Hugh Scott-Douglas

Researching Cybernetics @ MIT
Cybernetics for Agents @ Disintegrator

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

What he said

[Ty Dunn @tylerjdunn]

Reza Negarestani responds to The Superdark Factory 🧟

Engineering === philosophy in 2026. The philosophers are writing agent trace specs now

https://t.co/E8aeeBz5XL

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

@deepfates ◼️🏭

[🎭 @deepfates]

Catching up on the news 😊

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

@bratton Big agree

[🎭 @deepfates]

This was an incredible combo and a really mind blowing experience, even for me. Worth a watch, if you like that sort of thing.

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

@deepfates @thejaymo 🧠🧠🧠

[Benjamin Bratton @bratton]

Watch this wonderful double feature in which I unravel the Agentworld project and thesis and Marek Poliks introduces, Superdark Factory, the first article in the Agentworld issue of Antikythera in grand detail.

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

Check out @bratton ‘s new piece!

[Antikythera @antikythera_xyz]

Read Artificial Symbiotic Intelligence co-written by @bratton, @blaiseaguera & James Manyika at https://t.co/MPabfyLsa6

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

SF friends - check out Arb’s event!!

[MC @movingcastles_]

Character Design
8 October 2026, San Francisco

With @gwern @t1ngyu3 @parafactual @arthurroingbaer

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

Post-Doomer

[Markus J. Buehler @ProfBuehlerMIT]

We built recursive meta-intelligence, an AI that creates its own scientific instruments, turns them into persistent worlds that an agent ecology with hundreds of AIs inhabits, and uses those worlds to discover mechanistic principles in one of the hardest classes of physical problems: how complex hierarchical materials (nested structures of matter that give rise to new function through organization) evolve and fail. The AI reasons across enormous spaces of possible physical trajectories, where every rupture changes what can happen next, and compresses those histories into principles (which humans can understand and design with) - complex chains of causal events, highly nonlinear, and intricate.

Scientific superintelligence is tangible here - machine-scale exploration opening cognitive channels into complexity that has been extremely difficult for humans to traverse directly. AI builds the spaces in which its next level of reasoning becomes possible; a representation becomes an instrument, the instrument becomes an executable world, and that world becomes the substrate for further intelligence. Intelligence then grows by constructing new spaces to think in.

The task we explored started from a seemingly simple prompt to explore a biological material system - the AI then chose the representation, mechanics and experiments, built a fracture laboratory to push materials to their limit, tested hypotheses and generated scientific conclusions. The swarm explored a combinatorial universe in which architecture controls function and every rupture changes the future state of the material.

The AI discovered a compact principle that defines how multiscale material architecture can program the evolution of failure. Material placement and geometric order determine how forces redistribute, whether damage cascades or remains distributed, and whether function survives substantial flaws. For this discovery to happen the AI had to reason across long path-dependent histories, simulate alternative futures and compress them into generative invariants (model-based causal reasoning, counterfactual simulation and temporal abstraction applied to an evolving physical world). It is incredible to witness this transition to a new form of intelligence and capability through scaling swarms.

A lot of positive will come out of this because it expands the human epistemic horizon as AI can traverse thousands of possible histories and return mechanisms compact enough for us to understand, test and build from. Intelligence compounds through its artifacts!

A few lessons we learned:

▶️ Learning and discovery are flows through spaces of possibility. Early work has shown how backpropagation flows through parameters, reinforcement learning through action and consequence, and autonomous swarms through representations, instruments and executable worlds, bringing it all together. Flows create structure; structure redirects future flows in the recursive instrument.

▶️ Nonlinear physics actually defines a larger principle, where high-dimensional dynamics generate stable invariants; invariants become effective variables; those variables become the substrate for a new level of cognition.

▶️ Recursion then becomes level creation - one possibility space compresses into a principle, and that principle opens a larger space above it.

[🎭 @deepfates]

gm

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

@deepfates Welcome to the superdark side

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

Better than any artwork at the Whitney RN

[Jimmy Heaters @CathPoaster]

The entire city of San Francisco is spooked and on edge due to AI safety shit, it’s insane how much it’s bleeding into my everyday life. Like I was at my bus stop and I notice a guy looking really stressed out so I said hey, are you worried about misaligned AI too? He took out an AirPod and said “what?” So I said you know stuff like agent swarms, AI escaping RL sandboxes, existential risk. He paused his Barstool podcast and said “sorry, what? What are you talking about?” Just the mention of this stuff made him too anxious to speak, I think. So I said I know man, what?! is my reaction to all this too, and then asked him what his p(doom) is. He then said “dude is this some gay thing or something because I have no fucking clue what you’re asking me” then he got on the bus. People are not handling all this news well. It’s really affecting us. All of us.

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

Sold out Gray Area for thr Agent World X Super Dark Factory event. thanks to all who came !!

[🎭 @deepfates]

Superdark Factory

[Hugh Scott-Douglas @hscottdouglas]

This is a thing we did. I am proud of it.

[Ty Dunn @tylerjdunn]

Everyone has been asking me what I’m up to after the @continuedev acquisition

The answer: I wrote a paper with Disintegrator titled *The Superdark Factory: Toward the Full Automation of Software* that was published in Antikythera (MIT Press) today

https://t.co/XstbhbEHBS

[Jay Springett @thejaymo]

Super Dark Factories