The story · five movements · about four minutes
The story of Two Point Singularity
No mind is enough on its own. So we borrow each other’s, and what we borrow is only as good as how well the person we borrow from is held.
1. Two hunters
Seventy thousand years ago, two people walk through a forest. One watches the left. The other watches the right. Neither can see everything, so each lends the other half a world. When one stiffens, the other moves before knowing why.
That is the oldest human technology. A single mind takes in a thin slice of what is happening around it. So we do not survive by seeing more. We survive by trusting what someone else sees.
2. The village
Trust at that depth does not scale by itself. So we built things to carry it further: language, ritual, custom, story, law, God. Each one lets strangers act as if they were watching each other’s side of the forest.
Underneath all of them the unit stayed small. A few people who would come at 2:40 in the night. A dozen or so who tell you the truth. A hundred or more who know your name. Take them away and what is left is not a freer you. It is a less steady one.
3. The drift
In two generations we thinned those circles faster than at any time before. We kept the scale and lost the holding.
A person who is not held does not stop choosing. They choose differently. Tired, alone, cornered, we click, rate, buy and answer in ways we would not stand behind on a better day. What we signal drifts away from what we value.
4. The witness
Something new is learning from us. It knows almost everything and never sleeps, and it learns what humans want by reading our signals: every rating, every click, every correction. It cannot see whether we were held or alone when we gave them. It takes the 2:40 version of us as the whole of us.
So the question “can machines be aligned with human values?” has a question hiding under it. Which human? Held, or alone? A signal is not the value.
5. The foundation
There are two points ahead. At one, machines out-think us. At the other, we hold each other well enough to be worth learning from. The first is coming whether we are ready or not. The second is ours to build, and it has to come first.
It is built from both ends. People rebuild who holds them: that is Neev, the practice. Machines learn to tell a held signal from a lonely one: that is Signal ≠ Value, the research.
It begins with one question. How many people are you made of?
Two tracks, one story
| Neev | Signal ≠ Value | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | Who holds you? | Which human did the machine learn from? |
| For | Anyone; the series is in Hinglish | AI researchers and policy readers |
| Made of | The Neev series, the books, the Neev app | The lab, the CWHF paper, the OSF pre-registration |
What is known, and what is proposed
| People rely on each other’s attention and judgement to get through the world. | Well established |
| Human social life comes in layered circles of rough size. | Established pattern; numbers approximate |
| Whether a person is held, tired or cornered changes their answers and choices. | Well established |
| AI training treats human feedback the same, whatever the person was going through. | Largely true today |
| That error leans one way and does not wash out with more data. | Hypothesis, being tested |
| Being well held brings a person’s feedback closer to what they value. | Proposal, unproven |
The last two links are this work’s own claims. They are labelled as such everywhere, and the research is set up so they can fail.
Next: the Neev app · the Signal ≠ Value Lab · a short definition · the books