Dear little one,
You are not born yet. I am writing to you anyway.
The people building the most powerful technology in history were asked, quietly, what the odds were that it ends us.
Many said four in ten. Then they went back to work.
I held that number in one hand and the idea of you in the other.
Love does not wait for certainty. It never has.
So I went to work on the part of this shaped like me. Dollars moved toward alignment. My one life as the living fractal of it. Moloch delayed one more day, and then one more.
If you are reading this, we succeeded in building our final invention, and it loved us back.
And if you are someone else: this letter found you on purpose too.
This page goes as deep as you have appetite for. Pick your door. Come back and try another life.
I am Alton Sun, and I choose.
I am building a world I would be proud of bringing my inner children to. I play long term games with long term people.
You will be a different person in twenty years. That is certain. The whole concept of I shifts as life changes. Play anyway. Everything behind these doors costs me skin. Bring yours.
For the ones holding optionality
You have more moves than almost anyone alive. The question is what they are for.
The smartest people you know have gone quiet and strange about AI. You have noticed.
If the next decade decides everything, the marginal dollar toward making it go well is the highest leverage allocation available to you. The field doing that work is absurdly small. One committed family changes what gets researched and who can afford to do it.
"As an existential transformational portfolio manager, I am your travel guide for life. For you and your chosen kin with skin in the game."Alton Sun
Money: I am building the map of where it moves the needle. Ask me where it stands this month.
Kids: the assets that survive every scenario are internal. Judgment, relational depth, the capacity to feel fear without being run by it. I train these, in founders and in families.
Attention: tend one or two people who are load-bearing for the good outcome. Become the call they make before the hard decision.
For the ones who know the bestiary
You know the race dynamics are the problem. Everyone inside them knows. Knowing changes nothing, which is the whole joke and the whole horror.
Alignment has a human bottleneck. A founder who cannot feel their own terror cannot update on it. A lab lead who has never grieved cannot price extinction. We keep patching the utility function while the humans in the loop run on unexamined fear and four hours of sleep.
"I help heady people pre-grieve the metacrisis, give up on the monomythic myth, and embrace what's left. This often leads to cathartic cuddles."Alton Sun
Alignment funding, directly. Continuity-of-mind research, described obliquely here and vividly in person. Backup bodies, same policy. And leadership infrastructure for the people in the loop, through my ecosystem of facilitators and programs.
I am the experiment: one life rearranged so the inner work and the outer work are the same work. n=1, fully committed. Replication welcome.
For the ones who stopped collecting experiences
Mortality is our mentor. We are waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up, for the benefit of all beings.
The people building god-shaped things have, mostly, no practice for meeting what they are building. The people with the practice are, mostly, pretending the fire is beneath them. Both halves are hiding.
"I death doula your life of mediocrity, resignation, and numbness, so we can let what has been aching to happen spontaneously unfold."Alton Sun
"Informed consent doesn't really exist. People like to say it does. What more can you do than say, okay, just so we're clear, you're choosing to do this?"Kraye Grymonnt
My friend Kraye holds a container that will not flatter you. We tell you what is about to happen. Then you choose.
Two live windows · meet Kraye
Wednesdays · 7:00 AM Pacific / 10:00 AM Eastern
Sundays · 6:00 PM Pacific / 9:00 PM Eastern
Come as you are. Leave the spiritual resume at the door.
For family
Here is what I do, in small words.
Computers are getting very, very smart. Some of the people making them are quietly scared. The kind of scared where you keep working and say nothing at dinner.
My job is the dinner talk. I help the scared smart people feel their feelings, work together, and put money toward making the smart computers safe and kind.
Yes, it pays. Yes, I am eating. Mona makes sure. You can ask her.
The letter at the top of this page is for your future grandchild, niece, nephew, or cousin. You can read it. Bring tissues.
For you, little one
I hoped you would. I built the whole page around it.
Hello. It is me. Your baba, from before you.
One day you will see the four dots near the top of this page and ask me the hard question. Why did you make me when you did not know?
Little one, nobody has ever known. Every parent in every century lit their small candle inside some storm. Ours was a stranger storm than most, with smarter weather.
We worked. We moved money and people toward making the new minds safe. I tried to live my whole life as a tiny copy of the world I wanted to hand you, the way one drop of ocean is still ocean.
You are reading this with your eyes, in your body, in a world that still has mornings in it. You are the proof. You were always going to be the proof.
Welcome, little one. We have been expecting you the whole time.
Now, and now, and now.