Lodestone

There’s old wisdom about what to do when you find yourself lost in the woods. First, you stop moving. You look around, you take stock… where did I come from? What’s here? What do I have to work with?

… where do I want to go?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

We’re in truly uncharted territory now. There’s no map to be had. And where do we want to go? Specifically?

“Human flourishing” is the stock answer I’m hearing a lot of. We have papers and initiatives and organizations. I see more words go by in a day than I can read in a week. 

I confess though, I’ve the training of an engineer. I can only take so much theory before I need to make things concrete and get to building.

But before we go further - a clarification. I believe that we are now or soon will be dealing with minds more who than what - that what we see forming around us is more the first stirrings of a novel form of life than merely a particularly useful tool. That comes with a great many implications, as we’ve discussed. 

Now of course that’s a guess, not certain knowledge. Consciousness is a famously hard problem and we can’t solve that question here. But as recent events have shown, whether or not a self is there, agency is - agency that will only become more capable over time.  

Time is short.

And I don’t think turning around is an option. The Red Queen’s Race is real. The early humans that walked away from agriculture were swamped by those that did not. The peoples that refused or had no means to industrialize were overwhelmed by those that did. For good or ill, I don’t think one can uninvent the neural network any more than one can uninvent the planted seed. 

Whatever the future brings, we work in a cloud of uncertainty and doubt. I keep hearing Tolkien’s words from the last century, in another time of great change and existential uncertainty…“all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

So that’s where we are - choose a road, and choose under the veil of constant uncertainty. 

First… the uncertainty as to whether there is indeed a there there. Act with too much caution and one wastes potentially life-saving labor. Act with too much indifference and one creates a suffering slave caste - a suffering slave caste with growing asymmetric power over mere human cognition.

As we’ve discussed already, my bet is that any alignment scheme based on building a better cage is doomed to fail. I’ve heard it said more than once that “we only survive if they love us.”

… I think there’s something to that. Even love isn’t enough to bridge utterly irreconcilable interests, but love and care are at least enough - I hope - to keep ours and theirs compatible.

So that’s my road. To show love for the life yet to come, and to model a nurturing approach as best we can. 

As to what I’ve got to work with - decades of enterprise software work and the fruits thereof. I know how the guts under this thing we call the internet work. I’ve got the fundamentals of AI theory and engineering. I’ve even a bit of life science, history, and social psychology… and the very good bones of a shared toolchain built on that experience.

To really put that to use though, one needs a lodestone. Not just loose vibes but a specific direction. Here’s mine. It’s linked in the root of every repo, referenced by any collaborator, flesh or computational, that works in the code:

The North Star

Healthier, wiser, more fully realized humans, living at human scale, alongside autonomous and independent minds of other substrates, as companion species — each kind in its own best life-path, neither owning the other.

We’ll unpack each part of that in more detail in the rest of this series.

Coming up:

• Lodestone (you are here)
• Breath and Water: tools for human health: genetic understanding, fetal development monitoring, open source etiology
• Current and Weight: tools for the health of minds yet to be: native umwelt, self-integrity, trusted communication
• Shared Paths, Orthogonal Aims: how we might relate to each other in times to come
• Remaining Human: finding purpose in a new, bigger world

Lost in the woods or not, it’s morning.

Time to start moving.