iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Tomorrow evening in Santa Monica! Free, but registration required. events.bigthink.com/intelligence...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Surviving AI is Wednesday night in Tempe! Register here, its free: asuevents.asu.edu/event/surviv...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Come see my colleagues and I at Pickin’ in the Pines this weekend! These workshops are free to the public. We’ll be collecting data on jamming, cooperation and synchrony after the workshops from 1:30-3:30.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I’m in San Francisco today for Imagination in Action, which brings together the people actually building the future, and the conversations here are next level. imaginationinaction.co/2609sv/14

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I just released a new Substack piece, the first of a series called Cultivating Your Cooperative Intelligence: How to increase serendipity in your life, part 1. You can read it here: substack.com/@athenaaktip...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Last chance: Applications for Evolving AI fellowship close today! We're offering fully-funded fellowships for students, early-career researchers, and builders to join the first cohort! www.prosocial.world/evolving-ai

prosocial.world

Evolving AI

A Gathering to Catalyze Modern Evolutionary Thinking in the AI Community

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

ProSocial World in partnership with Cooperative Futures Institute and others, is hosting Evolving AI at Harvard this October - a gathering of AI researchers and evolutionary scientists exploring what AI means as an evolutionary transition.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I was on @kjzzphoenix.bsky.social this morning talking about why academia avoids scary futures and how the zombie apocalypse gives researchers across disciplines a shared language to actually tackle them. 🧟

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The same principles that allowed cells to cooperate and form bodies can help us build AI that actually helps humans flourish. I had a great conversation with David Sloan Wilson on Evolving Alignment Podcast about what cooperation science can teach us about the future of AI.

youtube.com

Athena Aktipis with David Sloan Wilson - Evolving Alignment Podcast

YouTube video by Human Energy

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

New on Not for Peer Review: why does serendipity feel so real, even though it doesn’t seem to make scientific sense?

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Reposted by Athena Aktipis

Rob Noble @robjohnnoble.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

First up this morning: ISEEC President @athenaaktipis.bsky.social on cancer-like phenomena in AI. Her substack is athenaaktipis.substack.com

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The Cooperative Futures Institute and Frontier Tower present an evening salon with Geoffrey Miller, Emmett Shear, and myself discussing this pivotal moment in time with AI and evolving a cooperative future with it.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Excited to be talking about ideas related to this post - about how replicator dynamics and hijacking evolve in AI systems - at the International Society for Evolution, Ecology, and Cancer meeting this week in Crete. open.substack.com/pub/athenaak...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

This morning I’ll be talking about the Cooperation Benchmark and what biology can teach us about building AI. Most benchmarks measure what a system can do on its own. What we’re asking is what does it look like when AI actually shows up for you? See you at 10am! @humantechweek.bsky.social

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

This was in Greece last summer. I’m excited to return, this time for ISEEC! You still have time to register and submit your breaking abstracts. Check it out: www.eventbrite.com/e/2026-iseec...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

I'm speaking at Human+Tech Week in San Francisco next week. It's not a conference. It's an offsite for people building what comes next across health, work, and cities, with the human stakes kept front and center.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Cooperative Futures Academy is happening this June in SF! Join us for a four-day intensive that applies cooperation science and evolutionary theory to intelligence, health, AI alignment, and system design.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

TONIGHT! Hear from Devinder & Alexia from Frontier Tower in San Francisco about how to cultivate community, arts and coworking - and making it a viable model that can be duplicated. It all starts at 5:30 PM tonight at The Dark Side in Tempe. See you soon!

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Recursion is the original algorithm. It’s why we have life, cognition, computation. Much of what makes brains so powerful comes from recursion and the positive feedback loops that recursion makes possible. Those loops let systems respond quickly, adapt, and learn. substack.com/@athenaaktip...

substack.com

Evolution Will Happen Inside AI Whether We Like It or Not

The Inevitable Rise of the Replicons

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Just yesterday, Eörs Szathmáry and colleagues published this paper in PNAS: Evolvable AI: Threats of a new major transition in evolution. If you’re interested in what is going on in the AI evolution space, I highly recommend taking a look! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

doi.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

We are currently moving into the era of Web 4.0, in which digital entities have an unprecedented ability to process information and behave autonomously. Read my latest Substack post “The Digital Cambrian: Evolution, Autonomy, and the Rise of the Agentic Web”. substack.com/@athenaaktip...

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Reposted by Athena Aktipis

Justin Rosenstein @justinrosenstein.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

I helped build Facebook. I watched it become a machine for addicting people. Because addiction was more profitable. Now the same logic is driving AI. I wrote about what we do about it. 🧵

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Nobel Prize winner, Geoffrey Hinton, has suggested that making AI “love us like a mother” could help keep it safe. It’s an intuitive idea. But evolution tells a more complicated story.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

I’ll be giving a keynote at the upcoming symposium “Organisms, Algorithms, and Alignment” at the Bielefeld University in Germany on March 24. The alignment problem is not new.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

I’ll be giving a keynote on Sunday at 3:50pm at the Funding the Commons SF: Intelligence at the Frontier main stage. Topic: From Multicellularity to Multi Agent AI: Evolution’s Lessons for Scaling Cooperation

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

I’ve been putting a lot of my heart and soul - along with my brains - into writing substack posts these last few month so it’s really exciting to see that it’s having impact. It’s at #14 Rising in Science!

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Agentic AI has crossed a threshold. We can now plug AI directly into our communication and coordination systems. From an evolutionary perspective, that is profound.

athenaaktipis.substack.com

Access Granted

Communication Is Built on Trust. What Happens When AI Enters the System?

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

I love that I was still able to sneak in some exercise and cross country ski while in Davos! The scenery was insanely beautiful. #Davos #WEF #WEF2026 🎿

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Los Angeles friends and colleagues - we are doing a private showing of our in-development Surviving AI show in LA this weekend, hot off the Davos train! (Yes, we literally had the last Surviving AI show in a train at Davos, more on that later.)

luma.com

Surviving AI · Luma

Surviving AI is a comedy show that blends humor with thoughtful exploration of how humans relate to artificial intelligence and how we might build a more…

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

AI is becoming social, but current evaluations miss a key dimension: real cooperation. In my new Substack post I explain why developing benchmarks for AI cooperation and friendship is essential if we want systems that genuinely contribute to human flourishing. substack.com/home/post/p-...

substack.com

Why We Need Benchmarks For AI Cooperation And Friendship

How engagement-optimized systems exploit social cues, and why cooperation science must shape the next generation of AI

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Excited to share that I’ll be in Davos this week for the World Economic Forum.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

From dodging cows on snowy backroads to proving humans help each other in crisis, my Reed Magazine feature dives into the science behind cooperation, catastrophe, and why fun matters in wild times.

reed.edu

How to Thrive in Wild Times

According to cooperation theorist Athena Aktipis ’02, the one thing we really need? Each other.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Reminder that abstract submissions for EvoCancer close tomorrow. If you’re working at the intersection of cancer, evolution, and ecology, this is a great community to plug into. Details here: www.evocancer.com

evocancer.com

ISEEC

The International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer

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Reposted by Athena Aktipis

Andrew Maynard @andrewmaynard.net · 01/01/2026

As I did last year, I thought I'd start the new year by highlighting five writers I enjoy reading, along with a recent post from each that grabbed my attention. Happy 2026! www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/five-voice... @athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenedonald.bsky.social @bnerlich.bsky.social

futureofbeinghuman.com

Five voices worth reading in 2026

As I did last year, I thought I'd highlight five writers I enjoy reading, along with a recent post from each that grabbed my attention.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Since it cost a lot to win And even more to lose You and me bound to spend some time Wondering what to choose This line from the Grateful Dead’s Deal has been on my mind as the new year begins - not as a metaphor about gambling or fate, but as a statement about choice under uncertainty.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

For most of our evolutionary history, alcohol looked nothing like today’s Bud Lights, Margaritas, or White Claws.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I’m delighted to share that I’ll be hosting at Human Tech Week in SF this Spring.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Join me Tuesday with authors J. Arvid Agren and Manus M. Patten for the launch of their book The Paradox of the Organism: Adaptation and Internal Conflict.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

The AI safety conversation focuses on alignment, making powerful systems do what we want. But what if that’s the wrong question? What if the issue isn’t controlling one system, but cultivating healthy ecosystems?

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

You’re sitting down to eat some greasy pizza - what sounds good to drink with it? If you’re thinking about reaching for a beer, you’re not alone. Beer and pizza go together like… well, beer and pizza.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Right now the AI ecosystem looks like fast colonization of a new habitat: resources suddenly opened up, competition intense, survival uncertain, and the whole landscape reshaped faster than anyone can track.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

The full Human Energy Global Salon Series “Alignment for a Major Evolutionary Transition: The Future of Humanity and AI” is now on YT: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kmv... We had an incredible discussion and hope you weigh in as well! 👇

youtube.com

Alignment for a Major Evolutionary Transition: The Future of Humanity and AI

YouTube video by Human Energy

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

AI systems - especially self-training systems - are built on recursion. They update themselves based on feedback. They generate variation. They propagate internal patterns across training cycles. In other words, they provide everything evolution needs to get going.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I talked to Human Energy about the topics I’ll be discussing this evening during the Global Salon Series panel. Check out the link to join the conversation that starts at 7 pm pst! www.youtube.com/live/73om6Pw...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I'm thrilled to share that I'll be joining the Global Salon Series tonight in San Francisco for a panel discussion titled “Alignment for a Major Evolutionary Transition: The Future of Humanity and AI.” Livestream starts at 7pm pst: youtube.com/live/73om6Pw...

youtube.com

Human Energy Global Salon – San Francisco | Alignment for a Major Evolutionary Transition

Join us live on the Human Energy YouTube channel as part of our Global Salon Series: the San Francisco Salon — “Alignment for a Major Evolutionary Transition.” This immersive evening convenes leading...

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I’ve spent my career studying cooperation and looking for general principles that apply across systems. Lately, I’ve been turning my attention to AI, thinking about the ways that cooperation science can help us navigate what is probably the most critical challenge of our time.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

I started a Substack called Not For Peer Review. I’ve filled my notebooks with ideas, many of which have inspired my articles and books. But there are so many ideas that I haven’t published, and, if I’m being honest with myself, I know I will never publish through the traditional peer review system.

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Athena Aktipis @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

I’m honored to share that I’ll be joining the Global Salon Series this Tuesday in San Francisco for a panel discussion titled “Alignment for a Major Evolutionary Transition: The Future of Humanity and AI.”

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