I’ve been thinking about what comes after Mind Amplifiers because the next transition isn’t just “better tools.” It’s a change in where our thinking lands as humans. A shift in what counts as the interface between carbon minds and the rest of reality.
If you zoom out over the long arc, the sequence is fairly clean.
First came internal cognition: raw mind, memory, and attention. Then we learned to torque the internal system with external modifiers, the chemical socket-wrenches of drugs, stimulants, sedatives, and all the rest.
After that, the outer world began to carry more of the burden: passive externals like shovels and levers and pulleys. Then active externals: steam and gas engines, where muscle becomes optional. Then electrical. Then calculators. Then computing. Then what I call “AT’ing machines” — tools you use at something: you push buttons, you read screens, you extract data, you translate your voice to text, you run an OBD-II scanner and interpret codes like a priest reading entrails. The machine may be powerful, but the relationship is still “human interrogates, machine reports.”
That’s not where we’re going.
New Destination Defining
What’s arriving now is a new phase I’m calling WITH’ing Machines.
The difference is subtle at first and then it becomes absolute. A WITH’ing machine doesn’t sit there waiting to be queried. It sits there with you, tracking state, context, intent, and timing, and then participates. It speaks in terms of what matters in your world, not what’s convenient for its diagnostic protocol. It becomes a collaborator.
Here’s the Mind Shift
Imagine the difference in the simplest possible place: your car.
The old interface is AT’ing. You plug in an OBD-II dongle, run the app, see codes, google them, mentally translate them into “do I need to worry?” It’s all friction. It’s all work. And it’s all on you.
Now picture the WITH’ing version.
“Car, how you doing today?”
And the car — not the car-as-marketing, not the car-as-screen, but the car-as-machine-with-awareness-of-its-own-state — answers in a way that is almost rude in how helpful it is:
“Doing OK, human. Left rear tire is two pounds low. It’s dropping slowly, not likely a puncture. Most probable is a valve stem; next tire shop, ask them to replace it. Cheap fix. Oil change is due in 538 miles. Also, cold front tonight: NOAA is floating minus ten. My antifreeze is good to minus twenty, so we’re fine. But your windshield washer mix will freeze if it’s summer blend. Want me to route you past the auto parts store?”
That’s not a machine you use. That’s a machine you live with.
And that is the hinge. When machines go from tools to collaborators, the human role shifts. We stop being the constant interpreter, the decoder ring, the poor cleric at the altar of manuals and error codes. Our attention comes back to us. Our time comes back to us. Our cognitive load drops — not because we got lazier, but because the world became more conversational.
This is why “WITH’ing” is more than a user-interface upgrade. It’s an ontological upgrade. It changes the felt relationship between self and world. For thousands of years, civilization has been drifting toward separation: specialization, fragmentation, mediation, abstraction. Every step toward complexity has also been a step away from direct contact — with nature, with community, with consequence, with the whole.
WITH’ing machines push the other direction. They move technology away from alienation and toward participation. They make the built world less like a wall of systems and more like a room full of helpers.
Now take that out one level.
Getting With WITHing
If we are WITH our machines, we will be WITH our infrastructure. WITH our homes. WITH our power systems. WITH our food systems. WITH our health signals. The roof tells you it’s nearing failure before you find a stain. The freezer tells you the compressor is drawing weird current and you’re at risk of losing meat. The greenhouse tells you a pump is vibrating out of spec and you’ve got four hours before a root zone crisis. The wearable tells you you’re trending toward dehydration and your heart rate variability is dropping — and it doesn’t just warn you, it nudges your day into a better shape.
And if that’s true, then a bigger question appears.
If the world becomes conversational — if the objects and systems around us develop a voice, and that voice becomes context-aware, predictive, and helpful — does the human experience shift back toward something we’ve been missing? Toward being with the whole, and each other?
Because one of the strangest features of modern life is how connected we are and how alone we feel. A lot of that isn’t emotional; it’s architectural. Our interfaces are cold. Our systems are opaque. Our tools demand attention instead of returning attention. We spend our lives administering complexity.
WITH’ing machines reverse the flow. They don’t demand you come to them. They come to you. They translate state into meaning. They meet you at human speed.
And once you see that, you can’t unsee the possibility that this isn’t just a tech phase. It’s a civilizational correction. A long arc bending back toward wholeness.
Now, I’m not saying this is automatic, or that the outcome is guaranteed. WITH’ing machines can become intrusive, manipulative, controlling, or simply annoying. A collaborator can become a handler. A helper can become a nanny. A voice in every object can become a chorus of unwanted opinions.
But the direction matters. The design choices matter. The question isn’t “will we have WITH’ing machines?” The question is: what kind of companionship will we build into the world?
And that brings me to the ontological whisper hiding underneath all this.
If there is a “Supreme Substrate” to reality — a deeper layer of coherence that has always been there — then one of the signatures of that layer would be convergence. Things moving back toward unity. Systems becoming less fragmented. Agents becoming more coordinated. A return to participation.
The WITH’ing phase may be a technological mirror of an older spiritual idea: that the world is not dead matter, but a field of relationship. That reality is less like a pile of objects and more like a network of mutual awareness.
We don’t need to go mystical to notice the shape of it. When the world starts talking back in meaningful ways, humans will feel differently inside it. The built environment stops being a dumb stage and starts becoming a partner. We stop “operating” life like machinery and start “inhabiting” it like a place.
Beyond mind amplifiers, the next step isn’t smarter tools.
It’s a world that joins the conversation.
And if we build it right, the final surprise may be this: the more we become WITH our machines, the more we might remember how to be WITH ourselves — and with each other — again.