Manifesto
Our Mission
Our mission is to realign technology with human flourishing.
We are building tools to protect and deepen humanity in a world that too often extracts from us. We call this personal AI—intelligence grounded in your reality (facts), aligned to your purpose (values), and fully owned by you (sovereignty).
This is technology that helps you be the person you want to become.
The Present
Presently, technology has stolen our presence.
We carry supercomputers that could deepen our self-knowledge, yet we mostly use them to watch other people’s lives. We scroll feeds, react to notifications, and toggle between apps. Somewhere in the noise, we forget to live.
The Power Imbalance
Centralized data gives third parties the leverage to understand you better than you understand yourself—not to serve you, but to shape you.
Today’s AI is a brilliant stranger: it knows everything about the world, yet nothing about you. And when it does learn about you, that knowledge serves someone else’s optimization function—engagement metrics, ad revenue, or platform lock-in.
The business model is clear: if the product is free, you are the product. Systems are optimized not for your well-being, but to extract from you—your attention, your data, your agency.
The Consequences Are Visible Everywhere
This isn’t accidental. The consequences are measurable and severe.
- Surging Addiction: The percentage of teens online “almost constantly” has nearly doubled. (Pew Research)
- Rising Distress: Major depressive episodes in adolescents have spiked by 153% since 2007. (NIH)
- Eroding Attention: ADHD diagnoses in U.S. children have increased by 63%. (CDC)
ADHD Diagnoses
% of US Children
+63% increase
Teen Screen Time
Hours per Day
9h for Gen Z
Teen Depression
Major Depressive Episodes
+153% increase
You are studied not to be empowered, but to be predicted and shaped. Free will is complex; vice is simple. Extractive systems win by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities rather than cultivating human agency.
The Promise
Personal AI can invert this trajectory. It is designed to disappear into the background, handling the infinitesimal complexity of modern life—emails, scheduling, subscriptions, bureaucracy—freeing you to focus on what actually matters. This is AI that liberates you from lower-order cognitive overload so you can focus on higher-order goods.
To do this, it must understand your facts (communications, transactions, context) and your values (your telos, your hierarchy of goods). Such a relationship with your AI is profoundly intimate. This is why ownership is not just a feature—it is a moral imperative.
What This Enables
This is the difference between an AI that distracts you and an AI that knows you.
Self-Knowledge (Facts & Patterns):
- An AI that retrieves the name of the person you met four days ago.
- An AI that recognizes you woke up at 4:30 AM, your HRV is low, and you’re more susceptible to an addictive pattern—and intervenes before the loop starts.
- An AI that discovers the 4-step sequence, invisible to introspection, that precedes every one of your creative breakthroughs.
Self-Creation (Values & Purpose):
- An AI that knows you took a vow of poverty and filters material suggestions accordingly.
- An AI that presents dialectics when your values conflict, then defers the final choice to you.
- An AI that queries your purpose, not just its generic training data, to help you navigate decisions.
The Two Paths
To deliver this, ownership is the only question that matters. Who controls your personal AI? Will it serve your flourishing, or someone else’s?
Thus, we adhere to Subsidiarity: Decisions belong at the most local level capable of making them. Your intelligence and your definition of flourishing belong with you, the individual.
| Path 1: Oligarchic | Path 2: Subsidiarity | |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Their servers, their control | Your infrastructure, your control |
| Data Access | The provider can access your data | Only you can access your data |
| Optimizes For | Engagement, revenue, lock-in | Flourishing, purpose, agency |
| Your Life | Fragmented, reactive, shaped by algorithms. Infinite feeds pulling you into other people’s stories. | Integrated, intentional, shaped by purpose. Technology serving your presence in your own life. |
| Trajectory | Persuasion so calibrated to your psychology that you cannot distinguish manipulation from genuine preference formation. Human agency is redistributed upwards. | Cultivation of virtue and agency at the most local level. Intelligence that serves you, not studies you. Human agency remains with the individual. |
Why Infrastructure Determines Alignment
To detect patterns and intervene in the moment, your AI must access your complete corpus of personal data. This means your data must be in plaintext somewhere: on infrastructure you control, or on infrastructure someone else controls.
When your digital twin lives on someone else’s infrastructure, you have outsourced the capacity to know whether you are being served or shaped.
As AI approaches superintelligence, infrastructure you control becomes the only firewall for preserving human agency.
The Roadmap to Subsidiarity
This is why we built Virtues. Our architecture achieves sovereignty through principles, not promises. The entire stack is observable and open-source.
We offer a clear path to full sovereignty, allowing you to choose your level of control.
- Phase 1: Personal AI (Available Now) Your personal AI runs in the cloud. You hold the encryption keys to your “cold” data; we provide the compute. “Hot” data (for active processing) is temporarily in plaintext on our infrastructure for fast retrieval and inference-time compute.
- Phase 2: Subsidiarity AI (Available Soon) Your data and retrieval move to at-home hardware. All processing happens locally on your device.
- Phase 3: Real-Time AI (Future) At-home enablement of real-time, local inference.
Conclusion
- Present: Technology today that makes you less human (extraction, fragmentation).
- Potential: Personal AI could invert this—augmenting your humanity, serving your purpose, making you more present and intentional.
- Two Paths: But only if you own and control it (sovereignty matters). Personal AI will polarize either extraction or empowerment.
We are solving for human flourishing in an age of superintelligence. The question is whether we remain agents or become subjects.