A few weeks ago I wrote here about the Voxari, a synthetic alien civilization of 5,000 individuals that I built with two very different AI models (check it here). You type a proposal, click Transmit, and 5,000 points of light on a map change color as each citizen answers for themselves. The whole poll takes about ten seconds and costs less than a dime. It worked because of a division of labour. Claude, from Anthropic, designed the world, wrote its history and plans and execut

Brussels, 1830s. Belgium is barely a few years old as a country, and its government has a very basic problem. It does not know much about the people it governs. How many are there, how tall are they, how many are born, how many die, how many break the law? Adolphe Quetelet decides to find out. He was an astronomer by training, a man used to measuring stars. But the sky had given him a habit: count carefully, and look for patterns in the noise. So he turned that habit on peopl

In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster plays Ellie Arroway, a scientist who spends years in the New Mexico desert with headphones on, listening to static and waiting for somebody out there to say something. For most of the movie, all she can do is listen. Last week I got to be on the other end of the line. I typed a message to an alien civilization: Every province should send a tenth of its harvest to a common granary for hard seasons. Then I clicked Transmit. 5,000 points of lig