Why I'm Not Worried About AI
A Return to Human Intelligence
There is a voice inside your head that never really stops.
It analyses, weighs, compares. It rehearses conversations that haven’t happened and replays ones that have. It narrates your own experience back to you, in real time, as you move through the day. It has opinions about everything, and shortly it will have an opinion about this article.
We call this thinking. We celebrate it. It is the faculty that education spends twelve years developing and professional life rewards almost exclusively. Logical. Analytical. Reasoned. The capacity to hold a problem in mind, turn it over, and arrive at a conclusion you can defend.
It is genuinely impressive.
But it is only one way of knowing. There are three others.
#1: You’ve been in a conversation that changed direction before anyone said a word. Something shifted in the room, in the air, and you felt it before you could name it. Not a thought. A knowing, arriving somewhere below the thinking. And you’ve also trusted someone immediately, without evidence. Or distrusted someone you had every reason to trust. And later, sometimes much later, you found out you were right. Not because you reasoned your way there. Because something in you read the situation more accurately than your rational mind could.
This is the gut. Not a metaphor, not a cliché. A real form of intelligence, registering what the analytical mind cannot reach, and communicating in a way that has nothing to do with words. More on that in a moment.
#2: You’ve also known what someone needed before they asked. Maybe before they knew themselves. A friend who said they were fine, and you knew they weren’t. A colleague whose question wasn’t really the question. A moment when you stayed, just stayed, without trying to fix or advise or move things forward, and something between you shifted.
This is the heart. Again, not a metaphor, not a cliché. A form of knowing that operates entirely outside language, in the space between people, in what is sensed rather than said.
#3: And sometimes, perhaps not that often, but on occasion, you’ve seen something that wasn’t there yet. A possibility that felt more real than the present situation. A direction that was simply, suddenly, obvious in a way that no amount of logic or reasoning had produced, and no amount of it could produce.
This is vision. The eyes, in the deepest sense, seeing new possibilities, new perspectives, new ways through.
Now, back to language.
These three other ways of knowing — the gut, the heart, the eyes — have almost no language for what they know or how they know it. “When you know, you know” is about as far as words get when trying to describe how the heart communicates. These are forms of intelligence that speak in a felt sense, a signal, a quality of knowing that disappears the moment you try to fully encapsulate it in words. It is the realm of poetry. And you cannot learn about love by reading a million poems. You have to have experienced it first to know what the poet is pointing toward. It escapes language.
This is not a limitation of vocabulary. It is the nature of these ways of knowing. They live beyond what language was built to carry.
Which is why the rise of AI clarifies something important.
Today’s AI systems are also known as Large Language Models. They are called this because they are trained on more text than any human could read in a thousand lifetimes. When it comes to analytical thinking, they are extraordinary, and they operate in exactly the medium the analytical mind operates in. Language.
But the gut, the heart, the eyes. You cannot train a model on what they know. Because what they know never made it into text. It was felt, sensed, seen. Lived but not recorded.
You cannot train a Large Language Model on intelligence that is beyond language.
If you are familiar with some of my work, you might already sense, perhaps in the gut, where this is heading.
Over the last few centuries (millennia, really, but we’ll stay focused) our culture has become incredibly head-centric. The kind of intelligence that powered our institutions, our sciences, our economies was the analytical kind. The verbal, analytical mind above all else. The gut, the heart, the eyes were deprioritized. At times, actively suppressed.
We built systems of education and professional life that are extraordinarily good at developing analytical intelligence, and equally good at training the other three out of us. Enough time passed that we largely forgot they were ever there. Yet we went further still. We began to identify ourselves with the analytical mind entirely, as though the voice in the head were the whole of what we are. Of who we are.1
And so our other ways of knowing, which had always helped us navigate life, grew quieter and quieter. But they are still there. Still speaking, in their own language, in their own way.
We learned to ignore them, to override their signals. But they are a part of us. Still there, waiting to be heard.
And now, ironically, the very cultural systems that suppressed them are calling for their return. Professional and educational institutions are investing in what they call “human skills”, you might’ve heard about this. And when you dig into what they mean, they are pointing, without fully realizing it, at the gut, the heart, and the eyes. A return of the fullness of human intelligence.
The reason value is shifting isn’t simply that AI does the analytical work faster. It’s that the analytical work was never the whole of what made us human, never the whole of human intelligence.
We have been trying to fly a 747 plane using only one of its four engines (no wonder it feels like a grind). It just so happens that this engine is also the one that AI can now do well, and we switched off the three it cannot.
AI is shinning a spotlight on what we aren’t using.
It is a correction. A return. An invitation, finally, unavoidably, to come back to the parts of ourselves we let go quiet. To our full self. Our whole self. Because the unintended consequence of taking up permanent residence in the analytical mind, rather than visiting when needed, is a life that is somehow thinner than it should be. More mechanical, less alive. Less fully lived.
And here is what is remarkable: these other ways of knowing return faster than you would expect. All it takes is for the active cultural suppression to be removed, even slightly.
These ways of knowing were always there.
They are also, not coincidentally, the things that make us feel most fully alive.
In the weeks to come, we’ll explore each of them in turn: what they are, what they feel like when they’re working, and what they need to return.
Your friend,
James
There are now entire therapeutic traditions, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy among them, dedicated to helping people loosen that identification. But how we got there in the first place has remained just out of reach.