A transcript of the 7-part audio overview on the AMA page:
Part 1: AI for Collective Wisdom and Collective Action
At Causative Labs, we use emerging AI to bring humanity's preferences to the forefront of global decision-making. Our aim is to apply AI's capabilities not for their own sake, but as a tool to source, assimilate, and amplify the collective wisdom of people worldwide across various disciplines.
We build a high volume of rapid application MVPs, each designed to engage niche pockets of society. These applications gather views on topics of consequence affecting the meta-crisis, ranging from AI and biotech to democracy and social cohesion, and beyond. Our applications are crafted to tap into the undercurrents of public opinion, societal values, and expert judgment, at scale and in rewarding ways. Our intelligence platform then transforms humanity’s collective voice into actionable insights that can meaningfully affect a web of interconnected global systemic issues.
Our approach is unique. We're not democratizing AI itself, but instead, we use the most recent powerful AI advancements to ensure that humanity's views and voices are heard, understood, and acted upon by leader. We’re using AI as a tool to democratize power and persuasion. As the decisions of leaders begin to reflect the live-updated preferences of informed stakeholders, we build civilizational resilience by enabling better problem definition, solution design to well-defined problems, and the foundations of collective action necessary for power to cooperate to meet the scale of the meta-crisis.
In coming years, AI changes everything for humanity, introducing innumerable both opportunities and risks across all human systems. Notably, it risks agitating existing fragility and rapidly amplifying the consequences of the decisions of leaders and institutions as AI capabilities increase. We aim to enable these decisions to be made in alignment with a live feed of humanity’s best interests, live dashboard of contextualized human values.
We believe that when addressing these cascading risks accelerated by emerging AI, there will be no choice but to use AI creatively and with exceptional forethought in the meantime when designing solutions. To do this, we employ axiological design principles from the conception of each of our products and strategies. This assures that our elegant ground-level solutions make sense in all dimensions, accounting for the second and third-order effects of our work in the context of the exponential pace of change fueled by AI.
We feel our vision of an ecosystem of mutually reinforcing but independent products enabling collective wisdom and collective action at the pace and scale of AI is our best shot at mitigating the meta-crisis and supporting the flourishing future of humanity.
Part 2: Directly Addressing the Meta-Crisis with AI
In the heart of Causative Labs' mission is a focused response to the meta-crisis, the intricate web of global challenges that includes democratic fragility, social polarization, risks of exponential AI and biotechnology, epistemic insecurity, and the patterns of human behavior and societal structure that give rise to these risks. All products and strategies are directly focused on pieces of the meta-crisis puzzle, either overtly or through "trojan horses."
Our applications gather anonymous views in single-player interactions, meaning individuals provide their thoughts directly to our trusted application rather than posting them online in public or sharing them as part of group dialogue. Community discourse is an important and necessary part of collective intelligence, as is scraping the internet for publicly available data. However, we recognize that many biases and incentives influence our public and group statements and how these statements are given presence online. There is a significant difference between what one tweets and what one shares with their closest confidant about our true views when we are in a calm and grounded state of mind. We aim to create a user experience conducive to capturing their authentic views, demonstrating the unreliability and danger of making assumptions about society based on internet scraping.
Compared to internet scrapes and outdated or low-quality social science research, we can empower leaders, discourse shapers, innovators, resource allocators, researchers, regulators and policymakers with a more accurate and up-to-date view on themes of consequence in the world. We go beyond snapshots and reports, creating immediately actionable outputs that leaders can use to quickly and efficiently convert this intelligence into workflows, strategic decision-making tools, and eventually Humanity-In-The-Loop AI steering mechanisms. This approach transforms the latent wisdom within individual experiences into a powerful tool for societal change.
From fostering informed debates on democratic processes to shaping policies in AI, influencing public discourse and culture in ways that support social cohesion, we aim to rapidly demonstrate what AI recently made possible in collective intelligence and collective action. We do this by assimilating massive quantities of qualitative data into iteratively more immediately useful tools. In doing so, we address many pillars of the meta-crisis head-on, building a foundational toolkit for all operators affecting aspects of the meta-crisis, whether intentionally or incidentally, both enabling and nudging wiser work.
Part 3: Our Product Strategy
Our strategy revolves around three types of products. First, applications to gather inputs from both niche groups of society and experts. Second, a novel AI-powered research tool that can centrally enable and monetize access to inquiry across our applications. Third, a novel intelligence platform that can centrally enable and monetize access to parts of our underlying data and the insights assimilated.
Our niche applications focus on diverse themes, inviting mass market users to contribute their perspectives on issues they are passionate about or engaged in. These applications facilitate very brief daily engagement, where users share their views, beliefs, ideas, hopes, fears, desires, insights, perspective, preferences, imaginations, etc. In return, when users engage daily, they receive insightful content, approximately like daily research outcomes reported on by engaging journalists, derived from user engagement the day before. They further unlock the ability to “chat” with our data when meeting engagement consistency requirements. This approach not only enriches our data pool but also keeps users engaged and informed while requesting a “wordle-amount” of their attention.
On a similar tech stack but altered inquiry paradigm, expert applications cater to professionals and specialists with credentials in a relevant field, offering a platform for sharing deeper, more nuanced takes on topics of consequence. Anonymity and the assurance their voice and views will feed actions in and adjacent to their field and causes they care about presents a refreshing modality to differentiate against tired meetings and communities that demand time but produce little effect. Here, experts spend minutes daily sharing insights and views they may not be in a position to share publicly but are important to humanity. Their inputs can also form formal expert judgment processes through which collective intelligence is directly formulated through proven methodologies in scalable and recurrently updated ways. This targeted engagement allows us to gather sophisticated perspectives to hold in context with broader public opinions. Experts also receive a high volume daily feed of exclusive access to research report-like content both from their user’s anonymous engagement and via feeds of content reporting on engagements on non-expert applications relevant to their field. Similar to niche applications, they further unlock the ability to “chat” with the relevant data when meeting engagement minimums. This provides them with a recently not possible form and volume of daily nuanced intelligence in their fields.
The Vitals Insights product offering centralizes a way of reaching subgroups of our collective application user bases to do valuable inquiry, ask questions, propose prompts, etc.. This approximates a novel, AI-enabled form of surveying and research at massive scales, low costs, and with rapid, comprehensive assimilation. The scale, speed, costs, and types of qualitative inquiry were all previously impossible before recent AI breakthroughs we leverage.
The Flourish Intelligence product aggregates data from our applications, assimilating and synthesizing valuable forms of output, iteratively improving towards the most useful tools for leaders and changemakers to access and even automate the use of collective wisdom in real-time. This platform provides decision-makers with comprehensive insights essential for informed strategies.
Our axiologically designed monetization model, embedded in Vitals Insights and Flourish Intelligence offerings, empowers the scale of our theory of change with resilience against risks of perverse venture incentive baked in. This means we have thought extensively about how the market could pull us off course from our mission and theory of change, and that we would not be building Causative Labs if we did not feel we have a mechanism in how we make a profit that actually pressures us to remain deeply impact aligned in the long run.
Part 4: Ethical Innovation and “Impact-Market Fit”
Causative Labs isn’t just creating products; we're shaping solutions to mitigate risks of civilizational collapse and steer AI outcomes with wisdom and forethought. In large part, our focus is on addressing the escalating risks posed by exponential technologies, biotechnology, and the growing divide in society's sense-making models. We aim to build a future where all life thrives, acknowledging the AI risks, biotechnology dangers, and complex challenges like social polarization and unsustainable economic models human structures are so invested in.
Our tools and products are meticulously designed to address these issues. Flourish Intelligence and Vitals Insights, for example, are part of a larger strategy to guide decision-makers in navigating complex decisions that affect complex risk factors. We're crafting content that aligns AI outcomes with human values, fostering societal resilience, and preventing the type of balkanization of sense-making models that ultimately make collective action impossible.
Axiological Design Principles: Guiding our steps, these principles involve evaluating the second and third-order effects of our products and strategies. We're mapping and anticipating impacts within the complexity of emerging technologies and the current state of the world. This approach is about actively promoting a future that supports breathtaking well-being. To do this while optimizing for certain objectives, we need to hold the complexity of the bigger picture when shaping the design criteria we use to work on a focused piece of the problem puzzle. It may sound complicated or distracting but in practice it’s just necessary complexity that can be executed on efficiently and simply in net profitable ways that save time.
Extreme Agility: We're also constantly adapting to the rapid evolution of AI, anticipating the waves of disruption on the horizon to both use them strategically and adjust our theories of change to account for the ways they create social and technological disruption. Our platforms are exceptionally agile, designed to never be too invested in existing ways of working, knowing the pace of evolution is faster than ever and accelerating exponentially, thus we must be more willingly and rapidly adaptive than companies previously conceived of.
Empowering Changemakers: We work closely with non-profit organizations addressing meta-crisis risks, providing them with actionable intelligence and inquiry access for effective research and impactful work. Changemakers often struggle with outdated tools and lack timely intelligence that keeps pace with technological changes. We provide them with a live feed of high-quality collective intelligence, enabling them to tap into the nested wisdom within society's collective voice.
Nested Wisdom refers to the deeper, often unspoken layers of understanding and empathy in our daily communications. It's about uncovering the more thoughtful, empathetic aspects of our views that are usually influenced by societal factors and remain unexpressed. Nested wisdom is found by looking beneath the surface, adopting a reflective approach to discover profound insights and empathetic meanings in our regular conversations.
Part 5: Strategic Foresight to Anticipate & Navigate Challenges
At Causative Labs, we're acutely aware that we're embarking on tackling some of the most complex and daunting challenges humanity has ever faced. We're not just building applications; we're confronting issues that sit at the very core of our civilization's future. This path is undoubtedly filled with complexities and challenges, and we're openly acknowledging this reality.
We’re Embracing the Challenge with Eyes Wide Open. We understand that the road ahead is going to be challenging, and that existing technology today is not yet there to enable optimal forms of everything we’re building, but the innovation wave is on the horizon and everything we build is designed to catch those waves.
In our mission to mitigate risks and drive positive AI outcomes, we're not naive about the complexities we face. We're spending considerable time forecasting and anticipating waves of innovations, conflicts, global disruptions, and societal shifts. We’ve spent years familiarizing with the complexity of the issue. Our work is meticulously designed with these realities in mind, ensuring we exercise impeccable forethought and are prepared for waves of disruptions and their challenges.
Strategy in the Face of Complexity. Our strategy is built around extreme agility. We're constantly strategizing to be reactive to changes in context, understanding that the landscape we're working in is dynamic and ever-evolving, to an extent we’ll need new language to describe the pace of evolution. This requires us to be tuned into the second and third-order effects of our work and decisions, as well as those less obvious effects we experience as exponential tech disrupts society in unprecedented ways. It's this acknowledgment of the upcoming challenges and the exponential pace of change that keeps us grounded and practical in our approach.
We’ve designed for ascending stages of impact and profitability, aiming for the top of the staircase, however, focusing on the step immediately in front of us and assuring meaningful impact and high financial return even at step one. Even as we aim for our big-picture mission, we're committed to making a significant impact at every phase of our company's development. This commitment extends to creating paths that lead to substantial financial upside, assuring investors and stakeholders of our pragmatic approach. We're not just aiming for fundamental global system change supportive of a third attractor for humanity; we're ensuring that, even if we face setbacks, our journey itself will have a profound impact on causes that matter.
Our acknowledgment of these challenges and our unwavering dedication to being attuned to the evolution of our context is what gives us an edge. It ensures that our mission, while ambitious, is grounded in reality. We're offering a unique proposition: a venture that, while striving to affect fundamental global systems change, offers tangible paths to significant financial success that expands in scale each practical step along the way. This dual approach gives investors the confidence that Causative Labs is not just a visionary endeavor but also a pragmatic and potentially highly lucrative investment. Without assuring this is true, we have no potential to scale our solution to meet the magnitude of the problems we face.
We're not just envisioning a scalable way to assure a flourishing future of humanity amid the meta-crisis with financial returns to match the scale of this ambition; we’re designing strategies in acknowledgment that the years ahead will produce more innovation and disruption by the week than we saw in all of recent years. We're balancing our big-picture mission with the realities of the rapidly evolving world around us, which will change more than most can imagine. It's about being proactive, adaptable, and always strategic in how we anticipate and respond. This integrated view of ambition and practicality is one thing that sets us apart and drives us forward in our quest to navigate the complexities of the meta-crisis and foster a flourishing future for humanity.
Part 6: Collaborators & Partners
As a mutually reinforcing and non-dependent part of our strategy, we work with many collaborators: Changemakers, Influencers, Thought Leaders, Expert Networkers, and Organizations.
Changemakers are typically nonprofit organizations working on puzzle pieces across the meta-crisis landscape, with an immediate emphasis on AI risk mitigation, safeguarding and improving democracy, and ensuring epistemic security. We provide Changemakers with free access to Vitals Insights research services and the Flourish Intelligence information platform to better enable their most effective work. In exchange, they share success stories from their work that were empowered by the shared voices of our users via Flourish or Vitals. We draw causal chains from users’ contributions to real-world impacts and tell compelling stories back to users to maximize the warm glow and the feeling that their voice truly matters when communicated into our applications.
Influencers, Thought Leaders, Organizations, and Expert Networkers each fall into categories of “Growth Partners”. Influencers, Leaders, and Organizations that have followings (subscribers to podcasts and YouTube channels, followers on social platforms, mailing lists, and so on) partner with a niche application with a theme that aligns with their work and the interests of their following. From our extensive menu of Stage One prototype applications, Growth Partners select the most fitting, and we then further calibrate for optimal fitness with their goals and our mission. They promote the application to their following. As we remain hands-off in initial growth, if their promotion results in target numbers of users on the niche application, thus validating the MVP, we trigger an event that turns this product into a company in which the growth partner holds a mid-six-figure amount of equity as we centrally manage monetization and hire leadership to pursue further growth opportunities. The partner elegantly receives a large upside for doing what they do best through tapping into an asset they hold.
The expert networker growth partners, whom we refer to as Expert Application Orchestrators, similarly tap into their valuable resource, a network of experts, to bring an initial critical mass of experts onto a chosen application. They vet the experts, gain points in their community for making this novel offer to experts, and expand their network in the process. And they benefit from similar equity upsides as we centrally monetize and hire leadership to grow the spinout company after the Orchestrators delivers on recruiting initial experts. And from there, they can remain involved or just benefit from the upside, perhaps while they enter another partnership to grow another application.
This approach gives way to a high volume, high failure tolerance model, where we expect the majority of our applications to fail to reach critical numbers. But recent AI advancements have made it possible to launch as many as multiple applications daily at such extremely low marginal costs that even a 2% rate of applications finding some user base puts Causative Labs on a path to unicorn status. So, we embrace a high failure tolerance as part of our innovative approach intentionally, really outsourcing the fate of any given niche application to the growth partner, allowing them the chance to really make it work and benefit from the life-changing upside for minimal effort on their part. As we hold the tech building blocks and centralized monetization power with minimal marginal costs and they hold own access to users and a desire for venture-scale upsides without building companies, the complementarity of assets and needs in this value exchange is uniquely compelling
It is important to keep in mind that Causative Labs is effective in the absence of any of these partners, though we are made stronger with their share in a very mutually beneficial exchange of value. We also expect most growth partnerships to fail, though we commit to assuring each partner has what they need to succeed if they desire to.
And while acknowledging the significant amount of creative value to share with collaborators, we should note that we similarly have on offer extremely lucrative ways of incentivizing internal teams and thus attracting top talent with non-vanilla and exceptionally competitive benefit packages. If inviting top talent to work on such a stimulating, groundbreaking set of products, that are also directly addressing the largest and most complex and consequential global issues comprehensively, isn’t enough, then surely the benefits package can close the deal. We are committed to working with the brightest and most capable team in the world, period.
PART 7: Where We Are Now
As we stand today at Causative Labs, we're at a pivotal moment in our journey. We're not just planning or dreaming; we're actively shaping a future where technology serves humanity's greatest needs. Let me share where we are now and what you can look forward to in this exciting journey with us.
Our Operational Milestones and Progress. We're actively testing dozens of Stage 1 prototype applications, each exploring different themes and resonating with both niche mass market audiences and expert contributors. These initial steps have been crucial in validating our concepts and fine-tuning our approach.
Moving further, we've developed a first large batch of Stage 2 prototype applications. These are more sophisticated, providing daily interaction and features that enhance user engagement and contribution. This stage is vital as it tests our applications' ability to maintain user interest and grow organically. The long lists of prototypes further serve as a menu for growth partners as they practically explore which application best aligns with their work and audience.
Prototyping Flourish Intelligence and Vitals Insights. We're starting with a minimal prototype of Flourish Intelligence, enabling test users to delve into a knowledge base consisting of a select portion of our aggregated anonymous data. Initially, this will focus on themes related to AI and democracy during the election cycle, but we plan to expand this focus after we fundraise.
Simultaneously, we're enabling Vitals Insights prospective customers to join the waitlist.
One of our exciting initiatives is the development of a basic teaser application exposing aspects of Vitals Insights and Flourish Intelligence in a clever way that incentivizes users to co-design the MVPs with us while building anticipation, buy-in, and financial commitment. Users will be able to engage with a sample of our data and intelligence reports emerging from our applications and even have a say in the inquiries we conduct over applications. Much like users of our niche and expert applications, these users will gain access to intel, insights, and inquiry after they respond to daily questions and prompts that can be linked to extended customer interviews.
As far as collaborations go, we're actively opening conversations with prospective Growth Partners and Changemaker partners who are most in alignment with our vision.
Looking Ahead at Fundraising and Talent Acquisition. Soon, we'll be launching a fundraising round to fuel our next phase of growth, exclusively looking for funders uncompromisingly aligned with our vision and mission.
As we have built everything so far with an extremely lean and scrappy team, we're also preparing to hire for major roles, bringing in talent that shares our vision and drive, and an interest in bringing joy and levity to a seriously playful environment.
If you’d like to get involved, now is the time to get in touch! This is not the type of company that will be taking it slow. We will grow aggressively to meet the significance of this moment for humanity, or we will fail trying. We feel urgency further encouraged by the exceptional timeliness of the vision. Now is the time!