Feldnotizen aus dem Jahr 2036: Ein Kartierungsinstitut findet einen Busfahrer, der 30 Jahre lang an einer Theorie gearbeitet hat, die niemand gelesen hat. Was wäre, wenn das Größte, was die KI entdeckt, keine KI ist?

Author here. This is design fiction: recovered diary entries from a cartographer at „The Human Atlas,“ an institute that maps human capacities nobody has named yet. The premise underneath it is a hypothesis I published separately as an essay: that the traits we measure today (IQ, Big Five) are just the ones that fit twentieth-century instruments, and that AI trained on human behaviour at scale might be the first instrument that can see the rest. The bus driver in Ghent is fictional; statistically, he is almost certainly real.

Two things I’d genuinely like this sub’s take on: the Charter in the story (the map belongs to the mapped, no selection, every classification expires) as a realistic constraint on this kind of technology, and whether a future where everyone has a personal AI that has read their whole life reads as a panopticon or a mirror.

Disclosure: written in collaboration with AI, which given the subject felt like using the instrument under discussion.