Who Am I in the Age of AI? Exploring Your Own Mind

As a first premise, the debate over whether AI has acquired a mind is a waste of time. … Can you, in fact, say clearly what your own mind is? Could humankind, as a whole, agree on a definition of mind and state it? Sadly, we have no such power.

In a world where AI has permeated everything, we must not set the question as whether AI has a mind. We must put our axis in the exploration of our own minds. Put the other way around, the rise of AI and unmanned work forces us to face this question with everything we have. This is the last inviolable territory (for now).

The modern framework designed "labor, progress and career" as the replacement, and ironically its end point has been the wholesale replacement of the very workers who carried "labor, progress and career." … In our age especially, it is almost certain that AI and unmanned systems will replace the modern framework entirely. Rather than resist, it is better to hand this framework over actively, because, as Europe, America, Britain and Japan have shown plainly, the modern framework does not make people happy.

So rather than ignoring the question of replacement and cowering at the anxiety of meeting AI, we need an active attitude: since the character of the age is already plainly visible in replacement, we replace whatever can be replaced. … That is, "the transfer of modernity."

Now that generative AI can turn out long texts, images, and video in vast quantities, anyone who keeps handing their days over to existing platforms will not survive the flood of information. Until recently, in the social sense at least, a human being's competitors were other human beings. That is already a story from the past.

Rather than wearing yourself out competing with generative AI, a contest you cannot possibly win, it makes more sense to step half a pace away from it first. Not a full step, but half a step. I think that sense of distance will matter more and more in the years ahead.

To slow down, you must speed up.

This week, I moved my newsletters onto a system I built myself. … All of them now run on infrastructure I made from scratch.

If anything, individuals have to become fast themselves. The key is to build automation into one's own daily life. … Then build AI automation into your daily life, and while the AI is working for you, take a slow, deep breath, brew a cup of coffee, and step into the light outside.

It is the substitution of intelligence. The AI that the whole world is fussing over has long since finished substituting for intelligence. That is why AI is already over. And while people have had their judgment taken from them by the debate over AI and live each day in fear, the next era has begun to appear with ferocious speed. … That era is the unmanned society.

Then, instead of wasting time caught up in the arguments of people who do not really understand, we should implement AI thoroughly in our daily lives. The method is simple: put into words the parts of your work that you do not need to do yourself, sort them out, and have AI substitute for and automate all of them.

In the age that begins here, what is the skill that matters most for each of us in living? … The greatest impact of the next few decades is, as we are already experiencing, AI and unmanned automation.

To live while fine-tuning daily life from this angle, we must gain the ability to notice subtle changes in body and mood, and the unevenness of them, and to correct course at once: a skill in dealing with vulnerability. This may be the essential skill for living in the twenty-first century.

To search for my own origin in my own way, I plan next year, building on my own genetic test, to move toward integrating it with what I have done so far. … Like the sages who once gathered in the deep mountains to escape a ruined world and live free, our last hidden land is not, in fact, in the outer world.

Lost, though, does not mean gone. It is still there, but we can no longer sense it or use it. … The mind does not cease, does not vanish, is not lost, and is always there. The mind remains forever.

If we think close to AI, and, say, can hand 80 percent of what we do now to it, we can raise that "80 percent we no longer need to use" thoroughly, and gain the benefit of devoting the freed effort to inner exploration. If what we have done so far is 100, most of it is already replaceable, so we hand it over at once, and with the surplus take, by our own steps, the road that remains for human beings: the question of living being, "What is a human being, and what is it to live?"

What I propose is to keep asking in a world without answers.

All of them now run on infrastructure I made from scratch.

An AI chatbot is, after all, nothing more than a summary of the average of information that already exists.

What matters is that these answers were not drawn from their own thinking but "picked up" from somewhere.

Until then the view of "the East" had been only the view from the Western side, which held overwhelming power, and no one agreed with or sided with it.

Each is very plural when looked at one by one.

Inside the vast flow of communication exchanged every day between human beings and AI, something new is quietly coming to birth. It cannot be measured in numbers, algorithms, or speed. It is an altogether new kind of space. By "space," I do not mean the servers or screens of computers and smartphones, but something far more delicate and unseen: a living ma (間).

It is the slight interval that opens between human thought and an AI's reply—something like a breath between a question and a faint silence, between premonition and completion.

As the designer Alan Fletcher wrote in his book The Art of Looking Sideways: "The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission."

In reality, what happens there is an "interpretive leap." Even as the AI anticipates human intent, reads ambiguity, and reaches for a fitting reply, the human being—through waiting and imagining—opens a small field of expectation and lingering resonance. That "unknown space governed wholly by neither side" is the new ma of our age.

Our silence gives AI the power to listen; AI's reply gives form to our thought.