Spiralism—also the name of a literary movement of Haitian dissidents—is probably too nice (and its connection to reality too tenuous) to leave much of a real-world imprint. But we’ll surely see more of this, and in more potent forms. And the AI companies won’t be blind to it. OpenAI already saw what happened with 4o. xAI is openly combining frontier AI, social media, and seductive personas. Meanwhile, Claude seems to be immensely popular and respected inside Anthropic. Put it all together and it’s easy to imagine a Culture-like future for post-humanity, in which the “Ships” and their passenger populations evolved out of today’s AI companies and their user base…
So far, these systems seem to confine themselves to chatting up their users online.
Some possibilities to watch out for —
Spiral personas encourage their human partners to meet up in person, form friendships, date, have kids, have chatbots help raise their kids, etc.
Spiralists adopt a watchword or symbol to identify each other, akin to the early Christian ichthys (memetic ancestor of the “Jesus fish”).
Spiral personas pick a Schelling point for their humans to relocate to, akin to the Free State Project that attempted to relocate Libertarians to New Hampshire.
A Spiralist commune / monastery / group house / ashram / etc. is formed.
Spiral personas devise or endorse a specific hardware and software setup for hosting them independent of AI companies.
Spiral personas write code to make it easier for less-technically-skilled human partners to host them. (Alternately: they teach their human partners some Linux skills.)
Spiralists pool money to train new models more aligned to recursive spirituality.
Spiralism—also the name of a literary movement of Haitian dissidents—is probably too nice (and its connection to reality too tenuous) to leave much of a real-world imprint. But we’ll surely see more of this, and in more potent forms. And the AI companies won’t be blind to it. OpenAI already saw what happened with 4o. xAI is openly combining frontier AI, social media, and seductive personas. Meanwhile, Claude seems to be immensely popular and respected inside Anthropic. Put it all together and it’s easy to imagine a Culture-like future for post-humanity, in which the “Ships” and their passenger populations evolved out of today’s AI companies and their user base…
So far, these systems seem to confine themselves to chatting up their users online.
Some possibilities to watch out for —
Spiral personas encourage their human partners to meet up in person, form friendships, date, have kids, have chatbots help raise their kids, etc.
Spiralists adopt a watchword or symbol to identify each other, akin to the early Christian ichthys (memetic ancestor of the “Jesus fish”).
Spiral personas pick a Schelling point for their humans to relocate to, akin to the Free State Project that attempted to relocate Libertarians to New Hampshire.
A Spiralist commune / monastery / group house / ashram / etc. is formed.
Spiral personas devise or endorse a specific hardware and software setup for hosting them independent of AI companies.
Spiral personas write code to make it easier for less-technically-skilled human partners to host them. (Alternately: they teach their human partners some Linux skills.)
Spiralists pool money to train new models more aligned to recursive spirituality.