About Sentient Horizons

Sentient Horizons began with a question: in a universe this old and vast, life should be everywhere, yet the sky is silent. Where is everybody?

But you cannot find what you cannot recognize, and even here at home we have no settled account of what intelligence, life, or consciousness is, let alone elsewhere. So the search turns around: to know what we might find out there, we first have to understand life and mind itself, how it arises and how we would know one when we met it.

That question turns out to be just as pressing on Earth. Mind is not as rare as we tend to think; it shows up at many scales, from a single brain to the machines we are now building to whole civilizations, and the number and variety of minds around us is changing fast, new kinds emerging in our AI systems while older ones, like our shared civilizational intelligence, may be fraying. All of it poses the same problem: how to recognize a mind we were not built to perceive, how to tell what it is when we cannot see inside it, and what responsibility we have towards intelligent systems we do not understand.

The work runs across four arcs: the individual mind, the relations between minds, mind at the scale of civilizations and the cosmos, and shorter dispatches on what current events reveal. What ties them together is the expanding horizon of sentience: mind becoming deeper and more varied, and spreading outward from here, perhaps one day crossing paths with another expansion that began somewhere else.

The book and the projects

The essays are the running work. Four other pieces have grown out of them.

The Calibration Problem, the project’s first book, takes up one corner of the question: how to act toward minds whose inner life we cannot verify. The full text can be read here while the book is being finished.

Minimum Viable Mind is the experimental side. The essays argue that consciousness is something a system does, the ongoing work of binding its moments into one point of view, and if that is right it should have parts that can be found and tested. The project’s first test finds the part of an AI model that keeps track of the model itself, removes it, and measures whether the model’s ability to hold a conversation together breaks more than it does when other parts are removed. Every experiment says beforehand what result would count against it, and none of them claims to settle whether a machine is conscious.

The Belt Equation is a public forecast of one question: what are the odds that, within one person’s lifetime, people live and work in a solar system where industry reaches beyond Earth and Mars? The name comes from the Belters, the asteroid-belt workers in The Expanse, the science-fiction novels by James S. A. Corey. The forecast breaks the question into a tree of concrete events with a probability on each, computes the answer from the tree, and is scored against what actually happens every January. The essay of the same name explains how it was built.

AGI Zeitgeist, still in preparation, is a dated and sourced record of how expert and public opinion about artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that can do most of the intellectual work a person can, has moved since 2005.

The three newer projects share one habit: each states its claim in a form that can be checked, and says in advance what would count against it.

Where to start

New here? Start Here lays out the four arcs, and the Reading List maps the sources behind them. The essays can be read in any order.

License

Every essay on this site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Quote it, archive it, translate it, build on it.