Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
It is January 13th 2026. I have just read, not very thoroughly, a lengthy article, a16z: The Power Brokers by Packy McCormick. Before that I had viewed (most of) a long podcast featuring Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis and Dave Blundin ELON MUSK ON AGI TIMELINE, US VS CHINA, JOB MARKETS, CLEAN ENERGY & HUMANOID ROBOTS.
These are both radical technologically oriented perspectives on the future from A16z a major Venture Capital company and Elon Musk, the leader of multiple companies potentially experting enormous influence on the future.
Both of these enterprises are very impressive, and apparently successful in many different ways. However, a full assessment of either would I think require clarity about overall purpose, a judgement possibly about the merits of that purpose, and an assessment of achievement or prospects for achievement against that purpose. It was most conspicuously in relation to clarity of purpose that they were both disappointing.
Elon, to give him credit, is frequently quite clear about the purposes of his organisations. The purpose of SpaceX is to enable self sustaining human settlement of Mars to guard against existential risk, and the purpose of Tesla is to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. He purchased Twitter to rescue free speech, and created X in his dismay that the open source credentials of OpenAI were being compromised.
But in the bigger picture, he sees progress as measured by the Kardashev scale of energy consumption, as if environmental extravagance were some kind of virtue. His concern about AI risks were silenced by the perception that regulation in the USA would only hand the advantage to China. One of his mantras is now the expectation of “sustainable abundance”, but the distribution of that abundance when most jobs are automated is not addressed.
Packy McCormick’s story about A16z comes closest to discussing purpose in his final section The Future of the Firm of the Future, in which he discusses the A16z “Culture Doc”, which all employees are required to read and agree to. He quotes Katherine Boyle, a General Partner at A16z saying that “We believe in the future and bet the firm that way” (from the culture document) is literally why Marc and Ben created the firm.
Naturally there is much to discuss about what believing in the future means, but can we take optimism as a purpose?
One aspect of the discussion of how AI is not “eating the world” was the expectation firstly that tech with AI would progressively take over entire industries, and that the resulting companies would be worth 10x, maybe 100x more than the previous incumbents. But no analysis of what that means. At the same time it is expected that AI will make everything cheaper through automation, and that the companies delivering those cheaper goods and services will be more valuable. Of course, we are seeking now considerable inflation of PE ratios, but this is justified by the expectation of rapid future growth in earnings. Not of commoditisation and revenue collapse. The only scenario in which an industry can get orders of magnitude more valuable is that massive capital and low prices drives incumbents out of business to enable monopoly pricing. This is not sustainable abundance, it is the enslavement of labor to capital for the benefit of the few.
It is a disappointment that neither of these influential perspectives on the future seem to have a clearly stated credible purpose, and that the consequences of the priorities they set are not examined critically.
So I’m going to make a stab at articulating the purpose of SPaDE, but first some words on what it takes to articulate purpose.
SPaDE is conceived on the scale of Musks enterprise, even though it is not a serious player at any scale. Ideas are cheap. To conceive of purpose relative to billion year timescales (that in which the Earth becomes uninhabitable) demands:
This is a first simple articulation of the purpose of SPaDE. To have any reasonable hope of success it must be continuously refined, elaborated, and promoted (since its realisation will ultimately be cultural).
As far as SPaDE is concerned, the future over these timescales is that of the proliferation of intelligence across the cosmos, both from this Earthly origin and likely also from other sources. This is a matter of evolutionary necessity, since forms of intelligence which do not proliferate cannot possible predominate. SPaDE is oriented to progressing that proliferation, but that cannot be regarded as a purpose in itself, for the outcome is inevitable.
By playing a part in that proliferation, SPaDE seeks to make that proliferation and that cosmically distributed intelligence benign.
Thus we reach the function of the top level of the SPaDE epistemological stack, which is to progress the purposes and values of SPaDE by clarifying what it is for the proliferation of intelligence to be benign, which stands at the top of a larger structure of values and standards developed to facilitate such a benign progression.