Medium Article: https://medium.com/@jsmith0475/building-human-facing-agentic-systems-the-psychology-and-sociology-of-super-intelligence-1571cf565d51

Dr. Jerry Smith's January 2025 Medium article explores the psychological, sociological, and ethical implications of "human-facing agentic systems," AI powered by large language models (LLMs). These systems, leveraging multi-headed attention mechanisms, aim to collaborate with humans, not merely serve as tools. The article emphasizes the potential for both empowerment and manipulation inherent in these systems, highlighting the crucial role of self-interest, emotion, and identity in human-AI interaction. Smith concludes with a call for responsible development guided by transparency, inclusivity, and justice, warning against the potential for these systems to become instruments of control.

Building Human-Facing Agentic Systems: The Psychology and Sociology of Super Intelligence

Medium Article: https://medium.com/@jsmith0475/ai-that-thinks-backward-the-rise-of-defensive-intelligence-c0260765a2ed
The academic paper, by Dr. Jerry A. Smith, introduces "Defensive Intelligence" as a new architectural principle for agentic AI, arguing that inversion reasoning—explicitly modeling and avoiding failure modes—significantly improves system robustness over traditional goal-oriented methods. It proposes four technical patterns, such as Adversarial Attention Heads and Failure Mode Memory, that embed this defensive mindset directly into transformer architectures, claiming up to a forty percent reduction in task failures. Beyond implementation, the source explores the profound implications of this failure-aware AI, addressing the cognitive asymmetry between defensive AI and optimism-biased humans, the sociological risks of concentrating "negative knowledge" among elite actors, and the ethical challenges of prioritizing which failures the AI should avoid. Ultimately, the work suggests that this type of defensive reasoning may result in an intelligence that is fundamentally more cautious and alien than human cognition.

AI That Thinks Backward: The Rise of Defensive Intelligence

In-Depth Explorations of Neuroscience-Inspired Architectures Revolutionizing AI.

AI That Thinks Backward: The Rise of Defensive Intelligence

Dr. Jerry A. Smith

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