In the latest episode of The Human Code, host Don sits down with venture capitalist Adam Pelavin to discuss the rapidly evolving intersection of humanity and technology. While the world focuses on the engineering feats of artificial intelligence, Pelavin argues that our greatest challenge isn’t technical—it’s psychological.
The Gap Between Technology and Self-Understanding
Pelavin’s interest in this field began with science fiction and pure mathematics, leading him to explore how consciousness and reality coalesce. Reflecting on Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, Pelavin recalls a realization from 2001: technological advancement was poised to outpace our understanding of ourselves.
Today, this “confusion” is becoming a practical reality. We are increasingly capable of building powerful machines, but we struggle with AI alignment—the process of ensuring AI behavior matches human intent. Pelavin notes that the effectiveness of alignment is “pretty dependent on how well we understand ourselves” and what we actually want these systems to do.
The “Missing Science” of Psychology
A core theme of the discussion is what Pelavin calls the “missing science”. For several decades, there has been a tendency to swap neuroscience for psychology. While neuroscience is vital, Pelavin argues it is like studying molecular biology while ignoring medicine; it lacks the higher-level framework needed to understand the “inner workings of the psyche” in a rigorous way.
Key questions that remain largely unanswered include:
Experience vs. Ground Truth: While we often view the external world as the “ground truth” and experience as something that emerges from it, Pelavin suggests this is backward. Our experience is the actual ground truth, and we build models—maps of the territory—to organize that experience.
The Nature of Agency: Understanding why humans care about having agency is difficult to explain in a purely mechanistic universe, yet it is fundamental to how we interact with technology.
AI and the Limits of Creativity.
The conversation also probes the boundaries of what AI can currently achieve. Pelavin, who has a background in both pure math and creative writing, uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the “spikiness” of machine intelligence.
He questions whether creativity is simply a “fast permutation of finite options” or if there is something “non-computable” happening within the human mind. A logical system, he notes, cannot choose its own axioms; it must build upon assumptions. Humans, however, have a history of creating new models—like Einstein extending the work of Newton—to reach higher levels of accuracy and open new doors of inquiry.
A Decade of Optimism
Despite the deep philosophical hurdles, Pelavin remains optimistic about the next decade. He compares our current era to the early days of the internet—a “precipice of change” filled with limitless imagination.
The goal for the next ten years is to bring our technological power and our self-understanding into balance. As the host concludes, citing Einstein, the biggest question is whether we view the universe as a friendly or unfriendly place. If we see it as friendly, we will use technology not to separate ourselves from nature, but to bring ourselves closer to it.
