Shannon Creek is an experimental project—equal parts art, storytelling, research, and personal learning—to explore the frontier of interfacing AI with the natural world.

AI today is dominated by large language models that:

  • Exist solely to serve humans
  • Think only to the degree necessary to answer human prompts
  • Have no agency of their own
  • Are disembodied
  • Have extremely limited action with the real world, except via API calls to other servers
  • Focus on chat or solving problems that involve transforming information (research, writing, coding, etc.)

Why This Site?

Who Are You?

Someone who loves the natural world and technology in equal measures. I am a humanist who loves nothing more than spending time outdoors, reading good books, and writing. I care about human flourishing, both at the individual and societal levels. I have also spent much of my career writing software and developing cutting-edge technology. I currently lead software engineering at an autonomy company.

I have spent my life trying to reconcile these two halves of myself. I conceived of Shannon Creek when I asked myself, “Can I imagine a personal project that would unite these two sides?”

Some other things I have done:

  • Built a nonprofit aimed at using swarms of drones to break starvation sieges in Syria
  • Helped design an autonomous boat to find and rescue survivors at sea
  • Written a book called Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal
  • Professionally published multiple science fiction short stories
  • Earned my PhD in Political Science at Stanford
  • Served 22 years in the US Air Force, flying cargo planes and developing drone technology

I also have a personal website.

Why Shannon Creek? Why Anne?

I am riffing off Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard’s 1974 Pulitzer-prize winning book. Dillard chronicles her year spent exploring Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. Her close observations of nature provoke profound insights about life, nature, and the human journey.

The book is a case study in how embodied experience in the natural world helps constitute thought. It also stands as an example of the pursuit of flourishing through experience, reflection, and connection. I love its rootedness in one particular place; it teaches us that we can plumb untold depths simply by paying attention to where we are at. If I want to teach an AI to appreciate the natural world, I can’t do that in the abstract. I would prefer to embody it in one particular place and teach it to go deep.

“Shannon” is a nod to Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. By giving us the language and tools to talk precisely about information, he laid the foundations for a framework that unites technology and the natural world. Information is the universal substrate, computation the universal process animating the universe.

Anne was as good a name as any.