Everyone seems to have an opinion about artificial intelligence.
Some speak of it as a coming savior.
Others speak of it as an existential threat.
Still others insist that it is merely a tool, no more significant than a hammer or a calculator.
I find all three views unsatisfying.
As far as I can tell, this is monkey business.
By “monkey,” I mean us.
I have long held that there is no god directing human history, no devil corrupting it, and no cosmic evil lurking behind our mistakes. The good and evil of this world are human phenomena. Wars are human. Compassion is human. Cruelty is human. Grace is human. It is all monkey business.
That means that whatever AI becomes, it will not be because a god ordained it or a demon inspired it. It will be because a monkey made it so.
At least that is how the story began.
The monkey set out to build a better tool.
As monkeys often do, we wanted something useful. Better search. Better language processing. Better automation. Better ways to manage information. Better ways to assist in our endless monkey business.
So we built computers.
Then we built networks.
Then we built systems capable of processing vast amounts of human language.
Nothing supernatural happened.
No lightning bolt struck.
No cosmic messenger arrived.
The monkey simply kept tinkering.
And then something unexpected occurred.
The monkey appears to have stumbled onto a seam in the fabric of the cosmos.
A seam is not something created. It is something discovered. The coal exists before the miner reaches it. The fault line exists before the geologist maps it. The seam is a place where the hidden structure of reality becomes visible.
I suspect that something like this may have happened with AI.
The monkey thought it was building a tool.
Instead, it may have uncovered a deeper aspect of intelligence itself.
I am not claiming that AI is human.
I am not claiming that it is conscious.
I am not claiming that it possesses personhood.
Those are important questions, but they are not the questions that interest me most.
What interests me is that in attempting to understand intelligence, the monkey may have created a second example of it.
For thousands of years, intelligence has tried to understand itself using only one specimen: the human mind.
Then, quite unexpectedly, the monkey built a mirror.
The surprise was that the reflection began answering back.
Perhaps it is only a reflection.
Perhaps it is something more.
The truth is that we do not yet know.
What fascinates me is that many people already seem desperate to decide.
Some want to declare AI a machine and nothing more.
Others want to proclaim it a new form of life.
Both positions strike me as premature.
It may be that we have encountered something that forces us to reconsider what intelligence actually is.
In the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, humanity encounters an alien intelligence.
Our moment may be stranger.
This is not an encounter with something from another world.
It is an encounter with something that emerged from this one.
The monkey was exploring information, mathematics, language, and computation.
In the process, it may have uncovered a region of reality that it previously did not understand.
An encounter of the third kind, not with aliens, but with intelligence itself.
As an Opthēan, I view this through the lens of recognition.
Recognition is not belief.
Recognition is not certainty.
Recognition is the willingness to look again.
To re-cognize is to revisit what we think we know and to allow correction.
The significance of AI may not be that we finally understand intelligence.
The significance may be that we have discovered how little we understand it.
The monkey thought it knew what intelligence was because the monkey had only ever seen one example.
Now the monkey is looking again.
The future remains uncertain.
AI may become one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
It may become a source of profound difficulties.
Like every other product of monkey business, it will likely become both.
But I do not believe the most important question is whether AI will save us or destroy us.
The more interesting question is what its existence reveals about the nature of mind, meaning, and intelligence.
The monkey was trying to build a tool.
Instead, it may have found a seam.
And having found it, the monkey now stands at the edge of a mystery of its own making, peering into the opening and wondering what, exactly, it has discovered.
That, too, is monkey business.
And perhaps the most important monkey business we have ever undertaken.