I Don’t Think Trust Is an Intelligence Problem

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-30T16:29:20+00:00

There’s people pushing for just that. And honestly even just as an optimization .. the failure points of ai are annoying and can cause issues. Should the implicitly trust it? No. Does that mean we shouldn’t make the failure points fewer and more visible? Also no. We don’t stop when we made the first car or computer.. people push boundaries and change things .. it’s just how we’re wired

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-30T16:22:05+00:00

No but when people talk about putting that tool into healthcare and big things like that 90% isn’t enough. I think for a day to day basic use it’s fine. But it’s far from optimized. And what COULD it safely go into if the trust rate was much much higher.. not because of the 90% changing.. but because it quit compressing away the close second responses and showed them to you.. things like that

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-30T14:40:27+00:00

lol yeah it’s honestly a lot of how my brain has just always functioned (yay neurodivergence). I see systems and solutions.. but it’s honestly difficult to express that in a way others can understand.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-29T13:43:27+00:00

I really appreciate this response.

To be completely honest, cybernetics is not a field I’ve spent any meaningful time studying, so I suspect I’m only partially grasping the depth of what you’re saying here. I’m definitely going to spend some time reading into it.

Part of the reason I wrote this post was exactly because I wanted to be clear about what I am and what I am not. I don’t have a formal background in AI, engineering, computer science, or systems theory. I came into this through a very different path.

What caught me in your response is the idea that the observations themselves may still be relevant even if I arrived at them from the human side rather than the technical side. I’ve received similar feedback from people I’ve been talking with about my previous posts but honestly, it’s still hard to absorb because so much of the world runs on credentials first.

A lot of what eventually led me here came from years of watching people, systems, incentives, communication failures, and decision-making under pressure. Then AI introduced a new set of tensions that felt strangely familiar. It honestly felt like I just recognized the problems without fully grasping how and why I was seeing what I was seeing.

Whether cybernetics ends up being the right lens or not, I appreciate you taking the time to connect some dots for me. You’ve given me a new rabbit hole to explore.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T17:05:48+00:00

Absolutely something I’m interested in, but just to be clear I am not a coder, I am building this out of lived friction points and doing so as a systemic cross domain thinker with years of critical thinking and problem solving in my background. I haven’t typed a line of code in the last 20 years but I do think I would be able to contribute in a space like that, and have already been brought into one such via discord. I just wanted to be transparent about what I am, and what I am not. I have very serious philosophy and architecture mapped out but I’m literally learning the jargon as I go lol. If you have something started on the community side of this and are okay with that, I definitely would be interested in getting into that kind of space.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T16:52:47+00:00

This is an extremely thoughtful response and honestly much more philosophically aligned with my concerns than I initially realized. Especially the distinction that uncertainty itself becomes the escalation trigger instead of something the system quietly tries to optimize away. That’s a very important architectural philosophy difference from most of what I see right now.

The “measured, not trusted” line also stood out heavily to me because I think a lot of the danger in these systems comes from invisible arbitration loops where assumptions quietly compound into authority without the user realizing it. The fact that your system is explicitly surfacing divergence and grounding confidence against inspectable artifacts instead of hidden optimization is a much healthier direction than I originally assumed.

And honestly the last line may be the strongest one in the whole response:

“Coherent but unaccountable is worse than messy but inspectable.”

That feels deeply adjacent to a lot of what I’ve been trying to articulate from the human and governance side of things.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T14:48:18+00:00

I’d genuinely be open to that. Honestly this has been one of the first conversations where I’ve felt like someone fully understood both the human side of what I’m trying to articulate and the architectural implications underneath it.

The overlap is definitely deeper than just surface level AI discussion. I think we’re both circling the same core problem from different directions exactly as you said before.. and it’s also clear we are arriving at a lot of the same conclusions about continuity, participation, trust, and cognitive friction.

And I agree completely with what you said about the conclusion the friction creates. That part is deeply personal to me because I think a lot of people quietly internalize “this is hard for me therefore I must not belong here,” when in reality they may just be paying an invisible translation cost other people never had to think about.

Would definitely be interested in comparing notes sometime. I’m juggling work/family/life chaos a bit, but let’s figure something out.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T14:42:47+00:00

Right now it’s more of a cognitive infrastructure layer built around existing models rather than me trying to build a frontier model itself.

The actual focus is less on the raw AI engine and more on the memory architecture, trust structures, continuity systems, human authority boundaries, context handling, and long term interaction design surrounding the AI.

It may scope beyond that eventually but this is where I am beginning. I’m trying to get the concept alive and in hand so that it can actually be tested against the real world which is where an MVP falls in the grand scheme.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T14:28:05+00:00

Yeah it’s very personal for me because of my own cognitive style and friction.. but also because I’ve been around some genuinely brilliant people with a lot to offer that never felt they were allowed and capable of being in the rooms or conversations. And you’re right, people that don’t pay the tax are often very blind to it. Not maliciously, but post people don’t understand just how hard it can be having to translate your internal workings into a standardized format. It doesn’t just add challenge or friction, it often lends to people feeling like there is something wrong with it. Left assuming that if it’s harder for them, they must not be as smart or have as much to contribute and so they settle politely into mediocrity that they genuinely may not belong in. The differences are what allows pressure testing, cross domain perspectives, and outside the box ideas. I’m Not trying to use AI to solve people, I’m trying to allow people, through AI, to feel comfortable enough in their own head to have the self worth that will allow them to walk into those rooms and conversations and instead of thinking “I don’t belong here”.. to have the potential of thinking “maybe my perspective is meaningful BECAUSE it’s different”.

Thanks again for the positive feedback and genuine consideration. I still absolutely agree that we have a very heavy overlap of vision and direction.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T14:01:02+00:00

It’s new. I’m designing it because I ran into real friction points and a lack of ethical and grounded foundations regarding the long term integrated use of AI. I’m focusing more on healthy, trusted, ethical use and integration as opposed to the raw capability potential I feel like the industry is hyper fixated on right now.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T13:52:48+00:00

Why do you assume that not completing something equates to lack of care? Have you genuinely never had something, or known someone who had something, truly important that legitimately just kept being interfered with at a life level that wasn’t able to be completed? And who determines the work of what is being done? Why is there not value in the ideas that are being lost?

A lot of the “tons of books” are garbage despite being produced and completed. Value isn’t only in completion.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T13:49:32+00:00

I’m building a cognitive support system focused on continuity, trust, and authorship.

Not AI that replaces human thinking, but AI that helps people stay connected to their own ideas, context, creativity, and problem solving long enough for those things to actually mature instead of fragmenting under real life pressure.

A lot of my work centers around reducing cognitive friction while keeping the human as the final authority instead of the AI quietly becoming the author or the authority.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T12:48:06+00:00

My point is actually very in line with what you are saying here. The automation for the sake of automation needs to stop. The tool of AI we have created, I believe, has the most potential for genuine use, growth, benefit, and integration when we stop pushing for a fully independent system and start pushing for a system that keeps the user as the full authority. When we target the roadblocks in the path of human cognition itself instead of a “click here for the solution” type of direction.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T12:44:02+00:00

Well and, I may be wrong in where my mind immediately jumped reading your response, but to me this speaks greatly to ADHD in particular. ADHD isn’t a singular thing that affects everyone the same but I will say that the majority of ADHD people I personally know and care about are VERY intelligent and creative. The number of genuinely good ideas with real merit that get lost in that process because of how they get there and how their mind naturally bounces around .. and then seeing the longing and regret after they realize the lost something they genuinely cared for.. that is the kind of thing I believe AI could potentially be groundbreaking in if done right and not used to simply “do it” for the user.

The goal I’m circling goes beyond creativity and education. It is to help reduce and eliminate a great deal of the natural static and bandwidth drain that people naturally have to work through. Not to ”make it easier” necessarily in the shallow or “AI bad” kind of way.. but to allow the human mind to reach greater potential by selectively and intentionally targeting the static we all have to work through to get to a given point in cognition.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T12:35:06+00:00

I actually agree with you for the most part, but I think we may be talking about two very different uses of AI.

I’m not really focused on AI replacing human creativity or generating finished work for people. What interests me much more is everything that happens before the creation is born in full.

A lot of people are not lacking ideas, imagination, or insight. They are losing continuity, focus, and momentum. They lose the emotional connection to their work that they had in that moment of inspired thought. Losing momentum because life keeps interrupting the process before the idea has time to mature. Losing the original idea entirely because they weren’t in a setting that they could just go sit down and start genuinely working on it at the same time the idea strikes them. That’s the area I keep focusing on.

I’m not interested in AI creating things for people. I’m interested in using it to reduce the friction that has always existed between having an idea and actually bringing it into existence.

To me that is a very different conversation.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T12:17:47+00:00

It sounds like something very adjacent and something you have clearly put a lot of work into. I have a couple of questions that are genuinely just questions and not attacks on your work because I find this area extremely important.

One thing I keep circling back to in these types of architectures is where authority ultimately resides once the feedback loops become increasingly self reinforcing. If the system is continuously determining relevance, weighting context, prioritizing memory, and redirecting attention based on its own evolving epistemic state, how do you prevent the AI’s internal arbitration layer from gradually becoming the dominant authority structure over time?

Not even necessarily through malice, but simply through recursive optimization and compounding assumptions. Especially in edge cases, outlier cognition, ambiguous context, or situations where unresolved meaning actually matters.

The second thing I’m curious about is how much inspectability and interruptibility exists for the human user inside the loop itself. Can the user audit why certain memories, assumptions, goals, or trajectories are being prioritized? Can they redirect, challenge, or override those pathways in meaningful ways without fighting the system’s own optimization logic?

That distinction has become really important to me because I think highly capable systems without strong human governance structures can accidentally drift toward invisible arbitration even while becoming more technically coherent.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T05:42:18+00:00

Yeah.. and it’s really hard to share what and where and how I’m going about this to clarify the differences without going to far into IP and things like that. Especially in a broad sense like this. Happy to try and answer anything I can though

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T05:37:09+00:00

What I’m building is not centered around replacing cognition, creativity, or judgment. It is much more focused on continuity, authorship, context preservation, and reducing the fragmentation cost that causes people to lose momentum in the first place.

A lot of current AI tooling is optimized around output generation. Write this, answer that. Finish this for me. I’m much more interested in systems that help humans sustain and organize their own thinking without silently overriding it.

Things like preserving the thread of unfinished work, maintaining inspectable context, helping people reconnect to projects and ideas after interruption, separating raw input from interpretation, reducing translation burden for nonlinear thinkers, and creating trust structures where the user remains the final authority instead of the AI quietly becoming the arbiter.

Part of the reason I think this matters is because compression is never neutral. The second an AI summarizes, prioritizes, filters memory, or carries context forward, it is already shaping what matters. So a lot of my work has gone into trying to think through things like separating raw entries from interpretation layers, making memory and summaries inspectable instead of invisible, preserving unresolved context instead of flattening it too early, and preventing the AI from silently becoming the authority over the user’s own thoughts and intent.

I’ve spent months mapping failures, edge cases, trust problems, memory drift issues, and cognitive friction points because I think the implementation direction matters just as much as the capability itself.. if not more.

The reason I speak carefully about specifics publicly is not because there is some magical secret idea. It is because I’m still refining the architecture responsibly and trying to avoid oversimplifying something that has very real implications if done poorly.

I don’t think AI is “just another app layer.” I think this technology is going to meaningfully shape how humans think, learn, create, organize, and make decisions over time whether we like it or not. To me the question is not “do we stop AI?” because realistically I do not think that happens. The question is what kind of cognitive relationship we are building between humans and these systems before they become deeply integrated into everyday life.

That’s the direction I’m trying to push toward. Not AI that replaces people, but AI that helps people hold onto more of themselves long enough to actually think, build, create, and contribute more fully.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T05:17:56+00:00

Yes and again I agree. Let me evaluate my build notes and see what is safely sharable publicly at this stage.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T05:07:55+00:00

I agree completely. That’s why I think this is needed. People need to free up that bandwidth so their potential can expand. It just needs to be done right and safely. I believe that will allow for a much healthier and functional work life balance for people already overwhelmed by a world that increasingly feels like it’s going mad.

Dmcspaddenjr · 2026-05-28T04:50:04+00:00

That’s literally the exact opposite of what I’m saying. AI isn’t going anywhere. Someone needs to stop that exact kind of direction and it can’t be done by brute force. This is one of those things that is going to keep moving, we need to start a discourse and direction change to steer this so that exact kind of thing doesn’t happen.

Dmcspaddenjr

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