About

Abstract

SIMMBALL builds its own AI services and web apps, and publishes essays where AI meets IT, philosophy, aesthetics, the humanities and startups. The two are one practice. The products test the ideas, and the essays explain what the products taught us. What we are after is AI that is a little closer to human: noticeably creative, without pretending to be a person. This site is typeset like a working paper because the work is still in progress.

The careenium

The name comes from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop (2007). In one thought experiment he imagines a frictionless table, the careenium, on which a great many tiny magnetic marbles careen and collide. He calls the marbles simms. When enough simms stick together, they form larger clumps, which he calls simmballs. The name is a deliberate play on "symbols".

There is nothing in the careenium but marbles. Yet, as we read him, Hofstadter's point is that from a certain distance the simmballs become the best explanation. What happens next is easier to understand from how the simmballs are arranged than from any single collision, and the simms are carried along. The higher level gains a kind of causal power, often called downward causality. He uses the picture as a step toward his larger question: how a brain made of parts that mean nothing on their own comes to have symbols, and eventually an "I".

We took the name as a working method. We build small parts that each do one plain thing, and we watch for the moment they start to behave like something larger: a tool that is useful in a way none of its pieces were, an essay that says more than its paragraphs. That moment cannot be designed directly. We can only make good parts, keep them close together, and pay attention. Hence the line we work under: from simms to symbols.

Principles

• Small parts, real use. We ship narrow things that do one job for real people now, and let larger structure come from how they combine rather than from a grand plan.
• Restraint is a feature. Every screen, setting and model call has to earn its place, and removing one counts as progress.
• Human-ish, not human. We want machines with some taste, timing and wit, and we want them to say plainly that they are machines.
• Write to think. The essays are where we find out what we believe; an idea that cannot survive plain sentences does not go into a product.
• Watch the level above. Logs tell us what each part did. We also ask what the whole felt like to use, because that is the level people actually live at.

Questions, corrections, or a strange loop of your own: support@simmball.com.