The Runcible Arc
Inception of the Term
The word Runcible originates with Edward Lear, who used it in his nonsense poetry to describe objects of ambiguous but large scale and powerful utility (“runcible spoon”). The term carried forward into science fiction as a symbol for tools that transcend ordinary categories – the supernormal.
Stephenson’s Use in The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson took that inheritance and, in The Diamond Age, turned “runcible” into the name for a computer, in the form of a multi-page book, each page a display, which was a continuous entertainer tutor and advisor from child to adult – to help you be the best you can be. In that world, runcibles were civilization’s ultimate instruments: computation made material, ideas made real.
The Path
- (1997) Neal Stephenson publishes “A Diamond Age”
- (1998) First Company: COMMITMENT: Doolittle founded his first version of Runcible around the year 2000, aiming to explore how technology could be harnessed for this purpose.
- (2002) Registered the Domain Name “Runcible.com”.
- (2006) First Draft of his work on natural law.
- (2009) Second Draft of his work on natural law.
- (2012) Natural Law Institute: THEORY: Realizing that the problem was not merely technical but epistemological, he founded the Natural Law Institute to research the grammar of truth, reciprocity, and decidability—to produce the theoretical foundation for the runcible machine.
- (2012) Reality by Chanting: PLATFORM: Founding RBC was another step toward this vision, developing the ai-first universal software platform (more of a Operating System Shell really). It’s ready. But it needs the AI.
- (2017) The article “All you need is attention” is published, and the team and he realize that they didn’t need to build the hardware stack and platform – just the logic and training.
- (2024) With the release of GPT4 the team recognize it was now possible to produce the governance layer for LLMs, and then use the governed LLMs as the AI for their ai-first universal software platform.
- (2025) Runcible Inc.: TRAINING: Today, with Runcible Inc., they are creating the ‘smartware’ for AI. Not the foundation model, but the training of any foundation model – not for nanotech fabrication, but for truth-constrained artificial intelligence: an impervious conscience for AI.
The Purpose
Each step has been part of the same arc: to achieve political change through technology and truth. Runcible is not just a company name—it is the name for a civilization project. Like Neal Stephenson’s Runcible (book-computer), it is designed to make anything possible. But in our case, what it makes possible is cooperation: auditable, computable, scalable truth.