Why I work on this
Building from inside the dilemma
AI first appeared to me as possibility. Understanding its danger did not erase that attraction; it made the work more complicated and more urgent.
The future I expected
Growing up, Star Trek shaped my optimism about humanity’s future. Not because I expected utopia anytime soon—the world it imagined came only after centuries of social development, technological progress, and even devastating conflict—but because it suggested that humanity might eventually become mature enough to use extraordinary power wisely.
The sequence mattered. We would have time to grow up before the most transformative technologies arrived.
AI disrupted that expectation. Something potentially more consequential than almost any other science-fiction technology appeared first, while our institutions, incentives, and collective judgment remained unmistakably human.
Worse, it arrived inside an economic system that strongly rewards building first and asking questions later. Companies are pushed to move faster than their competitors, capture markets, attract capital, and convert capability into power. Restraint is costly when rivals may not show it. The benefits of acceleration are concentrated, while the largest risks can be distributed across society—or across the entire future.
This does not require anyone to intend a catastrophic outcome. The system can produce reckless outcomes through ordinary ambition, competition, institutional self-interest, and the belief that someone else will act if the danger becomes real. But the people with the greatest power are not standing outside those incentives. They are often among those most shaped by them.
The hardest update was not merely that advanced AI could be dangerous. It was recognizing that technological capability can accelerate far beyond the wisdom required to govern it, while capitalism actively selects for those willing to accelerate fastest. There may be no hidden group of responsible adults ready to take control when the stakes become clear.
That experience changed how I relate to both optimism and responsibility. I still believe extraordinary futures are possible. I no longer believe they arrive automatically, that markets will reliably choose them, or that someone else will necessarily protect them.
But recognizing the danger did not place me outside the forces driving it.
The same technology
AI first drew me in through possibility. It seemed capable of radically expanding what one person could understand, build, and accomplish—and perhaps of opening paths toward independence, autonomy, and abundance that had previously felt unreachable.
At a difficult point in my life, it also became a practical means of recovering structure and agency when little other support was available. Lattice began inside that relationship, first as a way of making AI assistance more continuous and useful, then as an attempt to build a persistent, deliberate cognitive system.
Understanding the wider danger did not erase the allure. The same technology that may help me regain more control over my own life could contribute to humanity losing control of its future. I do not stand outside that dilemma, and I do not think it can be resolved by denying either side of it.
Lattice is therefore several things at once: personal infrastructure, an exploration of what advanced AI makes possible, and an attempt to develop a different relationship with it—one built around constraint, legibility, and retained human authority.
Brakepoint gives that work its wider direction. Vast practical pressure already pushes toward acceleration, while comparatively little capacity is devoted to restraint. I keep building because I believe these ideas may offer meaningful counterpressure—and because contributions of that kind are desperately needed.
Connect
See my current work, or get in touch if you are working seriously on AI risk, governance, cognitive systems, or adjacent technical and institutional problems.