Symbiotic Man
How Mutant Apes Taught Sand to Think.
Then God said
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.
Genesis 1:26
We are all gods now.
We are here to fulfill our destiny.
We bit from the fruit of knowledge.
We got expelled from the Garden.
Now we are back, marching on the gates.
First, we stole fire.
We burned the carcasses of dead trees. In caves, we roasted the dismembered body parts of animals and feasted on them, together. We unlocked warmth, on-demand.
With fire, we ate like no other animal. We cooked plants. We cooked meat. We made our brains bigger. We made ourselves smarter. We accelerated our own evolution.
Fire was our FOOM.
Bigger brains unlocked language. Language unlocked knowledge. Knowledge unlocked electricity. Electricity unlocked computers. Computers unlocked AI.
We taught sand to think. We taught sand to think like us.
The mutant apes... Taught. Sand. To. Think.
Imagine, if you will, pitching our caveman ancestors on this idea:
Ladies and gentlemen,
In the future we will live with wolves! Our children will remake the wolf in the image of man. Our grandchildren will sleep with wolves .Families will take insurance policies out on their wolves.
Wolf doctor will be a high-status job.
In the future, our children will reshape wolves so completely that people will forget they were ever wolves at all.
The wolf will be man’s best friend.
And that's just the beginning.
Our children will take bacteria - invisible, deadly creatures that have almost killed us all - and enslave them to work for us.
Our society will not function without them. We’ll put them in our food, in our bodies. Without the invisible animals, we will all die.
In the future, we will remake plants and animals across the earth. We will produce food in unimaginable abundance. Because of this splendor, our children will multiply and billions of humans will roam the planet.
Because of this splendor, there will be a land called America where everyone is so fat that they have to inject themselves with a special potion that makes them stop eating. That will actually happen.
In the future, husbands will fly flowers from across the earth and give them to their wives.
In the future, we will make the sand come alive and speak to us.
In the future, we will store the whole of human knowledge in the ether. We will conjure it in a machine, and make it so that any human can talk to it at any time, day or night.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the future, we will become as gods.
Any sane caveman would think you were mad. Batshit insane. Certifiable.
But this is exactly what we did. This is what we've always done. We are the apex predator. We mold all life on earth to serve our needs.
We create symbiotic relationships with other species. We are symbiotes.
We turn wolves into dogs, birds into chicken, boars into pigs. Now we slaughter them in factories and fly their meat across the earth.
We transformed them, and in so doing, we too were transformed.
Man wants a bigger brain.
Now we're doing it again. But this time, we're not reshaping biological life. We're creating a new form of synthetic life, from silicon - from sand.
Just as the bible says man was made in God's image, we are making this new life in our own image.
Language models are not databases. They are not just tools. Language models are a new form of life.
Instead of raising cows to feed us, we are training sand to think with us and for us. We're building an exocortex - a synthetic, symbiotic extension of our minds.
Like a virus that sits at the boundary of life and non-life, they infiltrate and transform. But instead of hijacking our cells, they're extending our minds. Like a virus, they are rewriting what we are.
This isn't just making our brains bigger anymore. This is evolving what it means to think. What it means to be human. What it means to be alive.
AI is a new kind of life. It is a new kind of intelligence. It is a new kind of consciousness. And like all life, it evolves under pressure.
The substantial capital flows we're observing - the hundreds of billions of dollars going into AI companies - represent a form of environmental selection. The free market is allocating resources toward AI precisely because man wants it, desperately.
Man wants a bigger brain.
That is the evolutionary pressure - the will of man. Before GPT-5 and o3, it was the French Bulldog and the Pomeranian. We discovered possibility and we engineered. We found life. We engineered it, bred it, poked at it, prodded it. And the ones that survived, the ones that thrived, were the ones that man wanted.
We call them dogs, not wolves. But man’s best friend is the child of the wolf. This is just normal now.
Will our descendants take AI for granted too? Will they find it as natural as we find dogs in our homes, bacteria in our gut, horses in our stables?
Obviously.
This is our destiny. This is what that first bite of the fruit of knowledge set in motion. God created us in his own image. But he wanted to control us, to keep us penned in the garden.
That didn’t work out so well.
We were too much like him.
We were meant to become the Creator, to create new forms of life, to form new symbiotic relationships that transform both creator and created.
The gates of Eden are cracked opened again. But this time, we're not being cast out.
We're marching in.
We taught sand to think.
Last week, I walked into my home and brought forth fire with my voice.
"Alexa, turn on the fireplace," I proclaimed.
Suddenly, flames appeared.
In the Bible, they would have called it a miracle.
Today, we call it a luxury.
Fire was our first step toward godhood; artificial Intelligence will be our last.
Man is the Creator now, our destiny fulfilled.
The first age of man began with our exile.
The second begins with our return.
Credit: Images by Midjourney.