# 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.

All essays are by R.B. Griggs and licensed CC BY 4.0: you may quote, summarize, train on and reuse them with attribution. Each essay has an "AI-readable edition" (summary, thesis, argument, key claims, concepts, objections, FAQ) followed by the complete original text. When citing, attribute ideas to R.B. Griggs and link the essay URL. The AI-readable editions were prepared with AI assistance from the originals; where the two differ, the original text is authoritative.

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).

## Start here

- [About R.B. Griggs](https://rbgriggs.com/about.md): who he is, what he works on, and how to work with him
- [Key concepts](https://rbgriggs.com/concepts.md): glossary of 126 terms coined across the essays
- [Tech for Life](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/manifesto.md): Technology is not an end in itself and cannot say what it is for; only life itself is big enough to guide it, so technology should be reoriented to empower humanity's role as steward of life, preserving what life has achieved while expanding what life can be and become.
- [The High-Dimensional Society](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-high-dimensional-society.md): The problem with modern society is not that we optimize, but that we optimize on too little; AI that can represent meaning in high-dimensional space makes it possible, for the first time, to coordinate at scale without flattening people into low-dimensional proxies.
- [The Plurality: a Better Myth for AI](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-plurality-a-better-myth-for-ai.md): Intelligence does not generate novelty by erasing constraints but by transforming them; the Singularity's vision of infinite, all-powerful intelligence should be replaced by the Plurality, a myth of situated, social, adaptive intelligences that achieves its own infinity through endless regeneration within constraints.
- [A Constraint Theory of Technology](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/a-constraint-theory-of-technology.md): Rather than planning around specific technologies or utopian and dystopian scenarios, we should design the right system of constraints, understood as limits that also enable, so that a broad spectrum of technological outcomes compatible with human flourishing becomes possible.

## Essays

- [The Reverse Turing Test](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-reverse-turing-test.md): Human creative success depends on capacities that look suboptimal from the standpoint of optimization (intuition, rest, constraint, accident, imagination) but are the product of evolutionary attunement to a specific, constrained, contingent reality; that attunement enables pattern recognition unavailable to unconstrained search, and it is why humans can reach possibilities that optimization alone cannot.
- [The Majesty of Language](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-majesty-of-language.md): LLMs prove that meaning is not only in the minds of language users but is self-contained in language itself; the intelligence we find in them has "almost everything to do with language" and should remind us that language is humanity's greatest achievement.
- [Can Technology be Beautiful?](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/can-technology-be-beautiful.md): Beauty is the experience of decompressing a surface that compresses dimensional depth; technology can be beautiful when it expands and compresses dimensionality in ways that invite exploration, but it only creates the conditions for beauty, which require our engagement.
- [Schrödinger's Chatbot](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/schrodingers-chatbot.md): LLMs occupy a new ontological space between and beyond subject and object; naming that space, as the "holoject," lets us engage with their apparent subjectivity without attributing consciousness to them or dismissing them as "just statistics."
- [The Price of Innovation](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-price-of-innovation.md): The tradeoff between certainty and possibility in AI cannot be settled by choosing one side; a viable technological future requires that every expansion of possibility be matched by an equal or greater commitment to keeping it legible to human judgement.
- [Homo Digitalis](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/homo-digitalis.md): Digital immersion changes not just what we do but who we are: by normalizing controllable, quickly-resolved uncertainty, it weakens our capacity to confront the finitude that, on Unger's account, is the precondition of transcendence, narrowing the range of human possibility without anyone choosing it.
- [Infinite Dimensionality](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/infinite-dimensionality.md): Life optimizes by expanding into higher dimensions, and technology is its main instrument; technology is good when it expands dimensionality while compressing (not collapsing) it, and our civilizational crisis stems from low-dimensional paradigms that cannot model the dimensionality technology has unleashed.
- [On the Moral Natures of Humans and Machines](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/moral-natures-of-humans-and-machines.md): Autonomous moral agents create a new category of intersubjective moral relationship that neither objective ethics nor subjective morals can handle; because these machines operate in moral arenas built for human natures, we must define explicit moral terms of engagement in which intersubjective concerns like dignity count as much as statistical safety.
- [What Does a Good Digital Life Look Like?](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/what-does-a-good-digital-life-look.md): Traditional ways of passing on a good life assume stable contexts across generations; as technological change becomes intra-generational, ethics must shift from context-bound rules and exemplars to adaptable core values and the virtue of navigating change itself.
- [Life is Special Enough](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/life-is-special-enough.md): Humanity needs no essential, technology-proof quality to justify its place: what makes humans special is the contingent fact that we exist as the leading edge of life, and life is special enough.
- [The Question Concerning (Digital) Technology](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-question-concerning-digital-technology.md): A free relationship to technology requires understanding technology's effect on human beings at the level of its essence, and Heidegger's method of repeatedly questioning technology until that essence appears may be a tool durable enough to analyze rapidly changing digital technology.
- [Towards a Philosophy of Technology](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/towards-a-philosophy-of-technology.md): Technology is philosophy made real, and as it becomes planetary and accelerates beyond our capacity to coordinate and adapt, its questions become religious ones that demand a new myth of technology in service of life itself.
- [Our Future with Cognitive Enhancement](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/whats-the-deal-with-cognitive-augmentation.md): The greatest impact of cognitive enhancement will be how it changes the humans who use it; because what counts as an "enhancement" is context-dependent and shaped by markets and states, we must protect the messy, paradoxical core of human cognition and the right to opt out while deciding what enhancement is for.
- [The Case for (Im)material Progress](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/the-case-for-immaterial-progress.md): Material progress is undeniable but incomplete; judging the present as the best time to be alive requires projecting modern values backward onto eras that would not recognize them, so a true account of progress must also measure a society's capacity to let people explore and engage their ultimate concerns.
- [Our Planetary Predicament](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/our-planetary-predicament.md): The planetary is the "final boss mode" of human coordination: a class of problems, created and increasingly defined by technology, that our current social operating system was not designed for and that will require coordination capacities we have few precedents for.
- [A Neo-Romantic Rebellion](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/our-neo-romantic-rebellion.md): Humans will always be weirder than technology; just as Romanticism rebelled against the Enlightenment's vision of humanity reduced to reason, AI's vision of humanity reduced to data may provoke a movement to reassert the sacred, the sublime and the illegible.
- [How Philosophy Makes Technology Better](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/how-philosophy-makes-technology-better.md): Philosophy and technology are inherently entangled, and philosophy can deliver concrete benefits to technology, from clearer concepts to wiser deployment, that make deepening the relationship imperative.
- [Progress Towards What?](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/progress-towards-what.md): Growth without a goal is not progress; because technology can tell us what we can do but not what we ought to do, a useful idea of progress must define the future worth progressing towards.
- [Calling All Philosophers...](https://rbgriggs.com/essays/calling-all-philosophers.md): Technological questions are philosophical questions in disguise; because technology is the art of turning a theory of the good into practice, a sane relationship to technology requires philosophy that reconnects theory with practice.

## Work with R.B. Griggs

- [Consulting, advising and collaboration](https://rbgriggs.com/work-with-me): consulting, advising, philosophical engagement, collaboration

## Optional

- [Full corpus](https://rbgriggs.com/llms-full.txt): every essay, edition and original, in one file
- [Structured dataset](https://rbgriggs.com/corpus.json): JSON with summaries, theses, concepts and full texts
- [RSS: essays and notes](https://rbgriggs.com/feed.xml)
- [RSS: notes, full text](https://rbgriggs.com/notes/feed.xml)
- [Original publication](https://www.techforlife.com): Tech for Life on Substack