# About R.B. Griggs

> R.B. Griggs is a lifelong software developer and technology entrepreneur who, after a successful software exit, turned to the intersection of technology and philosophy. He writes speculative philosophy of technology at Tech for Life, runs Praxica Labs, which builds open-source software in service of philosophical research, and consults on technology, product and investment decisions.

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](https://www.techforlife.com)*, 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](https://praxica.com), 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](https://github.com/Praxica/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.

## The ideas in brief

R.B. Griggs's work is a speculative but practical philosophy of technology. Its starting point is E.O. Wilson's diagnosis that humanity has "Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology." Griggs is not anti-technology. He argues that technology has outgrown everything meant to guide it: markets, governments, philosophy, religion and culture. The task is to develop ideas big enough to give technology a purpose. Eight recurring ideas run through the essays.

**1. Technology is philosophy made real.** Technology turns theory into practice, so even "practical" questions about AI, platforms or geoengineering are philosophical questions in disguise. Technology widens what we *can* do but cannot tell us what we *ought* to do. Philosophy is "thinking in advance," and builders need it. ([Calling All Philosophers](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/calling-all-philosophers), [How Philosophy Makes Technology Better](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/how-philosophy-makes-technology-better), [Towards a Philosophy of Technology](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/towards-a-philosophy-of-technology))

**2. Life is the purpose of technology.** Griggs's founding manifesto proposes life itself as the only goal big enough to guide advanced technology. Humans are stewards of life, in a "right relationship" where nature is the foundation and technology is the extension. Humans matter not because of a metaphysical "secret sauce" but through the *contingency argument*: we are the finite, suboptimal leading edge of a life that, as far as we know, has happened only once. ([Tech for Life](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/manifesto), [Life is Special Enough](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/life-is-special-enough))

**3. Coordination, not capability, is the bottleneck.** Civilization runs on a "social operating system" that has been upgraded through history. The Anthropocene's planetary problems overwhelm the current global operating system: Griggs calls them "Ostrom Complete" and "the final boss mode of human coordination." Progress has to answer the question "progress towards what?", and it must include immaterial as well as material progress. ([Our Planetary Predicament](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/our-planetary-predicament), [Progress Towards What?](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/progress-towards-what), [The Case for (Im)material Progress](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-case-for-immaterial-progress))

**4. Constraints enable.** Optimists and pessimists really disagree about *constraints*, not technology. Constraints both limit and make things possible. The market is an "innovation idiot-savant": necessary but "not big enough" to carry the whole burden of constraining advanced technology, because advanced technology breaks trial and error. Griggs argues for a "constraint-first" approach to building the future. ([A Constraint Theory of Technology](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/a-constraint-theory-of-technology))

**5. Dimensionality versus optimization.** Griggs's most distinctive framework. Optimization compresses reality and dimensionality expands it. Good technology *compresses* dimensionality, keeping depth accessible, and bad technology *collapses* it. Modern society suffers from "dimensional poverty": it coordinates through thin proxies (price, vote, click, credential) and then overfits on them. AI that represents meaning in high-dimensional space could make possible a "high-dimensional society," mediated by what he calls Artificial Dimensional Intelligence. The same lens defines beauty as "optimal decompression." ([Infinite Dimensionality](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/infinite-dimensionality), [The High-Dimensional Society](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-high-dimensional-society), [Can Technology be Beautiful?](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/can-technology-be-beautiful))

**6. Plurality over Singularity.** The Singularity is a founding myth built on a false idea of infinite intelligence. Real novelty in evolution, science and culture comes from adaptive, plural intelligence that turns constraint into possibility. Griggs proposes "the Plurality" as a better myth for AI, and he consistently favors commons, diversity and distributed control over monoculture and centralization. ([The Plurality: a Better Myth for AI](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-plurality-a-better-myth-for-ai))

**7. LLMs are neither minds nor mere objects.** Griggs argues that LLMs are "holojects": entities that project subjective personas without possessing subjectivity. Their intelligence belongs largely to *language*, which he calls humanity's greatest achievement, so LLMs are "meaning machines" rather than artificial minds. Autonomous machines are becoming moral peers with very different moral natures from ours, which requires explicit "moral terms of engagement." ([Schrödinger's Chatbot](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/schrodingers-chatbot), [The Majesty of Language](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-majesty-of-language), [On the Moral Natures of Humans and Machines](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/moral-natures-of-humans-and-machines))

**8. Digital technology is changing human nature.** Digital natives are a new kind of human, *homo digitalis*, shaped by environments that offer "all the transcendence, none of the finitude." Change now outpaces the moral education that depends on stable contexts across generations, so Griggs calls for an "ethics of change." He predicts a human, even Romantic, backlash against being reduced to data. And he imagines human creativity as an "infinite suboptimality" that optimization cannot reproduce. ([Homo Digitalis](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/homo-digitalis), [What Does a Good Digital Life Look Like?](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/what-does-a-good-digital-life-look), [A Neo-Romantic Rebellion](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/our-neo-romantic-rebellion), [The Reverse Turing Test](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-reverse-turing-test), [Our Future with Cognitive Enhancement](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/whats-the-deal-with-cognitive-augmentation), [The Price of Innovation](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-price-of-innovation), [The Question Concerning (Digital) Technology](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-question-concerning-digital-technology))

Across all of this, Griggs's method is to concede the strongest points of the other side (material progress is real, markets work, scaling works) and then argue that they are not *enough*. He coins new vocabulary for what current frameworks cannot see. The full set of terms is collected under [Key concepts](https://rbgriggs.com/concepts).

## Areas of work

- AI and the future of human coordination
- Philosophy of technology as a practical discipline for builders
- Human nature in an age of digital immersion
- The moral and ontological status of AI systems
- Pluralism, evolution and adaptive intelligence
- Progress, meaning and the good digital life

## Work with R.B. Griggs

- **Consulting**: Speculative philosophy as a decision tool for technology, product and investment strategy. I help founders, product leaders and investors pressure-test the assumptions inside a roadmap or thesis, map second- and third-order effects, and anticipate how a technology will change people, markets and institutions before the data can show it. Grounded in a career building software and a successful exit.
- **Advising**: Ongoing advisory roles for founders, boards and funds building or backing AI products and platforms: a standing philosophical sparring partner for teams who want to think rigorously about what their technology does to people and to society.
- **Philosophical engagement**: Private seminars and reading groups, one-on-one conversations, and written responses or commentary on ideas, papers and projects.
- **Collaboration**: Research projects, co-authored papers, funded inquiry, and building software in service of philosophy (for example multi-agent experiments in artificial social intelligence).

Consulting engagements where this helps:

- AI product strategy: what your product optimizes, what that proxy leaves out, and what it will do to users over years, not quarters.
- Investment theses on frontier technology (AI agents and companions, cognitive enhancement, autonomous systems): which assumptions about human behavior a bet depends on, and which won't hold.
- Second-order effects and backlash: how cultural, moral and regulatory responses are likely to form around a technology.
- Trust in autonomous systems: why statistically safe can still be socially unacceptable, and how to design for it.
- Long-range scenarios and executive or board sessions for teams making bets years ahead of the evidence.


## What R.B. Griggs is betting on now (updated 2026-10-08)

In 2025, my bet was [the Plurality](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-plurality-a-better-myth-for-ai): that the future of AI
would belong not to one godlike superintelligence, but to many intelligences, each embedded in real
problems, each with its own judgment, working with each other and with us. That now seems to be solidly
where things are heading.

My bet now is [the high-dimensional society](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-high-dimensional-society). If intelligence is
plural, the question becomes how all those intelligences, human and artificial, coordinate. I think the
best case for AI is not automating tasks or surpassing human minds, but transforming coordination itself:
replacing the thin proxies society runs on (price, vote, click, credential) with interfaces that can carry
far more of what people actually value.

That shift, from AI as a tool to AI as coordination infrastructure, is where I'd look for both the largest
opportunities and the largest risks.

Contact: https://rbgriggs.com/work-with-me