Why: Robots and Puppies

Why Robots and Puppies?

I want to be precise when measuring success. Success looks like carbon encrypted, in more robust and resilient ways. Encrypted into the collaborative structures we understand as life. Structures like the thing that enabled my friends; Darryl & Kathryn to turn a misfit, 6-acre triangle into a thriving hotbed of coordination. Chickens, goats, vegetables; a cornucopia of living.

Success looks like my generation having that opportunity. The chance to access and create the increased coordination that life embodies. A patch of dirt becomes a plant. A patch of plants becomes a pasture. A patch of pastures becomes a meal, in some way or another, that we enjoy.

Life is a process of increasing collaboration. That is easy enough to describe, and intuitively easy to understand. The equation behind it is simple enough for computers to measure and definite enough to train an AI. Why don’t we?

Robots and Puppies is an event to provide context and definition. Something to bring momentum behind the simple; the intuitive that is hard to realize. Three stories from my life push me forward on that dream:

It was an adventure race.

We were hurtling. Through the forest, across meadows of fallen trees. Balancing across logs, grasping at branches to stay upright. My team and I were lost. Somewhere in the wayfinding process, we had gotten off course. Eager to get ahead of the others we took a shortcut and started to descend off the ridge, and through the valley. We were sure of it. The map was so clear? How could we be wrong?

At least last place had a pity prize.

It was a cult.

We were close. A tight-knit group that could guess each other’s motives in an instant. If one of us was struggling, others would help. Our dreams were aligned and our wallets proved the point. They helped me raise $100,000 to advance our cause to the far reaches of the world. The community was everything, and what we shared was what mattered most.

But then I learned that love is something all humans share, and nothing is worth more.

It was an inkling of an equation.

I had almost given up. Used to the stability and structure of a closed worldview; nothing could provide me the same structure. Economics was a hopeful choice (I won my University’s economics award), but then the micro/macro seemed arbitrary, and it couldn’t compensate for human identity. What field held the answers? Entrepreneurship? Accounting? Cyber-security?

Then I learned math was language, and language was art. If G?del had proven it was all models; maybe an infinite fractal defines the human heart.

When you’re racing down a mountain, you can’t have the luxury of looking at the rocks in your path. You must train your mind to focus on the path between them. As you turn the corners,? look at the line your tires must follow, not the edge you could fly off. Robots and puppies look back to the spark of something special, to help us dream for the future. The cross-species partnership with dogs kicked off coordination not seen in the animal kingdom. Empathy fueled that transformation, and it will continue to guide us today. Pets are empathy-engines. Empathy is the foundation of coordination, and as the AI librarians of the future will tell our children; it is the rhythm that brought our species across the next threshold of evolution.