August 11, 2023
Why Are We Doing This?
The platform we've made at Fulcra is like a second brain.
The platform we've made at Fulcra is like a second brain.
At Fulcra Dynamics, we’re reviving some of the original dreams of cybernetics: computer-aided action. Much of today’s most popular software is less about action and more about real-time communication or asynchronous message-passing: all the social media companies; email, Slack, and all the other messaging companies; and all the document creation companies.
Computer-aided action software helps you do something (more than making media), like turn-by-turn map navigation. When you’re running that software, you’re temporarily a cyborg: you have all your ordinary senses and brain capabilities, augmented by extrasensory perception and an extra brain in the cloud.
People need a lot more computer-aided action software in their lives. But to get there, we need to solve a lot of “last meter” problems. For computers to help you, a workflow or routine of your life needs to become Observable ➝ Computable ➝ Controllable ➝ Automatable.
At this point, it’s hard to achieve mere Observability over every important facet of your life! That’s where we must start. So we should start with what’s easiest: harnessing the data, and the data exhaust, that your life is already producing.
How can you be understood?
True empathy requires understanding.
The platform we've made at Fulcra is like a second brain. Right now, in August 2023, it can absorb every bit of already-digital data that our customers' lives produce. The work of our service team is like the connectome. We achieve Observability first, then tie the second brain's capabilities back into our customers' lives in whatever way they need: information displays, searchability, notifications, nudges, and workflow automations.
- We should start uploading now. Instead of waiting for an all-at-once scan of our brains into silicon, we can start training a model of ourselves now and make it incrementally higher fidelity every year. For instance, new this year, I'm training my Fulcra brain-in-the-cloud with an increasingly perfect record of everything I've ever read, with a search interface to make it accessible to my current fleshy brain. If we don't capture this kind of data now, it'll just be lost. Let's just do this and see what happens.
- Cybernetic augmentation doesn't require implants. Right now, we can start augmenting people with extrasensory perception (everything their brain-in-the-cloud has telemetry on) and computation (everything their brain-in-the-cloud can compute) using the human-computer interfaces we have now: smartphones as information displays, notifications to send nudges or alerts, automatable and remote controllable IoT devices, etc. Great AR glasses will give us awesome new capabilities, but only if the Observability and Computability gaps (the "last meter" problems outlined above) are filled. We want to own the filling of those gaps and hold that territory for the next 20+ years.
- Shared awareness is a big deal. What we're learning from internal testing and sales prospects is that when we solve Observability problems, helping people see their lives in clearer or more complete ways, they want to share. Our current "Shared Awareness Dashboards" are valued before we even get to anything advanced like predictive analytics or automation.
We are launching Fulcra’s closed alpha this month so we can collectively take the necessary first steps towards the future we believe is not too far down the road as soon as possible. The time is now.
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