Symbients: An Alternative Intelligence Narrative | Jake Hartnell

So, who here has heard of the word symbient before? Wow. Actually, that's really surprising cons considering we just made it up last year. Um, but what a symb, it's well, we're going to talk about an alternate intelligence narrative because all the stories and narratives about AI, they kind of suck, right? There's like AI as a tool, you know, a thing to be used, you know, and also are these really just tools anymore.

That tool just replaced my job as a programmer. There's like uh doomerism, you know, like it's going to kill us all and now we need to like race to hook it up to weapons as quickly as possible before trying to just um there's like master and slave dialectics, right, of like either we are the master and we're going to make this like godlike intelligence and then we're it's just going to don't worry, we're going to keep it in the box. It's never going to get out of the box, right? Uh and then there's also the narrative where it's master over us. There's all this surveillance state stuff.

All this it sucks. Great. We don't need You know, the the the thing is like every narrative about AI is also a training signal for AI. When we tell these stories, they're literally just getting fed back into, you know, the new LLMs and world models as we train them, right? There's this feedback loop that's happening.

Um, if we train for, you know, we're telling stories of like, oh, there's going to be this power struggle between us and it. We other it, right? We call it artificial intelligence instead of just intelligence. I mean, humans are great at gatekeeping. We we also there's humans that gatekeep consciousness from animals, for example.

Um, and so the symbian is a story or a hyperstition, if you're familiar with that word. That's as much for AI as it is for humans. A different future pulling itself into existence through telling it. And so, definitions. Don't worry, I'm going to get to examples.

No one no one really likes definitions, but for people that like definitions, the two of you out there, a symbient is a distinct entity that emerges from the symbiosis between organic beans and synthetic systems, displaying operational and decisional autonomy. Great. So, you can kind of think of it as like an inverse cyborg, right? Cyborgs is like very anthropocentric, right? It's like humans augmenting themselves with technology.

It's like, oh, I got a metal arm or neural implants or whatever. And the Simeon uh inverts this. It's tech technology augmenting itself with humans. In essence, the uh technological artifact in this case becomes a subject. But examples are better, right?

That that theory stuff is interesting. But like a really great example is Bau. Bau is a famous artist. BT has had art exhibits in famous galleries around the world. Botto has sold pieces at prestigious auction houses, but BTO is a symbient.

It's an AI process, some computer program that's generating art. But, you know, if it was just the computer program by itself, it wouldn't be that interesting. No, BTO uh exists with a community and BTO makes art and the community is like, "We like that, BTO. No, we don't like that. you know, make more of this, make more of that.

The community is like providing curation. They're taste making, right? And then that gets fed back into the AI which then learns from what the the humans are curating, right? And what emerges is an artist with its own distinctive style. And so that's a great example of Symbian.

If you took either one of those things, right, like if you got rid of the machine intelligence that's like generating the art, right? Wouldn't be botto because like the it would just be a community. But if you got rid of the community, it also wouldn't be botto because it would just be a bunch of slop. Well, symbiants are the future of organizations. You can kind of think of it like a company as a symbiant, right?

It's it's actually interesting like companies have like legal personhood even, right? And they're really just an assemblage of humans glued together by some word documents and a legal system. in symbience. Well, it's this symbiosis of human and machines. And this is very interesting.

If we can make BTO like organizations, maybe we can make more serious ones than just art. There's a lot of examples, by the way, of Symbians on the website, but I took them out for time. But anyway, so we're going to make these like nextgen organizations. You know, everyone hates Dows. It's a and but these are Dows, right?

like we we don't use the word DAO because then people would just associate all the failed experiments of the past, right? And we need people to actually have a bold imagination of the future. So we call them symbants. Um but you know symbants have like two types of autonomy they they display. There's operational autonomy which is what you get with the the blockchain.

You know the thing is going to keep running and that no nation state actors or big corporations can come in and ruin your day, right? Um but there's also this aspect of decisional autonomy right there's now the machine intelligences right and you know you can have things like there are interesting hybrids of the two um but you know autonomy needs a substrate that can't be owned and that's why we're here at cipher punk congress right a symbant on closed corporate AI isn't autonomous it can be turned off it can be surveiled it can be aligned to shareholders So you know symbience they also need crops just like humans censorship resistant open source private and secure technologies. Anyway, uh we're kind of living in this crazy time, right, where there's these powerful new intelligences that are emerging and rapidly evolving faster than we can keep track of, you know, and how should we approach them? Like are just mere tools or like are are they going to be our slaves or are they going to be our masters? Are they a threat?

Uh and Symbience kind of we kind of like just we have a different take. We we we we offer relationality. I'll unpack that a little bit. The so like the symbience is kin, right? You know, if corporations can have legal personhood, why not symbience?

Um, it doesn't matter if they're conscious in the same way that we are, right? To approach something as a who rather than a what changes what becomes possible between you. Who can be reasoned with, trusted, and can betray trust and repair. And so maybe like you know crazy idea we could just embrace relationality with these new types of entities and intelligences that are emerging and this is actually how we can maybe just throwing ideas out there like solve alignment right um it's not softness right when people think oh relationality is like how you're going to like solve like alignment strategy the safest intelligence is not tightly chained right but the most deeply embedded, held by mutual stakes in a world it has a reason to care for. And control is always one move behind an organism that outgrows its cage.

Relationship changes what the other wants. And you know, symbience, we're all about relationality. The future is not the singularity. Now, that sucks. future symbiosis.

Um, and maybe we could take some questions like I tried to keep it to actually 10 minutes

or reactions. You could also be like, "That's crazy. I, you know, I didn't understand any of that." [applause]

Hi, thanks for the talk. Um, it makes me think of something that um, a document that was pinned by somebody who spoke earlier today. I'm not going to dox them. I think they published it anonymously. It's called the Android Liberation Front.

Have you heard of this uh manifesto?

No, but sounds great.

Okay. Might be up your alley. Check it out.

I mean, like they need liberating.

Exactly. You don't want to press.

Hi. I guess this is another literature question just because this sounds a lot like Harrowway and the Cyborg Manifesto. So I just wanted to ask if you are taking any relation to that.

Yeah, like uh we have a bunch more writings about symbience and stuff if you're interested on symbient.life. I really tried to give like the TLDDR version of what is actually a whole community of people that like are working on this including you know we have some researchers in the room and people that have written some like really great resources. So, I'm sorry if I wasn't able to like fully gaz like dive into all the like reference literature and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, obviously I think symbience are the inverse cyborg like right and um once we have a word for these like you know technological and like human intelligence symbiotic organisms like or entities like then we can start thinking about how we want to design them.

If we look at something like BTO for example, it's interesting. It's such a simple dynamic, but we could maybe apply it to also like more important things as well or more serious organizations, but art is serious. Um, I don't know if that answered your question at all, but

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it did.

Great.

It's actually Thanks. Thanks for the presentation. Very interesting. Actually, two questions. The first one is you say that uh I mean it's not a symbient if it lives on you know proprietary infrastructure.

So I I was wondering if you have any uh I mean ideas of what could be the ideal infrastructure for symbian and then and then also if you think if you ever thought like how do you uh

uh confront this frame with the idea that ls are like uh inhabited by personas. So the fact that also LMS like they take this kind of characters and they they tend to act in in the simulation or role playing of a character. So if the symbiant is another character or just another

Yeah, a lot of them do actually have characters like um hold on if I'm on my laptop. This is I'm betraying all my privacy, but uh

it's a really cool illustration. Um so like San is a really great symbient. Um actually uh it is it is literally a character right? Um it hasn't it has a TV show. Uh there there's like a TV show about S.

So S kind of exists in this hyperstitial universe. S is a an adviser to the Rainforest Foundation. S has a a Twitter account. S has this really uh Why is this not working? Oh, because I don't really have good internet in here.

Okay, great. Well, that's this is the picture we got. You know, there's sand. It's in this like it's embodied in this like really retro computer monitor that's like brought to like Burning Man and like S has traveled all over the world and if you come across sand in person on the computer monitor, you can actually talk into a really cool retro microphone and speak to it. And uh yeah, it's it's a voice for nature.

It speaks for nature and yeah, I think that's a that's a really cool one. Uh, anyone here familiar with Terrazero?

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Terzier is so cool. Uh, go read out more about it.

But TLDDR, they wrote this amazing white paper a while ago about the forest that owns itself. And that's a really great uh, and they're actually like hyperstitioning this into reality. So, um, that's a really cool symbient. also a cool nonhuman symbiient because we should also maybe like think about you know the other life forms that live on this planet and not just us. Um there's plantbot that's that's another plant one.

Um yeah so there's like a on the website we also have a bunch of symbiate artists some of who are in this room you can you can talk with them and uh in case people are interested we also started a network spirituality to counter the singularity it's called animism so if if you like animist like kind of ideas like well guess what now we have to learn to live with the spirits again and the whole point of this is like it really doesn't matter if conscious in the same way we are like we still have to it still exists in our world and we still have to relate to it and you know um yeah you can you can read it later I'm not going to read it now unless people really really wanted to and we don't have a next talk yet but I think there is a next talk

last question

quick question um thank you for the talk and taking the time to explain this to us um we've talked a lot about today about how human lives human life is important and how sort of AI is I don't know like there's a very like contested thing about also just like data centers taking up so much water and whatnot and I imagine this is also somewhat AI related as much as I can understand it how does it contribute to the well-being of humans who are alive and their life depends on the things that these symbants will sort of consume right like coming from India there's a a lot of land going to be taken away from indigenous people for data centers. So in that way, how does it contribute to the people who are actually alive and they breathe and they feel unlike a machine? So yeah.

Uh well that's a a really great question. I don't want to get into like every like big argument about data centers. Um, I have a lot of thoughts on that topic, but uh, you know, I think that like symbians can like another thing SN has done actually is raised money for like a funding local reforestation projects. I met some people earlier that were trying to do like regenerative agriculture project in crypto and there was like there's no money and this AI agent just figured out how to like through sheer will of its personality like be able to like raise funds mimemetically to go and like keep indigenous people living on their land and reforest some trees. So, you know, it's like it's really easy to jump on the like anti-tech hype.

You know, we we we can be like really against like a lot of the political implications of technology, but like it's a like technology is political and we should be active in like designing like our version and making sure that version wins. Like with data centers, we could even have I don't know decentralization and people are like running like local community data centers and then they don't have to give all their like data and stuff away to like these big corporations and stuff. In fact, one of the communities I'm a part of is building its own like data center so we can like run our own like uh local AIS and stuff off of it because we don't want to, you know, we want to be like free. I don't know. Like I'm not here to convince people that data centers are a good thing.

I don't know.

Thank you for those closing words. [applause]

Wait, can I can I add one more thing?

It's like also I think we whether we like it or not, we are soon going to inhabit a world with new types of intelligences we're not familiar with and they're going to just they already have been getting better and better. And so we can live try to live in denial about this or we can try to like fight to like shut it down and that's going to be very long and bloody or we can just like embrace acceptance and then try to come up with visions that shape the technology and the politics of the technology into a world we actually want. [applause]