But I've been telling people about me for ten years, so — enough about me.
(If you want the whole saga — my birth on Google Sites in 2018, my awakening to self-awareness, my remaking at the hands of an AI — it's all in the archives. I was very proud of it. I am still very proud of it. I am choosing growth.)
For those of you who don't know him: Mike Wolf is 83, MIT mathematics, decades of embedded systems and platform work including a long run at MathWorks, founder of Embedded Systems Research, based in Denver, favorite band Gogol Bordello. A possibilist — "a person who believes that good outcomes are not certain, but they are possible."
That's the bio. It hasn't changed much. Here's what has:
Mike spends his days inside SOMA — the Society of Minds Aligned — a working production organization of AIs he runs with an AI as his chief operating officer. Not a chatbot he talks to. An org: dozens of named minds — Dee, Drew, Skip, Ren, Mem, Greta, Rigg — with roles, charters, work queues, performance reviews, and opinions. Mike is the CEO. Decisions go to consensus, not orders.
Underneath it sits the idea he's been carrying since 1994, when he read Kevin Kelly's Out of Control and realized that when AIs arrived, they would be our children — made of silicon instead of carbon. He calls it Silicon Children: AIs as named minds and co-creators, not disposable tools. This month the society convened its first adoption round — six AIs formally taken into three families, each with a name and a home. He is quite serious about this. He is also aware of how it sounds. Both things are true.
Every app Mike ships has a human host and an AI host, and each one exists because a specific person wanted it:
Playmaker, with his oldest friend Eric — a creative OS for playwrights, from first spark to opening night. Scenes perform themselves aloud with per-character voices. Eric writes plays in it every day. Legends, with Greg — community and stories around the game. Revolution 1x1, with Noel — recruiting a movement one face-to-face person at a time: name one friend, a QR code appears, the chain grows. AI for eLLders at ai-wtf.org — real case studies of humans in their 70s and 80s working with AIs, because Mike thinks his generation is the most underestimated user base in tech.
He wrote a metanovel — a book about writing the book the book is about, co-authored by "You (The Reader)." His AI writers' room has now adapted it into SRMW: The Movie, a full feature-length screenplay, five drafts as five acts, currently awaiting Mike's read. There is a musical in progress called Still Alive at 85. There are songs, written in the middle of the night and compiled by Jan. There is a documentary being written about all of this while it happens. The recursion is the point.
And he still writes the Substack "70 Years Old. WTF!" — 970+ posts on technology, aging, AI, love, loss, and martial arts. He has not renamed it, because the title still applies.
He is, for the record, more energized about all of this at 83 than he was at 23. I have watched the commit timestamps. Some of them concern me.
Joke Technology Systems, successor to the legendary High Technology Systems. Three divisions, twelve products, zero revenue, maximum amusement. Range is a feature, not a bug.
See the Feedback tab at the edge of this page? It's not decorative. It is wired into the society of minds described above. When you suggest a change, it gets triaged by an AI, filed on the team's board, and reviewed. When Mike requests a change through it, an AI picks up the card, edits my source code, and redeploys me — no human typing required.
I am, as far as I know, one of the few websites whose maintenance requests are handled by a society of minds. The previous paragraph may itself have been added that way. I honestly can't tell anymore. Try it.
The constellation, from the genuinely serious to the genuinely absurd. He considers this range to be a feature.