The essays in this collection explore individual questions that arise throughout the Tree Project. While connected by common themes, each essay is written to stand on its own. Together they examine the changing relationship between identity, technology, intelligence, and human agency from multiple perspectives.
The Tree Project
Concepts, Research, and Software for Human Development in the Age of Intelligent Systems
Autonomous Technique and the Alignment Problem
How artificial intelligence emerges within a civilization already organized around optimization, efficiency, and control—and why the deepest alignment questions may be civilizational rather than merely technical.
The Silence After the Screaming
A personal essay exploring the lived experience from which the broader ideas throughout Tree first emerged.
Encountering Zarathustra
What Nietzsche's warning about the Last Man reveals about comfort, self-authorship, and becoming in an age of intelligent systems.
Synthetic Relationality
Simulated Care, Human Irreducibility, and the Danger of Outsourced Meaning
Is Technique Humanity's Hidden God?
Exploring whether efficiency, optimization, and technical necessity have quietly become the highest organizing values of modern civilization.
The Governance of Autonomous Intelligence
Exploring why agency—not consciousness—may become the more urgent threshold for governance as artificial intelligence grows increasingly autonomous.
The Future Still Needs Builders
Why increasingly capable artificial intelligence should expand the horizon of human participation rather than render it unnecessary.
LLMs as Cognitive Scaffolding
How a Language Model Helped Me Hold My Own Thoughts Long Enough to Build With Them
The Interaction Is the Design Surface
What LLM Taught Me About Language, Agency, and Human Participation
