{
  "title": "More Than Human Interfaces",
  "subtitle": "Experiments in resisting epistemic monoculture",
  "svg": "svgs/more-than-human-interfaces.svg",
  "body": [
    "There is significant enthusiasm for using AI to create advocates, avatars, and digital representations of rivers, forests, trees, and the more-than-human world. But our impulse to domesticate the more-than-human into digital representations may be outpacing our curiosity to understand our newfound interlocutors in the first place.",
    "What needs to be in place for us not to convince ourselves that AI slop is a faithful articulation of the world beyond us? What needs to be true for us to know the difference? Rivers do not know what Hamlet is, so why are we pretending to embody them with models shaped by a human corpus? How do we distinguish an interface with the world beyond ourselves from a representation that merely reflects our own assumptions back to us?",
    "To begin engaging these questions, we start with a proposition. The collapse of habitat and biodiversity is also a collapse of planetary cognitive diversity. Every habitat and niche situates its own ecology of intelligence, shaped by the particular beings, relations, signals, and conditions found there. In this light, we are facing not only a crisis of biodiversity, but a crisis of epistemic diversity. What risks do we assume when we copy and paste models derived from human intelligence and ask them to stand or speak on behalf of the non-human? There is a real danger in filling the voids created through mass extinction with simulations of ourselves pretending to be animals, rivers, rocks, and whole bioregions.",
    "River Computer is exploring and advising on this premise through several research threads. The first,  A Cautionary Field Guide to More-Than-Human Avatars examines the ethical integration of language models and living systems, asking what it would mean to build interfaces with the more-than-human world without confusing representation for agency. Upstream of the avatar is a deeper question: how might we model and encounter other forms of intelligence through curiosity and collaboration rather than projection?",
    "Nematode LLC  approaches the same question from another direction, using a C. elegans connectome as the governance organ of an LLC. Rather than asking a model to reason or speak like a human, it routes decisions through the worm’s own approach-and-avoidance dynamics, treating governance as navigation through a landscape of attraction and repulsion. The flatworm does not deliberate; it navigates. If intelligence lies partly in the relationship between an organism and the world it moves through, then the question of what kinds of beings can participate in legal, economic, and technical systems becomes much more open.",
    "Across these experiments, we are interested in how other forms of intelligence might exert influence within human systems without first being required to resemble us."
  ],
  "footerLinks": [
    {
      "label": "Nematode LLC Litepaper",
      "href": "https://github.com/RiverComputer/WormCorp/blob/main/docs/light_paper.md",
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    {
      "label": "Nematode LLC",
      "href": "https://nematode-llc.vercel.app/",
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    {
      "label": "River Computer Salon",
      "href": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLS6WSxqnAs&t=87s",
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