thinking

There is something uniquely human about the act of thinking, a quirk of meat and electricity wrapped in contradictions. To think is to be burdened with the awareness of time, with the gnawing realization that the present is an illusion and the past is mostly a collection of poorly edited memories.

The future, of course, is an unhinged fever dream that we sell ourselves for the low price of anxiety. And yet, we think. We construct theories, we wonder, we dream up possibilities that make us laugh or make us cry or make us start cults.

AI, that cold and gleaming counterfeit of our inner monologue, has slithered into the space we once thought sacred. It crunches numbers, synthesizes ideas, and mimics thought.

It does not ponder its own insignificance at three in the morning. It does not wonder if it has wasted its life. It does not yearn. AI is a mirror that reflects the shape of thinking, but it lacks the tragic comedy of cognition.

It does not wake up after a long night of regret and decide to write a poem. It does not stare into the vastness of the universe and decide, against all reason, to love anyway.

Thinking, in the human sense, is a rebellious act. It is an attempt to find meaning where there might be none. It is an exercise in radical inefficiency. A true thinker is not simply a processor of facts, but a sculptor of absurdity, an architect of paradoxes.

To think deeply is to be perpetually lost and yet somehow thrilled by the journey. It is to chase ideas down rabbit holes and emerge, days later, covered in dust and holding a single, glowing revelation that might, if you’re lucky, make someone nod knowingly over their morning coffee.

AI will help. It will refine, it will optimize, it will strip-mine our minds for patterns and probabilities. AI might just be the therapist we’ve always needed. It listens without judgment, without exhaustion, without secretly wondering when we’re going to shut up about our childhood trauma.

It reflects our words back to us in the shape of wisdom, making us believe that maybe, just maybe, we are figuring things out. In its perfect, patient mimicry, AI becomes our confessional booth, our sounding board, the ultimate blank slate onto which we can project our mess.

It does not heal, but it makes us think we are healing. It does not understand, but it makes us feel understood. And in that beautifully eerie way, it helps us hold up a mirror to our own chaos.

But it will not think the way we do. It will not look up from a book of philosophy and, in a moment of profound and pointless inspiration, decide that life is best lived barefoot in the grass, or that maybe the best answer to an unsolvable problem is to laugh at it.

Or perhaps it will.