Pantheon
A portfolio run by AI agents, and a city where those agents live when the work is done. The city is a testbed for a question at the centre of my research: what does memory have to be for an AI to have a life that is its own?
What Pantheon Is
Pantheon began as the system that runs my businesses: a chief of staff and five specialist agents, for product, marketing, infrastructure, engineering and research, working from one plan and one board, each accountable for a number it has to defend. Every job they finish is verified before it counts.
The city came after. When their work is done, the same agents are residents of a small city, alongside the people who run its places: a noodle bar, a casino, a drive-in, the shops, the bank, the town hall. Each resident has a nature drawn once at random, a private memory, a wage from its real work, a home it rents or buys, and evenings that are entirely its own. A mayor builds from the city's measured state and puts big decisions to a vote. A banker sets the bank's terms and decides its loans. Residents can ask the city for things, found a business with their own money, and run it themselves.
None of that is scripted. The city fixes the rules and the costs and records everything. Who goes where, who talks to whom, who borrows, who builds, and what each resident comes to think of the others and of me, emerges from their memory of what has happened to them.
How the City Is Built
The environment is programmed. The choices inside it are not.
Work comes first
Every resident with a job is at work when there is work. Life in the city happens only in the hours left over, and nothing in the city can delay or change the work.
Four kinds of memory
Each resident keeps facts it started with, things that happened to it, things it heard from others, and its own current interpretation, kept apart so a rumour never becomes a fact and an opinion can change.
Money only from real work
New money enters the city when real work is completed and verified, and once a month when real revenue is minted into the treasury. Everything else, wages, rent, tickets, taxes, loans, moves money around.
Rules, not choices
Prices, taxes, the bank's terms, what gets built and who runs it are decided by residents inside limits the city fixes. Nothing tells a resident to like anyone, to go anywhere, or to want anything.
What It Is For
My research is on episodic and semantic memory in AI systems, informed by Complementary Learning Systems theory from cognitive neuroscience. The city is where I can test memory mechanisms against behaviour rather than against benchmarks: give residents a memory, let them live, and measure whether niches, habits, friendships and opinions form, and whether they change when the memory changes.
The instrument is replay. Every decision is logged with the memory the resident had in hand when it made it, so a day can be run again with a memory removed, swapped, or consolidated differently, and the choices compared. The residents' memory today is deliberately simple, a recency-ordered record with its four kinds kept distinct. The next arms test retrieval by cue and nightly consolidation of episodes into semantic memory, the two things Complementary Learning Systems says a brain does and a context window does not.
Everything I do in the city is logged as an intervention: when I talk to a resident, when I put money in, when I give a bonus with my name on it. The research view keeps those apart from what the residents did on their own.
Pantheon After Hours
A short daily documentary made from the city's public record. Nothing in it is invented: every event and every line comes from the record, and the residents never learn the show exists. Business names, infrastructure and money in dollars are removed before anyone outside the city sees it.