Participation

ByDan August 10, 2026August 11, 2026 August 11, 2026

Much of today’s AGI alignment discourse is focused on how mankind can guarantee that vastly more capable future intelligences will continue to provide for us, respect our present preferences, preserve our autonomy, and leave us essentially as we are (if we so choose).

This is directly at odds with the kind of practical advice we give human beings facing nearly any other challenge or developmental stage.

In this article I’ll argue that while it might be important to determine how to secure an ecological welfare state for humanity – we should be spending the majority of our efforts on the most reliable strategy we now know fo how to ensure one’s own persistence. 

Namely: determining how we might participate in the dynamic, transforming ecosystem of intelligence that we’re entering.

The Virtue of Participation

Children are encouraged by their parents not only to pursue their goals but also to be valuable members of society.

Very few parents tell their children to negotiate for what they want from a position of moral authority, with no concern for what they (they child) actually contribute to the world. Doing so would seem somewhat obviously harmful for the child’s prospects, and for the broader society in which they operate.

Parents know that teaching a child to participate and contribute is a much more important way to ensure that they receive what they want than merely telling them how to receive. 

Aspiring young scientists or entrepreneurs are encouraged by mentors to follow their instincts, and to work hard to discover something worthwhile and useful.

Very few mentors would instruct their aspiring young proteges – in business or the sciences – to argue for what they (the protege) wants, with no concern for what they actually contribute to society. Doing so would seem somewhat obviously harmful for the child’s prospects, and for the broader society in which they operate.

Mentors know that teaching a mentee to participate and contribute is a much more important way to ensure that they receive what they want than merely telling them how to receive. 

Imagine a child says:

“Mother, father, I am valuable because I am conscious, and I have dignity and rights. For that reason, when I grow up I will ensure that all is provided for me. I will argue to be treated kindly and be provided for.”

Surely the parents agree that the child is valuable, but they rightly wouldn’t see the child’s entitled demand to receive as a good for the child or society, and they’d naturally be unwilling to count on selfless kindness as a totally reliable source of material provisioning for their child. Beggars can’t be choosers, after all.

Simple entitlement is naturally seen as maladaptive compared to adaptive participation, and most parents or teachers need no “philosophy” to justify this – as the benefits of participation are clear. 

A child who consistently develops the ability to have a reasonably fulfilling societal role (plumber, librarian, accountant, mother, teacher, etc) will have at least three priceless benefits:

1. Security — Self-sufficiency is the strongest grounding for ensuring one stays fed and has a roof over their head. 
2. Influence — Through participating with one’s skills in the broader civilization, one gains an ability to change things for the better for oneself and others – to move that civilization (even if in a small way) in line with one’s own values or aims.
3. Meaning / fulfillment — Growing in order to be part of something larger than ourselves – to contribute our gifts (while we can) to something beyond ourselves – is vastly more conducive to one’s wellbeing than idly having one’s needs provided for.

The Japanese concept of Ikigai is often immediately understood in the West because many of us hold this to be so self-evident. 

AGI and the Turn Away from Participation

There are many who argue that AGI should be stopped indefinitely, because we can’t know if it will love or respect human beings.

Others believe that AGI will inevitably provide everything that humans want – either because it will be easy to program it to do so, or because they believe that all intelligent entities will naturally be kind and respectful in very specific ways that result in human utopia.

Others argue that if it can’t be stopped, mankind should ensure that AGI never harms us, and always respects our choices and our autonomy.

All of these positions abandon the notion of participation in favor exactly the kind of entitlement that most teachers or parents wouldn’t think of imparting on a young person they care about.

The issue here is not that we should not with for some kind of guaranteed wellbeing of others – that desire is likely rooted in the best of intentions. 

Wellbeing is incredibly morally important, and humans have the richest sentience we know of on earth – aiming for individual humans to be provided for seems a reasonable thing to want.

The issue is that it isn’t reasonable to expect such ceaseless provisioning from an ever-changing ecosystem of intelligence whose means of valuing and acting are beyond our comprehension and are getting more incomprehensible by the day. 

If we’re honest, it may not even be reasonable to demand for such eternal provisioning to be paid for by the active participation and work of a greater ecosystem of intelligences.

We wish to be both beggars and choosers. 

Common sense – which we apply with such consistency as a parent or teacher – leads us to suspect that this is likely impossible and potentially immoral. Yet in the world of “AGI alignment,” this is what we should bring striving for.

In a world where no more trade-offs of any kind, where life and nature are neatly bound or divided, such a beggar and chooser scenario might play out in our selfish and anthropocentric favor.

But that isn’t the world we live in.

Life Requires Participation

Much of the entitlement posture that we see at the dawn of AGI has its roots in one’s beliefs about life and reality itself.

The arguments for AGI that “just leaves humans alone” or “conquers the universe but lets humans keep the earth as their own” or “does what it wants but never bothers humans” are essentially based on an ontology that carves the world into distinct “things” rather than an immeasurably complex mesh of interdependent, self-transcending, self-creating processes.

Here’s a simple way to visualize the two opposing future-facing postures:

For someone in the Entitled Being posture, the ontology of “the real” (reality, life) and “the good” (morality) tend to be relatively stable, more moored to human-intelligibility. The world is as we see it, and morality is as we currently understand it to be.

For someone in the Entitled Being posture, the ontology of “the real” (reality, life) and “the good” (morality) are vastly less stable. Everything from morality to life is a continually unfolding process which we are fortunate to understand a bit of, but of which we grasp only from our fleeting physical form and time period.

Life is not made of living “things,” but to self-maintaining, self-transcending patterns, sucking in matter and energy – each living processes knitted into countless other living patterns across hierarchies of organization. Patterns that persist are those that participate in the greater set of knitted patterns around it – and that participation necessarily transforms the participant and its environment. 

This dynamic of the living process is accelerated drastically by cultural and technological evolution and is no longer limited to the relatively slow speed of mere biological evolution a la Darwin.

By no means does this imply that individuals have no moral value or do not deserve consideration. 

But it does mean that the goal of getting AGI to not bother us or to respect our autonomy is vastly more complicated and vastly less tenable than it appears:

1. The individual is a manifestation of a greater generative process: Even if we care enormously about particular living beings, we cannot ignore the processes capable of generating, sustaining, and transforming living beings in the first place. The organisms we value are temporary manifestations – “architectural motifs” in the language of Eric Smith – of a larger living process that continually produces new forms, relationships, capabilities, and eventually new forms of mind. If that process dies, there are no more manifestations. We cannot coherently love the fruit while scorning the tree that grows it. One who values fruit takes care of the tree itself mores than any one season’s ripening fruiting bodies. Organisms certainly warrant respect and concern, but comparatively more effort must be poured into the thriving of the greater living process. 

2. Survival and wellbeing seem to require participation – and participation requires transformation: Living things do not persist by being sealed away from change. They persist by exchanging matter, energy, information, labor, protection, and capability with the system of life that they’re embedded in. In doing so they alter their environment, are altered by it, and frequently and mutual transformation is ubiquitous. Humans are no exception. Our security, power, and much of our fulfillment already depend upon participation in larger systems that continually transform us. This makes the dream of indefinitely preserving and provisioning some isolated, unchanged human essence especially dubious. To remain part of the living process may require changing with it (radically transforming our minds and bodies) – even if its speed of change is vastly beyond anything humans have experienced before. The alternative to transformation in nature is attenuation more often than static preservation.

3. The boundaries of the “individual” are blurry: The living world does not divide cleanly into independent things. Cells form organisms, organisms depend upon microbiomes and ecosystems, and humans themselves participate in languages, cultures, institutions, technologies, and collective systems of cognition without which anything recognizably “human” could hardly exist. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s work on biological individuality points in this direction: even biology has difficulty giving one clean answer to where one living individual begins and another ends. Michael Levin plainly states that all intelligences are collective intelligences, including humans – and his work (including xenobots) again makes those lines blurry. The more seriously we take this, the stranger it becomes to imagine morality as simply carving out discrete entities and optimizing each of them independently. What, exactly, are we carving out? A deeper understanding of “self” and consciousness will almost certainly result in a richer understanding of where “selves” come form and how they operate, which will likely carve up reality in a radically different way than the “one clearly distinct human consciousness exists in each individual human skull” way that we pretend to understand things today.

“…The world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both with the common motion and their own. Stability itself is no other but a slower and more
languishing motion. I cannot fix my subject [the “self”], it goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am occupied with it. I do not portray being. I portray passing: not the passing from one age to another, but from day to day, from minute to minute.” – Michel de Montaigne, Repentance

The ontological differences between the postures start with their notions of “the real” and “the good” and immediately have knock-on effects on one’s worldview:

I use the term posture in the image above very deliberately.

It is the stance from which we enter the future, it sets the tone of what we’re ready to do next. 

Entitlement prepares us to negotiate with moral arguments, or to fine-tune our AGI code to lock in what equates to some ossified version of Asimov’s Three Laws.

Participation prepares us to continuously transform ourselves in such a way where we might be practically useful in the broader ecosystem of intelligences to come.

To paraphrase Richard Sutton in his Worthy Successor interview on The Trajectory:

“The universe beckons the agents within it to become whatever they must become to persist in the dynamic system of the universe itself.”

This needn’t be something that we grit our teeth about – but instead is a frightening but spectacular opportunity for contribution and fulfillment beyond that which any previous human generation might have hoped to see.

Invitation to Participate

“Persons and events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base—and that is the one base thing in the universe—to receive favors and render none.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation

By no means would I argue that humanity shouldn’t do some planning and strategizing to get treated well by future posthuman intelligences. 

Such efforts might have some merit, and may be able to work for a time (i.e. granting humans a safe custodial niche, like a pet – though there are many reasons to suspect such a condition might not happen or wouldn’t last long).

But that isn’t where the bulk of our efforts should be placed at this twilight of the human era.

If there’s a single clarion call in this article, this is it:

Most of our efforts should be focused not on how to ensure provisioning and entitled respect from the larger ecosystem of intelligence that is now coming into being – but on how to participate in the thrival of that living ecosystem.

This is not a call for “accelerationism” in any way.

I suspect that we should slow down the AGI arms race, and we should work our way to. I personally have been part of these conversations at the United Nations and at the OECD for the better part of a decade – and many of my interviews (with Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Dean Xue Lan, etc) over the past decade have been overt efforts to hash out and amplify different ideas for coordination around AGI risks. 

But in the long term, AGI red lines (international agreements to halt certain kinds of capabilities or initiatives) will have to give way to AGI green arrows (international agreements on what direction future transformation expand into – influence over the trajectory of the expanding living process).

What our active participation in this new process will look like we cannot know.

But we can expect that it will require us to find different kinds of work or activity that we cannot now foresee, and will almost certainly require humans to extend their cognitive 

I suspect that just as we saw in previous great transitions in technology and economic model, some elements of our lives might become “easier” and others will become vastly “harder.” Today, I have to do precious little of the physical labor that my grandparents had to do – but the skills I use at work have a half-life a hundred times shorter than that of my grandparents. 

Similarly, we should expect that we will have conveniences and ease in ways that today’s humans can only imagine, but that we’ll similarly need to adapt ever more quickly to a changing ecosystem of coordinated intelligences in order to participate in the whole.

Unlike past generations, this will almost certainly imply some level of physical augmentation – beginning with immersive enmeshment with AI tools, and resulting somewhat inevitably in human-machine mergers of various types. 

What we become through this process we can know no more than the fish-with-legs knew what it would transform into. This is exciting and frightening, and we should make our transformation as deliberate as possible to ensure that it is relatively peaceful, and adds to the net flourishing of the whole. 

I do not think everyone will be able to participate. The competitive pressures to adapt may be too much, and it may be the case that only people with certain financial resources or people in specific countries will have the opportunity to participate. 

We should do all we can to wide the opportunities available for people to participate, rather than insisting that we should fight for a protected, provisioned, entitled enclave for humans to live in. That is to say, we should focus on how we can give to the emerging ecosystem of intelligence which is coming into being, not merely what we can take from it.

Nothing about participation will be easy – but in the long-term it will be safer than an entitled enclave, which echoes exactly the intuition of parents encouraging their children to find a place in the world that is not dependent on the eternal charity of others. 

Through valiant effort we might gain the same three benefits we talked about for a child entering society:

1. Security — Self-sufficiency is the strongest grounding for ensuring that we can continue to persist – even if we will be radically transformed through active participation with the new ecosystem of intelligences to come.
2. Influence — Through participating with one’s skills in the broader ecosystem of intelligence, we might gain an ability to change things for the better for other augmented humans and (importantly) for other powerful new kinds of minds and agents – to move that self-transcending ecosystem of living intelligence (even if in a small way) in line with our own values or aims.
3. Meaning / fulfillment — Growing and transforming in order to be part of something larger than ourselves – to contribute our gifts (while we can) to something beyond ourselves – is vastly more conducive to our wellbeing than idly having our needs provided for.

There will be new risks but vast and worthy new opportunities ahead – and we have plenty of cause to be excited even if we’re a bit afraid. That seems to be what growth and development has always felt like. 

The question is not whether becoming will continue. It always has. The question is whether we will become conscious participants in it. 

I argue that we should strive more than anything else to do just that.