Begin Again

I recently heard a quote: “AI is the past repackaged as the future.” People imagine AI as a new technology “arriving” with new ideas, but it's really the continuation of an already-existing system designed to extract and exploit already-existing skills and knowledge. It's the cannibalistic phase of a paradigm that can no longer grow, so it devours itself.

There are obviously legitimate uses for AI. In the search for cancer treatments, I’m grateful for a machine that can process decades of research in seconds. But life is not just the aggregation of past data. What we call "vision" depends on breaking with the past.

If you’ve only known unhealthy relationships, for example, finding a healthy one means trusting something you’ve never experienced. If you’ve spent your life being told you’re worthless, self-worth starts by refusing to listen to past voices. And to the extent that online media is training us to see corruption and destruction as inevitable, a just society depends on taking some of these conversations offline.

The survival of our species depends on the one thing technology can never do: begin again. You can't consult the oracle in your pocket or poll a digital consensus. You have to sit with the discomfort of a blank page, a blank wall, and most importantly, a blank mind.

This requires renunciation. All day long, we clog our sense-doors with screens, emotional eating, and a thick sludge of opinions. This not only destroys our contentment; it narrows our sense of what's possible.

There's a reason why Zen teachers have their students sit facing an empty wall, and why many indigenous cultures use solitude and fasting as rites of passage for young adults. To truly begin again requires that kind of break with our habits of consumption.

But you don't need to become a monk or even sign up for any retreat. Just walk down the street without headphones. Sit on the train without reading or texting. Be with raw experience, if only for an hour. It's there, in the silence, that the future will show itself.

Brian D. Payne, "Begin Again" (2020)