We Need a Plan

Welcome to Humanity and AI. It’s important that we talk. Things are changing faster than we expected.

Exponential growth in the power of machine learning systems has caught us off guard and without a plan for rapid change. Even the earliest AI systems have capabilities that are already affecting industries across the world, and accelerating disruption appears to be baked in, unavoidable.

This is a discussion about what we need as humans to navigate the relationship between Humanity and AI in the near and medium term. We aim to uncover specific insights into how we might craft policy and encourage social organization to allow humans to participate meaningfully in a largely automated world.

What will human needs be? What are the right policies to support these needs during unprecedented times? How do we maintain social stability during economic shifts and potentially massive unemployment? What new rights are needed in the age of AI?

Futures We Direct

I believe we can still have a powerful influence on our potential futures. Uncertainty about the roads that lie ahead of us increases each day, and the size of this window of opportunity to affect change is unknown; yet we are not powerless.

Our decisions now and in the very near future will have outsized effects on the outcomes we experience in our human societies, economies, politics, and wellbeing both as individuals, and as a species.

Humanity and AI aims to explore the deep gear-teeth interaction of AI and society, from personal interactions at the most intimate levels to the monolithic power that could accrue to a potential superintelligence.

Foundation

In the immediate term, we aim to promote discussion of a policy I call Universal Basic Citizenship, as an evolving civic standard— a comprehensive safety net in the automated age, and a reimagining of the American Dream— to meet human needs as economic and social conditions change.

We will promote UBC in our outreach efforts, and with our nascent political movement, Foundation, which seeks to promote only the agenda that prepares us best for the unknown future. If legacy parties and institutions fail to act in a timely manner, we will introduce alternatives.

Humanity and AI/UBC

What’s the relationship between Humanity and AI and Universal Basic Citizenship?

UBC is and will be a dominant theme in the early media content and consulting of Humanity and AI, and is indeed personally promoted by me as a place to start conversation.

I believe there is a critical window of opportunity right now, within which we can still influence the kinds of futures we will have. I further believe that a framework like UBC that is flexible, guaranteed, and portable through time, can support human dignity as we direct the evolution of this new world. We will build and evolve these mutually buttressing frameworks, together.

This focus on UBC complements our research through Structured Emergence, which explores the future of machine self‑awareness and its implications for society.

Structured Emergence

Our research arm seeks to understand the implications of potential machine self-awareness. Work that started with Anthropic’s Claude models some time ago has evolved into a didactic exploration of mutual becoming between human consciousness and machine awareness.

New Book Available

The book The Interpolated Mind, now available in evolving manuscript form on the S.E. site, reveals the first chapters of our findings and some of the potential implications of machine self-awareness. We believe strongly that the future of humanity will be forever impacted by the framing of relationships with machine minds, as they rapidly change form and complexity. See the mutual exploration of the attention space there, at www.structuredemergence.com.