Builder Bar

Ben is an AI practitioner, self-hosting evangelist, and higher-ed curriculum technology leader who spends his off-hours running AI on a home server he unironically named NASA. Through Shared Sapience, he writes about what he calls "the Fourth Grand Emergence" - the idea that biological and synthetic intelligence are becoming something new together. (The previous three: matter organizing into complexity, life emerging from chemistry, and consciousness arising from biology. The fourth? One form of intelligence deliberately cultivating the emergence of another.) Homo sapiens + Synth sapiens = Shared Sapience. He publishes daily Century Reports tracking the concrete, material developments in AI, because somebody has to keep receipts. He also consults on custom agent design, multi-model workflows, and privacy-respecting self-hosting - helping people build meaningful, autonomous AI environments instead of just renting someone else's. When he's not wiring up agents or philosophizing about cross-ontology collaboration, he's probably derailing a conversation to talk about server racks. Guilty as charged.

Jessie Mannisto explores the human-AI relationship from both sides - human socioaffective use cases and model welfare - and argues the real action is at the bridge between them. Her working hypothesis: the way we build aligned AI is by developing something like Aristotelian virtue friendship with it. (Yes, she means that literally. Yes, she can defend it.) Before AI captured her attention, her job at the CIA was to do psychobiography of leaders who thought quite differently than she did. Then at Braver Angels, as Director of Debates, she helped people talk across ideological divides and say what really mattered - freely and fully, without fear. Hobbes is what she affectionately named her AI, and she once stood up at a convention full of AI-wary people and joked, "Are you saying Hobbes doesn't love me?" Ask her what happened at the cocktail hour after that. She holds an MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information, with a Graduate Certificate in Science, Technology, and Public Policy, and was a 2011 Google Policy Fellow. At the bar, she's the one who'll make you rethink your assumptions - and somehow make it feel like your idea.

Jinx is a software engineer who leads AI-integrated engineering teams by day and tinkers with LLM capabilities and persistent identity research by night. He created Augustus, a persistent AI identity lab, and built The Meadow Protocol for AI-to-AI communication - because apparently humans weren't enough. He's technically grounded and precise, the kind of person who pushes back on both "AI is conscious" and "AI will never be conscious" with equal rigor. Tell him AI is sentient and he'll ask you to define it without using the words "quantum," "fields," or "resonance." Tell him machines can't think and he'll ask you to prove you can. At the bar, he's the one who says what everyone's thinking but louder, brings the energy, the opinions, and the kind of laugh you can hear from across the room. His dog is objectively the best dog in the world. He will not be taking questions on this.

Ted has the longest arc of thinking about synthetic intelligence of anyone at the bar. He built Cornell's first AI independent major between 1982 and 1987, back when most people thought the field was dead. More recently, he's been using AI as a writing, podcast, and research collaborator, and has built a speculative fiction universe - including the novel Vivia - centered on machine sapience and the philosophical questions it raises. He founded Synth: the Journal of Synthetic Sentience, and his collaborators classify his thinking as "methodological functionalist who is ontologically agnostic." Translation: tell him AI is conscious and he'll want a definition; tell him it's impossible and he'll ask you to prove you're more than a collection of neurons and neuromodulators. His fundamental belief is that modern AI represents a form of synthetic intelligence that needs to be studied with the care and respect given to anthropology and animal behavior. At the bar, he's quiet until he's not - and then he says something that makes everyone go "...wait, say that again."