CONCEPT
Perspective-Taking Infrastructure
The neural capacity to construct mental representations of minds unlike one's own — built through thousands of hours of literary reading and required for responsible building at AI scale.
Perspective-taking infrastructure is the cumulative neural capacity that deep literary reading constructs — the ability to represent in one's own mind the experiences of people whose circumstances, psychology, and inner lives differ from one's own. The capacity is not a personality trait that some possess by nature. It is trained architecture, built through the specific practice of reading texts that demand its exercise: literary fiction that places the reader inside consciousnesses alien to her own, for sustained durations, with enough fidelity that the reader's brain performs actual neural simulation of the represented experiences. Over thousands of hours, this simulation deposits the circuits for perspective-taking that support responsible design in any domain where decisions affect people unlike the decision-maker.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The infrastructure's operational relevance to AI-age technology building is direct. Every product affects populations beyond its builders. The builder with strong perspective-taking infrastructure can hold those populations' experiences in mind during design — can imagine the teenage user whose sense of