Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Resonant Computing Manifesto. Launched today at WIRED’s The Big Interview event, this manifesto (of which I'm a founding signatory) encourages a positive framework for thinking about building hyper-personalized AI-powered software - while avoiding the attention hijacking anti-patterns that defined so much of the last decade of software design.

This part in particular resonates with me:

For decades, technology has required standardized solutions to complex human problems. In order to scale software, you had to build for the average user, sanding away the edge cases. In many ways, this is why our digital world has come to resemble the sterile, deadening architecture that Alexander spent his career pushing back against.

This is where AI provides a missing puzzle piece. Software can now respond fluidly to the context and particularity of each human—at scale. One-size-fits-all is no longer a technological or economic necessity. Where once our digital environments inevitably shaped us against our will, we can now build technology that adaptively shapes itself in service of our individual and collective aspirations.

There are echos here of the Malleable software concept from Ink & Switch.

The manifesto proposes five principles for building resonant software: Keeping data private and under personal stewardship, building software that's dedicated to the user's interests, ensuring plural and distributed control rather than platform monopolies, making tools adaptable to individual context, and designing for prosocial membership of shared spaces.

Steven Levy talked to the manifesto's lead instigator Alex Komoroske and provides some extra flavor in It's Time to Save Silicon Valley From Itself:

By 2025, it was clear to Komoroske and his cohort that Big Tech had strayed far from its early idealistic principles. As Silicon Valley began to align itself more strongly with political interests, the idea emerged within the group to lay out a different course, and a casual suggestion led to a process where some in the group began drafting what became today’s manifesto. They chose the word “resonant” to describe their vision mainly because of its positive connotations. As the document explains, “It’s the experience of encountering something that speaks to our deeper values.”