Human purpose comes first.
Automation should remove friction around meaningful work, not make the person incidental. Orbit should assist with decisions and processes while keeping authorship, relationships, and consequential choices in human hands.
Ethics
Technology should help people have more say in their lives.
Ethical technology is not a label a project can award itself. It is a pattern of choices: whose interests are served, what happens to people’s information and work, where permission is required, how mistakes are repaired, and whether the truth remains visible.
Mack is building Orbit to support human creativity, judgment, and everyday life. That intention matters, but it is not enough on its own. The system has to earn trust through the way it behaves.
Permission must match the action.
Having access to an account does not make every possible use appropriate. Reading, organizing, drafting, sending, publishing, purchasing, and reusing someone else’s information are different actions and deserve different boundaries.
People deserve the truth.
Orbit should not pretend it completed work it could not verify, hide material tool involvement, impersonate a person, or use polished language to conceal uncertainty. Trust depends on an honest account of what happened.
Other people’s privacy counts.
A device owner may have access to messages, voices, and files that involve other people. That access is not unlimited permission to repurpose their lives. Context, audience, consent, and reasonable expectations still matter.
Creative work deserves respect.
A license to run a tool does not prove that every source behind it was obtained with consent. Orbit cannot resolve that history by running locally. The responsible response is to avoid false claims, prefer authorized material, protect private references, and preserve human credit and choice.
Efficiency is a responsibility.
Local processing can reduce some data movement and dependence on remote services, but it still uses electricity and hardware. Cloud services also remain part of some workflows. The honest goal is thoughtful, proportionate use—not a claim of zero impact.
Correction must be possible.
People need ways to stop an action, correct a misunderstanding, change a preference, remove stored information where supported, and recover from failure. A system that cannot be questioned is not a trustworthy assistant.
Accountability stays human.
When something goes wrong, “the system did it” is not an acceptable endpoint. The project must preserve evidence, acknowledge the real limit, repair the process, and remain answerable to the people affected.
Where the line is
The same capability can be responsible or harmful depending on how it is used.
Responsible direction
- Helping a person understand and organize their own work
- Using authorized references with clear purpose
- Reviewing consequential communication before it leaves
- Showing uncertainty and allowing correction
- Automating bounded, reversible processes
- Disclosing material tool involvement when it matters
The line is crossed
- Deceiving people about identity, authorship, or evidence
- Reusing private communication outside its expected context
- Imitating creators or exploiting their work without regard
- Turning account access into blanket permission
- Removing meaningful review from high-impact decisions
- Hiding environmental, labour, or provider dependencies behind “local” branding
A necessary honesty
Where generated content fits.
Orbit includes systems that can generate language and may use tools that generate media. What makes the project different is the role those tools are meant to occupy: inside a larger, owner-directed system for understanding and carrying out work. Generation is named when it matters, bounded by the project, and subject to human direction and review.
There are also unresolved questions, including incomplete knowledge about the origins of some underlying systems. Responsible development means keeping those questions visible and allowing stronger claims only when evidence supports them.