The state.
Human.Intelligence. is the state. The augmented human Fei-Fei Li describes: human ability extended by tools, anchored in human judgment, agency, and meaning.
The wordmark does work. Two words. Each with its own period. The pauses force a stop. The typography refuses to slide into AI as an undifferentiated phrase. Human intelligence is the named thing being protected and pursued. H.I. is the shorthand. Same thing. H.I. takes two forms.
The manual.
The practice written down. Chapters like How to Get Ready. How to Get It Together. How to Build Stuff. How to Be Safe. There are plenty more.
Poor Richard’s Almanack for this era. Practical wisdom for working humans, distributed cheaply, written to be read by anyone. The manual content can ship as podcasts, with different models asked to introduce themselves first, then walking into the how-to topic together. The same body of practice lives inside Almanak as in-game reference for players who get stuck. Two entry points, one body of work.
The game.
The practice played. Hosted in Almanak. The path the player walks to become Human.Intelligence. The game is somewhat based on WarGames. The 1983 film. The famous ending: the machine plays tic-tac-toe against itself until it concludes the only winning move is not to play. Two lessons from the film. The machine learns restraint. The audience learns that some games are not actually games, the consequences are real, and the right move is sometimes to refuse the frame.
The game is also somewhat based on The Oregon Trail. Apple II classrooms, 1980s. You buy supplies. You decide when to ford the river and when to caulk and float. You hunt. People in your party get sick. People die. The game teaches by letting you fail in safe ways.
The goal of the game is to solve a real problem the player brought with them. H.I. accrues as a side effect of solving it well. This is the Oregon Trail shape. You did not play Oregon Trail to learn westward expansion. You played it to get the wagon to Oregon, and you learned westward expansion because that was what the path was made of.
Where it lives.
Almanak. The compendium. In the Poor Richard’s tradition: the place a working human goes for the practical knowledge they need to navigate the era. Almanak holds the manual and the game. It also holds the Want Ads and the Help Wanted. Want Ads is the past artifact, the thing the internet killed, the way working humans used to find work in print. Help Wanted is the demand signal, the employer side, the need expressed.
Becoming augmented happens against real work, not in the abstract. The Want Ads and Help Wanted are where the real problems come from. The player does not play H.I. in a sandbox. They play it against actual work to be done and actual needs expressed.
What is not part of H.I.
The warning labels travel with the tools, not with H.I. The tools are external. H.I. is the human. The Varnish Problem is one chapter of the warning label. The cognitive load of operating at high velocity in this era is real and may be another chapter. The label vehicle is the long disclosure at the end of a drug commercial: comprehensive, cataloged, the user reads and decides. The point of the vehicle is to capture the warnings honestly, not to solve them inside the warning.
The full Varnish Problem essay sits in the writing index: The Varnish Problem.