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 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.