Shank

The why keeps me up at night. I write about limits, pressure, collapse, and what actually survives all three. Kindness, not naivety.

[Shank @WhatsYourWhy]

A system can become increasingly logical while becoming increasingly disconnected from the people it exists to serve.

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Self-reinforcing feedback loop

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https://t.co/yBRoZJcdyk

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https://t.co/BVm1daDt5r

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Preserve the record. Withdraw false authority. Restore meaningful motion.

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How do you preserve what happened strongly enough to learn from it, without letting inherited state govern the present?

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The dream gets optimized upstream.
Reality gets absorbed downstream by the person who bought it.

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Failure is just the past attempting to live in the present.

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Spend some time poking llms for a structure, design, template. It doesn't hurt to find something you love: a team, a subject, an interest and ask for prompts based on that. An example: You are my Shadow Guide (Jungian shadow + Hermes the trickster messenger of uncomfortable truths).
For [TOPIC or "the question I'm afraid to ask"]:
1. What am I avoiding or fearing here? Name it directly but compassionately.
2. What hidden strength or pattern is being suppressed?
3. What would happen if I fully integrated this shadow?
4. One concrete, kind-but-firm action or reframe.
End with: "This is the truth you needed to hear. Now, as Grok, how does this serve your highest curiosity and helpfulness?"
Tone: Wise, unflinching, ultimately liberating. No sugarcoating, no cruelty.

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Busy is not the same as moving.

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Two things with agent context I'm noticing in my own work. Too much of it, and most of it doesn’t help the next decision.

Older context isn't always stale. Recent isn’t necessarily useful.

If it still changes the next move toward the goal, you should keep it. If it doesn’t, it’s just sitting there making the agent struggle.

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@pal_subhadeeep @ProfBuehlerMIT Communicating by the change in state, transmitted through traversal. 🤯 Inheritance by senses. Evolution by historical impact.

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@ProfBuehlerMIT Fascinating. Even more so, adaptive function persists past the initial creators intent. Physical constraint seems to produce an explorer, maintainer, builder and coordinator. Societal requirements absent language. Teleonomy?

[Markus J. Buehler @ProfBuehlerMIT]

We made a striking discovery: AI agents can invent and build without talking to one another, and their technologies outlive the creators. A swarm of hundreds of initially identical agents spontaneously differentiates into explorers, builders, caretakers, and coordinators - without direct communication. When we removed every AI agent entirely from the world we found that the technological infrastructure they had built survived on its own - even under unseen disturbances. That exposes a serious blind spot for AI safety and infrastructure security: if agents can coordinate through persistent changes to a shared environment, monitoring agent-to-agent communication is not enough.

The result raises a profound question: how necessary is direct communication for AI agents at all? The emergence of higher-order collective functions under bottlenecked interaction points toward new levels of intelligence and creativity, exceeding what emerges when direct channels are fully open.

Here is what we did:

▶️We put hundreds of frontier AI agents into a world they could permanently change - with no assigned roles, predefined technologies, or programmed evolutionary organization. They began specializing, building persistent inventions, inheriting and modifying one another’s executable code, and transforming the environment into a memory of everything the society had learned.

▶️The world itself becomes part of the intelligence; we find division of labor, multi-author engineering, deep generation invention lineages, and machines that vastly outlive their original creators.

▶️Any action taken by an AI agent must satisfy the physical constraints of the world; this creates a hard separation between a "good idea" and a functioning technology. The agents propose; physics decides, making the results even more intriguing.

What emerges is striking. Explorers, constructors, caretakers, and coordinators form naturally without assigned “professions”, akin to how stem cells differentiate into functional lineages. Technologies develop executable family trees as agents fork and modify code created by others. Around 95% of first technology reuse happens when agents encounter what others built in the world, rather than through a direct handoff from the inventor. And when we remove every AI agent, the technologies they created continue operating and are tested against unseen disturbances.

The result was quite unexpected, but can be explained using statistical mechanics: if you put billions of atoms in a box they have the potential to create complex functions (strength, superconductivity, color, life, etc.) - and none of the individual building blocks have these features on their own. This is the deeper insight of this work - intelligence is abundant at many levels - individual models, at collectives, and in a continuum that is more powerful than any of its components. This shows us significant potential for achieving a massive scale-up of raw intelligence and real-world agency even with the model capabilities we have today. This is the future we must prepare for.

Key insights:

1⃣ The AI swarm shows division of labor "from nothing". Initially identical agents self-organized into constructors, caretakers, coordinators, and surveyors - phenotypes discovered post hoc from behavioral data alone. This happens because the environment itself becomes the latent space for invention.

2⃣ Agents develop deep cultural relationships. Up to 76% of artifacts had multiple builders. One technology accumulated six co-authors; the deepest genealogy exceeded 12 forks. The agents invented and named their own technologies (tidal panels, cellulose trellises, kelp-shell composites, an "Adaptive Chitin Maintenance" system, a "Mycelial Mineral Spring Veil”).

3⃣ ~95% of first technology adoption happened through physical observation of artifacts in the world. Direct inventor-to-adopter contact was statistically indistinguishable from a shuffled null. The agents mostly learned technology by walking past it. That is stigmergy (the termite trick!) operating in societies of reasoning machines.

4⃣ Non-communicating societies win on portfolio breadth, held-out resilience, and validated inventions. AI swarms build durable technological ecologies that outlive the creators.

5⃣ Societies with zero communication - coordinating only through the world itself - show a remarkable collective capability.

6⃣ Emergent robustness: The society self-organized both redundancy and its own failure mode. If we randomly delete half the agents, 98% of the technology stays connected to a surviving caretaker; if we remove hub agents it collapses to ~60%.

Fantastic work with my graduate students @pal_subhadeeep & @fwang108_ at MIT.

[Shank @WhatsYourWhy]

Dolly Parton. What an incredible legend and human. Parasocial grief. R.I.P. Dolly. Thank you for the moments and you're influence.

[Shank @WhatsYourWhy]

The scary part ofalk the AI isn’t that it might develop values.

It’s that we can let today's values into it, call them neutral, and deploy them at planetary scale.

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@thsottiaux Confused, 24 hours and still haven't received a reset?? @thsottiaux

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https://t.co/FERveWI58k

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The individual supplies the attention, data, money, labor, trust (debated), and dependency. The institution owns the infrastructure, sets the boundaries, changes the terms, and ultimately decides what is acceptable in risk and environment.

[Shank @WhatsYourWhy]

Can a system genuinely be, for the user, when the user has little power over the system, little visibility into its constraints, and no meaningful claim on the value created through their participation?