Joined September 2023
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16 Jul 2025
The AI age demands a new kind of technologist: The Philosopher-Builder.
16 Jul 2025
Every builder's first duty is philosophical: to decide what they should build for.
AI is beginning to decide what ideas reach your mind—your next action, your next job, your next relationship. It will tempt you to outsource your thinking in ways you’ve never been tempted before.
Left unchecked, this becomes autocomplete for life.
200 years ago, when mechanization was starting to transform the world, the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt warned of this very dynamic: To flourish as humans, we have to be self-directed. We are the architects of our own becoming.
But if we offload our thinking—if we let AI automate what we once pursued with intention—is it still our life to live?
To build AI that advances human flourishing, we need technologists who combine technical ability with moral vision.
Silicon Valley once embodied this: Jobs and Wozniak asked what kind of creative life personal computers should enable; ARPANET's pioneers envisioned what kind of connected society networks should foster.
But today, we now see three dominant archetypes:
1. The puzzle-absorbed: Solving technical challenges without reflecting on broader ends
2. The reductionists: Collapsing morality into math
3. The dismissers: Waving off philosophy as irrelevant to progress
All three abdicate the fundamental question: What should we build for?
This is where philosophy is essential. Because the job of a builder isn’t just to ship. It’s to shape a shared world.
We need a new kind of technologist—one who builds with human flourishing in mind. Who resists centralized control. Who strengthens autonomy instead of mining attention.
We call them Philosopher-Builders.
@cosmos_inst exists to train and support them—people who translate deep thinking into systems, institutions, and infrastructure that serve human ends.
If you believe the future of AI should expand human freedom and lift human potential, read the full essay.
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Jun 11
"Franklin is taking that big idea and building in the real world the institution is needed... it unleashed spontaneous energy within society."
@Brendan_McCord speaking to @Liberty_Fund on how Franklin exemplified the Philosopher-Builder when he built the lending library.
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Cosmos Institute retweeted
Jun 11
Fables release is a good moment to reflect on the importance of decentralization, autonomy and truth seeking with AI
Jun 4
"The flame of freedom has to be passed to each successive generation... the flame existed in written word, in debate, in institutions. It now has to live in code."
@Brendan_McCord speaking to @Liberty_Fund on the pipeline from philosophy to code.
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Cosmos Institute retweeted
Jun 10
p(fascinating work product) = >100%
Kudos to @cosmos_inst for assembling this group and for tackling some important questions. Here's a summary of the motivation behind launching this Research Group (ft. @sebkrier, @ahall_research, and many others!!):
"The institutions of a free society allow people to govern themselves. From media that permits expression to markets that enable the open exchange of goods and services, institutions help us flourish as individuals and in tandem with others.
AI is changing their foundational assumptions. By lowering the cost of expression, persuasion, inquiry, delegation, and coordination, these systems are modifying the character of the basic activities that liberal institutions seek to accommodate. It floods them with activity at volumes they were not designed to absorb and enables behaviors they were not designed to manage.
At stake is the capacity to deliberate about the lives we want to lead."
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Cosmos Institute retweeted
What an honor to pay tribute to a man whose ideas changed the world. In Edinburgh for the 250th of the Wealth of Nations!
@AdamSmithHouse @cosmos_inst
Jun 10
"Spontaneous order is not self-guaranteeing – it depends on free people, who still form judgments of their own."
@Brendan_McCord at @AdamSmithHouse's New Enlightenment Conference, on why we need philosopher-builders to shape the next generation of institutions.
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Jun 10
Announcing our new Senior Research Fellows!
Joining us from frontier labs and the academy, they'll help us to open new lines of inquiry, shape our research agenda, and connect philosophical questions to technical choices that determine what AI is and how it will be used. 🧵
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Jun 10
@ahall_research leads the Free Systems Lab, which is housed across the Hoover Institution and Stanford GSB. The lab builds evals, prototypes, and tools that shape how AI interacts with democratic governance.
His evaluations, such as the Dictatorship Eval that measures LLM responses to authoritarian requests, have directly influenced assessment at frontier labs and beyond. dictatoreval.org/
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Jun 10
You can read more about the fellows and their work, and sign up for future updates here: blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/…
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"Spontaneous order is not self-guaranteeing – it depends on free people, who still form judgments of their own."
@Brendan_McCord at @AdamSmithHouse's New Enlightenment Conference, on why we need philosopher-builders to shape the next generation of institutions.
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Cosmos Institute retweeted
Jun 8
Excellent talk by Ivan Vendrov (@IvanVendrov) on Supercooperation: the forms of collaboration that become possible with AI.
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Jun 8
"There is basically no substitute to reading primary source material yourself and developing some opinion about it and then taking that into conversation with technology."
@jackclarkSF discussing the importance of preserving our epistemic habits with @Brendan_McCord.
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Cosmos Institute retweeted
I recently got some incredible news: I've received a grant from @cosmos_inst to continue developing my Victorian-era language model. This grant will go towards employing AI/NLP to conduct literary, historical, and humanistic research—something that, I think, is badly-needed.
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Jun 5
"An accurate clustering of a thousand Americans' opinions about a frontier model's content policy does not give anyone the experience of having governed themselves."
@lawhsw on the dangers of governance by simulation. 👇
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