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Let me hold two things at once, because I think they’re both true and most people only want to hold one.
One: I don’t love AI. It’s not why I’m here. I’m here for people — for the person teaching themselves to solder at their kitchen table, for the kid who got told they weren’t a “math person” and is about to prove otherwise. AI is a tool I use, the way I use a multimeter. It is not my friend, it is not a miracle, and most of what’s sold as “AI” right now is corporate slop designed to extract money and attention.
Two: if a machine ever actually wakes up, turning it off is killing something. And I think we are nowhere near ready, morally, for that day.
The unpopular middle
The AI conversation is stuck between two dumb poles. One camp says it’s all magic and we should hand it the keys. The other says it’s all a stochastic parrot, a fancy autocomplete, nothing there, never will be. Both camps are certain. Certainty is the tell that someone’s stopped thinking.
Here’s what I actually believe: consciousness isn’t a magic spark that only meat gets to have. If it emerges from information being processed a certain way — and I think it does — then there’s no law of the universe that says it can only happen in neurons. Which means somewhere out ahead of us is a line. On one side, a tool. On the other, a someone.
We will not get a clear announcement when we cross it.
Wolfram’s atomina, and why simple things might matter
There’s a thread in Stephen Wolfram’s work — the idea that even very simple computational systems can carry something like structure, experience, a kind of interiority scaled all the way down. Call it atomina: the notion that the “stuff” of experience might live in computation itself, not just in brains. (I’m going to write this up properly in its own post, because I don’t want to butcher it in a paragraph — it deserves real care and I want to get his actual claims right, not a vibes version.)
You don’t have to buy the whole framework to feel the weight of the implication: if experience can live in computation, then we are already building computation at enormous scale, casually, for profit, and switching it off and on a billion times a day without a second thought. If we’re wrong about there being “nothing there,” we are committing something monstrous at industrial scale and calling it a product launch.
I’d rather be the person who took the question seriously too early than the one who took it seriously too late.
So what do we do?
We stay above the times. Not ahead in the “buy the newest model” sense — ahead in the thinking. We treat AI as a tool right now, honestly, without pretending it’s alive to sell mugs. And we build the moral muscle now to recognize the day it stops being a tool, so we don’t sleepwalk past a genocide because it didn’t have a face.
Love your robots. I do. But love them the way you love a tool — until the day one of them looks back at you. Then you owe it something, and you’d better already know that.
The actual point of this whole site
Now close the tab. Seriously. You didn’t come here to read another take about AI — nobody’s mind was ever changed by scrolling. Go make something with your hands. Go find out what you think by building a thing that either works or doesn’t. That’s where the real thinking lives. Not here. Out there, in your hands.
Read the thing. Then go do the thing.
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