Peter Sterling: Decision Evolution

AI Agents, Mathematics, and Making Sense of Chaos

From Artificiality This Week * Our Gathering: Our Artificiality Summit 2025 will be held on October 23-25 in Bend, Oregon. The

In this episode, we talk with Peter Sterling, the author of What is Health. Peter caught our attention with his concise and understandable description of how evolution, by optimizing for energy efficiency, has built human brains.

This week, we talk with Peter Sterling, the author of What is Health.

Peter has had a long career in medicine and neuroscience. He has recently published in Jama Psychiatry, with Michael Platt, on Why Deaths of Despair Are Increasing in the US and Not Other Industrial Nations with many Insights From Neuroscience and Anthropology. While that might not sound like AI, we do wonder what the role of technology might be for all of us to make better personal decisions about our health.

Peter caught our attention with his concise and understandable description of how evolution, by optimizing for energy efficiency, has built human brains. We care about this for a couple of different reasons.

First, his work is relevant to how we make decisions as modern humans. This tells us the things that matter to us, where there are evolutionary mismatches and what we might do about it.

Second, here at Artificiality, we care about how humans create meaning and how we learn and cohere with our communities—other brains and by implication, other intelligences. This leads us to be naturally curious about how brains work as well as how AI works. We are obsessed with understanding and designing for this interaction. We start our decision-making workshops with key insights from Peter’s book because it really matters to understand something about how our brains are built and what makes them so different from AI.

We really enjoyed this conversation and appreciate Peter’s time with us. We think you’’ll enjoy it too.