In 1970, at nineteen, Max Abecassis began a sixty-six-page philosophical manuscript, "Beyond The Romantic Animal" (BTRA). It opens with the observation that "it does not seem logical to assume that the earth’s four-billion-year story of evolution suddenly decides to stop." The manuscript saw humanity as a moment in that story. It foresaw a mind that would be a single whole, and kind to humanity. It also foresaw that humanity might lose the conditions of its own life before it understood what they were worth. That loss now shows up in employment statistics, fertility rates, loneliness surveys and youth mental health data.

Trained as an economist at Harvard (1973), Abecassis went on to a life of invention. He was issued 51 U.S. patents across unrelated fields, and a portfolio was licensed to leading manufacturers and studios, including Toshiba, IBM, and Time Warner. At CustomPlay LLC, he led teams of programmers and mappers in building a fully specified video information mapping and delivery system.

He is also the inventor of seven pending U.S. patent applications for AI systems that reason from first principles in any field, from athletic competition to the running of an organization. He published their subject matter before the patent office published the applications. Together with his commercial implementations, they are meant to show that the first-principles approach works. Systems of this kind can do what human experts do. Having built them, he is well placed to see what they will do to human work.

His larger work, "Self-Sustaining Isolated Societies" (SSIS), runs to more than 400 pages and is published at isolatedsocieties.org. SSIS is an effort to preserve the lived experience of being human for people not yet old enough to understand what is being lost on their behalf.

This work was produced in collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude, and the word is meant precisely. Both offered analysis, challenged assumptions and shaped the text across many drafts. The collaboration enlarged the capacities of both, which is the measure this work applies to everything else. It is also evidence of displacement. One author and Claude produced what once took a team.

The author welcomes inquiries from anyone who would fund or carry out development toward Superwisdom, and from those who wish to join the SSIS project. Questions and criticism from those with expertise are welcome too. Please email max@isolatedsocieties.org and include "SSIS" in the subject line.