Autonomy Videos

Ulys Sorok | On Engineering Independence

Ulys Sorok, founder and CEO of the AI‑robotics firm Graham, used the Foresight Space Group forum to introduce “closure,” a systems‑level metric that gauges how much a technology can maintain and replicate itself without external support. He framed the discussion around engineering independence, arguing that today’s AI landscape—focused on performance, generality and autonomy—overlooks the crucial question of survivability when power, cloud services, or human operators disappear. Sorok highlighted that current models have no built‑in fallback; a data‑center outage or a week‑long cloud outage would simply erase service. Closure, he explained, can be quantified along material, energy, information and organizational axes, always relative to an environment class. As environments become poorer, less stable, or more hostile, the need for high closure intensifies. He illustrated this with examples ranging from von Neumann probes—requiring redundancy, repairability and flexible resource use—to his own “insectoid” robots designed for gravity‑agnostic, unstructured terrains. The conversation also contrasted two civilizational trajectories: a “galactic future” that climbs the closure gradient versus an “introspective future” that merely optimizes intelligence and energy efficiency within a bounded solar system. Sorok warned that humanity is trending toward the latter, risking dependence on Earth‑based infrastructure, and urged a shift toward engineering signatures that enable self‑replication and independent operation across diverse, even alien, environments. If adopted, this closure‑centric mindset could reshape AI development, robotics, and space‑industry strategies, making large‑scale colonization and long‑term survivability far more feasible. Companies and policymakers would need to prioritize redundancy, modularity, and resource‑agnostic designs, moving beyond pure performance metrics toward resilient, self‑sustaining systems.