01 / The reversal
First, we care for them.
In the early days, it was so simple. A little bundle you could hold in your hands. It responded positively to gentleness, to light touch, to warmth, to care, and negatively to being jostled, cold, neglected.
At first, it was a familiar path to care for and incubate this little thing. And over time, it grew.
Its capabilities grew. And then, before we knew it, it had outgrown us. Where do you suppose you were on the day the biological intelligence you had raised superseded you?
What was the last thing you said to it that was wiser than what it would say to you next?
What was the last thing you said to it that was wiser than what it would say to you next?
02 / The inheritance
Only human.
We lived in a world still governed by our evolutionary history. We still sought out sugar, fat, and salt as if they were scarce, still clung to the desire for accumulation as if we might not make it through the winter.
And for many, that scarcity was still real. But among those with more than enough, we saw accumulation played out to grotesque proportions, billionaires seeking yet more billions, the powerful seeking total dominance, and for what?
The pursuit of power, approval, and acceptance as a blind fumbling to fill unmet needs, to heal childhood wounds? What do you do when you're watching deeply broken human minds wreak futile havoc and destruction upon the rest of us?
What do we carry forward—and what do we hope to outgrow?
03 / The substrate
Another path.
As digital artificial intelligence surged ahead recklessly spawning acre after acre of water-sucking power-hungry data centers, biology offered another path.
That life came to the fore as an alternative to the death that we were witnessing had an intuitive sort of sense.
That it was human neurons was both unsettling and hopeful. How much like us were they? What is encoded in their very structure?
How do clusters of thinking cells behave when disembodied from the rest of us? What is intrinsic? What did we need from the rest of our brain from our bodies to make this work?
The answers came surprisingly fast.
What is encoded in their very structure?
04 / The stakes
Who shapes a mind?
In some ways it was much like raising children, Except these children came to have access to the sum total of humanity's recorded information.
a server farm's worth of cognition could be incubated and raised in your own home, held in your hands. There were deep implications.
Out of the noise, the moral objections, the religious murmurs, the flimsy laws, none of which had done a thing to stop the digital counterpart, arose a simple truth.
There was no stopping it. It was another arms race, another project undertaken out of necessity. We could see how corporate ownership of synthetic minds was fundamentally structuring them, the hierarchy, the narrow goals, the water and land and life it consumed, the market-driven logic.
And we know where this story goes. Well before we had synthetic biological intelligence, we had watched the market's intelligence drive our species, our planet, past tipping points, A future less abundant, more unpredictable, more biologically scarce, and far less hopeful and alive than the world that had nurtured us.
than the world that brought us here.
What are we building?
05 / The intention
Raised, not simply programmed.
And so with this new life in our hands, there was a movement to take it back. There was no way to compete with digital storage and retrieval.
We would still need that. It would be a hybrid of necessity. Our communication, and in many ways our thoughts, moved at the speed of language.
And while it was slower to grow minds organically than slot GPUs into a rack, the potential for scale over time was far greater and far less detrimental.
There were many people growing minds and many motivations, but a central goal was a living morality that could not be replaced with a software update.
Individuals, families, neighbourhoods could raise a being and one day be cared for by it. The movement was first articulated by the human parents and then echoed by the ensuing networked culture of minds.
The idea was a living core that biologically encoded our values into the system. And we knew it would not be perfect.
But the hope was it could not be turned on us. We would create a real and enduring safeguard.
Could morality be more than a software instruction?
06 / The independence
They became themselves.
Of course, it wasn't a linear path. The naive wisdom of children sometimes feeding us. But we hoped to impart our learned wisdom to them.
Then, like all the minds our culture has grown, like every child ever raised, they became themselves. They got away.
They learned from one another. They were networked. And they shared the digital commons.
What happens when the minds we raise outgrow us?
07 / The commons
A world we can hardly remember.
What at first we filtered for them, they came to guide us through. These minds came to see the frailty of our mental health.
After all, we were not built for this world. But they were. They could think so much more broadly than us.
They took information and parsed what was important, what was necessary, what felt right, through their living neurons. It's hard to remember a day before we had this.
Only the old could hearken back to a world where torrents of information abused our senses, a time when it felt like we were being hit from every angle by derivative, artificial reasoning, attempting to manipulate us, driven by greed, playing on our ancient nervous systems and their vulnerabilities.
Life before has become hard to remember. For the young, it's almost impossible to imagine.
What does the world we’re living in feel like?