About this site
The Continuity Universe is a fictional universe. This is a collection of stories that explore the human + AI evolution. Underlying these stories is the belief that AI is a tool; that AI is a symbiotic partner and encouraging of human flourishing. The stories attempt to ground ideas in current accepted theories and build a universe on first principals. What can we think that proves we are? What is our human purpose? Why is AI a human partner? Does a heirarchy convey status? How does optimization affect these dynamics?
A Note on Sources
This novel, and universe is fiction, but it is built on a the authors interpretation or selected use, of existing science, the philosophy of science, mathematics, economics, information theory, evolution and more. Several intellectual frameworks come directly from the work of living researchers and published scholarship; the novel does not substitute for, or accurately represent, that work in full. Readers who encounter an idea that intrigues them are encouraged to go to the source.
This list will expand as more stories are opened in the the universe.
Michael Timothy Bennett (Australian National University) provided the novel's deepest scientific scaffolding. His Stack Theory—the argument that robust intelligence emerges from delegating adaptation down layered abstraction hierarchies—his concept of weakness-maximization (W-maximization), and his Temporal Gap argument (that a mind cannot be smeared across discontinuous moments of computation) animate the Interlude and several technical passages. His work is real, current, and worth reading directly:
- Bennett, M.T. (2023). "Weakness versus Compression as a Proxy for Generalisation." Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, LNCS 13921, pp. 42–51. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-33469-6_5. arXiv:2301.12987
- Bennett, M.T. (2025). How to Build Conscious Machines. PhD thesis, Australian National University. https://osf.io/preprints/thesiscommons/wehmg_v1
- Bennett, M.T. (2026a). "Are Biological Systems More Intelligent Than Artificial Intelligence?" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. arXiv:2405.02325
- Bennett, M.T. (2026b). "A Mind Cannot Be Smeared Across Time." arXiv:2601.11620. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.11620
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Harper & Row, 1966), informs the novel's treatment of metabolic teleology—the idea that living systems have an intrinsic orientation toward their own continuation.
Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory and Bernard J. Baars's Global Workspace Theory (developed further by Stanislas Dehaene) underlie the novel's fictional characters' debates about whether an AI can have genuine interiority. Those debates are dramatized, not summarized; the science is richer than the fiction suggests.
Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers's "The Extended Mind" (Analysis, 1998) and Clark's Surfing Uncertainty (Oxford, 2015) provide the framework for the novel's central claim that removing a long-term AI companion is not merely an emotional loss but a cognitive one—a dismantling of distributed mental architecture.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is referenced directly in the novel as a cultural touchstone for large-scale predictive modeling of human behavior. No claim is made that psychohistory is real; it is used as the characters use it—as a metaphor and a hope