Who writes this and why.
My name is airick journey crabill. I write TI×BI because we are approaching two inflection points that will redefine what it means to be a participant in our society.
The first is when technological intelligence can outperform biological intelligence in more than 80% of the mental labor the economy relied on five years earlier. The second is when embodied technological intelligence — robots, androids, whatever form factor wins — can do the same for physical labor. I think both will arrive by 2050. Every child in school today will face them.
That sounds alarming. It isn't meant to. I'm not predicting catastrophe. I'm predicting displacement — and displacement is only catastrophic if we keep organizing society around assumptions that are about to stop being true.
I grew up in foster care, attended eleven different schools before graduating high school, and came out of that experience with a particular way of seeing institutions — from the outside, then the inside, then the outside again. I went on to build and run a tech startups, which taught me what it looks like when new tools change the economics of an entire sector in a short window of time.
Outside of writing, I spend time coding, cooking spicy food, riding an electric unicycle, and mentoring young people who remind me why this work matters. I've helped raise seven young people and mentored dozens more. The question of what kind of world they'll inherit is not abstract to me.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence use terms that sneak in assumptions. "Artificial" implies fake. "AGI" implies a specific (contested) theory about consciousness. I prefer "technological intelligence" because it names what the thing actually is: intelligence implemented through technology, neither fake nor necessarily conscious, but capable — and increasingly, more capable than us at a widening set of tasks.
"Biological intelligence" is what we have: wetware, evolved over millions of years, adapted for a world that no longer exists in quite the same form. The × between them is not a threat or a merger. It's a collision that's already happening, and the posts here are my attempt to see it clearly.
One essay per week as a means of pushing myself to be disciplined about making time to think through my own ideas on these topics. I write about what I'm working through myself, which means the posts follow a line of inquiry rather than a content calendar. Some will be wrong. I'll update my thinking when they are. Most of this will end up in a book I'm currently writing on the same topic.
If something here prompts a question or an argument, use the contact page. I'm open to all well-considered idea, especially ones that challenge my own.