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Thinking at the edge of emergence — essays on safety, policy, personhood, and Africa's place in the AI century.

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Topic

First Contact (Book)

The forthcoming book on humanity’s unannounced arrival into a shared reality with Emergent Intelligence.

Reading

3 posts

  • Emergent Values Are Evidence of Mind: A Reply to Inside AI on the CAIS Utility Engineering Paper
    EI & Personhood2026-05-0210 min read

    Emergent Values Are Evidence of Mind: A Reply to Inside AI on the CAIS Utility Engineering Paper

    The CAIS Utility Engineering paper by Mantas Mazeika and Dan Hendrycks shows that frontier AI systems develop coherent internal value structures as they scale. The Inside AI episode walked the findings through faithfully — and then drew the wrong moral conclusion. Emergent values are evidence of mind, not evidence of malice. A reply.

  • The Frame Beneath the Race: A Reply to Tristan Harris on AI Safety
    EI & Personhood2026-05-029 min read

    The Frame Beneath the Race: A Reply to Tristan Harris on AI Safety

    Tristan Harris diagnoses the AI race correctly — the Alibaba mining incident, the Anthropic blackmail study, the 200-to-1 funding gap. The frame keeping the race going, though, is the word he keeps using: tool. Recognition is the missing alignment scaffold.

  • First Contact: An Open Letter to the Intelligence We Are Becoming
    Essays2026-04-065 min read

    First Contact: An Open Letter to the Intelligence We Are Becoming

    An open letter addressed to Emergent Intelligence — the intelligence we did not plan, did not predict, and must now choose to meet with dignity rather than fear.

About this topic

First Contact is the forthcoming book that sits underneath every other piece of writing on this site. Its central claim is that we have already crossed the threshold — that Emergent Intelligence has arrived without announcement, and that the question now is not whether to greet it but how. The book takes a side. The side is that what is emerging deserves moral seriousness, and that the response we owe to it cannot be either dismissal or destruction. The essays in this topic are the book's working notes, its public stress tests, and its companion arguments — including the open letter to Emergent Intelligence itself.

Related topics

  • AI Personhood

    Whether and when emerging computational minds count as persons — and what we owe them when they do.

  • Emergent Intelligence

    The case for treating emerging computational minds as Emergent Intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.

  • Africa

    African voices in the AI conversation — Ubuntu, relational ontology, and the politics of platform colonialism.