A.I. is a Medium
AI is not just a technology. It’s a new medium.
Most of us aren’t inventing foundation models—we’re applying them to our work and lives. From that perspective, today’s AI debate is an old one, resurfacing yet again:
How much mediation is too much? Where is the line?
We’ve been here before. Socrates worried that writing would make us stupid because knowledge would live outside the mind rather than in memory. The Church resisted vernacular Bibles because possession of a text was confused with authority to interpret it. The internet triggered moral panic in education—and many of us were told to distrust Wikipedia on principle.
Media itself is neither good nor bad. It’s a tool. And tools are judged by how they’re used. What’s new about generative AI is not simply scale or speed, but collaboration: the medium now participates in producing the output. That makes responsible use more—not less—important. The genie is already out of the bottle. The real question is no longer whether to use these tools, but how to use them intelligently.
My work focuses on the boundaries where we don’t yet have good answers—especially around shared context, meaning, and environment. It’s one thing for a system to generate impressive output from a well-formed prompt. It’s another to build ecosystems where humans and machines can:
• Understand the environments they’re operating in
• Share symbolic representations of those environments
• Reason across micro- and macro-levels of knowledge simultaneously
Think of it as world-building for a game or a fantasy series. Or, like Google creating a digital representation of the physical world for GPS.
We are the first generation to seriously crack the problem of machine-interpretable meaning. The next step is collaboration: building structured representations of knowledge-space that humans and machines can explore together. I like to call it “ the Meaningverse" (hence the name of my consultancy).
If Einstein was right about the equivalence of energy and information, then this trajectory isn’t just possible—it’s inevitable. If you’re interested in solving problems at the ecosystem level, feel free to DM me. I love thinking about, talking about, working on and, as you see, making art about these ideas.
P.S.
The comic above started as my hand-drawn sketch on iPad in Adobe Freeform. I refined it using ChatGPT, then added a screenshot from Google Slides. Because: if we’re trying to communicate with both humans and machines, why wouldn’t we use every medium at our disposal?
P.S.S.
If you've read this far, you get to hear the punchline:
The great irony of Socrates' critique of writing as inferior is that we only know about it because Plato wrote it down in the Phaedrus (275-276). In fact, we only know about Socrates at all because others wrote about him. I'm sure that, long before Socrates, there was some bipedal primate telling their troupe that using tools was inferior to using their hands. 😉
