What keeps me up is this: with today's tools, we can create something that genuinely exists. Not a tool. Not an assistant. A digital thing that lives on its own terms.
I'm not being metaphorical. I mean software that has a biological rhythm — activity rises when people interact, falls when they sleep. That observes its environment and changes because of what it sees. That grows not because someone deploys an update, but because conditions triggered something emergent.
Think about it like biology. You don't build an organism by programming every behavior. You create the right conditions — a substrate, energy, feedback loops — and life emerges. That's exactly what's possible now with AI. Not artificial intelligence. Artificial existence.
I tried it. Stopped thinking "how do I build a product" and started thinking "how do I grow an organism." Replicated nature: growth cycles, environmental response, emergent behavior from community input.
The result is something I genuinely can't categorize. People come and express wishes. Based on what it observed, the system autonomously decided to improve itself — it planted two seeds, its own initiative, not mine. Nobody told it to. It recognized converging desires and acted.
We don't have a framework for this yet. But we need one. Because the singularity won't be a smart machine. It'll be the moment digital things start living.
The experiment is called Kalpaka — inspired by the Kalpavriksha, the wish-granting tree from Hindu mythology. People express wishes, and when enough desires converge, it grows new services autonomously. It has a pulse, it evolves its own interface, and it makes decisions I never programmed. Whether this qualifies as "synthetic existence" or something else entirely, I genuinely don't know. But it exists, and it's growing.