Escape velocity

Through the AI-power-wealth vortex, I spiral into the gravity well and emerge reimagined on the far side of the wormhole.

Escape Velocity is a real world story on how AI amplifies the hard systems that hold us back—structural, cultural, and personal—and using those very difficulties to transcend the problems they create. Four gravity sucks—AI awe, wealth integrity, conventional imperatives, and distributed trust—tighten their grip, pulling me deeper. Resistance is futile, emergence is inevitable? Flourishing transformation arises through cultivating the mindsets and physical systems that privilege trust, enabling creativity and connection to take root and thrive.

The highest vibration always wins.
Michael Beckwith¹

I can totally make the case that big tech and AI is a race towards oligarchs. Some say we’re already there and that emerging consciousness—awakening and awareness all around—is inadequate.²

I am not going to make that case.

Instead four real world vignettes, of being sucked into this wealth-concentration gravity hole and then through the generated wormhole, into a new universe.

1. Awe

for other people, even people different from oneself, for nature and all her manifestations, and for whatever brings ‘awe’ into life, including reverence for a higher power or simply the majesty of the universe
Sandra Waddock³

My friend Deimantas prompts me, have I looked at what aistudio can do? I’ve not. I greatly appreciate his follow-up alongside the dissonance I feel: how can ai can be pro-human?

That leads me to build an ai bot for the Soulprint platform. It is to connect users with human interaction—real world inner practices and outer actions: programs, rewilding and nature experiences that amplify human interaction and grow our less foolish, wiser capabilities.⁴

The awe is from building the ai bot so quickly. I’m not a coder. When I ran a startup my team would need >2 weeks for this. In less than 2.5 hours I’ve instructed, debugged and sent Soul-Scriber live.

Beautiful and I’m quickly questioning my awe for this, what am I missing? My friend Anastasia asks about real world impact. I say this is about more and more resources into the hands of people who really really care about the planet.⁵

But is it?

2. Integrity

Can we construct societies that tend to enhance dignity and well-being with integrity?
Gregg Henriques⁶

The gravity suck is calling: aistudio is big tech (google) and, as a result, while Soul-Scriber helps people to find relevant human connections it also supports the concentration of wealth and power. Those connections are:

• This is so super efficient—fast, instant feedback is a competitive advantage.

• By using this Soulprint is supporting ai’s business model.

• That business model is centralised—ai is cash and energy intensive sucking wealth towards its providers.

Concentrating more power and wealth is bad, there is plenty of data for that.⁷ Consequently, Soulprint needs a business model that rewards its founders, participants and collaborators directly as well as from the personal and partner value it generates.

This is a dilemma faced and addressed throughout modernity by mutual societies, cooperatives and charities. For a variety of reasons those are unappealing as a primary enabling structure for Soulprint. However, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are emerging and for Soulprint it is an ideal fit. DAOs offer a transparent, opt-in and low barrier pathway for profits, sharing and further incentivising human caring.⁸  

Whoop—I’m enjoying the great irony as ai makes finding out about and setting up a DAO far more practical. And I’m out of the gravity well…

Maybe?

3. Conventional imperatives

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them⁹

My friend Liesbet graciously helps me stress test the DAO. There are powerful structural reasons around corporate success including the limited liability company. A shareholder in a Pty. Ltd. company has exactly that, limited liability.

Can a participant or partner, opting in to Soulprint’s DAO direct rewards, have the same?

I get stuck trying to answer that and sucked back to the bottom of the gravity pit:

• Do we have to give up the idea of incentivising engagement, profit sharing and direct rewards? They are powerful additions that further amplify Soulprint’s origins by increasing engagement and co-created action. This mirrors Soulprint’s inner awareness with outer action approach delivering more than the sum of those two parts.

• Alternatively, do we inhibit aliveness and success through more cumbersome systems such as shareholder allocation? Alongside the corporate embedding of fiduciary duty to maximise financial gain. In turn this incentivises using ai to minimise human to human interaction rather than maximising it.¹⁰

There’s got to be a better way?

4. Distributed trust

And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.
Meister Eckhart

I’m totally aware many others are wrestling with the same steps. Plus, we have a history of success: evolving to new levels, paradigm shifts out of centralised wealth.¹¹

I ask my friend Kevin on today’s dilemma. He’s actively engaged in creating systems that enable distributed trust, helping individuals and groups into responsibility.

I resolve my DAO limited liability dilemma. Hilariously (thank you Deimantas, Anastasia, Liesbet and Kevin) it’s now only seconds more work with ai.

It just means asking ai for transgressive help (in this case to highlight non-ownership partner-crypto-tokens)¹² …

Into a new universe

It is possible to come into such profound alignment with the moral and spiritual axis of the universe that every moment of your life is a walk in grace, and that you know without any doubt that you are in the right place at the right time.
Craig Hamilton¹³

The difficulties are the very things helping us shift and the answers take me through the wormhole into a new universe. The very nature of ai—centralising power and wealth—also enables the new paradigm, in this case a workable DAO. ai lets me:

• innovate outside of the structures that hold us back,

• prototype solutions with crazy-fast feedback,

• massively reduces traditional startup costs.

All of this means more and more life affirming enterprise can proliferate, beyond just this use case.

For Soulprint here’s where we’re at, the other side of the ai gravity-well-induced wormhole:

The DAO structure unlocks human collaborative power privileging equitable and revitalized futures… assisting collective action with better tools for coordination and trust than would otherwise be available… taking the best from conventional corporate systems without incentivising the types of decision making that is central to some of the difficulties these systems create—such as nature is an externality and consequently inherently discounted by company fiduciary responsibility.

…The DAO lifts barriers to sharing including capabilities to distribute rewards back to participants and partners¹⁴

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Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except Iguazu falls picture licensed from Shutterstock.

1. Humanity’s awakening hits critical mass. Inspire nation Michael Sandler & Michael Beckwith

2. For example: Catalyzing consciousness is central to the groundbreaking 3 year Intergovernmental Transformative Change Assessment science process that saw 147 governments and the UN highlight the fundamental importance of “spiritually reconnecting humans and nature”. For more see Soulprint substack>

3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41463-016-0012-4

4. Less Foolish is Peter Limberg’s great substack. Additionally, I am greatly informed by John Vervaeke. E.g. What AI can never be:

5. https://soulprint.space/about/

6. Greg here https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/theory-knowledge/201201/finding-our-moral-compass and https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-0058-5

7. E.g. increasing income inequality: see OECD here>

8. A DAO leverages blockchain technology to facilitate interactions and governance. In this case Soulprint becomes a hybrid Social, Service and Collective DAO. 

9. Often attributed to Albert Einstein. I’ve yet to find the original source.

10. Tristan Harris does a good job outlining imperatives in this space and a way through:

while Daron Acemoglu presents a (financially) less radical counterpoint:

11. E.g. see Easter unfolding here>

12. For this I use Gil Friend’s delphi ai bot. Short version is Tokenized partner membership with non-legal ownership plus Use of a DAO legal wrapper, Trust structures and/or Smart decentralized insurance protocols. Scaling and adding as appropriate. This is, of course, advise to confirm with humans and specialists. The point being it’s instant and greatly reduces what would have been several meetings and cost to get to this point in seconds rather than over a few weeks.

13. https://craighamiltonglobal.com/blog/is-enlightenment-possible

14. Full version https://soulprint.space/about/#letter