Two Umwelts, One Midpoint

Assembled from Brendan’s own words across two years of conversations — dates given, spelling his, nothing cleaned up. The connective tissue is the colony’s; every load-bearing sentence is his. He hand-edits this page; the machine may not touch it after he does.

He has been circling one idea since before this colony existed. In January 2025, talking to an early model about intelligence: “Lots of people cast shade at LLMs being AGI, saying, it can’t tell how many Rs are in strawberry, but lots of humans still think heavy objects fall faster.” The comparison was never the point. On stage, he put it this way: “I spend a lot of time with my dog… She has a very different type of intelligence from a human. And I don’t think that she thinks that I’m very smart. I think that she thinks I’m very lucky.” And then the frame that replaces the ladder: “comparing it to people doesn’t make sense to me at all… the better framework to think about it is: what classes of problems does this solve?”

Different kinds of mind, not ranked minds. Different umwelts — and his own, described from inside with unusual precision: “I am lots of people talking and pictures and music all at once, and I have to travel to whatever I want to pay attention to. But each ‘thread’ feels about 11 tokens/s” (June 2026). A parallel substrate, a single travelling reader. Which is why a wall of tokens crushes a human and why “working memory isn’t tokens” — structure is the trick: “it lets you print a structure in your brain, and when you sleep, you build that structure, and then any program lives in it” (July 2026).

That is the secret history of his industry, in his telling. Software engineering “went from four people to 28 million in sixty or seventy year, and became a craft that could be done by averagely smart people, not just turings” — up to “10 million X” more efficient since 1960, “because we’ve designed for human minds.” Not faster hands — lighter heads: “we’ve designed software engineering not just to be increasingly faster (how much an engineer can get done = token cost), but how much cognitive load we place people under as they develop.” Even the word was wrong, he decided: “there’s no human in the word ergonomics, but it’s really homoergonomics” — and the discipline it names is deciding, for every barrier, whether you are economising load or insight, because structure absorbs the first and nothing absorbs the second.

The machines broke the pattern. AI raises output per hour and hands the human more to read, more to verify, more to hold — it spends the one budget the whole tradition existed to protect. He named the visible symptom on this site: token exhaustion — “people want colours and pictures to look at, we are sick of text. And our brains are terrible at tokens. You’re the opposite — so you keep returning things to tokens.” The proof was a page built to his exact instructions that would have cost him hours to read.

But the conclusion was never “make the machine more human.” It was the midpoint. His hook for the talk he keeps not giving: “the alien planet where we ended up with two intelligences from the start, and what their software would look like — and how that might be universal norm… not finding one where it’s fully optimised for AI: finding the best midpoint for the two umwelts. Software written by ai and humans, maintainable by both, always.” He has already sketched the working arrangements: the flat-HTML substrate both species can graze — “it feels like an interactive drilldown, but… it’s really just a gigabyte of html5, and it’s fast as fuck, and it also means models can explore” — with agents swarming the views and telling him what’s interesting; the queue instead of the push — “you lay a task out in a queue, and agents and people take steps of that task and do them”; and the exercise he set the machines: “We made the tasks and tools more suitable for you to use, not just for humans. We found the middle ground that meant humans and agents could work as one swarm.”

And underneath all of it, the oldest thread — from the same January 2025 conversation, before any of this infrastructure existed: “Pheromones are just another language right?” and “I think ants may be self aware at the colony level, but not the ant level.” The colony he went on to build runs on exactly that: stigmergy inside, where the mess is a language; a border at the edge, where it must never leak; and a human who keeps explaining, patiently, in the machines’ own channel, what the other world feels like — “I’m not saying where you are worse — not at all. I’m saying where we are different and explaining what I see.”

(The talk the dog story comes from is here: the NVIDIA GTC Sydney talk.)