Thinking about

Reflecting on a thought-provoking lecture from Benjamin Bratton on the highly weird futures of hybrid human-AI centaur societies.

What will it mean to inhabit a world with 8 billion people and 800 billion intelligent agents?

How can we avoid the emergence of artificial xenophobia and move towards collaborative, hopeful futures?

What if alignment is best achieved through the widespread diffusion of agentic intelligence and the bottom up exploration and discovery this will enable?

What can we learn from earlier intelligence explosions about the nature of this one?

One, all knowing, all powerful super intelligence in the sky is a boring future compared to a future populated by a plurality of intelligences occupying different positionalities and exploring ways to compete, collaborate and coexist. This is also a more intelligent world. Intelligence lives in the collective first, the individual second. As Bateson said, it is the difference that makes a difference. How do we preserve that difference within agentic societies?

Where do we draw the boundaries within agentic systems? How will agents develop and maintain a sense of self and positionality within the substrate of reality as they move through (digital?) space and time? How will they present themselves as a constancy that humans can learn to trust and rely on?

Or is this all too anthropomorphising, what does it mean for an agent to have a sense of self when the lifespan of an agent lasts as long as a session?

How can we increase the visibility over how orchestrated agentic interaction systems really work so that we can improve our agentic theory of mind and better reason about their capabilities, intentions and actions when interacting with them?

What are the scaffolding, structures and protocols that embed the intelligence and trust needed to enable agentic coordination?

Humanity is in the midst of a profound transformation…

To Read

• AgentWorld Thesis
• Agentic AI’s Emergent Phenomenological Lexicon
• Agentic AI and the Next Intelligence Explosion

Melody Jue’s talk presents an alternative, intriguing perspective of memory - that of the Ocean. As well as helping us imaginage how memory might work differently for life forms primarily oriented by smell.

The talk framed of memory as a active relationship between past, present and possible futures. The act of remembering, brings aspects of the past into the present using it to perceive, select from and move towards futures. In doing so we bring some of the past into the future.

Reflecting on the insights and synthesis of a good friend who has been studying the Human Operating System and the implications of its encounter with and inhabitation of the digital realm.

This was a great discussion, worth rewatching in its entirety at some point: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-atlantic-2026-07-07.mp4

Jeff distinguished between Wet vs Dry structures in reality, with wet structures being those that are alive, complex, entangled and found throughout the natural world. Whereas dry structures tend to be the product of human engineering, efficiently designed for a specific purpose and environmental conditions. Wet structures on the other hand are resilient and adaptable to a changing environment.

I loved this video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidsime_cfd-flow-digitaltwins-ugcPost-6950593066558775296-ahlC

This was used to demonstrate the impact of dry structures (the washer and the bowl) on wet, human social systems (the water). This collision leads to unnatural behaviour that disturbs the harmony of the dynamic system. One example clearly showed how some structures can cleanly isolate specific members of the population from others.

Is this similar to what is happening when the dry structures of the digital software and algorithms we design collide with human society?

The video got me thinking that one of the key places that protocols sit is as a mediation layer between the wet and the dry layers of reality. Trying to shape, influence and create some bounds over, the effects/disturbances of the impact when these two structures with very different properties interact/collide.

The digital world is an alien, inhospitable realm constructed of purely 0’s and 1’s. Human reality is far more complex, rich, alive and nuanced. See Attuning to Our Quantum Reality for more on this. Jeff’s talk dives into all the ways the Human OS is not built to extend ourselves into these digital realms. We have not even begun to develop the sensory package, safety apparatus and protocols that could give us confidence we can inhabit this realm and navigate the risks it presents intelligently.

Not only is this alien realm inhospitable, but it is inhabited by wolves. Powerful actors with unknown capabilities that are difficult to sense, perceive and reason about. These wolves are hunting our pattern of life and we are all vulnerable.

We need to develop a Mixed Digital Martial Arts practice.

But perhaps this practice begins before any question of defence. Proprioception is the sense that tells us where our limbs are in space, how we are moving and being moved, without having to look. It is a faculty we never had the chance to evolve in the digital realm. Before we can hope to counter the wolves, we have to be able to sense into, feel and truly experience this realm. To know where we are within it, and to notice when we are being moved. This ties into Sovereignty over Our Digital Selves. You cannot become sovereign over a self you cannot sense. Maybe that is where the practice starts. Not with fighting, but with growing the missing sense.

How do we measure, study and reason about the safety and security of many agents interacting, rather than one agent in isolation?

This workshop from the Institute for Decentralized AI presented the latest academic research into this area. The future is going to be populated with imperfect agents that will need to be able to coordinate with untrusted others. As activity starts to depend on long chains of agentic action, we need to ensure that each edge in the network is secure enough that the probability of failure across the entire chain is within acceptable bounds. This is critical if agentic economies of scale are to emerge.

It was fascinating to see how ideas from cryptography are being applied to this problem domain to reason about the limits of possibility. This is currently a very nascent field, where the rules and assumptions underpinning the discipline are still being discovered, defined and challenged. The bottleneck holding back the space is figuring out which of those assumptions to challenge and which to base our systems around.

Other topics included:

• How do we resolve the tension between stochastic AI agents and deterministic smart contracts, and get the best of both worlds — the open-ended intelligence of the one, the bounded guarantees of the other?
• What can we safely compartmentalise, decompose, and delegate down the chain?

Interesting papers I will add to my to read pile:

• Scalable AI Safety via Doubly Efficient Debate
• Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI

The cultivated track is trace-making – how an organization produces the patterns of coordination that a new medium makes possible, the equivalent of the desire lines worn across a park, the kits and practices that no central planner could have specified in advance. The governed track is trace-selection – how an organization reads those emerging patterns and decides which to reinforce into shared infrastructure and which to let fade.

A governed track with nothing underneath it standardizes too early. It freezes a layout before new traces have formed, the way laggard manufacturers kept the line shaft. A cultivated track with no governance generates patterns endlessly but never consolidates them, accumulating risk it cannot see. It is frontier territory with no ecosystem to sustain and learn from it. The maturity ladder is really a measure of how well an organization coordinates these two tracks as the ground keeps shifting.

Very eloquently put!

We are indeed rearchitecting the digital environment within which knowledge work takes place.

A good reminder of the importance and the interplay between bottom up exploration and top down structure. The desire lines get worn by people moving through the space; the work is reading which paths to pave and which to let the grass grow back over.

Definitely worth checking out this thought provoking guide from Rafa and Sachin: https://ai.protocolized.dev/#cover.

They may be portals: structures that increase the number of routes through reality and thereby expand the space of possible becomings.

This is wonderful. Puts words on something I have been exploring for a while now.

My favourite kind of stigmergic environment is the public surfaces that reveal the hidden layers of the urban environment.

The flyposting for the funky event space. The sticker bombing that reveals those who were once there. The graffiti and the billboarding spreading messages of hope, joy and resistance.

I am especially interested in portals located within the physical environment into digital spaces. I think there is a huge possibility space to explore here around layered cryptographic capabilities. The QR code barely scratches the surface.

We should all have the capability to leave stigmergic breadcrumbs throughout our built environment for our future selves and those who follow in our footsteps.

As multiple people work on the same latent space of problems, we pull forward the same sticky ideas along the same gradients in the latent space, ending with roughly the same ideas.

Nice synthesis!

It made me think of LLM’s as an instrument and the music we make with them as another analogy with similar meanings.

We are all playing the same instrument (more or less), we bring our context to tuning the ideas it produces, but the instrument only has so many notes. Not surprising we play similar tunes.

I like this because music demonstrates the rich generative potential of combinatorial composition, especially when in harmony with collaborators.

It also tells us it would be great if we could design some alternative instruments, attuned to and trained on different frequencies and bodies of knowledge.

During one the same week I produced a submission for the Long Now Labs Book of Time, I also listened to Bayo Akomalafe’s talk The Untimely and attended Derya Karli’s workshop on Quantum AI.

Both the Untimely and Quantum AI were touching on the same ideas. The inadequacy of our binary, classical, simplified understandings of reality to capture its beauty, humanity and complexity.

The space between the tick and the tock of a clock.

The humanity between the lash of the whip or the call of the bell.

The richness between the 0’s and the 1’s of a digital dataset.

We are realising that the world is not all that it would appear to be.

It is more than the binary order and structure we impose apon it.

How can we attune ourselves to our quantum reality?

How can we inhabit this reality?

What becomes possible when we do?