Imagine a world where we could barbecue brisket, kebabs, tavuk and langoustine to ensure adequate protein intake without reliance on industrialised agriculture and the ruin it has wrought upon the biosphere. Better still, without the moral dissonance required to justify the mass torture and mechanised slaughter of domesticated animals.
There was a time these lofty aims underpinned the hype around lab-grown meat, attracting quizzical interest and generous allocations of capital. Salvation would soon be served à point and you wouldn’t believe it’s not Daisy. Yet somewhere between the pitch deck and the plate, reality set in. Regulation, entrenched special interests, issues of scale and cost and a miscellany of other matters that include mouthfeel have conspired to push meaningful disruption decades into the future.
AI, an academic at the table suggested, was destined for the same shelf of well-intentioned irrelevance. The AI investor, a few chairs down, countered with a polished recital of the billionaire barons’ seductive promises of a brave new world. Unsurprisingly, the academic waved these away with incredulous disdain. Behind this costume of progress, he argued, lay the robber barons’ true motive: porn.
I cannot say how the rest processed this particular revelation, but the occasional murmurs made clear that everyone shared a measure of unease about the side-effects of our latest cure for humanity’s woes that is currently inflating world markets.
And rightly so. Newly minted billionaires have been steering AI development with messianic confidence while opportunists buoy their zeal to cash in before the correction they all know is coming.
Meanwhile, governments have bungled just about every recent existential threat; no one sane has confidence they can, or are, managing the attendant risk. They have stumbled through the climate crisis with the grace of a stampeding pachyderm and have countenanced, abetted and quietly normalised a genocide, now two years in, authored by those who once trademarked “Never Again.” The latest confidence booster? A nostalgic yearning for robust nuclear stockpiles. The world holds its breath as politicos raise a blowtorch to the solder bouncing on the crack in the hissing gas line.
And so, as habit demands, we reenact our favourite philosophical theater.
Fight the system!
No, sign up and reform from within.
The familiar dialectic unfurls.
And now the half-expected interruption: “Perhaps the landscape is not binary.”
There is a third way.
The Tao.
Cue Bruce Lee. Flow. Water. Enlightenment in sixty seconds.
Deep.
Just not deep enough.
The answers to the questions before us will not be found in koans, aphorisms or proverbs. They arise from an aggregation of relevant details that resists meaningful compression. Our collective unease with that resistance is diagnostic. We live in an age that mistakes breadth of adoption for value and insists on distillation as a prerequisite for engagement. Why read a book when you can scan the Blink? Why wrestle with complexity when a summary pretends to deliver its essence without the frustration of a labored understanding?
We want Hegel in three bullet points and the Tao in a YouTube clip. The problem is not that wisdom is inaccessible. It is that we have grown impatient with the process that leads to it. The decline and fall of global leadership tells the tale.
The solution, if one dares use the word, will not be found in Hegel for Dummies, the Tao Te Miao Ye, Google or ChatGPT, and it will not be delivered within an election cycle. It requires that serious people undertake a long, uncomfortable journey across dense and demanding terrain, hitting roadblocks, doubling back, sustaining attention over a landscape that extends well beyond the limits of immediate comprehension. The path is cumulative, abrasive, slow. It requires deep learning of the laborious, human kind.
Here, the conversation about AI quietly inverts itself. The very domain we fear will replace human intelligence may instead reveal what cannot be automated: good judgment. The sine qua non of which is a moral architecture built by wrestling with decisions over time. The synthesis we seek will not be generated for us. It must be earned; or not, the choice remains ours.
We do not know this in any mathematically provable sense. Perhaps some future LLM, trained on the entirety of ethical thought and prompted by a sufficiently ingenious engineer, will produce a beautifully structured answer to the question of how humans ought to live. I would pay the fee and read it with interest. But even then, what has really been delivered. We would still face the irreducible act of judgment – to accept it, reject it, modify it or ignore it. The labour of becoming responsible cannot be automated. At best, it can be avoided.
If humanity is unwilling to engage at that level, if it prefers perpetual skimming to genuine comprehension, then it has not been robbed of its agency; it has voluntarily surrendered it. There is no scandal in this. We all have limits. The myth that everyone can be anything, understand everything, master all domains is part of the delusion of modern omnipotence. A higher level of consciousness does not begin with boundless ambition. It begins with recognition of constraint.
A journey through The Phenomenology of Spirit, the Tao Te Ching or the Qur’an forces the mind to confront the contours of its own cognitive and ethical limits. To live with thoughtful intention today is not to pick between rebellion, reform or spiritual bypass. It is to accept that the terrain demands a slower gait, deeper humility and a longer attention span when everyone around you appears to be racing at light speed across the universe as if on a six-day Mediterranean cruise that begins in Turkey and ends in Portugal.
We may well be living at the most materially prosperous moment in known human history. And yet, while we lack little compared to those who came before us, we appear increasingly unable to carry the weight of complexity.
That inability, more than any technological threat, may be the silent emergency we must face first.
SEÑOR - The Blog 