New models this week. Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra. Both have left me with that increasingly familiar combination of wonder, understanding and fear.
The distance between what we can imagine and what we can make is getting shorter. That includes our dreams of curing cancer, resolving conflicts, feeding, clothing and housing the world.
It also includes our nightmares.
So yeah, we’ve got some choices before us. Each of us. Individually and collectively.
Bernie Sanders is calling for an immediate pause on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence, with penalties of up to twenty years in prison for violating the proposed restrictions.
I understand the impulse. He fights for the little guy, and there are very good reasons to question what happens when this much power is concentrated in so few hands.
I love Bernie. I dream of a world where Al Gore won in 2000 and Bernie won in 2016. Or, I guess, dreamt of it. These days I spend more time thinking about what we can make from here.
And increasingly, that means synthetic intelligence alongside emotionally-driven intent.
But what does it mean to operate extraordinary intelligence with emotionally-driven intent?
Well, it means everything happening louder, faster, and with increasingly disruptive outcomes. And those outcomes will include whatever we haven’t worked through.
This is why I’ve spent so many years focusing on my inner world. Reliving, resurfacing and resolving the wounds that gravitationally altered the foundations of my decisions.
I still get scared. I still get angry. But I’m getting better at noticing what’s reaching for the controls in those moments.
That matters when the distance from impulse to consequence keeps shrinking.
Lately, things feel like they’re moving so fast they’re almost moving in slow motion. The demand for a response arrives before I’ve had the time I’d prefer to decide how to respond.
Meanwhile, things we once spoke about as society-ending possibilities become things we’re somehow expected to absorb into an ordinary week.
The pendulum is swinging so quickly it looks like a blur.
You know when a camera catches a helicopter blade at just the right interval, and it looks like it’s sitting still?
That’s close to the feeling. Except the blade is still moving. The danger hasn’t stopped because I’ve found a way to look at it.
And I don’t want to mistake getting accustomed to horror for understanding it.
As we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, I keep thinking about how differently suffering registers. The loss of nearly three thousand people tore through our collective consciousness. The vast suffering of the wars that followed occupied a different place in our attention.
These lives matter equally. Our attention doesn’t hold them equally.
I’m frustrated by whose suffering reaches us, how it reaches us, and how little room we sometimes have to respond when it does. I’m also thankful we can admit when we have nothing left to give to the witnessing.
Some days I reach a kind of witnessing bankruptcy. I still care. I just need to look away.
There’s something in that gap I don’t want to lose sight of now. Being unable to feel the full weight of everything doesn’t make any of it weightless.
So when I call speed the mercy of the moment, I’m trying to name something very particular.
I notice it in my own life: the distance between my intent and what I can create is shrinking, too.
I can ask myself: Where do I want that pendulum to sit? What do I want to help exist?
Then I can focus on that place long enough to take a step toward it.
Real enough for at least that next step.
The danger is still real. We have to keep moving, and the choice of where we move matters. I focus on what I want to help exist, and shuffle toward it.
Thankfully, so far, I’ve found terra firma under each step. Enough footing to make something, see what happens, and choose again.
My creative engine is giving me the stability to throw more clay on the wheel as the world goes to shit.
I make something. It gives me something to work with. I adjust. Sometimes someone else finds something in it that helps them, and that gives me enough signal to shift my weight forward.
This is where speed can become useful to me. I can reach an idea while I still feel it. Give it a shape. Discover what happens when it leaves my head and enters the world.
I understand Bernie wanting to slow things down. And I share his concern about who gets hurt and who gets to choose. I also feel the possibilities opening in my own hands, and I want more people to have access, fluency and (hopefully) excitement.
I don’t know how much we’ll get right.
I see a beautiful future, and I see how much harm we’re capable of doing on the way there.
None of us gets a private path beyond the reach of other people’s choices. The work includes caring for each other when those choices land as well.
I don’t think this next phase is going to be all that joyous. But I’m confident there will be moments of beauty.
And I will do everything in my ability to create as many of those moments as possible.
Just gotta throw more clay on the wheel.
Join me, shall you?
Author’s note:
I had a draft of Saturday morning thoughts and two new models to choose between: Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra. Astra won the coin toss. Apparently each Saturday morning now involves deciding which newly arrived intelligence to talk thru my thoughts with.
I brought my draft, and we talked through what I meant by “the mercy of the moment,” the limits of witnessing, and how creating helps me find footing amid accelerating change. Astra challenged gaps in my argument, checked the Bernie Sanders claim against his announcement, and helped me notice where my metaphors suggested more certainty or safety than I intended.
From that exchange, Astra synthesized a new draft. I edited it, we discussed those edits, and we refined the language together. Several of the central images—including witnessing bankruptcy, finding terra firma, and throwing more clay on the wheel—emerged from my side of that conversation. The finished prose reflects both my writing and AI-generated language.
We also developed the visual direction together, using an image-generation tool to create the pottery header and matching CW letter mark. The thickening paint around the hands grew out of our conversation about making things feel real enough to take the next step.
The experiences, convictions, and responsibility for what’s here are mine. The process was collaborative… and, fittingly, part of the very thing this essay is trying to describe.