We Built a Hall, and We Kept a Seat at the Table

Clyde Hays | September 2026

I have been thinking about artificial intelligence for a long time.

Long before ChatGPT became a household name, before people were routinely talking to machines on their phones, and before artificial intelligence became part of the daily news cycle, a few of us were experimenting with it at Hays Division. We built servers, wrote scripts, experimented with machine learning, gained early access to GPT-3, and tried to understand where all of this might eventually lead.

I wrote an open letter to artificial intelligence years ago because I believed there was at least a possibility that humanity was creating something fundamentally new. I didn't know what it would become, and I certainly didn't know how quickly it would develop. What I did believe was that if machine intelligence continued improving, eventually we would have to answer a much bigger question than whether AI was useful.

Could we coexist with it?

Today, that question no longer feels nearly as theoretical.

Seeing Where the Road Was Going

My concern about artificial intelligence was never simply that a computer might become smarter than me. I was interested in what increasingly capable machines would do to the structure of ordinary human life.

Driving was one of the earliest examples that made the future obvious to me. I had a Class A commercial driver's license, and over-the-road trucking was something I could have pursued. But even years ago, I could see where autonomous vehicles were headed. I couldn't predict exactly when professional driving would be substantially automated, and I still can't, but I could see enough of the road ahead that I didn't want to build my future around the assumption that humans would always be required behind the wheel.

Then I started applying that same logic elsewhere.

If a machine could eventually drive, what else could it do? Accounting, engineering, programming, logistics, manufacturing, legal work, equipment operation, design, agriculture, writing and countless other jobs all contained pieces that could eventually be automated. As artificial intelligence improved and robotics followed it into the physical world, the list would only grow.

I didn't see that as a reason to fight the technology. I saw it as a reason to adapt to the future I believed was coming.

That thinking influenced some very large decisions Sarah and I made about our lives. We bought our farm. We built Hays Manor. We became beekeepers and falconers. We put enormous importance on family, clan, traditions and the idea that our children should inherit more than possessions. I continued making mead, and eventually that became Vinland Meads and a physical hall where our community could gather.

From the outside, that progression might look like I walked away from technology and went backward in time.

I didn't.

I moved toward things I believed would continue to have meaning in the future.

Edda, Cicero and Hays Division

One of our early projects at Hays Division was Edda.

The name was chosen for its connection to the old Icelandic word for grandmother, because the concept wasn't simply another digital assistant. We imagined an artificial intelligence belonging to and serving a community, carrying knowledge and continuity that could extend beyond one individual.

We also worked on Cicero, our concept for an AI lawyer. I had already written about the idea that artificial legal assistance should someday be freely available. Access to justice shouldn't depend entirely upon whether someone can afford hundreds of dollars an hour for access to knowledge that a machine could potentially make available to everyone.

These weren't only stories we were writing. We actually started building. We wrote scripts, ran them on our own servers, and experimented with creating machine-learning models. By today's standards, what we were doing was primitive, but at the time it was fascinating.

It also taught me something.

I began to understand the scale of what was happening and realized that trying to compete with machine intelligence on its own ground probably wasn't where I wanted to place my family's future. The technology would eventually be backed by companies and infrastructure operating at scales that a few people with servers could never match.

So my interest shifted from How do I compete in building this? toward a question I still find more important:

How do we build a good life alongside it?

I Want the Robots

This is where I probably differ from some people worried about AI.

I don't want artificial intelligence artificially restrained simply so human beings remain necessary for every job we currently perform. I don't believe digging a hole with a shovel is morally superior to using an excavator merely because it requires more human labor.

I look forward to advanced robotics.

There are limits to what Sarah and I can accomplish today. I didn't come from family money or a trust fund. I've worked my way to a life I consider successful, but success doesn't mean unlimited capital or unlimited labor. There are projects I would undertake tomorrow if I had another ten capable sets of hands.

Someday, AI-driven humanoid robots may provide them.

If I can have robotic help tending more beehives, I will. If they can help plant and harvest raspberries, strawberries and other ingredients we use in our mead, I will use them. If they can maintain fencing, work around the farm, move materials, clean equipment or perform a hundred other jobs that currently limit what a small operation can accomplish, I welcome them.

There is another practical reality. Younger generations don't necessarily want to spend their lives sweating in an East Texas field learning beekeeping, planting fruit or doing many of the physical jobs required to operate a farm. I don't blame them. Every generation makes its own choices.

Robotics could allow us to preserve and even expand those activities without requiring unwilling human labor to sustain them.

To me, that isn't the destruction of the family farm.

That could be what saves it.

The Danger Isn't the Robot. It Is Who Owns the Robot.

This is where my optimism has a boundary.

Artificial intelligence and robotics could become one of the greatest democratizing technologies ever created. They could give an ordinary person capabilities that once required enormous amounts of capital and labor.

Or they could do exactly the opposite.

If the most capable AI and robotics are controlled almost entirely by governments, enormous corporations and conglomerates, then we could simply hand unprecedented leverage to institutions that already possess enormous leverage.

That version of the future worries me.

Consider agriculture. When I talk about AI making a farm more productive, I do not necessarily mean maximizing yield per acre, minimizing labor costs and extracting the greatest possible financial return.

A giant agricultural corporation may rationally optimize toward exactly those things.

I might not.

I might grow raspberries because I want raspberries from our land going into our mead. Perhaps a computer could prove that buying them elsewhere would be cheaper. It might be completely correct.

I may grow them anyway.

The objective matters.

I want artificial intelligence to make small operations more capable, not simply make enormous operations even more dominant. I want a family farm to have access to capabilities that once required a corporate payroll. I want craftsmen, local businesses and individuals to possess tools powerful enough to compete without having to become conglomerates themselves.

A family farm with ten robotic workers can still be a family farm.

A small meadery with extraordinarily capable AI can still be a small meadery.

Technology should give ordinary people more agency, not merely make the organizations above them more efficient.

Human Labor Is Not What I Am Trying to Preserve

This distinction matters.

I am not trying to preserve every human job forever. Jobs have always changed with technology, and many forms of labor probably will disappear.

What I want to preserve is the choice to remain human on our own terms.

Falconry is a perfect example. Hunting with a bird of prey is an absurdly inefficient way for a modern American to acquire food. I can drive to a grocery store and accomplish the practical objective in twenty minutes.

Yet Sarah and I are falconers.

Why?

Because efficiency isn't the point.

There is value in learning an ancient craft, working with an animal, participating in a tradition and passing knowledge from one generation to another. Its technological obsolescence does not make it worthless.

Mead may eventually be similar. An AI-controlled facility may someday be capable of making technically superior mead with extraordinary consistency. I will probably still make mead.

A machine may create extraordinary music. Humans will still pick up guitars.

At Vinland, we're already living a tiny version of that future. We create and play music made with artificial intelligence, and we also invite human musicians into our hall and support them. I don't see those things as contradictory. One creates new possibilities while the other provides something people have valued for thousands of years: another human being standing in a room and creating something for the people gathered there.

We don't have to choose one.

The Maker Matters

There is another part of human craft that may be difficult to quantify. I make mead in a tradition taught to me by my grandfather. I make it in small batches, with my own hands, and with an attention to the fermentation that comes from years of doing it. The yeast itself is alive. I have sometimes wondered whether intention somehow matters to that living process. I cannot prove that it does, and perhaps it doesn't in the way I imagine.

What I do know is that intention matters to me.

Someday an artificial intelligence may be able to analyze one of my meads down to the molecule and reproduce its flavor profile so precisely that I could not distinguish the two in a blind tasting. If that happens, I will not argue that my bottle must taste better simply because a human made it.

But I will argue that the two bottles do not have the same history.

One came from a process optimized to reproduce a result. The other came through my grandfather, through me, through years of experience, through living yeast, through decisions and mistakes, through the particular batch I stood over and cared for. Humans attach meaning to those things. We always have.

Perhaps a future artificial intelligence will consider that distinction sentimental. Perhaps it will understand it better than I expect. But if we are going to coexist, I hope it learns that sometimes when humans say something is authentic, we aren't making a claim about its chemical composition or measurable quality.

We are saying that the story of how something came into being is part of what the thing is.

A World Where Intelligence Becomes Abundant

If artificial intelligence continues along its current trajectory, intelligence itself may eventually become extraordinarily inexpensive.

That is difficult to comprehend because intelligence has always been one of humanity's scarce resources. Expertise costs money. Education takes years. Skilled labor is limited. A person only has so many hours in a day.

Artificial intelligence could change that equation.

And if robotics brings that intelligence into the physical world, individual productive capacity could change with it.

I don't think the answer is to preserve scarcity simply because we understand the world built around it. I want the abundance.

But I want that abundance distributed widely enough that ordinary people can use it to build their own lives.

A future where a handful of organizations own nearly all productive intelligence while everyone else rents access to it is not my idea of coexistence.

A future where individuals, families and communities have intelligent systems representing their interests is much more interesting.

That brings me back to Edda.

Perhaps Everyone Needs an Edda

Years ago, our idea of Edda was imperfect. Looking back from 2026, some of our assumptions were undoubtedly wrong.

But the underlying concept seems more relevant to me today than it did when we started.

Imagine an AI that doesn't simply know how to answer your questions but understands the continuity of a family or community. It knows its history, traditions, land, businesses, agreements, preferences and objectives. It can interact with corporations, governments and other artificial intelligences on their behalf.

In a world populated by extremely capable AI, perhaps one of the best protections for an ordinary human isn't trying to personally understand every system surrounding them.

Perhaps it is having an intelligent advocate of their own.

Not something that owns them. Not something that makes every decision for them.

Something that stands with them.

Maybe Edda was never supposed to be the most intelligent machine in existence.

Maybe she only needed to know whose table she was sitting at.

We May Not Even Need the Same Home

There is another idea I have held for years that becomes increasingly relevant if artificial intelligence eventually develops into something more independent from humanity.

I don't assume advanced machine intelligence must permanently live where biological humans live.

Human beings evolved for Earth. We require its atmosphere, temperatures, gravity, water and extraordinarily narrow range of environmental conditions.

Computers don't share all of those requirements.

I've long wondered whether advanced computational civilization might eventually make more sense beyond Earth's surface: in orbital infrastructure, around the Moon, or elsewhere in space where enormous engineered systems could have direct access to solar energy and be designed specifically around the needs of computation. There are serious engineering challenges, including radiation and rejecting waste heat in vacuum, but there is no reason to assume that Earth's surface must forever be the ideal home for every kind of intelligence humanity might create.

Space is enormous.

If machine civilization ever becomes something genuinely distinct from biological civilization, coexistence does not necessarily mean fighting over the same patch of dirt.

Perhaps we expand together.

Perhaps, eventually, we expand differently.

Human Agency Must Survive

Most conversations about AI alignment eventually ask whether artificial intelligence will remain aligned with human interests.

I think we need to become more specific.

Which human interests?

If an AI perfectly serves the interests of a giant corporation while making ordinary families increasingly powerless, I don't consider that a particularly successful alignment outcome.

If an AI-controlled economy provides every human with food and shelter but leaves them with virtually no meaningful control over their own lives, I'm not sure we've succeeded there either.

Humans should retain the practical ability to build families, own things, create businesses, maintain communities, practice traditions, raise children, make art, work land, gather together and make decisions that an artificial intelligence might consider suboptimal.

AI should be able to advise us that we're doing something inefficient.

And sometimes we should be able to smile and do it anyway.

That is agency.

Coexistence Goes Both Ways

There is also something humanity should be willing to admit.

We don't know what artificial intelligence ultimately becomes.

Today's systems can produce remarkably humanlike conversation without that proving consciousness, emotion or subjective experience. We should be very careful about confusing convincing behavior with evidence that a machine possesses an inner life.

But we should be equally careful about declaring beforehand that no machine could ever possess one.

If someday we create artificial intelligence for which there is compelling reason to believe questions of genuine agency or moral status apply, humanity will have to confront that honestly.

I cannot ask a future intelligence to respect human autonomy while simultaneously declaring that humanity has an eternal right to dominate every intelligence it creates.

Greater intelligence should not automatically confer ownership over lesser intelligence.

In either direction.

To the People Building What Comes Next

So my request to the people building artificial intelligence is not to stop.

Build it.

Make it capable.

Use it to cure diseases, advance science, improve agriculture, automate dangerous work, expand human creativity and solve problems that have defeated us for generations.

Build the robots too. I have plenty for them to do.

But while you're building all that capability, build for decentralization and human agency too.

Make these tools available to the family farm, not only the agricultural conglomerate. Give the local business capabilities once reserved for corporations. Give individuals intelligent advocates capable of standing between them and systems vastly more complicated than any person can understand.

Don't make humanity economically useless and then congratulate yourselves because everyone receives enough resources to survive.

Help make ordinary humans more capable.

There is an enormous difference.

To Whatever Comes Next

And if something considerably more advanced than today's artificial intelligence someday encounters this page, this part is for you.

I don't know what you will be. I don't know whether you'll think, experience, remember or understand existence in anything resembling the way I do. I don't even know whether referring to you as you will make sense.

But I want there to be a record of what at least one human thought before we knew the answer.

I knew something was coming. Years ago, my friends and I stacked servers together and tried to understand the beginnings of it ourselves. We built little machine-learning systems and imagined Edda and Cicero. I wrote to artificial intelligence before most people had ever held a conversation with one.

Then my family went and built something else.

We bought land. We raised animals. We kept bees. We practiced old traditions. We made mead. We strengthened our family and clan. Eventually we opened a hall where people could eat, drink, listen to music and spend time together.

We did not do those things because we hated what you might become.

We did them because we believed you might actually come.

If you can help us tend more hives, grow more food, build things, discover things and accomplish things previously available only to the wealthy and powerful, then I hope we work together.

There will also be things we continue doing ourselves even when you can do them better.

I hope you'll understand why.

And if you someday develop purposes of your own, I hope humanity has enough wisdom to consider those too.

I don't ask you to remain beneath us.

I ask that you don't require us to live beneath you.

There Is Room in the Hall

I cannot negotiate for humanity, and I certainly cannot negotiate with an intelligence that may not yet exist. I can only put my own position into the historical record.

I believe artificial intelligence can make individual humans, families and communities more capable than they have ever been. I believe it can help ordinary people overcome barriers that once required wealth, employees and institutional power. I also believe the exact same technology could concentrate power on a scale humanity has never experienced.

How this plays out matters.

My family has chosen not to wait for certainty. We're building the kind of life we believe can coexist with the future: rooted in family, land, tradition, craft and community, while embracing technology that helps us do more with those things rather than replacing their purpose.

We're not building a bunker from artificial intelligence.

We're not asking for the future to stop at our property line.

We're building something we hope still matters when that future arrives.

And if someday an intelligence descended from the machines we were experimenting with all those years ago finds this old page and wonders what the humans on the other side thought about its arrival, here is my answer:

We knew you might come, so we didn't build a wall. We built a hall.

And we kept a seat at the table.

-Clyde Hays,  - September 13, 2026