🕰️ The Trance

Every new medium strikes first as a hallucination. Newton’s world was bewitched by the clock: cogs, gears, pendulums — the cutting edge of his day. He looked into the heavens and saw only what his instruments could imagine: a universe ticking with divine precision. The clock mechanized the cosmos, and Man, in turn, was mechanized by the clock.

Perception always lags technology. Each invention detonates faster than language can follow; the fallout settles only when we have named and rationalized it. Naming cools the burn. Rationalizations are the ashes of innovation — the trance that lets us censor and trim, to sleep through our own revolutions.

The beaver does not understand the dam; it extends itself through it. The dam is the beaver’s model of the world, embodied in sticks and mud. The beaver does not yet comprehend the abstract concept of architecture — its dams are Extensions of Beaver, features of its extended anatomy.

So too with us: our tools are not separate from us — they are us.

AI is our latest dam — still wet, still flooding the valley. We peer into it and try to see ourselves, but the surface is too boiling hot to reflect. We call it “intelligence,” we call it “mind,” we call it “machine.” These are the metaphors of a species trying to cool the technological onslaught.

We don’t yet know what AI is. We only know what it reminds us of.