mind and machine

In an AI-ruled world, any human ability we neglect will start to shrivel up.

Discussions about how AI might influence our ability to live the good life and experience personal fulfillment are just beginning to take baby steps. AI ethics has expanded beyond simply figuring out how to use these technologies in moral or valuable ways. Yet, even these emerging conversations often miss the bigger picture, focusing mostly on

The year 1980 was a turning point for the philosophy of artificial intelligence, even while AI itself was still finding its feet. Philosopher John Searle introduced his now-famous Chinese Room thought experiment, arguing that machines could produce impressive results without a shred of genuine understanding.

The first crucial step toward cultivating a truly intelligent mind — and moving away from the automated thinking of machines — is to engage in what philosophers call “second-order cognition” or reflective self-awareness, recognizing the mind’s programmed patterns. Fortunately, the mind and mechanical thought aren’t the same, which means we have the

We live in a frictionless age in which process is typically obscured by results. You press a few buttons on your phone, and a car or dinner comes to you, a moving blue dot on a map, hiding a whole range of human effort.

For Krishnamurti, mind and mechanical thought are worlds apart. And when he talks about exercising the brain, he’s not referring to crossword puzzles or sudoku. He’s pointing to a human mind with an immense, even infinite capacity — one that remains unknown as long as it’s bogged down by knowledge, specialization, and material concerns.

To him, meeting it meant doing everything we could to make our minds different from artificial intelligence — a call to rise above the routines that risk turning us into reflections of our own machines.