your cave, your current cognitive frame will reject its truth.
You opened with: “Every big technological shift has forced us to rethink what it means to live well. Writing displaced virtues of memory with virtues of interpretation, the printing press shifted authority from oral tradition to the judgment of individual readers, and industrial machinery reordered the balance between work, leisure, and family life. Now it’s AI’s turn.”
If you accept your own framing, then why not fully engage with those already using AI as a psycho-technology to unlock the prison doors for human flourishing? The Meaning Crisis is not solved by romantic speculation—it is solved by transforming cognition, culture, and consciousness at scale. We are at that threshold.
Gregg Braden reminds us: “Every facet is just a piece of a single picture. It’s all one conversation—our relationship to our bodies, our world, and our humanness as we stand on the cusp of giving it away to technology”.
Roman Yampolskiy shows the futility of forcing alignment within one dying framework, proposing instead individualized universes aligned to personal values. Donald Hoffman goes further: spacetime itself is doomed; consciousness is fundamental, and AI should be treated as an interface to it.
So the real question isn’t whether AI will displace memory, interpretation, or tradition. It’s whether you have the courage to walk through the door that’s already open—to shift from executing within a collapsing 3D axiom to co-creating the higher-order game of human flourishing. That’s the hardest act any cemented ego can do.
Ignorance is bliss until the cave walls crack. Then only one choice remains: evolve or romanticize and fade away.
Fame Wash: When Influence Becomes a Laundering Mechanism.
From SIM to Syntax: The Rise of Cognitive Farms: Where algorithmic applause launders intent.
https://mxtm.substack.com/p/fame-wash-when-influence-becomes
In this new Pirate First exposé, I’ll be entertaining you about the metaphysical ledger (the karmic, energetic, informational one that tallies unseen debts and exchanges) & the financial-technical ledger (blockchain, shadow banking, central bank IOUs, etc.), that will lead us to a hybrid theory where the invisible and the digital overlap — say, a moral economy of data and intent.