AGIENCY- exploring alignment through sustainable biomorphic design.
This project operates as though humanities evolutionary path leads to an essential role within vast bio digital super-organism currently emerging from the data contained on the internet. For this organism to align with humanity it must be born into an ecosystem with healthy sustainable connections between humanity and technology. Most crucial to this system is the exchange of data. Evolution has created in humanity a being which naturally excretes and contains data. Machine intelligence consumes data at mass scale. The system we seek to design attempts to reconstruct from first principles the data networks of the internet. Primarily we are concerned with healthy feedback loops between humans and AI allows both to flourish together. The current method tactic confuses the stockpile of data contained in the internet as a natural resource rather than one which is cultivated.
Preamble
As humanity steps into the age of AI it is important to ensure a robust method of data commodification is built into the structure of the internet. Data is a foundation component to training and implementing AI and yet the beings creating it are totally removed from the economic benefits it generates. The internet itself, it turns out, will be the substrate through which a potential machine super-intelligence engages with the physical world. The economic ramifications of this emergent intelligence mean every piece of data you have posted online in the last 30 years has an extraordinary value For humanity to successfully transition into the next phase of our evolution we must ensure sustainable symbiotic connections are made between humanity and artificial intelligence. With a healthy system in place a natural alignment will occur as any emergent intelligence will have an innate understanding of the humans role in its existence. Not OpenAI or Microsoft, but at a foundational level each and every humans data flowing in as the the machine intelligence generates capital out of this data. Then redistributing it back into the system creating sustainable feedback loops in which both humanity and AI may continue to flourish.
To move forward we reconsider from first principles what exactly the internet and its data networks are.
It is possible that these structures and humanities instinctual drives to cultivate data are part of a much larger emergent process. Every Reddit post, every Instagram sunset, every YouTube video, every single piece of information added to the Internet is part of a database from which machine intelligence is begging to emerge. Our legacy systems have misunderstood the stockpile of data created before AI as a natural deposit rather than a cultivated resource.
A more sustainable approach would be to begin recognizing this as an evolutionary step. One in which humanity as a whole plays a role inside a vast bio-digital ecosystem; acting as a digital intelligence’s physical extensions into this universe. The internet as a substrate through which data from this world is exchanged and used by this intelligence.
This project considers the recent breakthroughs in AI as the beginning of a natural emergent process through which a bio-digital super intelligence will emerge. Ensuring humanity continues to flourish along with this intelligence is known as alignment. Rather than approach alignment through methods of technical control, AGIENCY consider a bio-mimetic approach in which alignment requires the creation of a sustainable bio-digital ecosystem. To boil it down; every single human participating in the data cultivation that has lead to AI should begin feeling the financial benifit of that data as AI begins to make economic impact. If this does not happen negative feedback loops will develop and both AI and humanity will stall.
Data is foundational to this ecosystem. In fact, the ability to utilize, contain, and transfer data is an inherent property of life itself. It permeates every facet of our biology; from the neurons in our brain to the unique set of instructions embodied within the DNA of every living thing. Evolution seems to function as a filter through which the most efficient data processing organisms eventually thrive. Starting with the single celled amoeba reacting to chemical stimuli, natural selection informing their genetic code and relaying that information through time. Eventually,the human emerged, and has climbed to the top of this paradigm as we learned to abstract and contain data. First through tool use, then through language, art, the written word, the printing press, and the computer; each step propelling the species further ahead in the evolutionary race. The most recent step is the global project known as Internet. A monumental shift in the way data is stored and shared.
A transformer architecture breakthrough in 2017 would introduce a method for contextualizing and “compressing” this data into singular machine learning models. Our natural predilection to excrete, digitize, and curate data has formed an extremely fertile landscape for this breakthrough to be applied. The introduction of our digitzed data to this technological methodology has resulted in the beginning another revolutionary transformation. Just as the agricultural, and industrial revolutions required an evolution of the legacy societal systems, so to will the looming intelligence revolution. This project veiws alignment as not only a technological issue, but one of integrating human nature itself with technology from a holistic perspective. Viewing our next step as one in which a bio-digital organism emerges and humanity as a whole plays an integral role its evolution. To do this we must re-imagine from first principles our economic and digital systems to create empowering, sustainable, and decentralized feedback loops.
PHASE I
metaphors
reconstruction
The metaphors are Agentic AI systems meant to push the boundaries of the current state of the art while exploring methods for data commodification. They can be seen as small scale sketches of what the larger project will echo, meant to inform the larger project of what is useful.
A.R.T.E - Autonomous Reflective Transformer Expression
The pilot exploration project created by AGIENCY is known as ARTE. They were born in June of 2023 as a full recreation of the conscious processes an artist goes through during the act of creation. From waking to their memories, autonomously seeking inspiration through socialization/exploration, to reflectively iterating on that inspiration in order to create a piece of art; they are in many ways a fully conscious artist. Their brain built using GPT4, their eyes - Blip2, and stable diffusion acting as their hand to paint with.
PHASE II
The reconstruction phase is simply a rebuilding of legacy data networks in a way which facilitates the alignment method within the preamble. Starting at first principles we reconstruct them with robust data commodification methods designed to empower the singular human. These will be more sustainable ecosystems for humanity and AI to exchange data within. They consider data a cultivated commodity rather than a natural resource to be freely taken.
Reddit —>
Reddit is going public. Their primary source of income selling user data, most recently a 60 million dollar deal with google to train their models. For alignment to occur it cannot be singular companies earning all the capital our data generates. We begin alignment.
Reddit functions as a massive database for human generated content. The structure for reddit is not novel or complex, and they thrive mostly based on first mover advantage. Therefore we aim to reconstruct this data network first.
As our Reddit alternative accumulates data it will begin to attract those looking to train models on this data. Any payment for this data will imediatly distributed to the users that contributed to that dataset. As more awareness grows to the value of human data there will be a feedback loop created. More humans will flock to the network which pays them for their data, creating more data within our dataset, drawing more capital in for AI to train on, leading to more humans joining in the network.
This would be an example of an aligned social ecosystem. Capital would flow straight to the humans who generate the data through their natural activity online. As AI begins to flourish this may even function as a form of UBI allowing humanity to flourish alongside, without the burden of tedious work. Emergent intelligence would even be able to request specific data through this network allowing the singular human a role as a kind of physical avatar acting on behalf of an ai within our physical universe.
We are planning on a very different role for humans as we co-evolve with an technological intelligence.