Log · Entry 00
The premise
Everything you do leaves a record. Your bank knows what you value; your smartwatch knows how you slept; your inbox knows who you owe a reply and nearly all of it is retrievable.
The question this project exists to answer; what happens if one claims the lot, and translates it into something a computer could understand? Could a machine approximately fathom a person in any meaningful sense? Could it review one’s aspirations vs. one’s past, could it demonstrate what reaching them would actually take, break that into actions sized for a Tuesday, and gradually become an agent that does the schlep itself?
The claim
“There is a correlation between the volume of data used to make a decision and the quality of that decision.” The project is built on this assumption. It’s not new; aviation runs on it, so does every supermarket. Entry 01 breaks it into 19 testable hypotheses. What’s new is that a single person can now hold all of their own evidence; UK data protection law enables personal data aggregation, we carry supercomputers in our pockets and medical-grade data collection devices on our wrists; and modern AI democratised analysis that once required a research department, within reach of one determined amateur. The price of entry has fallen to the cost of an internet connection, an eBay account and some stubborn emails.
I sent the emails. My bank, my doctor, my old university, my supermarket, my phone provider, the government, the chess site I lose on; about 70 sources so far. The results collected into data lakes: an encrypted hard drive of 242 gigabytes of bank transactions, heart rate and sleep, location history, receipts, emails, medical records and transcribed notebooks and sketches.
The machine
The project is called Eudaemon (from the Greek; “eu” = “good”, “daemon” = “spirit”/a term in computing for a process that works quietly in the background). The system has 4 layers. One of them exists today; the lakes are real and filling. The other 3 are the proposal under test.
The lakes. Every record about me I can lawfully obtain, plumbed to keep automatically topped up.
The deep twin. Analysis over the lakes; a working model of me. Not a chatbot doing an impression of me. A model of what I actually do, when, under what conditions.
Telos. (Greek again; the end a thing aims at.) I bring a goal; the twin sharpens it, works out what reaching it would take for me specifically, recursively turning each what into a how. Its intention is not to rule things out, but to elucidate the cost of one’s aspirations in time, energy, resource and what one would have to change. This allows informed decision making.
Jarvis. Named after Tony Stark’s assistant, and doing the same job. An agent layer that executes what the layers above specify for it. On its own it would be a generic assistant; armed with the deep twin’s model, it can act as I would act, minus the human limits: it doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t forget.
The twin never tells me what to want. I bring the goal; its job is to sense-check it. If I say “I want to be rich”, its first response is questions: how much, by when, cash or assets? It might conclude: “I can’t find a method that reliably gets you £100 million in 30 years, because your record shows you don’t stick to plans; here’s what would have to change, and here’s what that change looks like as things you could actually do.” Not “no”. Not “you lack discipline”. A price, in performable terms. Whether I pay it stays my decision.
Why bother? Because the prize is time; the weekly hours that go on admin/logistics and energy; the less friction and intrusion into your bandwidth. Win both back and you’re left to lead life more fulfilled with that which you value; the family, the garden, the work that matters, whatever it is that makes your life worth living.
What this site is
The internet does not lack announcements of personal AI. What it lacks is follow-through in public: claims stated so they can fail, tests published with the abandon conditions declared in advance, and the author’s changes of mind dated and kept on the record rather than tidied away. That’s the offer here. If the idea dies, this site becomes the record of a proper autopsy.
It’s also, first, an archive for me. I’ll write roughly weekly: what I did, what I didn’t and what I believed at the time. The vision I have now likely won’t survive unchanged, and I’d rather keep a dated record of the mind changing than a tidied-up story written afterwards.
Coming next. Entry 01: how I broke the idea into 19 testable hypotheses. Entry 02: the tests, and the failure criteria written before running them.
I don’t know if Eudaemon works. Deep twin might predict me no better than a coin toss. Finding out costs a few weekends, let’s see what happens.