1. Beyond common sense AI

The first distinctive trait is a critical stance toward artificial intelligence, and in particular against technological determinism: the idea that technical development follows an inevitable trajectory to which one can only adapt. The Center asserts the possibility of choice:

over which systems to build, for what purposes, and within what limits.

2. The way intelligent and adaptive technologies are built

The Center adopts sustainability and equity as its own criteria, translated concretely into a preference for light, targeted solutions over large general-purpose models. Several technical choices recur in the notes that are also choices of value:

small and specialized functions instead of all-encompassing systems;

local models and private AI, which keep data and computation close to those who use them;

disconnected models and offline AI, which function without depending on remote infrastructure;

a return to algorithms and applied mathematics as a transparent foundation, against the opacity of larger systems.

3. Forms of intelligence

The interest is not in “intelligence” in the singular, but in the different forms of intelligence and in intelligent machines as one such form. Central to this is the concept of Umwelt, the self-world proper to each organism or system: the set of what is perceptible and relevant to it. From this follows the attention to ways of interacting and ways of engaging with the world: every intelligent system has its own domain of experience, and to design it means to decide that domain.

On this plane sit the conceptual tools that recur in the notes: functional decomposition (breaking an intelligent behaviour down into its elementary functions), the domain of experience, and basic experiments as a method for investigating them.

4. Cooperation as method

The fourth trait is relational. The Center conceives of itself as a b structure, in which knowledge is built together. This orientation has a direct consequence for the participation model discussed further below: the Center is not an initiative that waits passively, nor is it a closed organization — it is a space open to the contribution of individuals and organizations.