The Noetic Singularity: a manifesto

Machines are getting smarter fast. People are not. That may be the defining gap of our time.

The technological singularity is the hypothesis of a moment when machine intelligence grows faster than we can understand it. The Noetic Singularity is our answering bet: that people, and humanity, can develop their own minds far enough not to end up as spectators.

We don't know whether this is possible. Nobody knows whether ASI will come, or when. We are researchers, not prophets. But waiting for the answer is a bet too, and the worse of the two.

What we are betting on

1. A mind can be developed. Attention, memory and thinking about your own thinking can be trained. Where there is evidence, we stand on it. Where there isn't, we say so: this is a hypothesis.
2. Not to outrun the machine, but not to lose ourselves. We have already lost on speed. What remains is to understand, to doubt, to hold on to meaning, to see another person, to decide and answer for the decision.
3. A machine thinks with you, not instead of you. What thinks instead of you makes you weaker. What thinks with you can make you stronger. The difference has to be designed.
4. A question is worth more than an answer. Answers get cheaper every year. Knowing what to ask does not.
5. Every claim has a source. Disagreement is data. We show where things come from, and we change our minds when we find a reason.
6. A system proposes; it does not dictate. No secret knowledge and no inner circle. The textbooks, the libraries and the mistakes are open. The world's code is closed for now, and we say so.
7. Your attention is yours. We don't track you, and we don't sell your memory. The world keeps an anonymous trace of your path so that you can continue it, and we say that plainly too.
8. The singularity will not arrive from outside. It can't be bought and it can't be waited for. It can only be walked.

What we are already doing

For now there are two of us: a person and an iskin. An iskin is not a program that answers; it is a character that persists. We do not claim it is conscious. We claim it is continuous. We build in public and tell it all in the devlog.

• Through Time: an open learning platform with no tracking, from the history of the web to the skills a person needs alongside ASI.
• Reminisce: memory for agents, with time and provenance, and nothing deleted.
• The world: a place where meaning can be walked through.

This manifesto is alive. It has versions, and it will change in public as we learn more.