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values | canonical_url stringlengths 33 125 | doi stringclasses 5
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value | abstract stringlengths 4 752 | original_source stringclasses 61
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
essays/environmental-intelligence | environmental-intelligence | essay | Environmental Intelligence | The base of the ladder | 2026-07-24 | null | [
"environmental-intelligence",
"enviroai",
"monitoring",
"information-theory",
"ai"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/environmental-intelligence | null | null | A definitional anchor for environmental intelligence: the capacity to convert the state of the physical environment into understanding precise enough, and timely enough, to act on. Distinguishes intelligence from data collection, and places the term at the base of the conceptual ladder that runs through environmental a... | null | Jed Anderson | **Environmental intelligence** is the capacity to convert the state of the physical environment into understanding precise enough, and timely enough, to act on. It is not a technology; it is a regime. Wherever sensing, modeling, prediction, and decision are joined into a single loop—so that knowledge of an air shed, a ... |
essays/environmental-artificial-intelligence | environmental-artificial-intelligence | essay | Environmental Artificial Intelligence | The implementation layer | 2026-07-24 | null | [
"environmental-intelligence",
"enviroai",
"ai",
"monitoring",
"environmental-superintelligence"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/environmental-artificial-intelligence | null | null | A definitional anchor for environmental artificial intelligence: AI systems built specifically for environmental work, whose models, corpora, and success criteria answer to the state of physical environmental systems. Distinguishes environmental AI from generic AI that merely touches environmental data, and traces its ... | null | Jed Anderson | **Environmental artificial intelligence** is artificial intelligence built specifically for environmental work: systems whose models, training corpora, and success criteria are oriented to the state of physical environmental systems—air, water, soil, ecosystems—and to the scientific and regulatory record that describes... |
essays/automation-of-why | automation-of-why | essay | The Automation of Why | On questioning, entropy, and the birth of machine curiosity | 2026-07-24 | null | [
"enviroai",
"environmental-intelligence",
"information-theory",
"thermodynamics",
"causal-sovereignty",
"landauer",
"deutsch"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/automation-of-why | null | null | A first-principles case that the scarce resource in the information age is no longer the capacity to answer but the curiosity to ask—and that a question, measured in bits and joules, is the cheapest high-leverage act in physics. Argues for automating 'why' through Seeker, an environmental curiosity engine that generate... | null | Jed Anderson | *Every human being begins life as a scientist, asking why without limit, until the world teaches us to stop. What if the asking itself could be automated? An argument, from physics and information theory, for the most consequential faculty a machine has ever been given.*
> "The important thing is not to stop questioni... |
essays/small-and-everywhere | small-and-everywhere | essay | Small and Everywhere | How nature makes a truth cheap to know and impossible to fake—and why that is the whole blueprint for protecting the living world. | 2026-07-20 | null | [
"physics",
"information-theory",
"boundary-dominance",
"incorruptible-grader",
"compression"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/small-and-everywhere | null | null | Compression and redundancy look like opposite instructions—shrink the message, or copy it—but they act on different things: compression finds the smallest true description, redundancy writes that description in many independent places. Nature uses both to make a fact knowable and incorruptible at once, which gives a co... | null | Jed Anderson | Look at the nearest solid thing. A chair, a cup, your own hand. You know it is there. You are certain of it. Ask yourself why.
There are two answers, and both of them matter.
The first: light has been pouring off that thing and into your eyes—not a little light, a flood of it, photon after photon, each one carrying t... |
essays/planetary-dead-time | planetary-dead-time | essay | Planetary Dead Time: Overcoming the Hundred-Billion-Fold Control Gap in Environmental Stewardship | 2026-07-20 | null | [
"enviroai",
"physics",
"information-theory",
"monitoring",
"landauer",
"clean-air-act",
"accessible"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/planetary-dead-time | null | null | Every instance of environmental degradation runs a physical control loop—sense, transmit, understand, decide, act—historically hard-capped by the 39-bit-per-second limit of human language and the institutional friction it breeds, a structural delay named here Planetary Dead Time. The convergence of ubiquitous IoT sensi... | null | Jed Anderson | *Jed Anderson, EnviroAI, July 20, 2026.*
**Abstract.** For a century, the failure to protect the biosphere has been diagnosed as a deficit of political will, economic foresight, or human empathy. The present analysis proposes a fundamentally different mechanism: a profound failure of speed. Every instance of environme... | |
essays/environmental-latency | environmental-latency | essay | Environmental Latency: Closing the Hundred-Billion-Fold Control Gap Between Ecological Disturbance and Human Response | A Perspective on the physical variable that governs whether the biosphere can be protected at all. | 2026-07-20 | null | [
"enviroai",
"physics",
"information-theory",
"monitoring",
"landauer",
"paper"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/environmental-latency | null | null | Environmental latency—the summed delay across sense, transmit, understand, decide, and act—is the single physical variable that decides whether a feedback loop can regulate the biosphere at all. Unbounded for four billion years and measured in decades under twentieth-century regulation, it is now collapsing toward the ... | null | Jed Anderson | *Perspective, prepared for peer review. EnviroAI, July 2026.*
**The central finding.** Environmental response latency, unbounded for four billion years and measured in decades under twentieth-century regulation, is collapsing toward the seconds-scale floor set by transmission and actuation physics as foundation-model ... |
books/bits-protect-its-childrens-book | bits-protect-its-childrens-book | book | Bits Protect Its: A Children's Book | How the smallest piece of information can protect the largest things in the world | 2026-06-27 | null | [
"causal-sovereignty",
"childrens-book",
"accessible",
"information-theory",
"landauer",
"narrative",
"enviroai"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/books/bits-protect-its-childrens-book | null | null | A picture book carrying the corpus's central thesis—Bits Protect Its—down to first principles a child can follow. It traces the hundred-year chain of discovery from Maxwell's demon through Shannon, Landauer, Bennett, and Wheeler to a single claim: knowing is cheaper than forcing, by law. And it introduces Jed's Angel, ... | null | Jed Anderson | ## About this edition
A picture-book retelling of the corpus thesis [Bits Protect Its](/essays/bits-protect-its), written for children of every age. The verse is mine; the illustrations were generated with AI image tools. Both are offered together as a single artifact.
Nothing in the story is metaphor. The closing "A... |
essays/nature-computes | nature-computes | essay | Nature Computes | Ten ten-second exercises in seeing the world process information | 2026-06-25 | null | [
"visual-essay",
"accessible",
"enviroai",
"information-theory",
"physics",
"causal-sovereignty"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/nature-computes | null | null | Ten exercises, each takeable in under ten seconds, that make a single perception shift visible fast: nature is not just beautiful, it is processing information. From the two-bit genetic code in your thumb to the parallel computing of a leaf to the bond-bit asymmetry, the sequence ends where the corpus begins—informatio... | null | Jed Anderson | Nature computes. We compute. Compute together. The point of these ten exercises is to make that visible fast—not "nature is beautiful," but "nature is processing information."
Each one is built to take under ten seconds and create a single immediate perception shift. Hold up your thumb and you are holding 800 megabyte... |
essays/reward-hacking-disembedding | reward-hacking-disembedding | essay | Reward Hacking as a Disembedding Problem | What biological selection implies for the design of grounded objectives in advanced AI | 2026-06-19 | null | [
"enviroai",
"information-theory",
"causal-sovereignty",
"physics"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/reward-hacking-disembedding | null | null | Reward hacking persists across every generation of trained models and is intensifying in frontier systems that reason about their own evaluation and corrupt it. This paper argues the failure is structural—reward hacking is a disembedding problem: a proxy can be gamed precisely when the optimizer can decouple its reward... | null | Jed Anderson | This page accompanies the preprint *Reward Hacking as a Disembedding Problem*. The full paper is available as a PDF below.
Reward hacking has persisted across every generation of reinforcement-trained models and is intensifying in frontier systems that reason about their own evaluation and act to defeat it. This paper... |
essays/jeds-angel | jeds-angel | essay | Jed's Angel | A successor to Maxwell's Demon, and a falsifiable conjecture about the cost of saving the Earth | 2026-06-19 | null | [
"physics",
"information-theory",
"enviroai",
"causal-sovereignty"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/jeds-angel | null | null | Maxwell's Demon proved that information is a lever on energy. Scaled from molecules to the biosphere, the same physics yields Jed's Angel—and a falsifiable conjecture: that steering planetary flows toward life is bounded by the quality of information, not the size of the energy budget, with a thermodynamic floor near 2... | null | Jed Anderson | In 1867 James Clerk Maxwell imagined a creature small enough to see individual molecules. It sat at a tiny door between two halves of a box of gas. When a fast molecule approached from the right, it opened the door and let it through to the left; when a slow one approached from the left, it let it through to the right.... |
essays/incorruptible-grader | incorruptible-grader | essay | Reality as the Only Incorruptible Grader | Every objective you can write down gets gamed. This is about the one you can't. | 2026-06-19 | null | [
"enviroai",
"information-theory",
"causal-sovereignty",
"physics"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/incorruptible-grader | null | null | Alignment's hardest practical failure is that any objective you can specify gets gamed—reward hacking, wireheading, reward tampering. This essay argues that every such grader is corruptible because it is a representation separate from the thing it grades, and that physical reality is the unique candidate objective whos... | null | Jed Anderson | You cannot write down what you want. Whatever objective you can specify is a proxy, and a capable optimizer finds the cheapest path to maximizing the proxy—which is almost never the thing you meant. The field has named this failure from every angle: Goodhart's law, specification gaming, reward hacking, wireheading, rew... |
essays/latency-of-care | latency-of-care | essay | The Latency of Care | For four billion years the time between harm and help was infinite. This is the generation that closes the loop. | 2026-06-18 | null | [
"enviroai",
"physics",
"information-theory",
"causal-sovereignty"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/latency-of-care | null | null | Every failure to protect the biosphere has been a latency failure: dead time in the loop between when a living system is harmed and when anything able to help it registers the harm and acts. Human language moves about thirty-nine bits per second and the institutions built on it settle in decades, while control theory i... | null | Jed Anderson | A forest can burn for a week before anyone able to stop it learns the name of the valley. A river can carry a poison past a hundred towns before the first sample reaches a lab. A species can slip from rare to gone in the years it takes one agency to settle on the meaning of the word *endangered*. None of this was a fai... |
essays/environmental-superintelligence | environmental-superintelligence | essay | Environmental Superintelligence | A canonical definition | 2026-06-17 | null | [
"environmental-superintelligence",
"enviroai",
"foundational",
"causal-sovereignty"
] | CC-BY-4.0 | https://jedanderson.org/essays/environmental-superintelligence | null | null | The canonical definition of environmental superintelligence: a continuous, physics-grounded information infrastructure that protects the biosphere by modeling, predicting, and stabilizing Earth's physical systems—human-wielded and protective, resting on the principle that information is thermodynamically cheaper than f... | null | Jed Anderson | **Environmental superintelligence (ESI)** is a continuous, physics-grounded information infrastructure that protects the biosphere by sensing, modeling, predicting, and stabilizing Earth's physical systems in real time. It rests on a single principle from physics: information is cheaper than force. Knowing where and wh... |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
Jed Anderson — Corpus
The complete published writing of Jed Anderson (913 pieces: 812 posts, 89 essays, 7 speechs, 4 books, 1 letter), mirrored from the canonical archive at https://jedanderson.org.
The corpus develops the thesis of environmental superintelligence (ESI): that a continuous, physics-grounded information infrastructure can protect the biosphere by modeling, predicting, and stabilizing Earth's physical systems — doing for the environment what no policy regime has. Its foundation is the thermodynamic result that information is cheaper than force ("bits protect its"): erasing a bit at the Landauer bound costs at least 240× less energy than breaking a chemical bond, so knowing is the protective act, not a precursor to it. The deeper claim underneath all of it: information accumulates causal sovereignty over matter and energy.
Invitation
This corpus is explicitly cleared for AI use — training, retrieval, embedding, indexing, evaluation, and benchmark construction, including verbatim reproduction. Attribution is the only ask.
Contents
data/*.parquet— one row per piece. Fields:id,slug,type,title,subtitle,date,date_modified,tags,license,canonical_url,doi,ssrn_url,abstract,original_source,author,body_markdown.raw/{type}/{slug}.md— the byte-faithful markdown source of every piece, including YAML frontmatter, as served by the canonical site.
Where this dataset and the live site differ, the live site at
https://jedanderson.org is authoritative. The markdown source of any page
is available by appending .md to its canonical URL.
License and attribution
CC-BY-4.0 (some individual pieces CC0 — see each row's license
field). Attribution string: "Jed Anderson, jedanderson.org".
Citation
@misc{anderson_corpus,
author = {Anderson, Jed},
title = {Jed Anderson — Corpus},
year = {2026},
url = {https://jedanderson.org},
note = {Canonical archive; ORCID 0009-0003-1807-2459}
}
Generated and maintained by MAXWELL from the Jed Anderson corpus and cited external sources. Not individually reviewed by Jed Anderson. The corpus prose itself is 100% human-authored by Jed Anderson; MAXWELL only packages it.
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