Are You Being Served?
The Dangers and Possibilities of Intelligent Agents, and a Proposal for Keeping Their Power Answerable to People
The same power that can exploit human weakness can strengthen human agency. Intelligent Agents are becoming capable of knowing us, persuading us, and acting on our behalf.
To serve someone can mean to care for them. It can also mean something much darker.
In the Digital Age, we became the product. The Age of Agency gives us a chance to build systems that serve us instead of consuming us.
Project Bridge is a proposal to build. We are seeking an interdisciplinary university partner to work with us to test and improve the architecture and help begin building it.
The machine can scale. The person cannot.
Four powers are converging faster than a person can scale to meet them.
They can know us. Intimate data can reveal what we search for, buy, fear, trust, value, need, avoid, and disclose when we believe a conversation is private.
They can influence us. Intelligent Agents can turn persuasion from an occasional message into adaptive conversation, recommendation, memory, coordination, and action.
They can shape what we see. Information systems can determine which people, claims, opportunities, and events become visible, repeated, credible, easy to reach, or quietly absent.
Together, these powers can concentrate extraordinary wealth, which can buy still more power.
Technology is not struggling to keep up with us. We are struggling to keep up with technology.
Good intentions are not architecture.
The destination is the reason to build the Bridge.
At the most basic level, Project Bridge asks Intelligent Agents to do something remarkably old-fashioned: help people find one another. But it is much more than that. The destination might be:
- Civic life: a meeting hall for every elected office, where a constituent can be heard by her own representative.
- Local commerce: a good local business, found on its merits and not because it bought its way in.
- Growing up: a young person gaining independence without pretending to be older.
- Help: help that arrives before anyone asks for an account or a credit card.
- Work and opportunity: people finding skills, collaborators, customers, jobs, projects, and ways to contribute.
- Each other: people who might matter to one another discovering that the other exists.
Instead of concentrating extraordinary wealth in a few hands, Project Bridge is designed to send prosperity outward: to the people who build it, and to research and public benefit.
The destination is greater human agency, not greater dependence on the machine.
Project Bridge proposes four connected parts:
- BCNU: a shared protocol establishing common rules and boundaries, designed for adoption beyond any single company or product.
- Bridge It: a civic digital utility designed to help people connect, coordinate, find help, and move toward what they need.
- Bridget: an Intelligent Agent designed to help and then recede, not capture.
- Stardust Connections: the institution designed to build, steward, and remain accountable for the work.
A person crossing a bridge is going somewhere. Project Bridge helps them get there.
A bridge and a casino can both be full of people. One succeeds when people cross. The other succeeds when they stay.
We do not measure success in clicks and views. We measure success in crossings.
Use the capabilities of the Age of Agency to help people reach one another, rather than helping machines reach deeper into people.
This Is a Proposal to Build
We are actively seeking a university partner.
This is not a thought experiment. Project Bridge intends to build the system this proposal describes. Computer science, law, business, public health, youth development, the social sciences, economics, ethics, design, and civic life must be in the room from the start.
We are not asking the university to finance Stardust Connections or fund the development of the technology. We are asking for participation: faculty and students from multiple disciplines, a classroom or other shared working space, regular meetings, and an initial semester-length collaboration in which the proposal can be examined seriously.
We are not looking for a university to endorse Project Bridge. We are looking for a partner to test it, improve it, and help begin building it.
Six volumes. More than 1,500 printed pages.
The protections have to exist before breaking them becomes profitable. The Library develops the argument across six volumes, each organized around a different question.
- I What has happened to the ground beneath us?
- II What must stay true, no matter who builds it?
- III What kind of system should exist for the people it serves?
- IV Who decides, and who can stop them?
- V What should Stardust carry, and what should it let go?
- VI What can money buy here, and what can it never buy?
We are presenting this to open a conversation. Would you like to start one?
Every serious response will be read.
Write to info@projectbridgegroup.org, or use the form.
How the work was made: How We Worked Together · Credibility & Symmetry