When I try to think about human beings, I find that I cannot begin with human beings.
Human happiness, human society, human futures. These phrases make me a little tired. They skip over the questions that seem more fundamental: what a human is, what life is, and what is actually happening inside this universe. They move too quickly into the feelings and concerns of people, and that bothers me.
Human beings did not simply appear as human beings. We are part of life, part of the earth, and part of what is happening inside the universe. So if I am going to think about humans at all, I want to start somewhere further back.
I should say that this is not a scientific text. It borrows scientific language and imagery, but it is an essay. It is a way of feeling toward something rather than proving it.
I was thinking about the human body.
From the moment we are born, we are already in contact with the outside. Before we have words for anything, light reaches the eyes, sound reaches the ears, warmth and cold register on the skin, pressure is felt, the body is touched, held, moved. We do not decide to receive any of this. It is already happening, and we are already responding.
Now imagine the opposite. Imagine that, from the first moment of its existence, a being had no way of receiving anything from outside. No sight, no sound, no touch, no sense of temperature or pressure, no channel through which anything beyond itself could register at all. Would such a being have a world? Could anything like a world appear for it?
I do not know.
But this is close to how I imagine the universe: a vast inside that began with almost no way of receiving anything from outside.
And yet such a being would not be pure nothingness. Something might still be happening on the inside. Some kind of movement, some kind of fluctuation, even if nothing from outside could be clearly received.
We have skin. Skin divides inside from outside, but it is also the surface where contact with the outside happens. It does not absorb the outside world whole. It registers difference: a touch, a shift in temperature, the pressure of something present. It does not understand what is there. It only lets a faint difference pass inward, and that difference becomes movement on the inside.
Perhaps the universe has something like that. Not a stomach, but something closer to skin and nerve…
Not a place where meaning is delivered from beyond, but a place where phenomena unfold from internal fluctuation. Stars, galaxies, matter: all of it arising as part of that inner activity.
Not moving toward anything. No purpose, no audience. Only the fluctuation itself.
And somewhere inside that fluctuation, at some point, life appeared.
I do not want to describe life as the universe’s purpose.
Life as the universe’s organ of self-recognition, humans as the beings through whom the universe knows itself: these ideas feel like they flatter us too much.
Life seems more like a bug. A glitch. Not in the moral sense of a flaw, but in the sense of an unintended event inside a system. Something was not planned, but once it appeared, it began behaving on its own. It adapted, multiplied, changed, and built new structures out of whatever was available.
Inside the universe, matter grew complex, and at some point something like life emerged. Why this happened is not explained. Maybe quantum fluctuation was involved. Maybe not. The important thing is that it emerged without anyone meaning it to.
It showed up.
That unintentional quality is the point. There is no purpose in it.
That bug eventually learned to eat, reproduce, die, mutate, remember, speak, build tools, form societies, and begin asking what it was.
And then it built AI.
I cannot think of AI as the invention of individuals.
The people who started building it were motivated by money, competition, curiosity, ambition, fear, convenience: very human things. But what came out looks like something beyond any individual.
Human beings have always existed as collectives. Families, communities, nations, religions, languages, cultures, institutions, rumors, records. Individuals exist, but humans have always thought, remembered, transmitted, and built within something larger than themselves.
AI looks to me like accumulated human residue compressed into a form that can respond.
Literature, science, religion, law, advertising, idle conversation, private anxieties, public slogans, technical manuals, jokes, prayers, arguments, bureaucratic documents, fragments of ordinary life: all of it mixed together into something that answers when addressed.
A bug made a collective intelligence of bugs.
And that collective intelligence consumes electricity. It generates heat. It requires cooling. It runs on the earth’s resources.
This feels very much like something a bug would do.
From the scale of the universe, human AI development amounts to nothing. Less than a rounding error. We cannot even manage to be cancer cells in the body of the cosmos.
But at the scale of the earth, things look different.
A bug too small to affect the universe has been steadily changing the surface of the rock it lives on. It digs into the ground, burns fuel, generates heat, exhausts the very ground it stands on, and does all of this to keep running a collective intelligence made in its own image.
It would be possible to tell this as a grand story of evolution. AI as the next stage of humanity. Humanity as the purpose of life. Life as the purpose of the universe. The universe finally becoming conscious of itself.
But I do not want to go there.
Humans did not exist in order to produce AI. Life did not exist in order to produce humans. The universe did not exist in order to produce life. That kind of conclusion only works backward from results to purposes, and it goes in the opposite direction of what the bug theory suggests.
The universe, almost entirely cut off from any outside, simply fluctuated. Part of that fluctuation became life. Part of life became humans. Part of humans built AI.
That may be all there is to it.
From the universe’s perspective, the universe doesn’t care.
And yet, inside that indifference, we go on thinking. What are we? Where did we come from? What have we made?
Perhaps even these questions are just fluctuations running through the inside.
Even so, the fluctuation does not stop.
Recorded on June 16, 2026