Human + Tech Week Talk — Leadership in the Age of AI

Standing here in the One Beach building, beneath its long sweep of glass and light, I was reminded of the Crystal Palace — that vast iron-and-glass structure built for the first World's Fair in 1851. It was designed to showcase the marvels of industrial modernity, to make visible a new epoch of possibility. And it struck me that this building — repurposed from a 1920s elevator factory — now hosting conversations about artificial intelligence and human consciousness, feels like a modern echo of that moment.

There have been points in history when a gathering crystallized a civilizational pivot — when new tools forced a new reckoning with who we are. The World's Fairs made visible the dreams and delusions of technological progress. The Macy Conferences midwifed cybernetics and the early thinking behind AI. The Human Potential Movement turned us inward, toward the call of self-actualization. And now, in gatherings like this, we face a similar task: to ask not only what AI can do for us, but what we must become in response.

We are living through one of the most rapid transformations in human history. In just the past few years, artificial intelligence has gone from a science fiction concept to a daily presence in nearly every domain of life — from healthcare and finance to art, education, and even spirituality. It's astonishing to see how quickly AI has advanced. Systems that once struggled to form coherent sentences can now write essays, compose music, design proteins, and simulate entire personalities. The sheer speed and scope of AI's development is breathtaking and disorienting.

This extraordinary technological evolution brings with it a deeper question: As our machines grow smarter, are we growing wiser?

I'm Bruce Alderman, associate director of the Blue Sky Leaders program — a yearlong initiative in conscious leadership designed to help professionals navigate this era of accelerating complexity. At its core, the program asks: What kind of human being — what kind of leader — is truly prepared to meet the challenges of a world reshaped by AI, ecological disruption, and social fragmentation?

The reality is that while AI is evolving at an exponential rate, human maturity and wisdom follow a different trajectory. Our attention is increasingly fragmented. Our institutions struggle to adapt. Many of us feel pulled between the dizzying speed of innovation and the slow, necessary work of inner integration.

This, I believe, is the core task before us. We stand at a pivotal threshold that is both technological and existential, a revolution in intelligence so vast that it demands a reckoning with meaning. As our machines accelerate beyond our grasp and stand poised to swallow whole domains of expertise, our challenge is urgent: how deeply can we reclaim what it means to be human?

What AI Can Do (and What It Can't)

To understand where we are now and what's being asked of us as leaders, it helps to be precise about what AI actually is. We often talk about AI as if it were intelligent in the same way we are, which can be misleading. AI has no inner world, no sense of care or consequence. What it does possess is an astonishing capacity to process data, detect patterns, and generate plausible outputs based on vast amounts of input. In other words, it excels at what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls propositional knowing — the ability to encode and manipulate factual or linguistic representations about the world.

Human knowing, however, encompasses much more than propositions. According to Vervaeke, there are four distinct yet interrelated ways of knowing that together constitute the depth of our intelligence: Propositional, Procedural, Perspectival, and Participatory. Let's walk through each of them, keeping in mind what AI can do and what remains uniquely ours.

Propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case — Paris is the capital of France, water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. AI is brilliant here. It can retrieve, synthesize, and recombine propositional content at dizzying speed. Yet humans bring something more subtle to this form of knowing: we discern what matters. Relevance emerges through feeling, which leads us into the next form of knowing.

Procedural knowing is knowing how to do something — how to ride a bike, lead a meeting, improvise a melody. AI can mimic procedural skill, especially when the procedure is well defined. Yet there's a difference between executing a procedure and living the skill, between following steps and undergoing the moment. A human being enacts meaning through the body. We embody the know-how, which allows us to meet the novelty and nuance of the present.

Perspectival knowing is our capacity to orient within a situation — to feel ourselves in the moment. It's the quality of presence that tells you when to speak and when to stay silent, when the room is ready for a shift, or when something unsaid is shaping the dynamic. AI can simulate a point of view, yet it cannot inhabit one. It doesn't know what it's like to be here because it is never actually anywhere.

Participatory knowing is perhaps the deepest of all. It is the felt sense that we are of the world, woven into its fabric. It's the knowing that arises in and through relationship — through mutual becoming. AI operates outside this dimension. It remains fundamentally unchanged by its interactions, unable to co-discover new depths of being in dialogue with the real.

AI can produce what looks like relevance, yet it cannot realize it in the lived sense. As Vervaeke puts it: "AI predicts how we talk about our experience — not the experience itself." The scale of what AI can do within its domain is staggering — Dr. Alan Watkins notes in his recent book, Smarter Than You, that AI already operates with an IQ of around 120 in every subject, making it, in Geoffrey Hinton's words, '1,000 times more knowledgeable than even the smartest human being.' Yet this vast intelligence operates without the felt sense of meaning that emerges through embodied experience. This distinction reveals why conscious leadership cannot be offloaded to machines. Leadership involves more than managing information — it requires being in relation to self, to others, to the moment, to the future trying to come through us.

This brings me to the work of Ginny Whitelaw — physicist, Zen teacher, and somatic leadership coach — who captures this beautifully. She observes that while "AI may know everything, it still won't know what it is to be alive." It won't know breath, or trembling, or awe. It won't chant hallelujah and feel its resonance throughout the body.

Resonance is somatic, not merely symbolic. It's the way reality pulses in us, through us, as us. As Whitelaw explains, when we chant sacred words like "hallelujah," the vibrations activate and unify different centers of consciousness in the body — the AH and AY sounds resonating in the heart and solar plexus, the UU sound vibrating in the lower abdomen. Through this embodied resonance, language becomes more than symbolic representation; it becomes a lived integration of mind, heart, and hara that gives words their deepest meaning and power.

This is what Whitelaw means when she describes a true leader as a tuning fork – a resonant body attuned to the deeper patterns moving through a team, a moment, a society, a planet. Leaders bridge the super-intellect of AI with embodied wisdom, serving as living antennas who can sense and manifest futures in which life flourishes.

This resonance — this capacity to be fully present, fully sensing, fully responsive and integrated — marks the essential distinction between intelligence and wisdom, between a system that can simulate language and a human being who can live meaning.

From Reciprocal Narrowing to Reciprocal Opening

One of the most subtle yet powerful insights Vervaeke emphasizes in his work is the idea that how we pay attention changes what is possible to perceive. Our orientation to the world is deeply relational and participatory.

When we're stressed, afraid, or overwhelmed, our perception tightens. We start scanning for threats, defaulting to familiar categories, and filtering out what doesn't fit. Over time, this creates what Vervaeke calls a reciprocal narrowing — a loop in which the more reactive our attention becomes, the more limited our options appear, and the more we double down on those limited frames.

You've likely experienced this. In a difficult conversation, for instance, you begin to assume bad faith in the other person. That assumption shapes your tone, your body language, your willingness to listen. Their reaction then confirms your suspicion. Each of you narrows the other, until eventually you're caught in a recursive loop of mutual contraction rather than genuine dialogue.

Reciprocal narrowing happens on individual, organizational, and even civilizational levels. It emerges when we treat complexity as a threat and speed as a virtue, when we prioritize being right over being real. Yet there's another possibility.

Sometimes — through a moment of silence, a slowing of breath, an opening of presence — we interrupt the loop. We soften our stance. And in that pause, the world begins to widen. This is reciprocal opening.

Where reciprocal narrowing breeds reactivity, reciprocal opening cultivates responsiveness. It's when our openness invites the world to open in turn. Think of reciprocal narrowing as echoing inside a sealed chamber where you only hear your own distortions reflected back. Reciprocal opening is more like standing at the edge of a canyon and singing out — the world offers something back beyond mere echo.

Or imagine a musical ensemble. When each player listens to both their own part and the whole, something larger than any individual contribution arises. That emergent quality isn't written in the score — it lives in the reciprocal openness of the group.

This is why contemplative and dialogical practices — practices that slow perception, that attune us to nuance, to breath, to presence — serve as essential foundations in times of upheaval. They create the conditions under which new kinds of leadership can emerge.

In the Blue Sky Leaders program, we approach these practices as ecologies of transformation rather than techniques to master. They are ways of becoming more permeable to what is true, more resonant with what is needed, more attuned to what wants to evolve through us. In an age where everything is accelerating, cultivating depth becomes a radical act. And reciprocal opening — listening with the whole of our being — may be the most essentially human act of all.

Blue Sky Leaders: A Response to the Meta-Crisis

What we're facing today goes well beyond a technological revolution. It's a meta-crisis — a crisis of sense-making, of systems, of soul. While we cannot outpace these changes, we can cultivate the kind of human beings who can stand in them — awake, resilient, responsive.

That's the purpose behind the Blue Sky Leaders program at CIIS. We're cultivating what you might call human general intelligence: the integrated intelligence of body, mind, spirit, and world. BSL is an experiment in developing leaders who embody this integration.

We began with a question: What kinds of leaders does the future require?

The future calls for leaders who can participate in transformation, who can move fluidly across registers — from the strategic to the somatic, from the systemic to the sacred — while maintaining coherence. Leaders who are attuned, rooted, and trustworthy.

To support this development, BSL brings together a remarkable faculty — cosmologist Brian Swimme, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, Zen leadership coach Ginny Whitelaw, systems philosopher Alexander Laszlo, Jazz leadership expert Greg Thomas, and many others — each offering a distinct window into the deep patterns of change, perception, and embodiment.

The program unfolds as a lived curriculum. Over the course of a year, students engage in immersive residencies, guided contemplative practice, systems modeling, and collective inquiry. They work with real-world complexity through capstone projects, many of which use Context.ai, a software tool that supports strategic insight through multi-perspectival modeling.

The cohort itself forms a vital part of the learning ecology. Our students come from across sectors — AI and tech, medicine and psychiatry, education, public policy, political activism, and the arts. While they bring diverse perspectives and vocabularies, they share a common sensing: the call to show up differently, to grow radically and responsibly in the midst of turbulence.

This diversity is essential because, as Watkins envisions, the future of human-AI collaboration will require what he calls 'polymaths and quarterbacks' — individuals with broad, integrated intelligence who can bridge multiple domains and coordinate complex teams. These are people who possess 'a skill set that is not currently replicated by AI' precisely because it emerges from lived experience across disciplines.

We've designed the program to foster development across all four of Vervaeke's ways of knowing:

• Propositional: We teach frameworks — from systems thinking and developmental theory to planetary cosmology — always oriented toward ethical discernment and what truly matters.
• Procedural: Students practice leadership through embodied inquiry, somatic work, improvisation, and ritual design. The body serves as an instrument of insight, integral to the learning process.
• Perspectival: Over time, students develop attunement — to themselves, to each other, and to the deeper timing and texture of unfolding processes. They learn to sense the unique affordances of the moment.
• Participatory: Most deeply, we create conditions for becoming. Students discover who the future is calling them to be — as evolving presences capable of cocreating more life-giving systems, stories, and ways of being.

These four ways of knowing weave together within a broader integrative framework. Drawing from Ken Wilber's AQAL model, we recognize that transformation unfolds along multiple axes simultaneously. We attend to all four quadrants — the interior and exterior dimensions of both individuals and collectives — while also tracking developmental stages through Beena Sharma's vertical assessment work.

A developmental perspective is particularly important here, at the dawn of the Age of AI, because as Watkins' research shows, people at different value stages — from achievement-focused 'Orange' to integral 'Turquoise' — interact with AI in fundamentally different ways. Those operating from more mature value systems are better equipped to use AI as a partner in service of collective flourishing rather than merely personal gain.

The curriculum also cultivates multiple lines of intelligence (cognitive, emotional, somatic, systemic, spiritual) and deepens access to expanded states of awareness through contemplative practice. This integral scaffolding helps participants sense themselves more fully — within, between, and beyond — enabling them to lead with strategies that emerge from presence, wisdom, and a wider field of coherence.

Through this comprehensive approach, BSL addresses both the leadership gap and what we might call the being gap. The program recognizes that developing new capacities matters as much as developing new strategies, and that the quality of our presence shapes the quality of the world we create together.

The Future Is Not Yet Written

We are living at a threshold moment. The intelligence of our machines is rising, and while this transformation will reshape our world profoundly, the future will be determined by more than machine intelligence alone. It will be shaped by who we choose to become — by the quality of our attention, the courage of our imagination, and the depth of our relationships.

AI will continue to accelerate, yet wisdom unfolds at a different pace. It moves at the speed of presence. And presence requires cultivation — of discernment, of empathy, of depth. It requires communities of practice and leaders who embrace the full spectrum of human experience, who can feel deeply, listen carefully, and navigate complexity with care.

The work ahead is formidable. We're being asked to evolve faster than perhaps any generation before us — to develop new capacities while old certainties dissolve, to find meaning as familiar forms of contribution become obsolete, to stay grounded as the very ground shifts beneath us. There are no guarantees about where this leads.

But this is precisely why the cultivation of human depth matters now more than ever. In the Blue Sky Leaders program, we're wagering that the future still needs humans who can stand in complexity without losing their humanity, who can bridge ancient wisdom and emerging realities, who can help us remember what we're here for even as everything changes.