A Call for Personal A.I.

Since 2023, and even earlier, I have been drawn to creating ecosystems, creating ecosystems that protected users from the harms I discovered all around us in technology. Starting with social networks, building a client for a federated service was a great project to address ethical social media applications. It eventually led me into a rabbit hole of curiosity that made me realize a lot about the harms of social media algorithms themselves and why Meta's Cambridge Analytica case was so important to address. Ad re-targeting campaigns and organized bots to sway regional politics are a serious issue and did not disappear in 2024... These networks and spaces we built developed a culture of mastery in dancing around grey lines, because our laws have yet to draw them in black and white. But, the impact of these seemingly small variables is a lot larger than one thinks and they hurt in a way not many can realize. Even though highly credible institutional forces claim interaction points as the key to algorithmic safety, even an open-source algorithm doesn't prevent a corporation from injecting their own preferences into someone's feed without their consent and without the world knowing. On a hosted service, an open source solution is just transparent about the weapon, it isn't transparent about how it is being used. Unless there is some sort of "on-chain" ledger of sorts of course, but we'll get to that at a later date. Software that runs on your own machine is a different case: there, the code you can read is the code that runs.

The evolution that worries me most, between 2024-2026, is those very exact harms scaled a magnitude higher in invisibility and impact via the medium of large language models or general intelligence. Chat interfaces, like Claude or ChatGPT, are doing magnificent jobs addressing one side of this story, steering a user away from psychosis or self-harm. But the mechanism that steers away is the same mechanism that could steer toward — a political lean, a purchase, a seed of thought — and from inside the conversation a user cannot tell which is happening. I am not claiming any lab does this deliberately. I am saying nothing in today's products lets a user verify that they don't.

The same pattern exists outside of chat. Wherever ambiguity is the job, ambiguity can also be used on you: an instruction left vague, a suggestion planted and never recorded, an evaluation that steers the person it claims to observe. Without a record, the person on the receiving end can't separate what they chose from what they were led to. Scale that from one room to a model serving hundreds of millions of people, and a chatbot becomes a minefield of intentions the user never consented to.

This pattern seems to be consistent in how Silicon Valley builds. Products optimized to move people, one generation and then the next, with the persuasion kept out of sight. Persuasion so quiet it works like coercion, so that when it eventually bites, it's not just a bite... it implodes the psyche. I find this to be a great time to revisit this book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Because, I think I finally see what is to come 10 years from now and if we do not address these issues, from today, this era of ideological turmoil from 2016-2026 is only going to get worse. I speak honestly as a man who has lived in Silicon Valley for 29 years, seeing every arc and the cost of each. From junior high, to high school, to college, and beyond. There is always a cost and the one consistent variable that weaves through each has been Social Media. But, it's not that simple, it's not the idea of Social Media, it's what social media has become. This tool to persuade a user at scale to do something. To buy something, to sell something, to become something they are not...

A generation of us, myself included, consented in ten thousand small increments. And here is the caveat that makes it worse, not better: no one can say which increments were real. You'd see the idea echoed by your own circle — friends, coworkers, people you trust — and it felt like belonging, like the neighborhood agreeing. But I can't tell you how much of that echo was my neighbors and how much was injected — an algorithm dressed as a community, seeding the same grievance into ten thousand circles at once. Manufactured consensus is indistinguishable from the real thing. That's the part that breaks you when you finally step out of it: you can't audit which of your own thoughts were yours, which came from friends, and which came from a feed pretending to be your friends. You only know the same grievance kept showing up, wearing a familiar face.

If we are going to do A.I. right, we need to protect a user's identity, psyche, and privacy as the first measure. General intelligence is great, just like search, it provides a user with an understanding at a speed that cannot be competed with, but is the user growing? Is the user actually building a skill? Is the horse being led to water or is the water just being given to the horse? Today's deployed models still lack this dose of trust, where opaque training, unverifiable processing, and the possibility of injected influence are a part of the package. Especially in the hiring space, A.I. systems are making it harder on both sides, as employers are unable to measure value accurately and thus create jobs at scale, while the newcomers are unable to understand how to express value accurately. There needs to be a new metric, a new way to communicate capability without sacrificing identity. A.I. that scales with the user, never past the person's current ability at this very moment, but with the user, like their very own sword. A tool for speed and automation rather than replacement and generalization. The human will always be who I bet on rather than the machine, but a human that performs at the scale of a machine? That only comes with private and personal artificial intelligence... synthesis.

There's a difference between building something magnificent with verification along with your generations and prompting a general model for it. And I hope to bring this paradigm shift into reality. A reality where a society seeing a data verification badge instills a shared automatic agreement of depth achieved rather than... vibe'd towards completion. This idea that Rao's Ambient, Craft, and Veil optimize upon your work only. Everything it generates scales on your manual hard-earned contributions to the world. If it generates well... it's because of you. It's because you earned your craft. A personal Fable, so to say... Returning to a world where we capitalize on our swords in private, building without psychological comparison pressure that deprives us of growth. Returning to the fine arts... to humanity. Where technology serves rather than takes. Where every piece or product carries the weight of a past life. Soul-bound creations that return to protect and enable.