Welcome to a New AI Discourse
Two of the most unlikely people are arguing that AI has a blind spot — “nurturability” — and that the human capacity to answer it has a name too: complexity intelligence.
Why Now...
Technologists have mastered technical problem‑solving. But they’ve left out something essential: how whole systems survive.
Most AI writing focuses on machine intelligence, AGI, and alignment.
Spherit Co-Founders, Phil and Pam Lawson, bring forward the missing half: the human capacities forged through lived chaos — emotional depth, relational pattern recognition, cultural navigation, whole-system awareness, resilience, nonlinear human development — and the science of complex adaptive systems.
This is the intelligence AI does not have.
The authors argue that this must be explicitly integrated into the future of AI — where math evolves into the geometry of human thinking.
They didn’t just propose an idea. They built the human side of the system and tested it with 45,000 people — through coaches, counselors, consultants, chaplains — across fifty different applications. Now they’re knocking on Silicon Valley’s door. The question is: will it open?
This is a discourse about a new path for AI — as a wingman, not a replacement. And a new way for humans to understand complexity itself.
How This Leg of the Journey Began
The work began with the two of them connecting the dots of their own lives. It took its name, The Sphere, through Phil's five-year collaboration with award-winning writer Robert L. Lindstrom, and it has continued and deepened in the decades since.
Phil and Rob's enthusiasm for the book-writing project surfaced in 1993, in Los Angeles, CA, when their business lives overlapped. By 1998, Phil was already sketching in the framework, and the two committed wholly to the project in 1999, publishing in 2004 after significant historic and scientific research.
It's Going to be OK (but not like we thought) (2026) by Pamela Powers Lawson, with Phil Lawson
The story behind the framework. A memoir of two lives and decades of relentless reinvention — from a Denver church to mission work, Hollywood, collapse, and a mountain-cabin reset — that carries the same geometry of wholeness into the age of AI. Where the first edition (2011) gave the world the tool, this one (paperback and kindle summer of 2026) tells how it was forged — and why it matters now.
It's the credentialing document behind the work.
Being Spherical (2004) by Phil Lawson and Robert L. Lindstrom
The framework, laid out. An illustrated philosophical work that introduces The Sphere as an alternative to the mechanistic, "box" worldview — and offers the Spherical Modeling Tool (SMT), a hands-on application for seeing complex systems whole. Across 65 short chapters, it argues that in an interconnected, interdependent world, we need a fundamental shift in how we see, think, and act.
Reviewed in Signature Magazine (2005) as "a modern philosophical treatise" of great merit. — John Maling, Ph.D.