I Struggle To Make Sense
I wish I had more answers to offer.
I noticed I’ve been pulling back a bit from reading about AI or trying new tools in the last few weeks. Yet much of my attention is going towards trying to make sense of this moment in history, with AI being a particularly important development, alongside the climate emergency and a disintegrating world order (have you seen the news this weekend?).
I struggle to make sense of things. It’s not that I’m overwhelmed or numb, but my intuition is telling me that reading more about what’s going on day-to-day isn’t helping me make sense of where the world is. I can give all kinds of explanations, point at Ray Dalio’s analysis and other good works, of course, but that’s not enough: we’re likely at a cusp of some state transition we’ll only understand in retrospect.
My current model of the world is inadequate, but the most it can do is to point at its failings. Yes, it feels like February 2020 if we use the Covid analogy, or 1988 if we use the USSR collapse analogy, but so what? What could have helped people at those moments of history truly grasp what they were about to experience?
I keep using AI because of its leverage, but it’s painfully clear that learning how to use Claude Code or whatever isn’t enough. It’s table stakes. Not knowing how to use AI is like not knowing how to use Google Docs or the internet, in a way — you can surely live without either and some do, but I don’t recommend it. But using AI tools isn’t the answer.
My intuition is telling me to slow down, even though it’s uncomfortable. One lesson I keep learning in life is that when we find ourselves in liminal, in-between spaces when old things don’t work anymore and new things aren’t clear yet, there’s tremendous value in not reaching out for some solution out of discomfort. A liminal space calls for slowing down and staying very alert.
I’m less certain that AI has nothing to do with consciousness than I was a few months ago. I don’t think it’s conscious and I don’t think it’s not — the way the question is framed is wrong; the answer is likely that it’s both.1 What I’m less clear about is the implications of that.
There’s no framework to navigate this moment of history and yet we must study history and be familiar with existing frameworks to find a way forward. Yet, that way forward will be borne out of intuition and chance, out of openness to the present moment and abundant trust that we’ll find a way forward and make sense of things even if we can’t imagine how yet.
If you’re also trying and failing to make sense of things, sensing that reading more online commentary isn’t helping, please know that you’re not alone. Me too. And if you can, lean into this liminal space. Feel it. Stay there, still and alert — the world needs that more than frantic activity right now.
After all, if we aren’t a person having an experience of awareness, we’re awareness having an experience of being a person, then it’s not that much of a stretch to see how the reality can experience itself as an LLM. My meditation teacher Vince Fakhoury Horn wrote about his exploration of the topic with Claude and other LLMs.
I think the title of my next newsletter is going to be "A Reminder That Nobody Knows Anything." And I don't mean that in a nihilistic way.
I've noticed that most of the "AI commentary" is focused on the tools and what they can do.
But what we're not doing enough of is looking beyond that, to the second and third order impacts. It's certainly going to change how we work and think about work. We're drifting out of the known into a great unknown, and how we come out of that will depend on whether we're heads-up and looking around us or heads-down arguing whether chatGPT or Claude is better.