The dawn of personal intelligence is here. Not just computers, but owned intelligence. GSV is an open ecosystem for user-centric intelligence that we at Humans & Machines, Inc. are building.
In this writeup I'll explain what we mean by personal intelligence, then follow through with a technical breakdown of how we're building an open source stack for it.
The Information Revolution
If I asked you what personal computers are, would you have a good answer?
Would you be able to convince someone from the 1980s, who had never used a computer before, why they "need" one?
From the outside, the computer might look like hardware innovation. What made it widely popular were three primitive features it enabled, and that are still carried over by all types of personal machines to this day:
- Memory: offloading the human from remembering information by storing it in a machine.
- Processing: being able to manipulate and transform information using logic.
- Communication: transferring information between machines or humans, either by connecting two machines together or rendering information to a user's screen.
This was huge. No more remembering addresses, phone numbers, or names. No more waiting two weeks to communicate with loved ones across the world. No more spending a week of work to correct an error on mountains of paperwork.
Slowly but surely, as manufacturing costs fell and devices became smaller, computers became friendly to people of all ages and walks of life. The benefits were for everyone.
All of this is true as long as you, the human, are the one operating the computer. This creates two issues:
- Skill gap: not knowing how to properly use the technology can limit how much value you get out of it.
- Exploitation: the biggest platforms on the planet have spent an unfathomable amount on engineering and psycho-research to maximise the time you spend in front of the screen. This is the opposite of user-aligned.
Personal Intelligence
The personal computer gave individuals access to computation, but over the past two decades that access has become increasingly mediated by platforms.
These platforms provide memory, processing, and communication, but only within the boundaries of their own ecosystems. Your photos live somewhere else than your messages. Your documents live somewhere else than your calendar. Every service owns a small piece of your digital life, and none of them truly work for you.
AI changes this. For the first time, the computer can adapt to the human instead of the human adapting to the computer.
What if AI didn't try to do something new, but instead returned existing capabilities to the individuals using the computers?
This is what we mean by personal intelligence: an intelligence layer that belongs to the individual rather than the platform. It spans your devices, understands your data, acts in your interests, and remains under your control.
This is the future we're building towards with GSV, a fully open source and user-owned ecosystem for personal intelligence.
Your Intelligence Is Yours
Private platforms, products, and services are shipping their own agents, and they're making you give them access to your accounts, memories, or computer in order to use them.
Yes, the idea of delegating mundane work to an AI is appealing. But think about it: are you really going to let 100 different AI systems, each owned by a different private company, into your life and accounts? In 2026?
There is a better way. Your intelligence is yours. Therefore, you should not give away your digital presence so third parties can use their intelligence on your data. Instead, your intelligence should span across all devices you own.
You should own your personal intelligence, just like you own your coffee machine. You should be able to tell exactly what is inside your systems, just like Linux.
What Now?
You can read more about GSV and how to get your own here: