What's a Submind?

What if you could externalize your thinking and attention to create space in your world for the things you care about?

A submind is a partial representation of a human.

I got the idea when reading Expeditionary Force (fantastic series of books, by the way). In a nutshell, humans encounter a super advanced AI named Skippy. Skippy is a bit of an asshole, which is quite a bit of fun throughout the books. But in the process, he occasionally creates subminds that can focus on specific pieces so that he doesn't need to spend his super valuable attention on it.

When I talk about humans being undervalued, that comes down to our attention, because everyone is constantly competing for our attention. And most of it is trying to make us pay attention to bullshit that we don't want to pay attention to.

So what if we also had the ability to deploy subminds?

In my opinion, this is the new internet. That's how you can create the future you want to see, because you'll be able to pay attention to an infinite amount of things. If you can multiply your attention like that, you'll be able to do some incredible things. That's what the dream is when people talk about concepts like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). It's possible, but it requires deliberate attention somewhere to determine what's important to pay attention to.

With Build In Public University, I'm going to be helping students develop their own Subminds. That will open up new capabilities and opportunities for them.

I'll be open sourcing code as I get a generic working architecture for them. They've been going through rapid iteration as part of products and I need to create a library that can support them. If that's something you are interested in helping with, please reach out via Twitter or LinkedIn.