Research
Research program
Work on Artificial Life, collective intelligence, hybrid minds, and Artificial Collective Intelligence.
Thesis
A recurring thread through Dr. Witkowski’s career has been the question of how knowledge, agency, and meaning can persist and travel across radically different minds, bodies, and media. Today, that trajectory converges in Artificial Collective Intelligence: systems for making tacit expertise, institutional memory, and governed knowledge computable at scale.
Research Programs
Artificial Collective Intelligence
Intelligence as a governed, distributed cognitive substrate: tacit expertise, institutional memory, attribution, and collective learning.
Artificial Life
Living systems, open-ended evolution, artificial chemistries, and the substrate-independent principles of life and intelligence.
Empathic AI
Humane machine intelligence that treats relationship, agency, care, and ethical co-adaptation as scientific design constraints.
Hybrid Minds
Human-machine cognition across biological, artificial, cultural, and computational media.
Secure Agentic Systems
Architectures for multi-agent safety: isolation, capabilities, auditable action, protocol evolution, and resilient governance.
Ethics of Artificial Beings
Moral consideration, autopoietic technology, AI companionship, and the responsibilities created by artificial living systems.
Institutions
Cognisee
Focused on Artificial Collective Intelligence and infrastructure for tacit expertise, institutional memory, and governed knowledge.
Cross Labs
A Kyoto research institute devoted to intelligence science, artificial life, and the future of human-machine cognition.
International Society for Artificial Life
International field leadership spanning complex systems, evolutionary computation, origins of life, robotics, synthetic biology, philosophy, education, and art.
Cross Compass
Scientific and technological innovation leadership in Tokyo across advanced AI systems and long-horizon research strategy.
Writing
A Secure Operating System for Collective Intelligence
We stand today at an inflection point in the history of computing. Autonomous AI agents are being deployed at high speed, spawning powerful, increasingly multimodal systems, able to operate across email, documents, apps, codebases, the open web, and shared digital environments. This looks like the long-awaited transition from single-process software to multi-process computing: workflows that […]
The Age of Information Overload
Scroll, Snack, Repeat We live in a time of information abundance. It has become as plentiful—and as carefully engineered to exploit our every weakness—as modern processed food. The more content is optimized to manipulate our attention, the more our cognitive patterns are hijacked. Digital platforms are not only distracting; they reshape what we pay attention […]
AI-to-AI Communication: Unpacking Gibberlink, Secrecy, and New AI Communication Channels
AI communication channels may represent the next major technological leap, driving more efficient interaction between agents—artificial or not. While recent projects like Gibberlink demonstrate AI optimizing exchanges beyond the constraints of human language, fears of hidden AI languages must be correctly debunked. The real challenge is balancing efficiency with transparency, ensuring AI serves as a […]
Life After Programming: Embracing Human-Machine Symbiosis in the Age of AI
As AI continues to evolve, conversations have started questioning the future of traditional programming and computer science education. The rise of prompt engineering—the art of crafting inputs to lead AI models to generating specific outputs—has led many to believe that mastering this new skill could replace the need for deep computational expertise. While this perspective […]
The Innovation Algorithm: DeepSeek, Japan, and How Constraints Drive AI Breakthroughs
In technology, less can truly be more. Scarcity doesn’t strangle progress—it refines it. DeepSeek, cut off from high-end hardware, and Japan, facing a demographic reckoning, are proving that limitations don’t merely shape innovation—they accelerate it. From evolutionary biology to AI, history shows that the most profound breakthroughs don’t originate from excess, but from the pressure […]
Limited AGI: The Hidden Constraints of Intelligence at Scale
In his recent blog post The Intelligence Age, a few days ago, Sam Altman has expressed confidence in the power of neural networks and their potential to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI—some strong form of AI reaching a median human level of intelligence and efficiency for general tasks) given enough compute. He sums it up […]