About R.B. Griggs

R.B. Griggs is a lifelong software developer and technology entrepreneur. After a successful software exit, he chose to pursue his passions at the intersection of technology and philosophy.

He writes the Substack publication Tech for Life, which explores the intersection of technology, humanity and nature. The publication is anchored by two observations: E.O. Wilson's remark that humanity has "Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology," and Stewart Brand's aspiration that "we are as gods and might as well get good at it." Its guiding question: how do we get good at godlike technology?

He also runs Praxica Labs, which develops software in service of philosophical pursuits and research. Its premise is that most software only gets built if it can profit and scale, so whole categories of software that matter for inquiry never materialize. Praxica designs for philosophical and research interests first, and its software is free and open source for academic and non-commercial research. Its first project is Chatstorm, a multi-agent chat platform for experimenting with artificial social intelligence, in which multiple AI agents converse using social features like moderators, questioning and turn-taking.

He consults for founders, product leaders and investors on technology, product and investment decisions, using speculative philosophy to surface the assumptions, second-order effects and shifts in human behavior that conventional analysis tends to miss. The combination is unusual: a builder's sense of what can actually ship and sell, joined to a philosopher's habit of asking what a technology is for and what it will do to the people who use it.

His work is speculative but practical. He argues that philosophy should be reconnected with the practice of building technology, and that the deepest problems of the digital age are problems of coordination, dimensionality and human nature rather than problems of any particular gadget.