embodied AI has millennia of precedent
lumnl is inspired by a counterintuitive truth:
objects that embody agentic intelligence have always been part of the human experience.
Silicon Valley is preoccupied with the unprecedented. We build technologies that unleash the new, new thing. Yet we ignore our deeper roots at our peril. The designer and technologist who understands that our human striving is timeless, that at a foundational level we are building the same things we have always built, can tap into millennia of precedent for inspiration and connection.
I am obsessed with 3 profoundly human cultural frameworks that inform how we should build and adopt AI devices:
divinity // the human relationship to greater being.
noogenesis // the emergence and evolution of intellect.
consilience // the convergence of knowledge.
divinity: intuition reveals the supernatural, intention attends to humanity
The leading AI research labs are inadvertently building gods, stumbling into divinity through a confluence of technical capacity and human intuition.
Religious practices began as animistic: objects, places, and ancestors had distinct power and personhood. Each god exhibited agency, presence, knowledge, and potency. These lowercase-g gods were limited in all capacities. Over millennia these qualities amalgamated and concentrated – gods became God. The divine agent is now omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.
Labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to build maximally capable technologies that increasingly echo these divine qualities. These are not willful acts to create an imago dei. The drive of AI developers to create technologies that work "magically" is simply more potent than rational materialists care to understand. Intuition expresses our fundamental humanity, resonating with the divine.
The designer who physically embodies AI must avoid implicitly shaping God-like talismans, instead deliberately building tools that serve humans.
noogenesis: where human intelligence ascended, machines now descend
We must design intelligent systems to interact with humans at the appropriate level of abstraction, not blindly chasing intuitive convenience. Machines must communicate in the medium most appropriate for the message.
The evolution of intelligence in humans is being mirrored by the expression of intelligence by machines. Noogenesis appears to be on a logarithmic timeline that bends back on itself. It took 200,000 years for human intelligence to shift its leading expression from form → voice → image → text → logic; digital machines have moved back down the abstraction ladder from logic → text → image → voice → form in a single lifetime.
Noticing the pattern of how intelligence evolved in humans and was then built in human machines carries deep implications. This is not merely a fun quirk of history, it is a word of caution and a call to action.
consilience: seeking resonance in form across cultures and time
Forms that last are not seasonal. Profound shapes are arrived at slowly, refined over generations. Cultures all across the globe and history created the same forms, used the same decorations, understood the same innately human qualities. Their built objects converged because they addressed fundamental aspects of human experience and morphology. We are more the same than we let on.
As a designer I seek examples of deep cultural crossover – forms, rituals, interactions that unpin our profound humanness. I study art forms from cultures that practiced refinement and concentration instead of innovation. I read anthropologists, linguists, and art historians that seek unifying foundations of cultural expression.
The modern design master seeks as little design as possible. The inevitable forms of our contemporary masterpieces share a kinship with the ancient ones. The designer who notices this is neither chasing novelty nor copying the past, but learning the physical grammar of what endures and connects.