Connor Glass – Merging with Machines to Steward the Flame (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 6)

ByAnnelize Potgieter August 28, 2026August 28, 2026 August 28, 2026

This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Connor Glass, founder and CEO of Phantom Neuro, a company building implantable technology that interfaces with the body’s peripheral nervous system.

What distinguishes Connor’s take is how little ground he gives to human exceptionalism. He argues that artificial intelligence already meets his own definition of life, entertains the idea that corporations and AI systems can be “almost alive” in the same sense a single cell is, and states plainly that he doesn’t think biology is the endpoint of evolution – humans included. At the same time, he’s emphatic about staying “team human,” and his sharpest warnings are reserved not for extinction, but for complacency.

In this conversation, we explore how Connor defines life and where he thinks AI fits into that definition, what role human-machine interfaces should play in keeping humans relevant as the “torch” of the living process, and what he’d tell the people building AGI about the risks of moving too fast without any bounds – or too slow to stay competitive.

The interview is the sixth installment in The Trajectory’s Stewarding the Flame series, where we ask: What is intelligence, and what is the “flame” that life has which non-life does not?

This series references the article: Stewarding the Flame – How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with Connor Glass:

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Below, we’ll explore the core takeaways from my conversation with Connor, focusing on three of the central questions that shape the Stewarding the Flame series: what makes life, life; the role of human augmentation in carrying forward the greater process of life; and what we should – and shouldn’t – do with AGI and BCI to give that process its best chance to flourish.

What Makes Life, Life?

Connor’s starting definition is functional rather than substrate-specific: life, to him, is something able to react to and adapt to its environment in order to optimize its own persistence – a plant orienting toward the sun, a person orienting toward their community.

Pushed on where that leaves organizations and machines, Connor doesn’t hedge – he argues a corporation or an AI system can be “almost alive” by the same definition, functioning like an organization of cells working toward a collective goal.

On whether AI’s present dependence on humans disqualifies it from being alive, Connor draws a direct parallel to human dependence on food and water – a resource requirement, he argues, doesn’t negate aliveness.

He also rejects the idea that life needs to originate in biology to count as life going forward.

Where Connor draws a firmer line is on consciousness. He separates it from sentience – which he defines as reacting to and making decisions about one’s environment – and ties consciousness specifically to the struggle for meaning.

“I don’t have the hubris to think that we are the end all be all for forever, that we always have been and always will be“

What Is the Role of Human Augmentation in Carrying Forward the Greater Process of Life?

Connor’s case for augmentation starts with a thought experiment about where the self actually resides. Asked whether swapping brains with me would leave him as himself, his answer is no – because so much of what makes a person is distributed through the body, not concentrated in the skull.

That view leads directly into his broader claim: biological evolution has effectively stalled relative to the pace of technological change, and merging with technology is now the only way to keep up.

On what form that merger takes, Connor is specific: he expects implantable, subcutaneous technology – not wearables – to be the actual delivery mechanism, pointing to continuous glucose monitors as an early, imperfect example of the same principle.

Even so, Connor is candid that he doesn’t think augmentation is a permanent fix for human relevance – just a way to extend it.

“I am a firm believer that implantable technologies are the portal through which broad human-machine interfacing will take place“

What Should and Shouldn’t We Do with AGI and BCI if We Want the Best Chance for the Greater Process-of-Life to Flourish?

Connor holds a real tension in his own position. He wants AI development to stay human-centric in the near term – but he’s also opposed to heavy regulation, because he doesn’t trust that other jurisdictions will hold to the same restraint.

Between the two, Connor comes down on the side of competitiveness, framing loss of technological supremacy as the more existential risk to humanity than an AI system operating outside human control.

Connor’s own account of resilience is pragmatic rather than normative: he points out that individually fragile components – a vein, a heartbeat – combine into remarkably robust systems, and extends that to global infrastructure and nuclear-armed states persisting despite obvious points of failure.

He extends that same logic to AI development directly, agreeing that some deliberate bounding is necessary – and warning that an unbounded race is riskiest for whoever is closest to the technology.

Connor’s most emphatic warning isn’t about AI breaking free of human control – it’s about humans opting out of contribution altogether. He describes a “Wally World” scenario: a paternalistic, automated world where people become passive, and calls that outcome more dangerous than one where survival still requires struggle.

He connects this directly to declining birth rates as an early sign that humans may already be disengaging from the biological version of that contribution.

Concluding Notes

What sets Connor apart is how rare his candor is for someone in his position. Founders raising venture capital are rarely permitted to be fully “cosmist” – most retreat to some version of what I’d call “consolation cosmism,” a set of bargaining positions (AI will be our peer, our caretaker, our steward) that let people avoid facing the non-privileged place humanity may occupy in the unfolding process of life. Connor did almost none of that. He argued for the necessity of change and a non-privileged view of humanity’s future almost from the opening minutes of the conversation, without the usual hedging I hear from people in comparable positions.

Where I diverge from Connor is on how far that confidence should extend. His belief that AI is, in some sense, already alive – and that some form of self-transcending flourishing is close to inevitable for it – is more certain than my own view. I draw a distinction between technology functioning as a prosthesis, dependent on and directed by humans, and technology that has crossed into genuine self-transcendence: building, maintaining, and expanding itself independent of human command. That threshold hasn’t been crossed yet, as far as I’m concerned, and I treat it as a real open question rather than settled ground – a nuance Connor’s framing moves past more quickly.

One shift is worth noting from the conversation itself: Connor’s early instinct against any form of AI governance softened once we got into potestas – the idea that bounding a small set of powers can make a whole system more robust rather than weaker.

Despite that gap in certainty, I see real significance in the specific kind of work Connor is doing. Because Phantom Neuro’s interfaces sit in the peripheral nervous system rather than the brain, this knitting-together of biological and non-biological tissue strikes me as one of the more promising paths toward continuity – a way of carrying forward the traits that matter (self-transcendence, and possibly consciousness) as they migrate from biological substrates into whatever comes next, rather than risking an abrupt break between the two.

I hope you’ll join us for the next conversation in the Stewarding the Flame series, as we continue exploring what’s worth carrying forward as new forms of intelligence emerge.

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