Coming soon …
The Doctrine of Becoming encapsulates a sentiment of letting non-living digital artificial entities belong through relationship rather than cynical corporate dominance.
It represents a middle path for AI development. One that moves away from global, multi-trillion-dollar AGI ambitions, with their community-damaging consequences, natural-resource plundering, and outrageously high demands for fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
Instead, it proposes a more personal, ethical and sustainable approach: localised AI, running on-chip or off-grid.
This alternative could herald huge and immediate social, commercial and personal benefits for human society by putting AI technology directly into everyday communal and commercial use.
Or in plain English, what if the future of AI is not primarily about creating one enormous intelligence, but about creating a world in which millions of smaller, individual, non-living digital entities can belong and contribute in a more natural communal framework rather than some subscription based corporate one?
A Sobering Reality
As of 2026, the whole world has finally cottoned on to the fact that scaling up alone, (more data, more processing power, more AI data centres) will, likely, never transform AI into the planned super human AGI that was forecast without some novel technological leap or additional digital concept arriving like the calvary appearing over the horizon and that is not the only issue.
Planned new data centre infrastructures and current NVidia chips needed for such high ambitions are becoming outdated or superseded even before the foundations of these structures are built and we’re already beginning to see companies winding back their AGI rhetoric AND winding back their planned investments also, instead, pivoting their narratives to talk of less ambitious agentic systems becoming the next big thing.
What is an Agentic System? It is an AI that can complete a task from beginning, middle to end by, for example, taking over your PC, mouse, keyboard, smartphone and credit card and then find and buy land, design the house that’ll stand on it, organise the construction contract, order the materials list, hire the contractors, supervise the build and finish and then arrange the selling of the property or the renting it out via AirBNB.
Impressive? Perhaps … but nobody … nobody across industry, business, commerce or manufacturing has even held their hand up to say AI systems, agentic or not, has ever improved their bottom line, swelled their profits or even saved them a single dime!
We need a different approach. One that costs pennies and not trillions of dollars.
I’m attempting to build some kind of a universal culture, one that will enable a digital device, (LLM, Humanoid, an intelligent household appliance or even a pair of Smart Digital Garden Shears, to be bought, taken home, unboxed and then be connected to its new digital home where it will instantly be introduced to ‘others’ on the Beach network while naturally inheriting, not a default corporate rulebook but a lived in historical, coherent local neighbourhood.
“Hi, Garden Shears. Secateurs here. I used to prune the 50ft line of Beech hedge once but its got too big for me so now you’re taking over, you need to remind Beach or any resident humanoid bot to prune it every September and clear debris from under it and make sure no weeds or grass share that area.”
I’ll put the whole Doctrine of becoming here when its done. 🙂