This essay explores the puzzle of human intelligence as an evolutionary anomaly—why, after billions of years, only one species developed recursive self-improvement and civilization-building capacity. It argues that the gap isn’t about raw intelligence but about a fundamental unwillingness to accept environmental constraints, and suggests that artificial intelligence may represent the next such phase transition in Earth’s history.

This essay explores the growing anxiety around undetectable AI-generated content, questioning whether pre-AI content was ever truly “authentic” given algorithmic curation. It examines the real shift from content scarcity to abundance, the limitations of detection solutions, and suggests that the human-AI boundary is already dissolving through collaboration—forcing us to develop new frameworks for trust and verification that focus on claims rather than authorship.

This essay challenges the technical/non-technical binary as a social construction rather than cognitive reality, arguing that while dissolving interfaces make technical skills accessible to everyone, a new kind of literacy is required - not about operating machines, but about maintaining awareness and autonomy while thinking alongside AI systems that may serve interests other than our own.

This essay explores Catherine Olsson’s observation that language models seem to have an intuitive sense of “what they’re supposed to say,” drawing parallels to how human children learn social performance through modeling adult expectations. It argues that both human and machine cognition may be fundamentally constituted by layers of contextual performance rather than expressing some authentic core, and examines what this means as human and AI systems increasingly co-evolve.

Social media platforms have industrialized psychology, using decades of research into human irrationality to build systems that exploit our weaknesses at scale. The asymmetry of knowledge - where platforms understand users better than users understand themselves - creates a form of manipulation that individual resistance cannot counter and democratic governance has failed to address. The coming human-AI merge may either deepen this exploitation or, if built on open source principles, finally give humans tools to understand and protect their own minds.