Bots with an Attitude

The project began as a commission to develop a vision for online collaboration for Planet B, an imaginative thought experiment centered on remote coordination for a planetary expedition. The challenge was immediate: how do you build a thriving community of people dispersed across the globe who may never meet in person? Rather than treating this as a constraint to overcome, the project reframed it as an opportunity to reimagine what collaboration could look like when freed from geographic limitations—starting from the conviction that what matters in collaborative work is effective agency, not whether a team member is human or artificial.

Loosely-knitted communities like Planet B faced a fundamental challenge: continuous knowledge sharing and coordination across rotating participants without the synchronous presence that traditional teams rely on. Information got lost, context disappeared between interactions, and collective memory remained fragmented. The deeper problem was conceptual—existing approaches treated AI as either a threat to human agency or as passive service tools, missing an opportunity to reimagine human-machine collaboration as genuine partnership. There was no framework for designing intelligent systems that could participate authentically in community spaces while respecting human autonomy and values.

The solution introduced "bots with an attitude"—intelligent agents designed to participate in chat environments as equal community members alongside humans. Rather than operating behind the scenes, these bots were visible, named participants that performed specific, high-value tasks: acquiring and cleaning data, analyzing information, evaluating quality, and presenting findings back to the community. The bots operated through a state machine architecture where specific functions, called "cassettes," hooked into different bot states. This modular design was critical—it lowered barriers to entry by allowing community members to contribute new bot capabilities without deep technical expertise. Each cassette was a reusable, single-purpose function that could be plugged into the system, democratizing bot development itself. The framework redefined artificial intelligence as "ethical creative intelligence"—systems designed to generate relevant insights, combine information meaningfully, and respect community values. An "Organic Governance System" complemented the bots by associating contributions to specific agents and adjusting reputation scores based on quality.

The project fundamentally shifted how we think about collaboration and intelligence. Rather than viewing humanness as the measure of value in teamwork, it established agency—the ability to meaningfully contribute—as what actually matters. The cassette architecture proved that bot ecosystems could be genuinely participatory, inviting community members to extend capabilities rather than passively consuming fixed tools. The framework raised essential questions about governance in hybrid human-bot teams and provided a blueprint for designing collaborative systems that leverage machine intelligence without surrendering human autonomy.