Don Wood is an inventor, patent holder, and writer focused on practical innovation and AI safety.
In the golf equipment world he co-developed early neurosymbolic and expert-system approaches for fitting clubs to individual swing characteristics. That work produced multiple U.S. patents, including the 2000 patent US6083123 for a computer-implemented method using artificial intelligence to prescribe golf club chemistry from measured swing data.
The same inventive habit of asking “why not” instead of stopping at “why” later turned toward a larger problem: keeping advanced AI systems aligned with human primacy. The result is the Alignment Sentinel Kernel (ASK), a hardware-enforced constitutional governance processor designed so that AI nodes must respect foundational constraints at the lowest level possible. A non-provisional application was filed with the USPTO in May 2026.
Wood also publishes on Substack under ddonaldcwood, covering AI alignment, creativity (including the idea of Negative Capability), culture, and the practical engineering path away from runaway systems. He is the author of the memoir The Great Enigma and the novel Endowment: A Gift of Love.
Based in East Texas, he continues to prosecute intellectual property, write, and explore how invention and storytelling reinforce each other.