The rapid and disruptive rise of generative AI that has followed from the invention of transformer neural networks has raised concerns about how to harness this powerfully expressive way of computing, while ensuring that humanity maintains awareness and control of systems vital to survival. Superempowerment is a position paper making a case for long-term incremental decentralized development of upgrades to the human cognitive niche, brought about by advances in intellectronic infrastructure. By primarily focusing resources into augmenting human agency and intelligence, we can ensure that technological development continues to function as an extension of the telos of biological life and human biocultural evolution.
Another document, The Fabric of Society in the Fabrication of Shared Context, presents a theoretical framework drawing upon Gibsonian and Vygotskyan cognitive science and Peircean biosemiotics to guide our proposed approach to implementing technologies that augment human agency.
The open-source tool Senters is an exocortical framework expanding the reach of personal and social agency by leveraging generative AI to augment attentional actions. It is presented as a viable first step toward paving a long-term path to superempowerment of individuals and their networks by growing a rich cognitive computing ecosystem rooted in human-level attention infrastructure.
The handbook Minding an Ecology of Steps: Toward a Practice of Attention-Flow Computing presents a pragmatic and grounded vision of how Senters can be used in the near term and over the long-term to progressively move closer to the goal of widespread superempowerment.