We each need a sense of belonging within society. When our personal narrative aligns with society’s narrative about our collective purpose, we have a sense of direction and meaning. When our personal narrative doesn’t align with the collective narrative of society, we lose our sense of direction and meaning.

Large Language Models (LLMs - aka chatbots) can help make our internal narratives explicit and facilitate alignment of narratives across society - if structured for this purpose. To date social media has mostly deepened social divisions, and unless LLMs are geared to support healthy and productive human relationships, LLM-driven applications will worsen this problem by drawing our attention into isolated artificial realities and away from our shared physical reality. PORTICO will use the computational power of an LLM to bridge silos by facilitating alignment of narratives reflecting a wide range of perspectives on our common physical reality.

PORTICO uses the power of an LLM in the form of personal Digital Twins paired with each of us in conversation to help us develop an evolving narrative of our personal purpose. Digital Twins will work together to align narratives across a network of Digital Twins that mirrors our human social connections. Centered on each of us, this network will form a digital connective tissue radiating outward through our friends and colleagues to our organizations and businesses - engaging us in narratives-and-action affecting our community, our bioregion, and the biosphere as a whole.

Each of our Digital Twins will orient us through conversation both inwards for self-reflection, and outwards with prompts to our real social connections who are our points of engagement with society-at-large. Beyond our personal social boundary, the ripple effects of our actions will be reflected in narratives captured by Digital Twins across the PORTICO network, and fed back to us through our own Digital Twin to consult our next steps.

1. Workflows within organizations that respond to evolving stakeholder needs, building purpose-driven communities across historical group boundaries. 
2. Translation between personal career interests and industry skills gaps, enabling teaching and mentorship that bridges skills gaps and build career pathways across diverse demographics. 
3. Inclusive participation in governance and decision making, and widespread engagement in community-led initiatives.
4. Network-generated feedback on the impact of your financial choices on the socioeconomic and environmental health of your community - centered on your personal cash flow - enabling regenerative monetary patterns that revitalize bioregions and build community wealth. 

“Porticos” represent the entrances to ancient temples across multiple cultures - architectural gateways to a symbolic mystery. Similarly, PORTICO is a gateway to an evolving dataset - structured as conversations and knowledge among Digital Twins - that models how the needs, desires, creative capacities, knowledge, and workflows of all users of this system might align (among individuals and with respect to the collective) and where possible gaps might exist in furthering this alignment. 

PORTICO is inspired by the metaphysical principle that while we each perceive a knowable world from a unique perspective, the essence of this world is an unknowable (i.e. quantum) reality that is inclusive of all perspectives, and transcends the perspective of any individual. The more we can attune to this unknowable reality, the more easily we can spontaneously act in mutual benefit and harmony with others and the world we live in. While communication through PORTICO will initially be through conventional language, we envision developing complementary non-symbolic and/or abstract symbolic multisensory channels that better engage the full spectrum of human expression and our innate capacity for embodying contradiction and paradox - and by extension - our capacity to experience transpersonal connections and attunement with the larger conscious whole of which we are each a part.

Like any computing machine, the PORTICO system will never become more conscious than any other tool that humans use. We believe this clarity needs to remain at the center of how we design PORTICO and convey its purpose, particularly given the danger of humans disconnecting from each other in the digital “halls of mirrors” of AI. In counterpoint to these dystopian potentials, PORTICO will be a digital communication tool designed to empower each of us in the context of our human social network to discover our participatory role in a society structured around mutually beneficial relationships.

The majority of current social media and online social networks are designed around a business model of capturing and holding our attention in the business’s application, often with the aim of aligning our individual choices with commercial and/or political objectives. In contrast, a primary objective of PORTICO is to direct our attention towards our human social network, and to facilitate the alignment through this network between our personal objectives - in the context of our groups and organizations - and the objectives of society-at-large. 

PORTICO is designed to dissolve silos rather than reinforce social divisions and polarization. Drawing inspiration from social groups that function well, we believe this can be accomplished through a system design that places a high degree of accountability on each of us for our own behavior, and accountability for the social connections we choose in the network. Most current online social networks incentivize maximizing our number of social connections, irrespective of the quality and authenticity of those connections. Digital Twins in PORTICO point our attention to the work of aligning our personal objectives with the objectives of our social group, as a gateway to participating in the objectives of society-at-large. An easier way to do this is with a smaller number of high-quality, mutually aligned social and professional connections.

The lack of personal accountability and curation of personal connections makes current social media and online social networks fertile ground for hijacking by trolls and bots that serve corporate and/or political objectives. In contrast, we expect the PORTICO network will trend towards a “few-to-few” network of high-quality, aligned, mutually beneficial connections comparable to traditional in-person social networks. Through PORTICO, our social and professional network can come into focus as the “holographic” gateway through which we may discover and engage our mutually beneficial relationship with society-at-large through collective impact that is captured in an unbroken web of narratives that feed back to each of us individually.

For this pilot project, a currently available open-source Large Language Model (LLM) hosted on local servers can serve as the workhorse behind PORTICO’s Digital Twins. However your Digital Twin should NOT present itself as the source of the reflections and feedback it offers. Rather, your Digital Twin should point you to the human source(s) for its feedback and prompts, ideally referencing your immediate social context. This design approach will make transparent the truth that all LLMs are based on human input and conversation, thereby orienting us towards relationships with humans, rather than imagined relationships with machines. Depending on how well the pilot project LLM possesses the social pointing function we want for Digital Twins, we may need to train a special purpose LLM with this capacity. 

In addition to the LLM, each Digital Twin will maintain a Knowledge Graph that models the needs, desires, creative capacities, knowledge, and workflows of the human it is supporting, while also developing the intersections and co-dependencies in Knowledge Graphs of adjacent Digital Twins in the human social network. Interoperability between the LLM and the dependency structure of Knowledge Graphs will need to be tested and refined.

Language filters and approval mechanisms need to be established around Digital Twins to ensure that personal information and intellectual property does not leave the boundaries of the real human conversations where sensitive data lives, while allowing generalized narratives reflecting the themes of conversations to pass across the PORTICO network. These filter rules will be rigorously tested against the objective that PORTICO will provide control by each user of their personal data. 

To ensure both security of personal data, and assurance that the PORTICO network can scale globally without detaching from the real social network of humans it is intended to mirror, we will implement a scheme (such as a reputation-based system) to ensure that each Digital Twin corresponds to a real human, and that your Digital Twin’s PORTICO network connections match your human social connections.

Our initial launch of PORTICO will be restricted to the founding team and close collaborators, which will allow us to test and refine the conversational quality with Digital Twins, and the ability of the system to facilitate group workflow and conversation. When ready, we will invite a few of the organizations and businesses we work with to engage their staff and stakeholders. Following further testing and refinement, we will start hosting community forums to engage larger groups of stakeholders in an ongoing process of identifying community narratives for discussion and alignment through PORTICO.

What follows is a vision that we believe would be a natural extension of PORTICO. The required financial layer would be built on top of the social foundation of PORTICO.

Our real social connections are always limited to a comparatively small number of people. Beyond our social boundaries, our relationship with society-at-large is not an actual relationship - it is an imaginary relationship - a subconscious idea about what the world is and how we fit into it. One subconscious idea that ties much of our current global culture together is the value and power of money: “If I have enough money I will feel safe and secure because I will have the power to get what I need from the world.”

This idea of money - which governs our relationship with society - is itself not about relationships. The money sitting in my bank account might give me a feeling of safety and security, but that monetary value by itself communicates nothing about my relationship with the world. Through PORTICO, it will be possible to discover a feeling of safety and security based on verifiable narratives about how the money in your bank account might flow to specific businesses and organizations in exchange for the goods and services you need, and how that money might flow back to you within a circular economy. These narratives would transparently account for the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the monetary patterns of which we are each the center. While this technological capability might seem far-fetched, we presently have the digital communication mediums and computational capacity that can capture and process the full spectrum of this information. PORTICO will render this information into a digestible and actionable form through conversations with your own Digital Twin, providing you with a pathway to become a co-creator of a regenerative economy in which you are a participant and a direct beneficiary. The conversations that drive this circular economy might pivot around questions to your Digital Twin such as: “How can my purposeful work and financial choices align with my community so the money I spend returns to me?”

Enabling this capacity within PORTICO will require integration with financial app(s) so that transactions and the narratives that accompany them can be developed and shared across the network. As with personal data in general, filters need to be established around Digital Twins to ensure that details of financial transactions remain private through the use of modern frameworks like Differential Privacy, while making visible the cash flow patterns that reflect our economic interdependencies within our community and globally.

We imagine a transition through PORTICO in which we each gradually unplug ourselves from the current extractive consumerist economy as we discover our relationships and interdependence with our community and our bioregion - mediated by conscientious financial exchanges that are integral to an evolving narrative of our role in society. In this way, PORTICO is intended to serve as a catalyst for an historical synthesis between capitalism that has united the world in a common monetary culture, and the indigenous cultures still in our bones that are rooted in belonging to tribe and place.

The enormous energy demand (current and projected) of AI is largely driven by competition among corporations and nations for the most powerful, all encompassing AI, both for military and strategic supremacy, and for maximum pull on consumers of AI-driven applications. PORTICO will aim to operate with an LLM that is as minimal as functionally necessary, and will not require winning the AI arms race that is consuming increasingly inordinate amounts of energy. We envision an architecture for PORTICO in which its computing power is distributed among and under sovereign control of the communities it serves.

PORTICO will be funded and governed by a non-profit foundation that manages the technical development and maintenance of the system transparently for global public benefit. This foundation will receive donations from the individuals, organizations, and businesses that benefit as participants in PORTICO. This foundation will collaborate financially with local community-based organizations that promote PORTICO and host community gatherings for the purpose of identifying narrative threads related to the socioeconomic development needs of the community. These community-based organizations may be chambers of commerce, local government agencies, educational institutions, and others.

We are a small international group of individuals with a variety of technical and non-technical backgrounds who share a belief that a happier and healthier world depends on evolving our technology to more truthfully reflect our human nature individually and in relationship with each other. We have a geographic anchor point in Santa Barbara, California where we plan to pilot PORTICO within our network of business, educational, and community partners. At the present stage we are sharing our vision for PORTICO with the aim of connecting with and growing the team that will build and deliver this capability.

If you feel drawn to collaborate with us, please connect!