Question

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.