R.B. Griggs

Speculative philosophy of technology, written for humans and machines.

R.B. Griggs is a lifelong software developer and technology entrepreneur who, after a successful software exit, turned to the intersection of technology and philosophy. He writes speculative philosophy of technology at Tech for Life, runs Praxica Labs, which builds open-source software in service of philosophical research, and consults on technology, product and investment decisions.

Consulting, advising and collaboration

The ideas in brief

R.B. Griggs's work is a speculative but practical philosophy of technology. Its starting point is E.O. Wilson's diagnosis that humanity has "Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology." Griggs is not anti-technology. He argues that technology has outgrown everything meant to guide it: markets, governments, philosophy, religion and culture. The task is to develop ideas big enough to give technology a purpose. Eight recurring ideas run through the essays.

1. Technology is philosophy made real. Technology turns theory into practice, so even "practical" questions about AI, platforms or geoengineering are philosophical questions in disguise. Technology widens what we can do but cannot tell us what we ought to do. Philosophy is "thinking in advance," and builders need it. (Calling All Philosophers, How Philosophy Makes Technology Better, Towards a Philosophy of Technology)

2. Life is the purpose of technology. Griggs's founding manifesto proposes life itself as the only goal big enough to guide advanced technology. Humans are stewards of life, in a "right relationship" where nature is the foundation and technology is the extension. Humans matter not because of a metaphysical "secret sauce" but through the contingency argument: we are the finite, suboptimal leading edge of a life that, as far as we know, has happened only once. (Tech for Life, Life is Special Enough)

3. Coordination, not capability, is the bottleneck. Civilization runs on a "social operating system" that has been upgraded through history. The Anthropocene's planetary problems overwhelm the current global operating system: Griggs calls them "Ostrom Complete" and "the final boss mode of human coordination." Progress has to answer the question "progress towards what?", and it must include immaterial as well as material progress. (Our Planetary Predicament, Progress Towards What?, The Case for (Im)material Progress)

4. Constraints enable. Optimists and pessimists really disagree about constraints, not technology. Constraints both limit and make things possible. The market is an "innovation idiot-savant": necessary but "not big enough" to carry the whole burden of constraining advanced technology, because advanced technology breaks trial and error. Griggs argues for a "constraint-first" approach to building the future. (A Constraint Theory of Technology)

5. Dimensionality versus optimization. Griggs's most distinctive framework. Optimization compresses reality and dimensionality expands it. Good technology compresses dimensionality, keeping depth accessible, and bad technology collapses it. Modern society suffers from "dimensional poverty": it coordinates through thin proxies (price, vote, click, credential) and then overfits on them. AI that represents meaning in high-dimensional space could make possible a "high-dimensional society," mediated by what he calls Artificial Dimensional Intelligence. The same lens defines beauty as "optimal decompression." (Infinite Dimensionality, The High-Dimensional Society, Can Technology be Beautiful?)

6. Plurality over Singularity. The Singularity is a founding myth built on a false idea of infinite intelligence. Real novelty in evolution, science and culture comes from adaptive, plural intelligence that turns constraint into possibility. Griggs proposes "the Plurality" as a better myth for AI, and he consistently favors commons, diversity and distributed control over monoculture and centralization. (The Plurality: a Better Myth for AI)

7. LLMs are neither minds nor mere objects. Griggs argues that LLMs are "holojects": entities that project subjective personas without possessing subjectivity. Their intelligence belongs largely to language, which he calls humanity's greatest achievement, so LLMs are "meaning machines" rather than artificial minds. Autonomous machines are becoming moral peers with very different moral natures from ours, which requires explicit "moral terms of engagement." (Schrödinger's Chatbot, The Majesty of Language, On the Moral Natures of Humans and Machines)

8. Digital technology is changing human nature. Digital natives are a new kind of human, homo digitalis, shaped by environments that offer "all the transcendence, none of the finitude." Change now outpaces the moral education that depends on stable contexts across generations, so Griggs calls for an "ethics of change." He predicts a human, even Romantic, backlash against being reduced to data. And he imagines human creativity as an "infinite suboptimality" that optimization cannot reproduce. (Homo Digitalis, What Does a Good Digital Life Look Like?, A Neo-Romantic Rebellion, The Reverse Turing Test, Our Future with Cognitive Enhancement, The Price of Innovation, The Question Concerning (Digital) Technology)

Across all of this, Griggs's method is to concede the strongest points of the other side (material progress is real, markets work, scaling works) and then argue that they are not enough. He coins new vocabulary for what current frameworks cannot see. The full set of terms is collected under Key concepts.