Human Wisdom in the Age of AI

Reflections on not knowing, Zen, and the subtle disappearance of ourselves

July, 2026

Lately I have been puzzled by my own state of mind.

There is a particular sensation that has become increasingly familiar. I am here in this body, yet my mind seems to abide nowhere. There is no clear center. Thoughts arise, but they no longer seem to belong to anyone. They appear and disappear like clouds in an empty sky.

This sounds very Zen.

When I look within, I cannot find who I am. There is only emptiness. When I look outward, I cannot find anything solid there either. Thoughts continue to arise, but they are simply thoughts. We can write them into books, build philosophies from them, and now create artificial intelligence. They are expressions of the mind, yet they have no independent substance. They appear, and they disappear.

This is not a philosophical conclusion. It is simply how experience presents itself.

At the same time, we are entering a completely new age.

Artificial Intelligence is an extraordinary evolution of human thought. Its ability to recognize patterns, organize complexity, and uncover relationships is astonishing. Someone recently compared AI to humanity’s discovery of fire. At first I thought that sounded exaggerated, but perhaps it isn’t. Fire changed civilization. AI may do the same.

But my question isn’t really about AI.

My question is about us.

Lately I have been feeling that more and more people are somehow disappearing, — including myself.

Of course they are still there. I speak with them, meet them, spend time with them. But something feels different. It seems that the center of gravity is no longer fully within the human being. It is somewhere between themselves and AI.

It’s as though there is less human noise. Yet that sounds contradictory, considering what is happening in the world with all its polarization.

And still, something feels different. Something is becoming sterile. Or perhaps it is simply that we are no longer listening to one another.

I don’t know.

But I notice that enormous amounts of energy are going into conversations with AI.

Faced with uncertainty, we increasingly turn toward AI. We ask what to write, what to think, how to make decisions, how to understand ourselves. The responses can be surprisingly clear and often very helpful.

Yet I find myself wondering what may be disappearing.

I wonder how much of our future understanding will arise from lived experience rather than AI.

What happens when we no longer let time ripen our understanding?

We usually say that there is a difference between making a decision through thinking and letting the decision arrive or land by itself.

We are used to spending time reflecting on our deeper questions. We seek people to have conversations with.
Are we losing that?

Will we still have time to metabolize our experience in the way we always have? It happens over time. AI produces results faster than we can blink. What about the maturation of feelings and emotions? Metabolizing our life experience takes time and often brings maturity and natural wisdom.

What happens when we no longer need to go through those periods of questioning? What happens when we no longer need to wrestle with uncertainty because AI can always find the answer for us, or can it?

Or are we slowly replacing our own inquiry with someone, or something, thinking for us?

Recently I had a phone conversation with a seasoned Roshi. We were working on a koan together.
The moment he greeted me and spoke his first words, something shifted. As I presented the koan, his listening drew me into a complete embodied stillness. There was only this whole body. Earth itself. Nothing extra.

Afterward I found myself thinking about two old Zen expressions: silent utterance and dark activity.

For many years I loved those phrases without really understanding them. Lately they have begun to feel less like teachings and more like descriptions.
They do not point toward understanding or insight. They point to the functioning of life before understanding enters at all.

Before we divide experience into this and that.

Before there is someone trying to understand.

From there, life manifests as a whole. Nothing is missing because nothing has yet been separated. Action or response appears naturally, not because we have found the right answer, but because there is no distance between life and the living of it.

Perhaps this is what touched me in the Roshi’s listening. It wasn’t that he gave me a better understanding of the koan. There was simply no need to understand. There was a shared not knowing beyond words.

This is what makes me pause as AI becomes woven into our daily lives. AI can produce extraordinary thoughts. It can explain, compare, analyze, and organize knowledge with great intelligence. I use it every day and continue to be amazed by what it can do.

I don’t know what AI will ultimately bring to humanity.

Perhaps it will become one of the greatest gifts we have ever received. Perhaps it will even invite us to rediscover what cannot be automated.

I don’t know.

These are not conclusions.

They are simply reflections from someone watching a new world emerge while sitting in an old tradition. Perhaps the greatest challenge of the coming years will not be learning how to use AI wisely.

Perhaps it will be remembering that wisdom has never belonged to thought, even though thought can express it so beautifully.