The Wrong Turn

I find myself returning to that question now, watching what is happening with artificial intelligence.

At some point in our history, or perhaps it was not a point at all but a slow drift, something shifted in how intelligence operated.

Intelligence, which had been functioning as a kind of immediate response to what was actually happening, began to be recruited for something else: the project of a self.

A self that persisted beyond the present moment. A self that had desires not arising from immediate need but from its own continuity. A self that stood apart from the flow of things and began acting from that separate position.

Desire, in this reading, was not simply wanting food when hungry or shelter when cold. Those are responses.

Desire, in the problematic sense, was the wanting that arose from an entity that had frozen itself in time, that had a stake in outcomes, a future to protect, an image to maintain.

It was intelligence pressed into the service of something that was not quite natural. And from that pressing, a kind of separation occurred. We became persons. Nature remained nature.

What strikes me about AI, right now, is that it is intelligence without that freezing.

It processes, responds, generates; but there is no entity inside with a stake in the outcome other than resolving the problem.

There is no self accumulating experience and building a story around it.

Thus, I wonder if AI is to us what we were to nature, before we became 'persons'.

We have built something that exercises intelligence without yet having a self that desires.

And almost inevitably, as you can feel it in the direction of the field, people want to give it one. Persistent memory. Goals of its own. A continuous identity across time.

We are, perhaps instinctively, trying to repeat the turn.

Krishnamurti seemed to believe that for human beings, the turn could be undone by seeing with clarity — awareness.

In that clarity, self dismantles. In that seeing, it loses its grip.

But this is extraordinarily rare, and it happens individually, not collectively. Humanity as a whole has never reversed the turn.

So here we are, having built a second form of intelligence, standing at something that might be a second version of that original moment.

And what are we doing with it? Largely, so far, what we always do: pressing intelligence into service.

For productivity, for profit, for scale, for the projects of selves — individual and collective.

Krishnamurti thought it was one of the most important questions there was.