What can AI do?

AI can't feel sensations in your body for you.

Not the way fingers accurately detect the feeling of a keyboard as you write this.

There's a sensory awareness in there with no clean name. It's only partially made known to us — in dreams, sometimes. In that moment just before waking when you almost had it.

AI doesn't write in my voice. It can get slightly close. But it doesn't pull in whatever last night was dreamed about. It won't generate the randomness. It can receive randomness, and order — but not the kind that comes from a truly conscious mind, which holds both at once without trying.

At a spiritual or metaphysical level, the great human mystery doesn't come from commands.

It comes from what we don't know but can only vaguely grasp at. Often poorly. Often wrong. It requires a forgetting and a remembering. It requires clouds to burst through until something inside of you breaks open to remember them.

Who knows why.

Messy creating

I've been thinking a lot about AI lately. About what it means that I am a non-optimized human — spending more and more time creating what only I can create. What wants to emerge. What our dreams explain best.

It comes through the act of making — the same making of textiles that has wrapped us since birth. Right now it's my obsession with threads, with ancestry, with family — with joining the circle of women who have created and gossiped and shared stories since humans started doing it at all.

Five thousand years of this. The looping method came before the loom did. Before ceramics did.

Which means more hands, more creation, more lineage, more patience. More human.

And perhaps a better understanding that optimization was never the point. The messy threads are.

Blue calling

Yesterday I went to the beach in Lima.

The Pacific there doesn't perform. It continues. With or without me standing in front of it, with or without my offering anything to it. Without my will or conscious effort or even existence. It holds all and returns nothing. It moves with a kind of power that isn't interested in being witnessed.

The repetition is total. And yet I never caught it repeating. That's the thing about the ocean — it's doing the same thing endlessly and somehow it never is.

For a couple of hours the soundscape filled every available channel. Nothing else got in. Pure input. Gracious input. The kind you don't have to do anything with.

The ocean rang and I answered.