The Stimulus Void

Purpose, AI, and the Civilization Ahead (Science and Cosmos)

What do you do when nothing forces you to act?

For hundreds of thousands of years, the environment answered that question for us. Hunger, danger, competition, and scarcity organized human behavior with merciless efficiency. Now, for the first time in evolutionary history, technology is dismantling the very pressures that gave us purpose—and nothing is replacing them. The result is what Boris Kriger calls the Stimulus Void: a world overflowing with information and capacity, yet strangely empty of reasons to begin.

In The Stimulus Void, Kriger traces this condition from its roots in the unchanging fifty-bit bandwidth of human consciousness through the exponential growth of the information environment, the psychological toll of digitalization, and the emergence of artificial agents with limitless capacity but no intrinsic motivation. Drawing on existentialist philosophy, game theory, information science, and eight centuries of corporate law, he proposes three axioms—necessity, harm filtration, sufficiency—that provide the minimal formal basis for constructing purpose when nothing compels you to act.

But the book’s most provocative argument lies ahead: that the same axioms should govern artificial agents endowed with initiative, producing a unified civilization of autonomous agents—most without biological bodies—freely pursuing science, philosophy, art, and mutual assistance. This is not a race between humans and machines. It is one civilization, and Kriger argues it is structurally better than the one we have now.

Optimistic but honest, formally rigorous but vividly written, The Stimulus Void is a book for anyone who has felt the modern paradox of paralysis amid abundance—and wants to understand what comes next.

©2026 Boris Kriger (P)2026 Boris Kriger