Dynamic Stability and Dynamic Stewardship at the Dawn of AGI

ByDan November 7, 2026November 7, 2026 November 7, 2026

“Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.” – Heraclitus, Fragment 51

Much of the discourse around AGI and the future of humanity seems to assume that we have two options:

• Option 1: Preserve humanity, its values, and its present form for as long as possible (implies that life itself can be made static).

• Option 2: Rush forward into some posthuman future, hoping that whatever comes next will be better (implies that radical change is itself good).

I don’t think either of these is a particularly coherent position.

Better would be:

• Option 3: Understand and ensure the conditions for life’s robustness, while also understanding and guiding the trajectory of inevitable change responsibly towards greater future thriving and robustness (implies that life must inherently change, but that robustness is important and future trajectories should be stewarded with care).

In practice, this means bearing in mind the tension between stability and necessary transformation:

My reasoning beyond the position of Stewardship is as follows:

• Life is composed of changing, knitted patterns, wrestling against entropy: Life exists at the edge of chaos, taking in atoms and energy in order to maintain itself, and insodoing necessarily changing itself, changing the living patterns it is knitted into, and changing the environment itself – sometimes allowing for entirely new emergent circumstances for new kinds of powers, coordination, or competition. This exists across the scale of single cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Living “things” are in fact parts of a larger living “process” whose robustness and capacity to thrive is predicated on change itself (Santa Fe’s Eric Smith explains this extremely well in this 10-minute “what is life” clip). 

• [Dynamic Stability] Change in living forms the space of possible minds and values is inevitable: All individuals or species either attenuate or transform – there is no option for stasis. The robustness and thriving of a living ecosystem is not the presence of some kind of perfect balance of static species, but is rather an ever-shifting dynamic stability, granting robustness to the entire ecosystem to endure shocks and changes, and to overcome the inevitable period by which the living system undermines the very conditions of its current persistence.

• Some trajectories of change are likely to be better than others: But these constant changes in the process of life don’t seem to be neutral. We might imagine some scenarios (such as the Great Oxygenation Event, or a substantial enough asteroid strike) where earth-life may not have recovered, or where it might have been set back billions of years. We might also imagine trajectories of life that land in fettered local maxima, and cease to continue to bloom into higher forms of power, experience, and capacity to thrive. It seems clear that some pathways might lead to a better experience for current forms of life, but to greater capacity for thriving (and so, experiencing or unfolding vastly more value) than others.

• [Dynamic Stewardship] The trajectory of the living process might be influenced: Humans have a remarkably low level of understanding of the conditions that allow for life’s robustness, and (at present) a rather low level of control over the waves of technology (AGI) that seem wildly likely to irrevocably alter the regime of earth-life in the near-term. That said, we have the ability to coordinate, communicate, and innovate in ways that might tilt the trajectory of the future not only to more causal purchase and relevance for hominids, but towards a greater level of thriving in the undergirding process-of-life of which we are temporarily part.

I place an emphasis in many of my essays (Torch and Flame, Servitude vs Blooming, Participation) on influencing the trajectory of change, rather than ensuring stasis (which so often tends to be the human tendency, wanting humans to rule forever or wanting their anachronistic present moral values to be forever for all future human and posthuman minds). 

I am consistent and clear that I don’t want change to be happening as fast as it is (Foisted), and that we should work towards AGI coordination and an international dynamic that is not an arms race (Unite or Fight), though we may not have time to make it happen. 

The timelines before humans either attenuate or transform is very short (Short Human Timelines). Achieving some happy period of long-term dynamic stability is not viable – we must embrace the fact that we are presently transforming along with the entire regime of earth-life, and so we must be able to speak frankly about preferable and non-preferable trajectories of posthuman life.

But my focus (Stewarding the Flame) has always been on discerning good futures, rather than advocating for reckless change in all directions is “progress” (Against Accelerationism). 

We must take into account the dynamic stability or life, and the dynamic stewardship of life’s becoming, of which we are presently an important and temporary part.

The graphic below highlights the present (stability) and future (necessary transformation) concerns through the lens of analogies I often use here on by blog and in our Trajectory community events:

There is no guarantee that humans efforts towards stewardship necessarily lead to “better” futures for the trajectory of posthuman life. But neither can a CEO of a company predict the future of its products, staff, or industry. They take their best swing at stewardship regardless, and we might imagine vastly more companies going bankrupt if no such attempt was even made. 

Ignoring stability and ignoring stewardship both have significant downsides – as mentioned in the quadrant below:

Our best swing at influencing the flourishing of the process-of-life beyond us would involve a dynamic balance between retaining stability and robustness, and a willingness to becoming whatever we must become in order to persist the in fast, divergent, emergent future we’re now entering.

So what would managing this tension look like in practice?

I suspect:

• Much more deeply study life and the living process – If we was to respect the current dynamic stability of that which undergirds the present living process (never mind steward it to greater levels of thriving) we should deeply understand what the living process is and how it thrives. We’d want to ensure that the AGI we’re almost inevitably going to be conjuring is an actual participant and expander of that living process, rather than a mere prosthetic that ends up crushing current bio-life and fizzling out (Worthy Successor).

• Much more deeply study consciousness – If we value our own sentient experience, and that of other conscious creatures, then surely we’d want to ensure that this critical quality exists in the new kind software posthuman minds that are going to be conjured beyond us. As Michael Levin has said, this might involve careful steps towards human merger and symbiosis with machines in order to see if sentience can be transferred to the new substrates that are likely to wield the most influence over earth in the near-term.

• International coordination around AGI red lines – Some degree of cooperation between the USA and China around preventing some of the worst possible unbridged runaway AGI scenarios. This is much more than advocacy for a one-world government, and is much more in line with establishing a “tapestry” of imperfect coordination and control mechanisms in order to ensure enough robustness in the global system to allow us to have causal purchase in stewarding (Dean Sue Lan of Tsinghua University has excellent ideas on what this might look like in practice).

• Active international discussion around what we are building (AGI) and becoming (BCI / symbiosis) – While it will be terrifying, humanity must at some point face squarely the idea that eternally staying human-as-we-are-now is obviously untenable, and that staying alive and doing “good” will imply participation in the process of change that moves beyond the present human form an civilization entirely (Eric Smith has an excellent quote on this, also see: The Meiji Era for Man).

In no way am I proposing the bullets above as a complete list, but I think it’s a reasonable start.

If you’re interested in joining policy thinkers, startup founder, AGI safety team members, and researchers in biology / AI / neuroscience in discussing what “stewarding” actually implies, and how we get there – visit the Trajectory Focus page and submit your interest in our Philosophy Circle online events or our in-person private symposiums.