CONCEPT
The Work of Direction
The irreducibly human labor that the topology of possibility space cannot perform — the evaluation of which innovations to pursue, shelter, or constrain, and the construction of institutions capable of applying judgment at the pace that acceleration demands.
The work of direction is the chapter Wagner's framework writes but cannot complete. The topology of possibility space guarantees that innovation will arrive — the architecture of high-dimensional structured spaces makes novelty systematically accessible to any sufficiently dispersed population of explorers. What the topology cannot do is recommend. It generates the menu with perfect mathematical fidelity and is indifferent to what should be ordered. The same mathematics that makes beneficial innovations accessible makes harmful innovations equally accessible. The landscape is value-blind. The question of which innovations to pursue, which to constrain, and which to approach with the care that transformative power demands belongs entirely to the beings whose defining characteristic is the capacity to ask not only what is possible but what is good.
In The You On AI Field Guide
In biological evolution, the work of direction is performed by natural selection — an automatic, distributed, continuous process that evaluates innovations against