TITLE
Artificial Entities: How DMT can help us make sense of AI and The Internet.

ABSTRACT
We're on the cusp of an AI revolution that may impact our lives at the same level as the industrial revolution. In his upcoming book 'The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world', Alexander Beiner explores how the psychedelic experience can help us navigate the strange and dangerous times we live in, from climate change to political polarisation and runaway technology. In this talk, he'll explore the cognitive science and phenomenology of the DMT experience to argue that the techniques, practices and attitudes that help us navigate it well can be applied directly to navigating the changing internet; a realm that is increasingly populated by AI entities that we can't distinguish from human beings. Drawing on indigenous knowledge systems as well as his own experiences on Imperial's DMT extended state trial, this talk will ask how DMT can help us adapt to a world that's getting weirder day by day.

BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Beiner is a writer and podcaster. He’s one of the executive directors of Breaking Convention, and the author of the upcoming book The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics can help us make sense of the world.

In 2018, he co-founded Rebel Wisdom, an alternative media and events platform that grew to a quarter of a million subscribers, and became an influential node in the systems change, personal growth and sense-making communities. His work explores how psychedelics can be used to elicit sustainable cultural change, the complexities of psychedelic capitalism and mainstreaming, and how differing beliefs and value systems affect psychedelic culture.