I woke up this morning thinking about machines. Not in some abstract, philosophical way, but in the way you think about something that’s changed how you move through the world.
This morning I read about yet another AI medical breakthrough. One more boundary crossed in the quiet revolution happening around us.
And I felt that now-familiar mix of wonder and disorientation. The same feeling I had when my four-year-old asked Alexa a question I couldn’t answer. When my calendar started suggesting meetings before I knew I needed them. When I realized AI was finishing my sentences better than some humans in my life.
Something is happening to us.
I’ve been sitting with this question during quiet moments between work and family life, while my four-year-old creates imaginary worlds and my 15-month-old discovers her own reflection: What does it mean to be human when machines can do so much of what we thought made us special?
Not just calculate or memorize, but create. Empathize. Predict. Understand.
The answers aren’t neat or simple. But they matter. Maybe more than anything else right now.
The quiet displacement
Yesterday I watched a friend lose her job to automation. Not some far-future hypothetical loss. A real Tuesday afternoon phone call that changed her life.
“They said the AI does it better,” she told me. “And honestly? It probably does.”
This isn’t just about efficiency or economics. It’s about identity. Purpose. Meaning.
For generations, we’ve defined ourselves by what we do. By our outputs. Our skills. Our contributions.
What happens when those definitions dissolve?
Some see only threat in this question. I see possibility.
Because maybe what’s being disrupted isn’t just jobs or industries. Maybe it’s our fundamental understanding of what humans are here for.
The Inner Singularity
The Inner Singularity isn’t just a clever counterpoint to the technological Singularity that dominates our headlines. It’s something I’ve felt in my own body, my own awareness. That precise moment when something shifts irreversibly within you—like waking from a dream you didn’t know you were having.
We hear endless speculation about AI surpassing human intelligence, accelerating beyond our comprehension. But I’m drawn to its internal counterpart—that threshold crossing where awareness becomes aware of itself. Where consciousness recognizes itself not as some mystical achievement, but as the natural evolution of human presence.
This internal awakening changes how you process information, make decisions, navigate complexity. You gain that precious space between stimulus and response. And that space contains everything—your freedom, your clarity, your ability to shape what comes next.
I’ve watched it happen with clients—that moment when something clicks and they can’t go back to their old way of being. The internal noise quiets. Presence emerges. And suddenly their relationship with technology, with information, with reality itself transforms. Not because the world changed, but because they did.
Once you notice consciousness itself, not just its contents, you can’t unsee it. That’s the turning point that changes how you relate to everything—technology, others, yourself. And in a world being transformed by artificial intelligence, this internal evolution isn’t just possible. It’s necessary.
The mirror we didn’t ask for
AI learns from us. All of us. It ingests our books, our conversations, our art, our arguments. Our brilliance and our biases. Our wisdom and our wounds.
Then it reflects it back, amplified.
When I first started working with these systems, I noticed something odd. The outputs felt strangely familiar. Not just the style or substance, but the underlying patterns of thought.
I realized: I was seeing humanity’s collective mind made visible. With all its contradictions, creative leaps, and unconscious limitations.
We’ve built an external intelligence that shows us who we are. And sometimes, that reflection is uncomfortable.
A CEO I coach recently put it this way: “The machines aren’t making us obsolete. They’re making us honest.”
He’s right. AI isn’t just changing what we do. It’s changing how we see ourselves.
What we can’t automate
Running the trail this morning, winding along coastal bluffs, ocean stretching blue below, I passed an older man walking slowly with his dog. The dog stopped to sniff something. The man waited, watching with a patience I recognized.
I thought: You can’t automate this. This quiet moment of care. This choice to pause. To notice. To allow another being its curiosity.
This is what I mean by the Inner Singularity. The recognition that there are forms of intelligence that transcend computation.
Consciousness. Presence. The ability to be with what is.
In our rush to build smarter systems, we’ve often neglected these deeper capacities. The quiet intelligence that doesn’t solve problems but dissolves them. That doesn’t seek optimization but connection.
A client who runs an AI startup told me last week: “We keep trying to teach machines to think like humans. Maybe we should focus on teaching humans to think like humans.”
I’ve been turning that over in my mind ever since.
Finding the center
Sometimes I sit in silence and watch my thoughts like clouds passing overhead. Not judging. Not chasing. Just noticing.
In these moments, I touch something beyond thought. A field of awareness that contains all my thinking but isn’t defined by it.
This awareness doesn’t compete. It doesn’t optimize. It doesn’t scale.
It simply is.
AI can generate endless content. It can simulate emotions. It can even learn from its mistakes.
But it cannot be aware of itself in this fundamental way. It processes, but it doesn’t presence.
And this distinction isn’t just philosophical. It’s practical. It’s the difference between a system that serves human flourishing and one that diminishes it.
Conscious tools, conscious use
Last night I experimented with using AI as a mirror for self-reflection.
I prompted: “What patterns do you notice in how I describe challenges?”
The response was startling in its clarity. It showed me how often I frame difficulties as individual burdens rather than collective opportunities. How my language revealed subtle resistance to asking for help.
I sat with that insight for a while. Let it sink beneath thought into something deeper. And I felt a shift in how I held the project I’m working on.
This is conscious use of the technology. Not outsourcing our thinking, but extending it. Not replacing our wisdom, but refining it.
The tool itself isn’t conscious. But our engagement with it can be.
The real crisis, the real opportunity
We talk about existential risk from advanced AI. About alignment problems. About value systems encoded in machines.
These conversations matter. But they often miss the more immediate crisis: the crisis of human consciousness.
The crisis of attention fractured by endless stimulation. Of wisdom drowned out by information. Of connection flattened into transaction.
This crisis existed before AI. But AI accelerates it. Makes it impossible to ignore.
And paradoxically, that’s its gift. Because we can’t solve what we don’t acknowledge.
AI is calling us to evolve. Not our technology, but our awareness. Not our systems, but our selves.
What comes next
I don’t know exactly what the future looks like. None of us do.
But I know this: the people who will shape it well are those who have crossed their own Inner Singularity. Who have moved from unconscious reaction to conscious creation. From fragmented attention to integrated presence.
These aren’t just spiritual ideals. They’re practical necessities in a world of accelerating change.
And they can’t be engineered from outside. They can only be cultivated from within.
This morning on the trail, feet connecting with earth, breath syncing with movement, I felt a moment of real clarity about this. Not the kind that comes from argument or analysis, but the kind that arrives as a quiet knowing.
We’re not in a technology race. We’re in a consciousness race.
The question isn’t whether AI will surpass human intelligence. The question is whether humans will discover what our intelligence is actually for.
I believe we will. I see it happening already, in small moments and quiet revolutions. In people waking up to what matters. In communities choosing presence over productivity. In leaders finding the courage to build from wisdom rather than fear.
The Inner Singularity isn’t just possible. It’s necessary. And it begins with a simple choice to notice what’s happening within us as we interact with what we’ve created.
To stay awake when it would be easier to sleep.
To remain human in the age of machines.
