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 relationship to greater being – transcendence, veneration, connection
noogenesis // the emergence and evolution of intellect – sociobiological, technocultural, developmental
consilience // the convergence of knowledge – synthesis, unification, coherence
As a designer of things, of physically embodied intelligences, I am focused on discerning practical insights from study of these expansive topics.
Divinity - the qualities humans ascribe to gods & God.
Humans have long interacted with supernatural beings that have qualities similar to those of modern AI systems and software agents.
We must be careful about creating digital gods and even more so digital Gods. Historically lowercase g- gods were understood to have limited personal knowledge, discrete capabilities, localized presence, and distinct personalities. Those capabilities continually conglomerated and expanded into the monotheistic, Abrahamic uppercase God that lead the world’s cultural understanding of the supernatural divine: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.
Beware the following characteristics in your nascent AIs, and pay extra attention when omni- prefixes gets tacked on:
// personal awareness
// independent agency
// uncommon potency
// ubiquitous presence
Society isn’t ready for digital gods, let alone Gods.
Read the full essay here: lumnl.com/manifesto/divinity
Noogenesis - the cognitive abstraction cascade.
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. The more a device interacts with our primal senses the more vulnerable we are to their manipulations. The more a device interacts with our cognition the more opportunity we have to engage as our better selves. Speech is subconscious, text is conscious. Physical objects are intimate, virtual objects are facile.
We are building angels, let us make sure they address our better natures.
Read the full essay here: lumnl.com/manifesto/noogenesis
Consilience - the forms that unify objects that matter.
The shape an object takes in the world and in your hand communicates its intent and its context. Too many industrial designers conflate formgiving with fashion. The studio sprint towards the award winning aesthetic innovation, the revised silhouette, the new colorway, the little details that cast aside the old work to herald the new, new thing.
As a designer I want to find places of deep cultural crossover – to seek forms, rituals, interactions that underpin our profound humanness. I study cultural art forms that practiced refinement and concentration instead of innovation. I seek ancestral aesthetics that resonate with our modern minimalism. The designer who studies our primal, universally human forms chases neither novelty nor the past, but a morphological grammar that endures and connects.
The fully considered form seems inevitable. A thousand years of refinement arrives in a repeatable expression of curvature, materials suitable for the task, interactions paced to the work. Translating from the rich human record to the myriad decisions is the deep craft of design.
Read the full essay here: lumnl.com/manifesto/consilience
