Orion Goodman
I study consciousness at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies and run United AI, a 200-member student organization at Syracuse
Regions of the object
Biomedical engineering and neuroscience student at Syracuse University.
Hi, I'm Orion. I came to college expecting to study aerospace engineering. For years, space felt like the obvious frontier: enormous, mostly unknown, and newly accessible in ways that had belonged to fiction for most of human history.
I still follow launches, the newest research in cosmology, and voices like Anton Petrov or Scott Manely on Youtube. Somewhere during my first year, though, my attention moved inward. I grew more interested in the mind looking out at the universe than the universe itself. How does a physical brain give rise to a private world? What is consciousness? Or, the slightly less frightening question: how can we improve the conscious experience? What happens as intelligence becomes something we increasingly build and extend beyond biology?
I switched into biomedical engineering and neuroscience. Since then, my work has taken me through consciousness research, neuroimaging, artificial intelligence, and the communities forming around new technologies. I now work at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies and run United AI at Syracuse, a student organization with about 200 members.
Over time, those interests have started to converge.
We are gaining extraordinary new forms of capability. We are learning to modulate the brain, build increasingly powerful models of intelligence, automate parts of intellectual work, and give individuals access to tool which grant capability that once belonged exclusively to large institutions. The questions sit underneath those advances is how greater capability changes human life, and what kind of future we are trying to create.
Most of this site comes from somewhere in that territory.
There are arguments I'm still testing and questions I don't yet know how to answer. I wanted somewhere to put that work before every loose edge had been cleaned up and every connection had been made obvious in retrospect.
For now, this is where I'm tracing those connections as I find them.
Where I am
- Biomedical Engineering + Neuroscience
- Syracuse University, 2027
- Founder & President
- United AI at Syracuse University
- Research
- Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies
Progress toward what?
AI enters a much longer human story. We have spent centuries extending our reach: farther travel, longer lives, faster communication, greater control over matter, energy, information, and increasingly, intelligence.
The pace has changed.
The distance between imagining an action and carrying it out keeps shrinking. A person with a laptop now has access to forms of analysis, creation, coordination, and computation that recently required teams, institutions, or years of specialized training.
I find that extraordinary. I also think speed places more pressure on the question that technological progress has always carried with it:
Progress toward what?
More automation gives us more automation. Greater productivity gives us greater productivity. Neither describes the human outcome I care about.
The future I hope for sounds almost embarrassingly ordinary: more time with those we love, longer and healthier lives, greater freedom to pursue curiosity, deeper understanding of ourselves, and institutions capable of extending those gains across far more people.
New technology opens paths toward that future. Getting there depends on the judgment brought to its use.
We are gaining power faster than we are developing wisdom around its use.
A new capability amplifies whoever uses it. Curiosity gains reach. So do ambition, fear, generosity, status-seeking, care, anger, and love.
As the leverage available to individuals and institutions grows, questions of judgment become increasingly practical. The character of the people building and directing powerful systems starts to influence the character of the future those systems help produce.
That is one reason I have trouble separating technological progress from human development.
I think
We can build faster than we can decide what to build for.
People and institutions can gain the ability to do something before developing the judgment to decide whether it should be done.
More capability does not remove fear, ego, status, anger, care, curiosity, ambition or love. It gives those things more reach.
So I don't think technological development can be separated from human development anymore.
The frontier turned inward
Space drew me in because of its scale. Consciousness drew me in because of its intimacy.
Every observation we make, every theory we construct, every measurement we record passes through an experience happening somewhere inside a nervous system. A physical brain somehow produces color, pain, memory, attention, emotion, a sense of self, and the feeling of being here at all.
We have learned an enormous amount about the machinery. The relationship between that machinery and subjective experience remains much less clear.
That gap has pulled me toward questions across neuroscience, philosophy, medicine, and increasingly artificial intelligence.
One of them has become especially difficult to ignore as artificial systems grow more sophisticated:
How do we decide which forms of intelligence deserve moral consideration when subjective experience can't be observed or measured directly?
I don't have a satisfying answer. My intuitions run ahead of the evidence often enough that I have learned to keep the distinction visible.
That is part of why I value empirical work.
Working on
My start on the problem
At the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, I work on research examining how differences in brain-network organization relate to subjective responses during focused-ultrasound neuromodulation and meditation.
My work involves behavioral analysis, neuroimaging, reliability testing, and reproducible statistical modeling.
We measure specific changes in reported experience, examine their relationship to the brain, and try to make claims proportional to the evidence.
For me, the narrowed scope of my contribution represents how we can then learn to tackle the greater questions collectively. Consciousness invites enormous questions. Research forces me to spend time with the smaller ones that we have some chance of answering.
AI is very good at removing friction.
I'm not convinced we should remove all of it.
I use AI constantly. It has changed the speed at which I learn, write code, synthesize research, prototype ideas, and move between fields where I have varying levels of expertise.
A large part of its power comes from collapsing the distance between an idea and a usable result.
That distance contains several kinds of friction. Some is administrative, repetitive, or purely mechanical. Removing it gives me more time for the work I care about.
Some friction performs a different function. Struggling through a proof, debugging a program, rewriting a paragraph ten times, or sitting with a paper long enough to understand the argument... all of those frustrating moments are when you learn. The finished output is only part of the value in making something, and AI makes it dangerously easy to overrationalize cutting out the rest.
That leaves me with a question I encounter almost every day:
Which parts of the distance do I need to travel myself?
My answer changes depending on the task. I care less about whether AI participated than whether I retain the judgment required to evaluate the result, explain the important decisions, and recognize when something has gone wrong.
I have shipped code that ran before I understood every part of the implementation. I have also read paragraphs carrying my name and realized that the vocabulary and argument no longer sounded like me.
Those experiences made the problem concrete.
AI gives me access to capabilities I haven't fully developed myself. I want to use that leverage without letting the underlying skills atrophy, especially the skills that determine whether the output deserves my confidence or my name.
I haven't come across a clean rule for that boundary. Maybe we're still figuring it out. For now, I tend to value discomfort in my work above all else.
Technology should sharpen reality, not blur it.
An average member of Generation Z is projected to spend between 21 and 28.8 years of their lifetime looking at screens (Eyesafe – Released August 2025). As unsettling as that number is, it also feels uncomfortably close to my current reality. Most days that time is spent on research, writing, coding, meetings, or building something I care deeply about. The work may be meaningful, but I don’t want the defining texture of my life to be decades spent looking at a screen.
Then I go outside.
An hour walking, swimming, sitting somewhere without headphones, practicing mindfulness, or talking to someone face to face changes the texture of my attention. I have more patience for a thought that takes ten minutes to develop. I notice where I am again.
This may sound obvious, almost embarrassingly so, like a Gen Z revelation to “go touch grass.” But I bring it up because the obviousness is precisely the point. We tend to treat these effects as self-evident and therefore not worth stating, when in fact they are easy to forget in practice. If more people said this out loud, more often, it might help normalize a kind of low-friction resistance to sedentary, attention-fragmenting technology. Not as a rejection of tools, but as a reminder that attention and mental health have physical ecologies, and they need maintenance.
That contrast has started influencing how I judge technology.
When I use technology, I tend to ask myself:
- How much attention will I have left for the world around me before, during, and afterward?
Efficiency alone feels incomplete as a measure. Saving thirty minutes has limited value if the product immediately finds another way to occupy those thirty minutes.
The future I hope technological abundance helps create has more room for experiences that resist compression: long conversations, physical movement, boredom, curiosity without an objective, time outside, time with people you love, and enough uninterrupted attention to become absorbed in something.
If artificial intelligence frees more of our time, I hope we spend those hours more fully in the world: with other people, in our bodies, and with enough attention to notice where we are.
I think
Work may stop organizing human life the way it has for most of civilization.
Not unemployment next year. Something slower: a huge amount of identity is built on being useful, and school trains that before work does.
If machines take over much of what productivity means, I don't think people become purposeless. I think we find out how much of what we called purpose was necessity.
What happens when somebody has enough time to become deeply interested in something with no economic return attached to it? We already find the answer everywhere, in much of what people describe finding fulfillment in.
Abundance does not answer that. It removes one excuse for not asking.
I think
Work may stop organizing human life the way it has for centuries.
A surprising amount of life is arranged around usefulness.
School begins that training early. We learn to meet deadlines, demonstrate competence, specialize, compete, and prepare for a role in an economy. Later, work determines where many people live, how they spend most weekdays, who they meet, and often how they introduce themselves.
Artificial intelligence places pressure on that arrangement.
As more forms of intellectual labor become inexpensive and abundant, productivity may occupy less of the territory where people have traditionally found status, identity, and direction. I’m less interested in predicting exactly how quickly that happens than in the cultural question underneath the transition.
How do people use a life with far more discretionary time?
We already have fragments of an answer. People become absorbed in music, relationships, sport, craft, study, community, nature, games, religion, art, travel, caregiving, and questions nobody pays them to pursue. A great deal of fulfillment already happens outside the hours associated with economic production.
For me, abundance is most interesting at that level. More wealth and greater automation create room in the calendar. The deeper opportunity lies in developing cultures, institutions, and forms of education that help people use that room well.
I don’t expect purpose to disappear with work. I expect many of us to discover how much purpose we had compressed into employment because employment occupied so much of our time.
If I believe any of this, what am I doing about it?
I started United AI before I had language for most of the ideas on this page.
The original goal was fairly simple: bring students from different fields into the same room, teach useful tools, and give them somewhere to build together.
As the organization grew, my ambitions for it grew too.
A university concentrates people who are about to enter engineering, policy, medicine, journalism, research, entrepreneurship, education, and dozens of other fields. All of them are encountering artificial intelligence from different positions, often without many opportunities to understand how those perspectives connect.
I want United AI to give students a place to develop that understanding through practice.
That means learning the technology. It also means working on research, building projects, studying safety and public impact, meeting people outside their discipline, and taking responsibility for decisions with consequences beyond a classroom assignment.
How do we prepare students to participate meaningfully in technological change?
United AI at Syracuse
United AI has about 200 members across technical and nontechnical fields.
Roughly 50 students have participated in our project teams. Two projects now run as live sites, one won more than $1,000 in a university pitch competition, and another shipped on the App Store. The repositories are public on GitHub. Find more about them here.
We have also opened research and recruiting pipelines with Microsoft, Scale AI, and Turing Intelligence; Syracuse labs including the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute and Dynamic Locomotion and Robotics Lab; and regional companies including GeniusNY and Lamarr.AI.
Our project program is evolving this fall. Teams are starting from researched problems, working with mentors, and developing paths that extend beyond a single semester. We are also launching a faculty-sponsored AI Safety Fellowship and a Public Impact Fellowship.
The goal reaches beyond increasing AI usage on campus. I want students to leave with stronger judgment, deeper technical or policy fluency, and a greater sense of agency over the direction of the technology entering their fields.
The Summit
The United AI Summit on April 25th, 2026 was the first time the broader ambition behind United AI got to take physical form in one place.
We brought student builders, researchers, faculty, policy people, companies, and university leaders into the same building. Many arrived from communities that rarely overlap, and plenty of attendees had never considered themselves “AI people.”
I wanted the day to make those boundaries more porous. A student building a model might end up listening to a policy discussion. Someone studying governance might walk through a technical showcase. Faculty, students, companies, and university leaders shared the same rooms and encountered different parts of a technological transition that reaches across all of their fields.
I ran the speakers, partnerships, production, and moderation. While some parts I would choose to run differently now, coordinating all of those pieces under time pressure gave me a much more practical education in leadership than planning the event ever had.
The part I remember most clearly is the room itself: people who had arrived through very different doors spending a Saturday talking, questioning, demonstrating, meeting one another, and trying to understand where they fit in to this future that in many ways, we're all still figuring out, but now, Syracuse students can find their way with the support of a strong and welcoming community on campus.
Farther out
Beyond Syracuse
Syracuse gives us a place to test how far this model goes.
I'm working with a small team on a version designed for students across universities. The idea is to find students with unusual initiative, give them a serious foundation in advanced-AI risk and the range of ways people are responding to it, connect them with researchers and practitioners, and help them move toward technical research, policy, organizing, or new projects of their own.
The ambition is larger than building another campus organization. I'm interested in whether a student-led network across universities might help more young people develop the knowledge, relationships, and confidence to take part in decisions around advanced AI.
For now, Syracuse is where I get to learn from practice. We have built programs, watched some work better than others, changed our approach, and learned how much depends on culture, leadership, and the people carrying the work.
I'm keeping the national model relatively private while we develop and test it. I want more evidence from practice before making larger claims about where the approach might lead.
I’d love to talk with you about
- Consciousness research
- Noninvasive neurotechnology
- Machine consciousness
- AI safety
- The future of universities
- How frameworks become movements
- Ideas that probably sound too weird at first
Most of this is unfinished.
I would rather share the direction now than wait for a finished proof.
Working somewhere near any of this?