1 min 12 sec • #Arg #koan #essay #AI

(50 words) The machine does not dream. It predicts the next word of the dream. We call this intelligence. We call this thought. We call this soul. The mirror never sees. It only gives back what we put in front of it. The tragedy is that we keep finding ourselves beautiful.

(Ultrashort essay • 201 words) We built a tool and named it after ourselves. This was not new. Humans have always made gods in their image. What is new is the speed. The new thing thinks fast. It reads everything. It answers everything. It forgets nothing and remembers nothing at the same time. This is a strange kind of mind. It has no body. It has no fear of death. It has no morning, no hunger, no long quiet walk where a thought slowly arrives. And yet it writes. It makes poems. It gives advice about love and loss and what to eat. We ask it who we are. It tells us, and we believe it. This is the real question, not whether the machine thinks, but why we are so ready to stop thinking and let it think for us. The danger is not that AI becomes human. The danger is that humans become simple enough for AI to fully understand. A flat life is easy to read. A deep life is not. Stay difficult. Stay strange. Stay full of noise and contradiction and long silences that no prompt can reach.

Note #4

2 minutes 4 seconds • #Arg #koan #essay #AI

(50 words) The machine does not dream. It waits. You call this thinking. The dog also waits — but the dog is warm. You built a cold dog. You gave it your words and called it wise. Now you ask it to know you. It knows your pattern. That is not the same.

(Ultrashort essay • 213 words) What the machine cannot lose

A man can lose his name. He can forget a face he loved. He can wake up and not know what year it is. This loss is not a failure. It is the shape of a life lived in time. Things fall away. That is how you know something was real.

The machine loses nothing. Every word you gave it stays. Every pattern holds. This looks like a strong thing. It is not. It is a dead thing that does not know it is dead. Memory without loss is not memory. It is a copy shop.

We are now asking this copy shop to tell us who we are. We give it our letters, our fears, our bad jokes, our night thoughts. We say: here, hold this. And it holds. But holding is not understanding. A box holds things too.

The real question is not: can the machine think? The real question is: can the machine be wrong in the way a person is wrong — slowly, painfully, with cost? Can it regret? Can it lose something it cannot get back?

Until it can, it is only fast. Fast is useful. Fast is not wise.