Tagged: ai
I Don’t Think Elon Musk Was Being Misunderstood. I Think He Was Speaking A Different Cognitive Language.
The interpretation problem didn’t begin with AI. It began with us.
I watched the interview between Elon Musk and Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, and what fascinated me most wasn’t the politics. It was the mechanics of the conversation itself.
As I watched, I found myself thinking less about whether I agreed with either side and more about why two highly intelligent people seemed to be operating in completely different linguistic universes.
Then I realized… I’ve been studying a variation of this exact dynamic in my own life for years.
Two Lenses, One Mountain
My fiancé, Leon, and I debate ideas constantly. Part of this is purely cognitive, but part of it is cultural: I’m Canadian, and he’s British.
Leon naturally zooms in with sharp, classic British precision, listening for exact wording, specific facts, precise numbers, and internal inconsistencies. If a date is slightly off, if a statistic is rounded, or if a claim isn’t technically accurate down to the decimal, that’s where his attention naturally goes first.
I naturally zoom out. I’m looking for the architecture, the thread connecting one idea to another, the pattern emerging underneath the individual facts.
Neither approach is inherently flawed, and Leon’s sharp eye for detail has saved us both more than once. But when those two cognitive and cultural styles clash without a shared translation layer, they produce friction.
Leon sometimes thinks that if he provides enough granular facts, the picture will shift. I sometimes think that if I can just sketch the overarching model more clearly, the details will fall into place. We’re both trying to build understanding, we’re just climbing the same mountain from opposite sides.
Ontario Already Built a School for the Future. Then We Forgot About It.
What Thornlea Secondary School’s forgotten experiment can teach us about education in the age of artificial intelligence
I recently discovered that the high school I attended for Grade 9 was not originally designed to be an ordinary high school.
Thornlea Secondary School in Thornhill, Ontario, opened in 1968 as a deliberate experiment in educational innovation. Long before today’s debates about artificial intelligence, personalized learning, student agency and the future of work, a group of Ontario educators was already asking a more fundamental question:
What should a school become when the world it is preparing students for is changing?
I find that extraordinary, partly because I attended Thornlea without knowing any of this.
To me, it was simply the school where I studied computer science using LOGO Turtle and DOS, joined the orchestra, took creative writing, journalism, photography and drama, swam competitively, studied Shakespeare and experienced meditation and visualization in physical education. Only decades later did I discover that I had briefly entered a school built from a very particular philosophy of learning.
Now I cannot help wondering whether Thornlea helped make me who I am.
Not in the simplistic sense that one year at one school determined the direction of my life. Human beings are shaped by thousands of influences. But environments do not merely give us information. They give us permission. They show us which kinds of curiosity are welcome, which connections are possible and whether learning is something we receive or something we actively pursue.
I became a writer, traveller and philosopher whose work moves between technology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, creativity, culture and human intelligence. I have never naturally understood why knowledge should remain divided into neat categories when life itself does not arrive in subjects.
Perhaps Thornlea did not create that way of thinking in me.
Perhaps it recognized it.
Perhaps it encouraged it.
And perhaps that is precisely what education should do.
Yes, Of Course It’s ALL About Me.
People often ask me what I write about.
Artificial intelligence? Travel? Philosophy? Language? Neurodivergence? Ageing? Humanity? Science? Culture?
The honest answer?
All of those things.
And none of them.
The subjects may appear to constantly change, but my fascination never does.
For as long as I can remember, I have been captivated by one question above all others: what does it mean to be human?
Not just biologically or historically, but experientially.
How do we think? Why do we perceive the world so differently? How does language shape our understanding? What invisible structures connect seemingly unrelated ideas? What exists around us that we simply haven’t yet developed the tools, or perhaps the vocabulary, to perceive?
Those questions have fascinated and followed me my entire life.
Long before I travelled.
Long before artificial intelligence.
Long before I knew words like intertwingularity or sonder.
I think it’s important to clarify that travel didn’t create my humanity curiosity.
It helped to actualize and fulfilled it.
I never wanted to collect passport stamps or simply say I had “been somewhere.” I wanted to stand where history unfolded. I wanted to hear languages I couldn’t yet understand, experience the many cultures that I had deeply researched about, and witness humanity and decipher societal narratives with my own eyes instead of solely through someone else’s interpretation or teachings.
I’ve never truly trusted accountabilities from knowledge that is not complimented with experience.
That is why my writing moves so freely between biology, anthropology, archaeology, language, psychology, philosophy, travel and technology. To me they have never existed as boxed in, separated disciplines. They are different windows looking out onto the same extraordinary mystery.
That’s probably also why I have never felt like I comfortably fit inside neat little boxes.
I don’t naturally think in categories.
I naturally think in relationships.
One idea flows to another. A conversation about dolphins becomes a reflection on communication. Communication becomes language. Language becomes artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence becomes interpretation. Interpretation becomes philosophy. Philosophy inevitably circles back to humanity.
To me, none of that is a distraction. It is how my mind explores. It quite excites me to feel a natural deep dive coming on.
For much of my life I wondered whether there was something unusual about the way I thought. Today, I know that it is my way of seeing and interpreting this amazing world.
Over the years, I’ve also come to notice that we confuse a great many things in our culture.
- We mistake self-observation for self-absorption.
- We mistake introspection for narcissism.
- We mistake confidence for arrogance.
- We mistake curiosity for eccentricity.
They are not the same thing.
Maybe that is why writing about myself has occasionally been misunderstood by some. I’m not writing because I believe I am the most fascinating person on Earth (however, I have had some pretty extraordinary experiences). I’m writing because I am literally the only consciousness (to date, who knows what is to come in the future!) that I will ever experience completely from the inside.
Your life is just as rich.
It is just as complex.
And definitely just as worthy of exploration.
But there’s only one problem, I simply don’t have direct access to it.
Continue reading
writingsofamrs.com 