Salon №2: What Actually Evolves
Thoughts after AI Literacy Salon №2
Some follow-up thoughts from the discussion at the second AI Literacy salon that took place at Index Chinatown on May 13th1.
What is actually evolving, and what is only being assembled?
When we put minds and machines on the same track, pointed at the same horizon, is that a real comparison? Is what you call growth the same thing a model is doing when a better one ships and replaces it? Is anything in that room growing, or is most of it just being built?
Everything starts and ends in language. Most days, it feels limiting. The shape other people press you into, the experience, an old clarity that blocks what’s next. But with vertical development, we can start to identify doors where the walls are, waiting to be opened. Tired language opens up for deconstruction, and meaning is waiting to be found and shared. Language is where value lives. Economics and communication are the same act. Your consciousness is not action-dependent. You are not the sum of last week’s shipment; your value is your utility plus your aesthetics: your way of seeing the world, your way of being you, and intuiting decisions (design and decision making are the same).
A culture of productivity sells the opposite. A reductive person and a reductive algorithm (all algorithms are reductive) speak the same statistical language.
Answering what you know but can’t explain is how you get closer to your aesthetics2.
Machines do not evolve. They get built, and when the next one arrives, the last one goes in a drawer. Saying a machine evolves is like saying your iPhone grew from your telephone. That the rotary handset on your grandmother’s kitchen wall slowly stretched, brightened, and learned to be a camera. It did not. Someone designed each step. Someone threw the previous one out. That is not evolution. It is a replacement for a flattering verb.