William Morgan

William Morgan is co-founder of Restless Egg, an incubator for creators who use emerging technologies such as AI, game engines, and blockchain as their canvases. Restless Egg provides capital, cultural infrastructure, and strategic support to help these artists move from experimental provocations to scalable, paradigm-shifting products, becoming artist-founders in the process. William completed a PhD on the philosophy of AI at UC Berkeley, where his research examined how frontier technologies, particularly transformer models, reconfigure questions of aesthetics and epistemology.

He deepened this work through participation in the inaugural cohorts of the Antikythera program and the Cosmos Institute. William is the editor of Interplay, a newly published book on game engines, machine creativity, and inter-species collaborative design. His writing has appeared in numerous journals including e-flux, Theory, Culture & Society, and Media Theory.

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What is Artificial Experience?

What if the most important question about AI isn't whether it's intelligent, but what kinds of experiences it makes possible that nothing else could? William Morgan argues we're living through a categorical shift - AI is becoming infrastructure like electricity, fading into the background of daily life. But unlike electricity, this infrastructure thinks.

Morgan warns that current AI development is trapped in what he calls the “tour guide gravity well”. Endlessly refining ways to access machine intelligence rather than discovering genuinely novel forms of human experience. We're getting better chatbots when we could be inhabiting persistent multi-agent societies, emotional scaffolding that evolves over weeks, or decision rehearsals that let us test-drive alternative futures.

The transition from "artificial intelligence" to "artificial experience" (AX) requires an abandonment of our current interface paradigms. Morgan introduces HAIID (Human-AI Interaction Design), predicting that AI will demand new "psychosocial metaphor systems" based on character and sociality rather than the spatial metaphors (files, folders) that enabled human-computer interaction. This means moving beyond screen-keyboard-user relationships toward interfaces that don't force humans to decompose their experiential worlds.

Current AI products mostly amplify existing activities—email proofing, image generation—rather than unlocking the genuinely transformative experiences that infrastructural AI could enable: situated sensor-rich feedback loops, collective synchronization, decision rehearsals where you can inhabit counterfactual futures before choosing between them.

Morgan's solution: become "artificially intelligent"—not like machines, but intelligent about consciously designing our technological future rather than sleepwalking into whatever emerges.

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邊界 Team
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