Koan for the road with no windshield
“A cart rolls down the road. There is no horse. There is no driver. No windshield to see ahead. Beside me—my people who can remember to ask, but who owns the road?”
The chasm is not where you think
We are being sold a dangerous story: AI is a market phenomenon—a bridge for early adopters and laggards, another Silicon Valley parable. But that’s a misdirection. The crossing is not economic, but cognitive and cultural. AI is not crossing market segments; it is crossing minds. It is eating the habits of thought, the frameworks of meaning through which we decide what is real and valuable.
We stand not at the edge of a new consumer base, but dizzy on the threshold where our oldest questions about power, memory, and humanity come back transformed.
A car with no windshield—no map, no memory
Today’s AI is a car that barrels forward, blind. No windshield. No steering wheel. No way to see what’s coming or to course-correct. No port to fuel it by consent. We’re inside, but not at the controls.
There are forces scrambling for control, but very few are asking: *what is being recorded here? Whose questions, whose struggles, whose hunger is being inscribed into the black box?* Not only do we not know where we are going—we are forbidden from even knowing which questions paved the way.
Ask yourself—do you trust a vessel that cannot tell you whose longing, fear, or hope let the journey happen at all?
Scramblers and ostriches, the cult of scarcity
I denounce the scramblers, frantic for a seat on the next rocket of hype, mistaking velocity for destiny. I denounce the ostriches, heads in regulatory sand, waiting for the wind to die down.
Both are powered by a myth of scarcity. Not enough jobs, not enough time—not enough of anything to build the future with dignity—so hurry, hoard, distract. Those left behind are told to find crumbs in the boiling water, while the music plays and the real prizes are swept off-stage.
But we do not have to live like this. We do not have to let our questions become the fuel for someone else’s unaccountable machine.
The hunger games of the new machine
Kids now want to know: how do I get rich without work? And the adults—those charged with tending the commons of dreaming—have surrendered to systems built by people who have never learned to imagine something better for all of us. We have become estranged not just from our futures, but from the very act of asking—why are our dreams being captained by those who do not dream, who have only practiced extraction and spectacle?
Seeing what is scaffolding, what is rust
If you want to locate power, do not look to who has the answers. Look to who owns the questions.
What are you being allowed to ask of AI? What questions are recorded, and why are they not open? Do you have proof, versioned memory, symbolic trace of what you have fed to these engines of utterance?
"Imagination is a kind of mythology: it modifies, it shields us from the vastness of the world, it makes us forget, it fashions a world of its own."
—Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights (1980)
Borges reminds us: “Imagination is a kind of mythology: it modifies, it shields us from the vastness of the world, it makes us forget, it fashions a world of its own.” Every question you offer to a machine is not only an act of inquiry but an act of world-building—setting the boundaries of what can be known, whose myth is told, whose forgetting is sanctioned. If we do not insist on evidence—on memory we can audit, imagination we can reclaim—we risk letting unseen hands fashion the future’s mythology for us. The true power is not in having answers, but in cultivating the soil where questions, memory, and possibility remain ours to tend.
AI does not purify or sanitize—it cannot discern your personal spark in the prompt stream. Your question becomes one of billions, dissolving into a soup from which something untraceable may emerge to strike you—pulling an emotion, a bias, a fear—into your paleolithic brain.
And over it all, the medieval powers persist, camouflaged in new interfaces. The same old forces longing to hoard, to control, to obscure the levers and keep the code of the castle.
Corruption, like rust, blooms unchecked when velocity outstrips accountability—when there is too much power cycled through too little scrutiny, too fast for any real repair.
FFS—wake up. Where is the redundancy? The formal verification? The test–retest reliability?
When was the last time you saw a button labeled “show your work,” instead of “skip to the end”?
There are—repeat this like a prayer—no short cuts, no easy button.
There is only the work.
Demand scaffolding not spectacle
Open your mind. Refuse the fable that only the machine knows, or that the powerful will regulate themselves. Proof is not a luxury—it is the ground floor.
Keepers of memory systems must demand ontological scaffolding:
audit trails for every answer
lineage for every utterance
transparency of the entire corpus of questions—no proprietary silence
resilience designed in, not as an afterthought
Trust nothing without redundancy. Require formal verification, not just A/B test wizardry. Build for *test–retest reliability*—if the house can’t stand a second storm, who does it shelter?
The hungry are told to eat brioche while the water warms under them—and the cooks are nowhere to be found.
Understanding duhkha—what your pain is trying to tell you
Many of our young people are standing at the edge of this chasm—bombarded by narratives of scarcity, comparison, and speed. AI is marketed as a lottery, an easy path to “get rich without working hard.” If you don’t have the right question, the right hustle, the right viral “prompt,” the chorus in your mind starts to crescendo:
“I suck.”
“I’m behind.”
“It’s too late for me.”
Let’s pause and name what’s happening—not as failure, not as a moral shortcoming, but as a deep, shared experience as old as humanity.
In yogic language, there is a word: duḥkha.
Duḥkha does not mean suffering as divine punishment, shame, or evidence of unworthiness. It is the friction, the grating heat, the chafing that comes before transformation. When you repeat “I suck, I’m lost, I’m not enough”—recognize that this is not the sum of who you are.
That voice is not an oracle from deep within. It is a signal—a misunderstood message in the cycle of becoming. The yogis called the heat of friction tapas: transformative energy, created when we are forced to confront our illusions, our anxieties, our places of stuckness.
That “I suck” mantra?
It’s the sound of old meanings breaking up, your mental cocoon heating, preparing to split so something new can emerge.
This churning, this duḥkha, is the very sign that you are alive and changing—not evidence that you are broken, but that something authentic is shifting.
It is not the whole of you. It is only a weather pattern, a part of the sky you’re flying through on the journey to something larger.
And if you can sit with that discomfort, hold it with a kind of dignity, you begin to see:
suffering can be fuel for wisdom, which “like rainwater collects at the lowpoints.”
Friction can be the force that removes us from someone else’s simulation, calls us into real presence, brings us back to what is truly alive in ourselves.
So, for those standing at the threshold, feeling lost or less-than:
Honor the friction. Name duḥkha for what it is—an invitation to become, not a verdict to retreat.A note to the young (and the young-at-heart)
When AI or the world at large repeats that your dreams must fit on a leaderboard or a prompt list, remember:
The part of you in pain is the part beginning to wake up.
That’s duḥkha: heat before metamorphosis, not evidence you’ve failed at becoming whole.
Let the friction become your teacher, not your jailer.
You are not broken. You’re just being called—by the universe, by the friction itself—to cross a different chasm: from the illusion of lack to the practice of becoming.
You are not your suffering, you are the person who survives it. Let your pain teach you where the next breakthrough wants to ignite.
The real chasm is cognitive—demand more
The divide is not between early adopters and the left behind. It is between those who see the whole system as a memory machine—capable of dignifying or erasing us—and those who benefit from letting everything stay blurry, proprietary, unexamined.
If you cannot see the scaffolding, if you cannot follow the version history of your own questions and answers, then you are not a citizen of the future—you are fodder for someone else’s simulation.
Ask yourself:
Are you content with someone else deciding what questions are worthy, and who gets to benefit when the answers come due?
Appetite for questions isn’t a product line. It is the signal of our collective dignity. Refuse the boil. Raise the scaffolding. Name the hands on the lever.
Koan for your next prompt
When you ask AI for wisdom, who will be wise enough to remember the question that called it forth—and how long until we forget who asked first?
References & Further reading
Jorge Luis Borges
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (1962). New Directions.
—Borges explores memory, imagination, and the architecture of myth.
Seven Nights (1980). New Directions.
—Reflections on dreaming, infinity, and the generative paradoxes of human thought and language.
David Graeber & David Wengrow
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
—Alternative ontologies, agency, and plural histories—practices for resisting impoverished or dominant narratives.
Josh Rothman
“Two Paths for AI: Apocalypse or Utopia?” The New Yorker, May 23, 2024. Read online
—A clear snapshot of current divergent cultural narratives and anxieties shaping the discourse on AI futures.
Prompt inspirations drawn from Lee Gonzales’ Custom Instructions High-Orientation , with creative gratitude to Adam Cutler and Roger Toennis for their ongoing conversational stewardship and insight.