The best way to engineer and bring about an increase in the overall potential goodness a sentient being in this world can experience, starting with the focus on humans who utilize computational devices to practice the Tantra of Abstract Machine Assembling (TAMA / “たま”), such as software engineers and AI researchers.
Begin with those who build.
Our initial focus is software engineers and AI researchers: people who use computational devices to construct, test, and understand abstract machines. We want to investigate how their tools and practices might expand what they can create, learn, and experience.
Three lines of inquiry
Languages & abstract machines
How can language design, formal semantics, and interactive environments make difficult ideas easier to express, examine, and compose?
Human–AI research practice
How can LLM harnesses support exploration without confusing fluent answers with verified understanding?
Conditions for flourishing
Which practices and environments support agency, learning, care, and constructive disagreement? How could improvements be investigated rather than merely asserted?
A direction, not a finished result.
These are research questions. We distinguish our aspirations, philosophical commitments, experimental observations, and established findings. Neither faster computation nor more capable AI is, by itself, proof of greater goodness.