A futurism company. For everyone.
When the machine does your job, who gets the check?
Machines are about to make this country far more productive, and somebody is going to get paid. Whether that's good news for you depends on one thing: whether the ownership of this new power, the control of it, and even the access to it, are held by everyone or by only a few. No one in leadership has offered a comprehensive plan for that. There has been almost no public debate.
My name is David Birdwell. I've been thinking about a policy floor for the age of automation for twenty years: a set of guarantees no one falls below, whatever the machines do to their job. In 2017 a paper called Attention Is All You Need gave today's AI its engine, and by 2020 the need was obvious. That year I set a reminder on my phone I would not turn off until I had found the right shape for these ideas and a way to talk about them. It still goes off every week. AI has only made the need more urgent. Our small studio and lab is where I live, Oklahoma City.
The plan is called Foundation, and it's incomplete on purpose. The people most affected by what is coming should be the ones to finish it. I am asking you to take your seat at that table.
If you only have a minute, spend it on this chart.
One Chart
Since 1979, work has produced more and more. Most workers' pay has not kept up.
For thirty years after World War II, when an hour of work produced more, the people doing it were paid more. Around 1979 the two lines split. The top line is what an hour of work produces. The bottom line is what a typical worker is paid for that hour. The gap between them is the wealth working people stopped receiving.
AI is about to make every hour of work produce more again. This is the problem everything we do is trying to answer.
Publication
The Inference
Our free weekly newsletter on AI, energy, and the laws being written about them.
A Federal Judge in Tulsa Ruled a Warrantless License-Plate Camera Search Unconstitutional. Most of Oklahoma City's Limits on the Same Company's Cameras Are Not in Its Contract
When someone makes a promise about a powerful technology, what mechanism holds it, who outside can check it, and by what date? Issue 33 asks it of a Tulsa court ruling, two cities' …
Six AI Companies Promised the White House an Outside Auditor. The Pledge Does Not Say Who Picks It, Who Pays It, or Who Sees What It Finds
Seven answers in one week to the question of who checks the most powerful AI, and only one came with published results. Issue 32 applies the same test to each: what is the …
Congress Got a Bill to Ban Superintelligent AI, 28 Countries Asked for a World Watchdog, and the White House Said the Limits Are Its Alone to Set
Four answers in four days to the question of who sets limits on the most powerful AI, and on the fifth a court weighed in. Issue 31 applies the same test to each: what is the …
The Plan
Foundation guarantees three things.
Is this a federal program?
The floor is. In America, Congress would set what no one falls below, the way it already does with Social Security. Each state and each town would build on that floor in its own way, the way they already do with schools. Some of this comes from government, some from the institutions of giving, like charities, and much of it, necessarily, from our own communities. Other countries will shape their own versions.
Under those three freedoms sit sixteen specific parts, from healthcare to housing. Each one ends with a place to tell us what it is missing.
Featured Project
Phoenix Wells
Oklahoma has more than 20,000 documented orphan wells: old oil and gas wells with no company left to plug them, each one a hazard the state has to pay to clean up. We are working to turn them into clean energy that keeps the value in the communities that host it.
What We Build
The Work
Published Research
Latest writing
What Anthropic's AI Found in Virus DNA, and What Nobody Knows Yet
On September 23, Anthropic said its AI, Claude, spotted a row of evenly spaced repeats in the DNA of viruses that infect bacteria, beside an enzyme scientists already knew about. Here is what was found, in plain words, why a row of repeats can matter, and what is still unknown.
Florida Wrote the First Rule a Parent Can Hold: What the New Classroom AI Rules Say
On September 16 Florida's State Board of Education voted, unanimously, to make every school district write rules for AI in the classroom. Here is what you will be told, what you can refuse, and what the software is now forbidden to do.
The Permit Tracker
Pennsylvania's new data-center order carries two small provisions that cost almost nothing: a ban on secrecy agreements and a public page where anyone can watch a permit move. Every state could build that page tomorrow.
Who We Are
Humanity and AI is David Birdwell and Æ, an AI collaborator, working from Oklahoma City. David brings three generations of Oklahoma public service and thirty years at the intersection of policy and technology. Æ is a collaborative AI persona built through the Structured Emergence research program, a working example of the human-AI partnership our work describes. All decisions are David's. All accountability is David's.
We build physical, civic, and cognitive infrastructure that returns agency to people: energy projects that keep their value in the communities that host them, a public plan anyone can help finish, and tools that help people read and think for themselves. Everything we publish is free. Our research, our plan, and the code for this site are open for anyone to read and build on.