Why the Search for Minds Needs a Department of Technology
By Department of Technology
Third in a series. If you’re new here, start with The Quietest Minds in the Galaxy May Be the Oldest, then Can You Whisper Across the Galaxy?. The math lives in the technical appendix.
Tying the string
In the first article of this series I made a claim I’ve been circling ever since: we can’t count minds we haven’t learned to define, and the first place we’ll have to define them is here on Earth.
Then I spent two articles on equations, lasers and entangled photons. Fair enough, those were the fun parts. This one is where I tie the string.
Here’s the short version. The Department of Technology proposal at department.technology/ is usually pitched as a way to govern artificial intelligence, protect student data and secure our infrastructure, and it is that. But the same machinery it would need for those jobs turns out to be the machinery the search for other minds needs too: shared definitions, shared measurements, rules that help civilizations last, and an accountable body to make hard calls. I want to show you where each piece connects.
A note on sourcing before I start. Everything I attribute to the proposal comes from what’s published on our site. Where I’m extending it, adding my own idea, I’ll say so. That’s the same habit I tried to keep in the appendix: you should always be able to tell what’s established, what’s proposed and what’s mine.
What the proposal actually says
Our DoT site describes itself as an independent policy research and advocacy project based in San Diego. Its central argument is simple to state: every official who makes technology policy should be accountable to voters. As the site puts it, many of the most consequential decisions of this era, about artificial intelligence, surveillance, autonomous weapons, student data, quantum computing and digital infrastructure, are being made by people nobody elected.
The fix we propose is a Department of Technology at four levels of government:
- Federal: a cabinet-level Secretary of Technology, nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, with real authority over national AI policy, cybersecurity standards and digital infrastructure.
- State: a directly elected Technology Secretary serving four-year terms.
- County and local: elected technology supervisors and directors, accountable to the communities they serve.
Our site’s work covers far more than this series touches: draft legislation on AI disclosure and whistleblower protection, a privacy proposal called the Data Sovereignty Act, school and college identity systems under the names School Contact and College Contact, plans for continuity of government during blackouts and electromagnetic pulses, draft conventions on autonomous weapons, and more.
One thing I want to say plainly: this is a proposal. No such department exists, and nobody in government has adopted the plan. Everything below is an argument for what could be, not a description of what is.
Four terms, four jobs
If you read the technical appendix, you’ll remember that the Sentience equation boils down to a handful of terms that matter most. Here is how I’d map them onto what a Department of Technology could do.
| Equation term | The question it asks | What a Department could do | What the proposal already includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| ψ (psi) | Is this mind actually sentient? | Define tests and thresholds | The RMS classification framework; sentience safeguards and stop criteria for biocomputing |
| d | Could we detect it? | Set measurement standards | The SCOPE index and the Void Hypothesis |
| τ (tau) | How long does it last? | Help civilizations survive their own technology | The No First Use Quantum Pledge, the No Weaponization of Biocomputing Pledge, treaty drafts, continuity-of-government planning |
| p (emergence) | How often do minds change form? | Track the transitions as they happen | Registration and public reporting for high-complexity experiments |
Let me take them one at a time.
Defining minds (ψ)
The hardest term in my equation is ψ, the probability that an intelligent system is genuinely sentient. I said in the appendix that we can’t measure it remotely, and I stand by that. But “we can’t measure it from 500 light-years away” doesn’t mean “we can’t make progress on it here.”
This is where the proposal’s work on biocomputing gets interesting. The site’s article on the subject starts from an honest admission: researchers don’t have a settled definition of consciousness, so no clean test exists for telling whether a lab-grown neural system has morally relevant experience. Its answer isn’t to pretend otherwise. It asks what society should do if researchers cannot confidently answer the question at all, and proposes a precautionary approach. That includes classifying experiments by their potential cognitive complexity, increasing oversight as complexity grows, monitoring for predefined warning signs, requiring an independently reviewed shutdown plan before a high-complexity experiment starts, and sending any evidence of potentially significant cognition to independent review, not to the research team alone.
The article also draws careful distinctions that I wish more public conversations drew: between biological activity, intelligence, learning, consciousness, sentience and moral status. They’re related, but none of them automatically implies the next.
Now here’s my addition. Suppose a Department did the hard moral work of deciding, in advance, what evidence would make us pause an experiment on a neural organoid. That list of indicators, written down and argued over, would become the closest thing we have to a working yardstick for ψ. It wouldn’t answer the astronomical question. But it would mean that if we ever face a strange signal from a strange mind, we won’t be inventing our standards in the middle of the surprise.
Measuring the quiet (d)
The second job is measurement. In the first post I described the SCOPE index, which scores a civilization on a scale of 1 to 100 across five dimensions: Synthetic integration, Complexity, Operational utility, Processing capacity and Efficiency. Its motivating idea, the Miniaturization Paradox, says that advanced civilizations are more likely to move toward dense, efficient computation than toward star-sized machines, and so might look cold and dark to our current telescopes.
Two honest notes. First, SCOPE is a hypothesis, not an established finding. It hasn’t been tested against observations, and I’d treat it that way. Second, it has relatives in the literature. The cosmologist John Barrow proposed back in 1998 a scale ranking civilizations by how small a scale they can manipulate, which is a cousin of the same intuition. I think SCOPE is stronger for acknowledging that lineage, and I’d encourage anyone working on it to do so.
Why does this belong in a Department of Technology? Because measurement standards are a classic public job. Think of how much depends on agreed units, definitions and test procedures that nobody gets rich from. A federal technology department working with agencies like NIST and the National Science Foundation could convene the astronomers, particle physicists and computer scientists who’d have to agree on what an efficient civilization’s footprint might look like, so that observations from different instruments can be compared. The site’s own technosignature analysis of the Amaterasu particle is one early example of the kind of cross-disciplinary work I mean.
Lasting (τ)
The third job is the one I find most moving. In my equation, how long a civilization lasts, τ, is among the biggest drivers of how many minds exist. And persistence isn’t a constant of nature. It depends on choices.
This is where the proposal’s pledges and treaties come in. It calls for a No First Use Quantum Pledge, modeled on nuclear arms control precedent, and a draft International Treaty on Quantum Intelligence. It calls for a ban on using AI in nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. And it proposes a No Weaponization of Biocomputing Pledge, an international commitment that living computational systems will never be developed or deployed for warfare. The site’s reasoning on that last one is worth noting: unlike code, a biological system built for one purpose can’t be repurposed by editing a file, so the labs, cell lines and expertise built to weaponize it would become a standing capability that’s hard to dismantle.
Add the site’s continuity-of-government work, covering electromagnetic pulse resilience, blackout protocols and infrastructure protection, and you get a picture of a civilization trying to lengthen its own τ.
I should be careful here. The claim that pledges and treaties actually extend a civilization’s lifespan is an argument, not a result. Arms control agreements have a mixed record, and nobody can run a controlled experiment on civilizational survival. But if you believe persistence matters, and the math in my equation says it matters enormously, then these are the kinds of levers worth pulling.
Changing form (p)
The fourth job is watching the transitions. My equation asks how often a biological civilization hands its thinking over to engineered tissue or machines. That’s a question about the future of any species, and we happen to be running the only observable example right now, on this planet.
It’s a sample of one, which is a weakness, but it’s one we can watch in real time, which is more than Drake ever had. The proposal’s call for mandatory registration and public reporting of high-complexity biocomputing experiments, in the spirit of clinical trial registries, would turn what’s now scattered and private into data. So would disclosure rules for AI systems. A registry of how long organoid systems last, how they scale and how they fail would give us first measurements for the biocomputing branch of the equation.
Talking (my extension)
The previous post raised a question the proposal doesn’t, as far as I can tell from the site, address: what happens if we ever receive a signal?
The site does propose open standards for quantum technologies, and the logic of standards bodies translates well to communication. Beyond that, I’d like to suggest something new: a standing, nonbinding contact protocol, drafted in public, before we need it. Who is allowed to confirm a detection? Who decides whether to reply, and what to say? How do we handle the possibility that a signal looks like noise?
There is already a body of thinking on this inside the SETI community, and I’m not proposing to replace it. I’m saying that a department already responsible for communication standards, verification and international agreements would be a sensible place to host the conversation, and that “we’ll figure it out when it happens” is a thin plan for the biggest conversation in human history.
Why elected, for something this far off?
A fair question: the search for aliens is not a municipal matter. Why should voters in a county or a city have anything to do with it?
Here’s my case. The decisions at the center of this series aren’t purely technical. An engineer can tell you what a score on a neural-complexity test means. Nobody can tell you from a measurement alone what we owe an organoid that passes it, or whether to answer a message from the stars. Those are value judgments. In a democracy, value judgments with consequences for everyone should be made by people who answer to the public.
I also think the pipeline matters. The labs, the university programs, the compute and the people all sit at the state, county and local levels long before anything reaches a cabinet table. A structure that listens at every level has a better chance of noticing a problem early.
What critics will say
I’d be undermining the whole point of this series if I skipped the objections, so here are the ones I find strongest.
“We already have institutions for this.” NASA, the National Science Foundation and private efforts like the SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen already work on astrobiology and technosignatures. Critics could reasonably argue that better coordination among existing agencies would do the job without creating a new cabinet department.
“Elected technical officials may politicize expertise.” Some people prefer appointed expert bodies insulated from election cycles precisely so that hard technical calls don’t turn on popularity. That’s a real tension, and supporters of the proposal need a clear answer to it.
“New cabinet departments are costly and slow.” Creating one is a major undertaking, and reformers sometimes argue it’s better to strengthen what exists.
“It’s too early.” Today’s organoids are small and narrow, and no credible researcher claims they’re sentient. Regulating ahead of the evidence could slow legitimate research. The proposal’s reply is precaution with proportionality, with oversight that scales as complexity grows, but reasonable people weigh that trade-off differently.
“The foundations are untested.” The Sentience equation and the SCOPE index are hypotheses. Policy built on them inherits their weaknesses.
Where do I land? My honest view is that the fragmentation argument is the proposal’s strongest card: many agencies, each owning a slice, none owning the whole. But the critics are right on one point that I won’t wave away. The case for elected technology leadership needs more evidence than I’ve given it here, and it deserves a fair fight.
What a first year could look like
To keep this practical, here’s a sketch. This is mine, not something from the site.
- A national biocomputing registry and review standard, so that high-complexity experiments are logged and independently reviewed.
- A public working group on classification tests for sentience, bringing neuroscientists, philosophers, ethicists and engineers to the same table.
- A nonbinding contact-protocol workshop with the SETI community, to draft answers to the “who decides” questions before we need them.
None of that requires believing anyone is out there. It only requires believing that the questions are worth asking early.
Why I keep coming back to this
When I started this series, I thought I was writing about aliens. I now think I was writing about us: about how a species decides what counts as a mind, how it measures what it can’t see, and how it keeps itself around long enough to find out.
The search for other minds and the governance of the minds we’re building are the same project seen from two ends. If the proposal at department.technology/ gets one thing right, it’s the instinct to treat them together, and to insist that someone accountable is in the room when we do.
I’d love to hear where you think it breaks.
Questions to think about
- Should decisions about what counts as sentient be made by experts, by elected officials, or by some mix of the two?
- Is a pre-written contact protocol wise preparation or premature bureaucracy?
- Which of the four jobs (defining, measuring, lasting, changing form) do you think a government is best suited to do, and which should be left to scientists and the public?
Summary
What if the oldest minds in the galaxy are also the quietest? Across this series, we’ve explored a new way to count sentient life, from biological minds to biocomputing and Machine Intelligence, and asked what a Department of Technology could do about it. Every like and share puts these questions in front of someone who might see the sky differently. These ideas get stronger when more people argue with them. If this made you think, tap like, share it with a curious friend, and tell us where you think it breaks.
Read the whole series: The Quietest Minds in the Galaxy May Be the Oldest · Can You Whisper Across the Galaxy? · Technical Appendix: The Sentience Equation, Step by Step