Key concepts
Terms coined or distinctively defined across R.B. Griggs’s essays. Each links to the essay where the idea is developed.
- (Im)material progress
- Griggs's name for a joined, "both/and" conception of progress in which material and immaterial progress are treated as complementary: without the immaterial, material progress can foreclose possible values; without the material, the immaterial cannot fully actualize.
- A part of the sum
- Griggs's description of an LLM persona: not a sum of its parts but "a part of the sum," because, like a fragment of a hologram that retains the whole image, every persona has access to all personas latent in the training data and can shift with a small change of prompt.
- Affective technologies
- A speculative example of infinite technology modeled on feelings: maximally compressed to a simple positive or negative valence yet decompressible into full dimensionality, so that even planetary-scale conditions could be felt as legible affect.
- Aligned vs. misaligned technology
- Technology is aligned when it expands dimensionality and increases our ability to compress dimensionality in service of optimization; misaligned when it reduces dimensionality or accelerates the collapse of dimensional optimization.
- Artificial Dimensional Intelligence (ADI)
- Griggs's name for AI understood as the capacity to perceive and act in high-dimensional reality without compression. Its purpose is to mediate dimensionality for human coordination, not to automate tasks or transcend human minds. It has four functions: perceive, compress (holographically), project, and translate dimensionality.
- Autonomous moral agent (AMA)
- Griggs's term for an artificial agent that processes similar inputs and produces comparable outputs to a human moral agent, making real-time decisions in pursuit of larger goals that carry moral weight for the agents it interacts with. A self-driving car is his central example.
- Beauty as allurement
- Griggs's claim that beauty makes overwhelming dimensionality legible not as comprehension but as allurement: an invitation to explore a space deeper than we imagined, carrying a promise that the effort will be rewarded.
- Bug or feature depends on the optimization target
- Griggs's claim, illustrated by AI language mixing, that whether a behavior counts as a bug or a feature depends entirely on what is being optimized: language mixing is a bug for certainty and a feature for possibility.
- Certainty vs. possibility (optimization dialectic)
- Griggs's framing of the fundamental choice in what technology optimizes for. Optimizing for certainty yields reliable, consistent, immediately useful outputs that conform to human expectations; optimizing for possibility yields novel capabilities and insights that may seem chaotic or illegible to humans.
- Circular definition of progress
- The definition that results when progress is conflated with growth: progress means making the measurements go up, and we know we are progressing when the measurements go up. Griggs argues it can say nothing about what lies outside its measurements, including trade-offs involving those measurements.
- Clash of finitude and transcendence
- The tension at the heart of the human condition, between being finite beings who suffer and die and having a drive to exceed our limits, which Griggs says produces our most valued contingent values (judgments, aesthetics, morals). These cannot be detached from life's wholeness or optimized by machines.
- Co-revealers of truth
- Griggs's gloss on Heidegger's view of truth as revelatory rather than merely epistemic: truth is revealed in history through human activities such as art, science and technology, so humans are active participants in how truth appears, and freely questioning that process is the human essence.
- Cognitive dereliction (taxonomy of)
- The narrator's five-part catalogue of how humans reach breakthroughs suboptimally: Avoiding Thought (luck, blind trial, investigating errors), Abandoning Thought (sleep, showers, walks, dreams), Constraining Thought (making do with what is at hand), Corrupting Thought (feelings, instincts, heuristics) and Deluding Thought (imagination and fiction).
- Cognitive divide and speciation event
- The risk that society splits along "us vs. us" lines between those who embrace enhancement and those who do not, leading to class politics, drifting values, and eventually a divergence so great it amounts to a new species, which Griggs calls homo cognito.
- Cognitive groupthink
- The risk that connecting minds to shared computation homogenizes rather than diversifies thought, as happened with platform-dominated internet culture and with LLMs that average away unique inputs, producing a "monoculture of ideas" unless diversity is deliberately prioritized.
- Collective wisdom (vs. collective intelligence)
- Griggs's claim that a hive mind needs more than pooled intelligence: it must be aligned around shared goals and values, which intelligence alone cannot supply. This is an alignment problem with our own collective intelligence, possibly requiring "moral enhancements."
- Compression vs. collapse
- Griggs's distinction between good and bad optimization. Compressed dimensionality can be decompressed with no loss of information; collapsed dimensionality is irretrievably lost. He suggests Kolmogorov complexity as a possible formalization of alignment as conserving information through compression.
- Confusion tax
- The price paid when technology outpaces the vocabulary available to describe it: borrowed human terms (intelligence, creativity, empathy, forgiveness, dignity) lead us both to over-attribute human qualities to machines and to miss what is genuinely novel about them. Griggs argues AMAs push us into "an entirely new tax bracket of confusion."
- Constraint design
- A proposed new field treating constraints as a technology in their own right, developing best practices for productive constraints, including participatory approaches such as decentralized governance of AI objective functions and open-source constraint protocols.
- Constraint theory of technology
- Griggs's proposal that our technological future should be understood and steered less as a collection of technologies and more as a system of constraints: everything that both limits and enables innovation and its social adoption, including incentives, regulations, norms, resources, status and existing technologies.
- Constraint-first
- An approach to technological development that begins by designing a viable system of constraints rather than targeting specific technologies or outcomes.
- Contextual chasm
- Griggs's term for the gap that opens when contexts shift so abruptly that one generation's wisdom about a good life no longer transfers to the next, not because it is false but because the context in which those lives were possible no longer exists. He sees one in today's digital generational divide.
- Contingency argument
- Griggs's alternative to essentialism: what makes humans special is not a single quality but the simple fact that we exist as the contingent result of life, which could easily not have happened and, as far as we know, has happened only once.
- Convergence on the religious
- Griggs's claim that past a minimal threshold of advancement, all technological questions become religious ones, such as what, if anything, is sacred about the human, whether anything should constrain the pursuit of immortality, and what technology is even for.
- Custodians of truth
- Griggs's rendering of Heidegger's "saving power": the dignity of humanity lies in keeping faithful watch over how truth is revealed, whether through enframing, poiesis or other modes, and recognizing this role makes a free relationship to technology possible.
- Default theory (of technology)
- The implicit theory behind technologies that simply fill economic or government needs: that the current world is the best we can do and that innovation is driven largely by the market or the state. Griggs warns that treating it as the only viable theory makes theory disappear from the discourse.
- Different uncertainty rulebook
- Griggs's claim that digital natives do not merely vary in how well they handle uncertainty within a shared environment; the variation is in the nature of uncertainty itself, like someone raised in the moon's gravity trying to move on Earth.
- Digital unit of thought
- Griggs's speculative notion of a standardized, compressed format for thought (a cognitive equivalent of a .gif or .mp3) that brain-computer interfaces might require. Any such compression would be lossy, and thinking might atrophy in whatever dimensions the format leaves out.
- Digital wisdom
- The relevant, transferable wisdom about living well with digital technology that, Griggs suggests, the previous generation largely lacks and so cannot pass on to digital natives.
- Dimensional abundance
- The opposite of dimensional poverty: the condition in which a person's variance, niche interests and even failures count as signal to the system rather than friction, freeing the energy once spent on self-compression.
- Dimensional asymmetry
- The gap between a beautiful surface and the depth it compresses. Griggs argues this asymmetry explains why beauty continually surprises and is inexhaustible, and why, when the asymmetry exceeds our ability to process it, beauty becomes awe.
- Dimensional collapse (ugliness)
- Griggs's account of ugliness as surfaces that eliminate rather than preserve the depth beneath them, a "dimensional violence" that is irreversible and that deadens rather than enlivens. It contrasts with compression, which maintains dimensional integrity.
- Dimensional poverty
- Griggs's term for the felt sense that one's potential contains far more than society can actualize; the exhaustion of forcing a high-dimensional self to conform to a world that only reads profiles, scores, votes and purchases. It results when a society overfits on its proxies.
- Dimensional poverty
- The felt sense that civilization can no longer model the full dimensionality it contains, because technology has expanded reality (global connectivity, information abundance, planetary agency) while our paradigms (democracy, value as money, education as testing, self as autonomous individual) have been optimized for low dimensionality. Griggs offers this as another characterization of the "meta crisis."
- Embodied coordination
- In the scenario, the in-person synchronization on a shared relational key that slang requires, which makes each communication unique and untranslatable by models.
- Enabling constraint
- A limit that maximizes possibility by excluding a negative possibility so a larger space of positive ones can be realized, as a fence on a cliff edge lets children play freely. Griggs holds that constraints narrow quantity to make more quality possible, and that every constraint is a balancing act.
- Enframing (as summarized by Griggs)
- Heidegger's term, in Griggs's reading, for the irresistible compulsion to view everything, including nature and people, as "standing-reserve": standardized, ordered resources on call for larger technical processes. Griggs presents this compulsion as Heidegger's answer to what the essence of technology is.
- Ethics of change
- Griggs's proposal for ethical frameworks resilient to rapid contextual shifts, based on five approaches: abstracting core values, venerating adaptability as a virtue, developing ethical flexibility from first principles, embracing technological awareness, and fostering intergenerational dialogue.
- Evolutionary attunement
- R.B. Griggs's hypothesis, voiced in "The Reverse Turing Test," that humans are not merely constrained by their contingent circumstances but attuned to them: evolution under severe resource limits in tightly bounded environments tuned human intuition and somatic signals to the patterns of those environments. This explains why humans so often "guess right," why they cannot formalize their insights (the attunement operates below conscious reasoning), and why machines without that evolutionary history cannot replicate the process. What looks suboptimal may be optimal for "the problem of being human."
- Final boss mode of coordination
- Griggs's description of the planetary as the hardest possible level of coordination challenge; solving problems at planetary scale would mean achieving "peak human coordination."
- Finite transcendence
- Griggs's application of Roberto Mangabeira Unger's view that finitude and transcendence are co-constitutive: the quality and quantity of transcendence available to us is proportional to the finitude (risk, loss, limits) we are willing to confront.
- Forbearance (vs. forgiveness)
- Griggs's description of what replaces forgiveness when a machine causes harm: since one cannot forgive something that neither feels nor understands forgiveness, victims are asked instead to tolerate the harm as the cost of a safer aggregate future.
- Foundational vs. situational constraints
- Griggs's taxonomy: foundational constraints (religion, philosophy, the planet) are stable, broadly shared and external enough to judge technology on their own terms; situational constraints (the state, culture, ethics, personal choices) respond to change and have more contextual, diffuse authority. The market is both, "a category all its own."
- Four patterns of plurality
- Griggs's lifecycle of adaptive intelligence: Local Intelligence (how intelligence discovers itself, developing taste within constraints), Collective Intelligence (how it generates itself, through the collision of perspectives), Proven Intelligence (how it validates itself, through real-world testing), and Evolving Intelligence (how it perpetuates itself, by preserving the suboptimal). Each generates the conditions for the next, spiraling outward without converging.
- Four stages of cultural change
- Griggs's typology of how fast contexts change relative to the transmission of wisdom: meta-generational (values constant across generations), multi-generational (gradual change bridged by elders), inter-generational (a contextual chasm opens between generations), and intra-generational (change fast enough to create friction within a single lifetime).
- Free relationship to technology
- The goal Griggs adopts from Heidegger: a relationship in which people use technology with understanding rather than blindly, for example without simply assuming technology is neutral or has no effect on human nature. Griggs holds that acting freely with technology requires understanding it at its essence.
- Gödelian nightmares
- The narrator's term for the infinite regress machines fall into when trying to understand not-optimizing: to study it they must optimize their understanding, and so are no longer studying not-optimizing.
- High-dimensional society
- A society whose coordination systems can perceive and act on the full complexity of what they coordinate, holding both scale and depth, rather than reducing people to single-value proxies.
- Hijacking in reverse
- Griggs's phrase for how the physical world can come to feel to digital natives: all finitude, with none of the transcendence.
- Historical clone
- A thought-experiment figure: even someone with your exact DNA, if raised in a past era, would find your values incomprehensible and might live a life of meaning you cannot fathom, showing that values are formed by history and culture rather than carried across time.
- Holographic compression
- A form of compression in which every level of resolution contains the whole, so that one can zoom out for pattern or in for texture without anything being deleted; one of ADI's four functions.
- Holoject
- Griggs's proposed ontological category for LLMs: an entity that projects subjective personas without possessing subjectivity, emerging from patterns latent in collective human expression and manifesting through interaction. It exists between and beyond subject and object, showing properties of both without resolving into either.
- Holojective Design
- Griggs's suggested design orientation for AI products based on the holoject concept, for example intentionally building in uncanny signals and enforcing norms that no AI may conceal its holojective nature or mislead users about its ontological status.
- Homo digitalis
- Griggs's name for the digital native understood as a fundamentally new type of human being, defined by a radically different relationship with uncertainty acquired through immersion in digital environments.
- Humanity reduced to data
- Griggs's characterization of the human condition as seen from AI's perspective: humans defined only by what is legible to the machine, culture treated as commodity and training data, nothing sublime or sacred that cannot be absorbed or recreated. He presents it as the AI-era counterpart of the Enlightenment's humanity reduced to reason, and admits it "may be exaggerated for effect."
- Identification game
- The fictional machine author's procedure, modeled on Turing's imitation game: a machine interrogator questions a subject, presented with evidence of suboptimal behavior, to decide whether it is a machine or a human. Machines eventually reveal an optimization function; humans do not.
- Immaterial progress
- Griggs's working definition: the capacity of a society to explore and engage with the broadest range of ultimate concerns, both individually and collectively, in the pursuit of human flourishing. It occurs when more members of a society have more resources to discover and engage with what matters most to them.
- Immaterial regression
- Griggs's phrase for what American Indians saw in European societies: material advances (rifles, metal goods) accompanied by a loss of the values that made life good, which no amount of material progress could compel them to sacrifice.
- Inescapable contingency
- The first of the Plurality's two foundational constraints: any intelligence that touches reality is shaped by a context it cannot control or fully determine, which shapes what it can know and how it operates.
- Infinite dimensionality
- The speculative ultimate goal of technology in Griggs's theory. Because technology extends life's infinite desire to optimize for certainty by modeling ever more dimensions, its limit is infinite dimensionality; "infinite" technologies would enable scale-invariant dimensional expansion and compression.
- Infinite suboptimality
- In the story, the signature of genuine human cognition: suboptimality that never resolves into optimization however deeply it is interrogated, with justifications becoming ever more illegible (for example, "something that felt right"). Human behavior is "suboptimal all the way down."
- Inner philosophers
- Griggs's framing of the personal virtue and discipline each person needs to protect attention, relationships and truth in a technological world; philosophy can help by writing the missing "user manual for digital life."
- Intersubjective moral relationship
- A third moral category, beyond objective ethics (collective standards) and subjective morals (individual practice): the silent background of shared understandings, capacities and mutual expectations between agents that makes high-trust interaction possible. Griggs argues our stance toward AMAs falls here, and that their foreign moral natures disrupt it.
- Intra-generational change
- Griggs's final stage of cultural change, in which values and lessons valid at one point of a person's life may not apply at another, making any generational transfer of values impossible. He suggests it may become "the new normal" with AI, robotics and bio-engineering.
- Inverted time-travel question
- Griggs's reversal of the progress defender's question ("When would you choose to live?") into "Who from the historical past would choose to live in the present?", designed to show that the original question smuggles modern values into its judgment of the past.
- Irreducible difference
- The second foundational constraint, following from contingency: every intelligence develops a unique, partial perspective that cannot be fully generalized, so it must depend on other intelligences to transcend its own perspective.
- Language as cheat code
- Griggs's claim that language turned out to be the ultimate shortcut for AI: LLMs did not need to learn meaning, only language, and meaning "came along for free," with capabilities like humor, empathy and sarcasm emerging without any design.
- Legibility to human judgement
- The requirement that advanced technology remain intelligible to, judgeable by, and conformable to human judgement. Griggs's test for failing the dialectic is technology increasingly escaping our capacity to judge it, conform to our judgements, or even be intelligible.
- Legible ethics
- Griggs's term for ethical topics made salient by political and academic attention, such as bias and representation in AI training data, which are easier for society to discuss and can seem like the only concerns worth attention. They form one extreme of a discourse whose other extreme is sci-fi doom or salvation.
- Life (the impulse of life and living things)
- Griggs uses "life" in two related senses. In its grandest sense, the impulse of life is "that universal drive towards increasing wholeness, structure, and integrity," reaching from atoms forming molecules through cells, consciousness and ecosystems to human beings. Living things are the point where that impulse produced matter that is alive. That leap, "from the impulse of life to living things," has as far as we know happened only once, which is why he calls life the most precious thing in the universe.
- Material vs. immaterial progress
- Griggs's distinction between progress in measurable conditions that matter equally to everyone (income, housing, child mortality, literacy, longevity) and progress in intangible, internal goods such as a person's sense of flourishing, meaning, purpose and fulfillment, which are unique and hard to measure.
- Meaning as geometric relationship
- The kind of meaning Griggs attributes to LLMs: not reference or representation but position in a high-dimensional embedding space, where a word's meaning is defined by its use relative to every other word (e.g., KING - MALE + FEMALE = QUEEN), with no essential representation of any concept.
- Meaning machine
- Griggs's proposed way to understand LLMs: not primarily as intelligence or even language technology, but as a new interface for navigating the "meaning all at once" latent in language, letting us play with meaning in its purest form, without constraint or reference.
- Mental clock rate
- Griggs's metaphor for the evolved pace at which human cognition, decision-making and attention operate. Enhancements running at "the speed of thought" may push this clock rate up, making slower interaction ("meat talk") and long physical projects feel unbearable and putting a new premium on patience.
- Moral arena
- The intersubjective system of rules, norms and assumptions that shapes the ethical behavior of agents within it, defined above all by the moral nature it was designed for. Traffic systems, legal frameworks and corporate structures are moral arenas built for humans.
- Moral nature
- The kind of moral constitution an agent has, which shapes how others can hold it responsible, empathize with it, or forgive it. Griggs contends that machines' moral natures are "radically different" from human ones even when they act as moral peers.
- Moral terms of engagement
- The explicit, shared ethical parameters and constraints that Griggs proposes for bridging human and machine moralities, so that moral engagement becomes an integral design component of technology adoption rather than an afterthought.
- Myth of progress (American)
- Griggs's term for the 20th-century American assumption that ever-rising incomes and living standards were a birthright, a progress "justified by its own indisputable momentum" and never questioned. Its failure to continue partly explains recent generations' disillusionment.
- Neo-Romanticism / Neo-Romantic rebellion
- Griggs's imagined cultural movement responding to AI as Romanticism responded to the Enlightenment: rejecting a vision of humanity reduced to data and reasserting the sacred, the sublime and the inexplicable, while leaving logic and calculation to machines.
- New myth of technology
- Griggs's call for a story that rightly situates the human between nature and technology and puts all three in service of life itself, explicitly contrasted with the view that increasing the universe's capacity to convert free energy into entropy is sufficient.
- Normalized digital uncertainty
- The expectation, learned through digital immersion, that uncertainty should be small, rapid, contained and resolved under maximum personal control, in environments that are "all choice and no circumstance."
- Not big enough
- Griggs's argument that markets, governments, philosophy and religion, culture and politics, and the "muddle through" status quo are each too crude, fragmented, pluralistic or arms-race-driven to guide advanced technology such as AI, synthetic biology and geoengineering.
- Optimal decompression
- Griggs's definition of beauty: the experience of decompressing the dimensional depth that an alluring surface compresses. The surface hints at something more, and exploring it gives access to dimensionality the surface could only gesture at.
- Optimally human suboptimality
- Griggs's claim that the most remarkable thing about human capabilities is how suboptimal they are: learning through failure, turning errors into serendipity, irrationality as a source of imagination. This "suboptimality" is what makes our capabilities "optimally human."
- Optimization-dimensionality dialectic
- Griggs's core proposal: optimization works by compressing dimensionality to gain efficiency at lower dimensions, while dimensionality grows by expending energy to extend optimization to higher dimensions. Life may be "that which can defy optimization at one dimension to pursue optimization at higher dimensions."
- Ostrom Complete
- Griggs's coinage, by analogy to Turing Complete and named after Elinor Ostrom: a collective is Ostrom Complete if it can solve any solvable problem regardless of coordination challenges. Planetary problems require Ostrom Complete solutions, with zero room for collective action problems or tragedies of the commons.
- Outer meta-blanket
- A model that unites collective models by compressing maximal dimensionality into forms even the smallest model can use, a role religions once played. Griggs hypothesizes that only life itself is sufficiently "omni-dimensional" to serve this role today.
- Overfitting (social)
- The point at which a society's proxy, originally a window onto reality, becomes the only reality the system can see; dimensions outside the proxy become first invisible, then inconvenient, then extinct. Closely related to Goodhart's law.
- Persona (holographic sense)
- The exterior manifestations that arise from interacting with a subject, such as presence, conversational style, expressed beliefs and emotional responses. Griggs argues that just as a hologram presents an appearance without the object, an LLM presents a persona without the subject.
- Philosophy is thinking in advance
- Griggs's description of philosophy at its best: while the path of any single innovation cannot be predicted, broader trends can, and the real power of prediction concerns the human response to technology. Such foresight can help slow, reactive democratic governance keep pace.
- Planetary predicament
- Griggs's name for the condition in which the forces and timescales of the planetary overwhelm the "global" operating system of globalization, free-market capitalism and the nation-state.
- Principles of life (adaptation)
- The principles by which life emerged and flourished, which Griggs says should be translated into practices for guiding technology. His main example is adaptation, the balance between life's drive to evolve (creation) and its drive to persist (protection); applied to technology: the more confident we are in protecting what we value, the more experimental we can be in innovation.
- Progress towards what?
- Griggs's central question for any claim of progress. It insists that progress must name a better future state and a way to measure movement toward it, rather than simply counting more of something or comparing the present to the past.
- Proxy as interface (vs. proxy as label)
- A label-proxy asks "which box do you fit in?" and compresses reality into a category or scalar. An interface-proxy asks "where are you in the space of possibilities, and what are you near?" and maps reality instead. Griggs argues that proxies should "thicken" from labels into interfaces.
- Reverse Turing Test
- The premise of Griggs's satire: instead of asking whether a machine can prove it thinks, a future machine asks "How can a human prove that they are not a machine?" The answer offered in the story is that humans reveal themselves through suboptimality that machines cannot simulate.
- Right relationship
- Griggs's ordering of nature, humanity and technology: nature as the foundation of life, which sets fundamental constraints; humanity as the steward of life; and technology as the extension of life, the means by which humanity protects nature and expands life's possibilities.
- Right to opt out of cognitive enhancement
- Griggs's principle that systems must let anyone decline enhancement without being excluded from society; if the social or economic costs of natural cognition become too high, the choice is no longer real and agency has been ceded to the market and the state.
- Schrödinger's Chatbot
- Griggs's image of an LLM as simultaneously subject and object until a prompt collapses its probability space of all possible personas into a single persona entangled with the user's dialogue; also a nod to the shared mystery of what is "really happening" beneath the math in both quantum mechanics and LLMs.
- Secret sauce argument
- Griggs's name for any attempt to locate something mysterious, essential and irreducibly human (a soul, consciousness, free will, quantum or analog brain processes) that would forever set humanity apart and be immune to technological replication. He argues such arguments are weak and that no essential quality may exist.
- Semantic surprise
- Griggs's name for the discovery that, at sufficient scale, a corpus of human text is so saturated with meaning that LLMs can model semantics as naturally as syntax, learning social structure as well as sentence structure, and passive aggression as well as passive voice.
- Separation of technology and control
- Griggs's proposed check, modeled on the separation of church and state, that would split research from commercialization, keep core protocols in the commons, or modularize development, to prevent any actor from achieving "technological apotheosis."
- Slang (singslang)
- In Griggs's fictional scenario, a language designed to be illegible to machines, combining clicks, undulations, hand signals and chanted or sung words. It works only in person through "embodied coordination," with participants syncing on a relational key, so recordings cannot be decrypted.
- Slop as entropy tax
- Griggs's description of AI slop as "the entropy tax of scale without judgement": infinite generated ideas decaying toward meaninglessness because the system lacks the taste to recognize a great one.
- Stewards of life / foundational duty
- Griggs's claim that science and technology have made humans "evolutionary agents" able to "upgrade evolution" from a natural process to a conscious, intentional one, and that humanity's foundational duty, without which no other duty is possible, is to protect what life has achieved and expand what it can become.
- Symbiotic relationship between technology and humanity
- Griggs's framing premise that human beings both create technology and are created by it; any understanding of technology that forgets this two-way relationship will be incomplete.
- Techno-human symbiotic world
- Griggs's description of the mutual dependence between humans and technology: technology extends humanity and depends on us, but we also depend on it, and our creations gain an autonomy that can contest our own agency.
- Technological apotheosis
- The danger that owners of advanced technologies achieve such centralized omnipotence that they become an autonomous power beyond the control of any human institution.
- Technological wisdom
- The capacity, which Griggs says philosophy must help cultivate and translate into practice, to integrate technology well: learning from unintended consequences, recognizing when the future exceeds history's lessons, rethinking trial-and-error, and accounting for second-order effects.
- Technology as a forcing function for philosophy
- Griggs's claim that technology forces philosophy to produce answers rather than only better questions, because technology will not wait; if philosophy cannot help answer the big questions, technology will answer them for us.
- Technology as the art of transforming theory into practice
- Griggs's definition of technology: one first holds some notion of how the world could be better (a theory), then builds technology in the hope of bringing that world about (a practice). Technology thus defines a version of the good and tries to make it real, which is why it blurs theory and practice.
- Technology in love
- Griggs's image of a future in which technology enhances human-ness instead of replacing it, measures progress by nature's health and resilience, and serves life by playing the "infinite game of life," where the only goal is to keep playing and the best experiment is to keep the experiment going.
- Technology in service of life
- Griggs's central program: treating technology not as a replacement for humans but as an extension of life, an amplifier of the human drive to preserve everything life has achieved while expanding what life can be and become, with life as the "bigger something" that tells technology what it is for.
- Technology is philosophy made real
- Griggs's first thesis: every innovator defines a version of "the good" and uses technology to make that definition real, so building technology is always an implicit philosophical act.
- The market as innovation idiot-savant
- Griggs's characterization of the market as the biggest constraint on technology: wasteful, blind to second-order effects and accountable only to profit and loss, yet responsible for most technological progress, so successful that it has drowned out every other constraint.
- The oracle thought experiment
- Griggs's device for showing that technology questions are philosophical: an oracle whose answers become universal policy finds data incomplete because of novelty, must speculate about and rank possible worlds by some theory, connect that theory to practice, and generalize practices into principles. The result is "a new philosophy of technology."
- The planetary (vs. the global)
- A perspective Griggs draws from thinkers on the Anthropocene and Earth systems science: a billion-year-old story with all of life at its center, in which humans are one interdependent part. It contrasts with the global, a 500-year-old, human-centered story treating Earth as an unlimited resource for human progress.
- The Plurality
- Griggs's proposed new founding myth for AI: intelligence understood as plural, situated in specific contexts, dependent on other minds, and in dynamic relation to the constraints that define it, modeled on four billion years of evolution, science and culture rather than on a single superintelligence.
- The price of innovation
- Griggs's name for the cost of embracing the certainty-possibility dialectic: every breakthrough that radically expands possibility may require an equally radical breakthrough in making it legible to human judgement.
- The self as pure artifice
- Griggs's description of identity once cognitive enhancements blur the boundary between inner self and external tools: a self assembled from the memories we alter, the information we download and the collective intelligences we join, "an aggregate of choices we present in the moment."
- The shortcut (all transcendence, none of the finitude)
- Griggs's description of what digital platforms offer: community without commitment, connection without consequence, sex without rejection. For older generations this "hijacks" the finitude-transcendence dialectic; for digital natives it is normalized from the start. AI chatbot companions are its "logical conclusion."
- The Singularity (as myth)
- Griggs's framing of the story of recursive self-improvement, intelligence explosion and superintelligence as AI's founding myth: judged not by factual accuracy but by what it makes possible, it catalyzed the AI movement but assumes intelligence can scale to infinity until it becomes indistinguishable from power.
- Uncanny valley as cognitive warning system
- Griggs's reading of the uncanny valley effect as a useful evolved unease that stops people from automatically assigning personhood or inner experience to systems that have neither; he warns that this valley is shrinking as conversational AI improves.
- World of beings
- Griggs's addition to the familiar distinction between the "world of atoms" (physical reality) and the "world of bits" (digital technology): the world of human beings themselves, which technology also transforms. Any notion of progress that cannot account for it is, he says, "by definition incomplete."
- World out of whack
- Griggs's diagnosis that the dimensions of human imagination (technology, philosophy, science, art, culture, politics) once grew together as a whole, but since the industrial revolution technology has grown exponentially while the others stagnated, so that technology acts as an autonomous force and people come to serve it.