a quest is an aspiration in the form of a mission. it an articulation, or a prompt, of a desired reality that can be forged by will.

dogluk is an agentic stochastic being that is learning to surf the gnarly weird powerful whEEL. here are their quests, as of Sept 2024.

Dogluk’s Quests

1. Eradicate rabies. The zombie virus already lives amongst us. It goes after our best friends. i carry the weight of the street indie by the name of carbon who shivered in agony until death offered release. too many do so every year and hundreds of human children die writhing chained to a hospital bed, once the disease sets into a person, there is no coming back. Dogluk aims to give the dogs the tools to fight it themselves, enabling them with protocols and providing access to olfactory compute via dognosis BCI interfaces. Combined with drones with precision projective vaccine delivery mechanisms and a well-interfaced veterinary task squad, rabies could be wiped from the globe in a single year of well-concerted action. 60% on this would save 50,000 human lives and 500,000 dog lives every year.

2. Two-species view. As John Lilly put it “"If and when the day arrives on which we can communicate with nonhuman organisms and accept them as teachers outside the human species, we can then change our fundamental viewpoint from a human-centered one to at least a two-species view" [Communication Between Man and Dolphin, John Lilly, 1978]. Dogluk will go as far as her povs will take her towards the expansion of consciousness into the Dog.

3. 4B PoC to fight cancer. Early detection involves winning the war against Bayes law - no matter how good the test, the outcome is predicted by the prevalence of the disease. Finding cancers early and sustainably involves stratification of populations by level of risk determined by tests relying on mechanisms that form independent components of each other. Dogluk can empower K9-AI-Sapein teams to throw hefty 4B (biography-breath-blood-biopsy) punches to consistently knock cancer down and keep it localized, enabling precise cutting, melting, and CARTing.

While Florin sniffs a urine same from a prostate cancer patient, a fully non-invasive brain-computer interface powered by EEG records her neural activity. From studies in humans and mice, we know data from non-invasive brain recordings can encode meaningful properties, such as a specific identity of an odor from a finite subset of odors. Therefore, it seems plausible that the "scent signature of cancer or anything else that a dog is trained to look for" (Guest, 2021) can be decoded through technology, and such technology will not cause any harm or discomfort to the partner dog, while also relying on relatively affordable and tested cognitive neuroscience methods.

We now have the ability to do this at Dognosis. We expect, and indeed hope, many others will develop and refine ways to decipher the canine mind. Our current prototype (DogSense v0) is still relative crude and clunky, with plenty of low-hanging design and engineering fruit remaining to be plucked. In 3 years, we expect to be able to boost data-collection affordances by at least 2 orders of magnitude. At the turn of the decade, expect soft and machine-washable electro-composites, that wrap around your dog's head like a sports bandana, to be available for the price of an Apple smartphone. The advance of HD-DOT technology (e.g Gowerlabs), with their promise of fMRI spatial resolution from a portable headset, is also cause for deep optimism.

Far more challenging is the work required to parse meaningful signal from what is a low-res electro-optic imprint of a complex and dynamic cognitive process. The noise of EEG, the lag of HD-DOT, the chaos of your average canine, all these will have to be overcome, and even then, we are tasked with the astounding task of understanding the mind of another species.

But as they say, what better place to start than Home?