Why Obsessing Over AI Today Blinds Us to the Bigger Picture
AI is the train that never stops
I. The Hogwarts Express is a window to the past
On the second day of our two-week-long summer journey through Scotland, after zigzagging for hours through the towering, mist-cloaked peaks of Glencoe Valley, we arrived at Fort William, a quiet town cradled by the shimmering shores of Loch Linnhe.
The air was damp and carried the briny scent of the sea, mingling with the earthy aroma of wet Scots pine and moss. I looked down at my phone, only its soft inert touch to remind me that I was still in the 21st century, and inspected the map.
Loch Linnhe, together with the mythical Loch Ness, stretched like a liquid scar between the rugged Highlands—I later learned it’s a geological mystery called the Great Glen Fault—slicing the landscape up to Inverness into two: to the southeast, the Glencoe mountains and the greenery of Cairngorms; to the northwest, scattered fishing villages, jagged coastlines, and Isle Skye—all battered by weather and wind.
If you want to become an expert in Scottish topography, you can inspect the maps below to locate the Great Glen Fault:
Fort William offered exquisite views of the fjord, framed by the tree-covered hills behind. Not even the rain could dim the beautiful multicolor sky that painted the late afternoon. We ate wood-fired pizza at the Black Isle Bar, in one of those repurposed churches that populate Scotland.
That night, we went to sleep with that feeling of anticipation, the kind that stirs when something magical awaits on the horizon. It was Glenfinnan’s calling—the next day we’d fly take the car and go find the Hogwarts Express.
It was a short walk from the car park to the iconic viaduct, accompanied by the lushest trees, a gentle drizzling, the mist hiding the sun for the third day in a row, and a hundred other curious adventurers who, despite the weather, didn’t want to miss it. (Or perhaps it was actually an amazing day—being from Spain one can never tell.)
We found the best spot behind the arched bridge, sufficiently high to capture the moment but distanced from the rest in case someone decided to theme the scene with the Harry Potter soundtrack (it happened; we heard it). My watch marked the appointed hour. 10:45. 10:46. 10:47. We stood quiet, in impatient expectation, awaiting the arrival of the old train.
Despite the defiant clocks, the enchanted train wasn't late, nor was it early. It arrived precisely when it meant to. The echoing engine gave away its presence behind the ridge before we could see it. Loud, smoky, and rhythmically slow the iron horse approached the large stone viaduct, preparing the spectacle.
We weren't just happy witnesses but the privileged audience to a magic show.
People's faces were sculpted in nostalgic awe, as if spell-stunned, awaiting an invitation to a fantasy world that doesn’t exist. My gaze, however, stayed fixed on the mundane—the mushroom-shaped clouds coming out in mechanical cadence from the locomotive's chimney. I didn't flinch at the imaginary fiction. The Hogwarts Express was there, chugging at me, but I was unfazed because I was in the presence of something much more fascinating: the past.
A world that doesn't exist either. But once did.
II. The present is an invisible magical envelope
I had never seen a steam train before. I learned about them in school—from pictures in textbooks, descriptions in novels, and classic black-and-white movies. But seeing one up close made me realize how easy it is to misunderstand—even downplay—the present as normalcy because we ignore the past.
No, the present is profoundly magical.
We ride the train daily now. It's much faster. Quieter. It sometimes moves underground. It sometimes moves by itself. It doesn't need to burn coal, wood, or whatever. It's electricity instead—elusive electrons flowing through wires, harnessing the mysterious power of chemical reactions or magnetic fields to create cinematic motion. There are no pistons, rods, or bulky parts sticking out of the cabinet. It's so technically advanced that we can afford to prioritize smoothness, comfort, and even environmental considerations.
You tell me which Harry Potter spell can turn the Hogwarts Express into such a marvelous creature!
We don't think twice about any of this. We forget to become aware; that this water that surrounds us, as David Foster Wallace would say, is fascinating. Instead, we step inside and scroll our phones or perhaps open a book if we’re feeling intellectual. Throughout the trip, we remain unaware of our privilege and, perhaps more surprisingly, of the nightmare-inducing scenery that surrounds us, which would have caused mania, panic, and nausea to our steam-train-riding ancestors. Nothing about the present is normal.
Technology happens. Unexpected, unasked for. It disrupts our world and our conceptions. Some welcome it. With admiration and relish. Others yell, curse, and resist. After enough time, when emotions settle and both hopes and fears fade away, we take it for granted. Technology ends up belonging, like rivers and mountains, to the world that always was. But when it takes shape right in front of our eyes, it’s often seen as the enemy—more like a pluvial flood or a volcano. A threat to the customs and the status quo we so eagerly fight to preserve.
Instead of looking back at the past to remember this lesson—the present is an invisible magical envelope disguised with the wrapping paper of normalcy—some people choose to step on the same stone. Twice. Thrice. A thousand times: “New thing bad.” Instead of showing appreciation for a present they didn't build and seldom deserve, they lose themselves in the fantasy of some wizarding world they think they like but only because they can't touch it.
It’s funny to realize that the same people who oppose progress with tribal impulse in our reality, would protest the introduction of wand-based magic, the evolution of the broomstick from Nimbus 2000 to Firebolt, and the existence of obscure potion crafting with “potentially harmful and/or offensive effects.”
People who fail to appreciate the present in contrast to the past—which is a pity and a disservice to the efforts of their distant ancestors—still like to imagine positive things in fantastic worlds that are much less impressive than our own. (Full disclosure: I love Harry Potter.)
The train passed.
My girlfriend stopped the video and we left. On our way back to the car I couldn't shake the feeling—how the things we make change over time and how they change us in the process. I realized the old train that looked to me slow, noisy, and primitive was to my elders a wonder of technology, a metallic monster out of Lovecraftian science fiction among tiny, insignificant humans.
How could a relic now worthy of a museum exhibit have once been the most advanced thing on planet Earth? Bearer of unwarranted tachophobic terrors and shifter of paradigms beyond our grasp. It dawned on me: How wrong we are in believing we can ever fully wrap our minds around technological progress from an inevitably static point of view. We are the future of the past. We’re also the past of the future.
It’s happening in AI.
III. The puzzle that shapes and shifts the future
People keep trying to come up with the right way to think about AI.
It's natural. We may like novelty but not when it's tied to uncertainty. AI is like that in both nature and implication: What's this alien thing that behaves so weirdly human sometimes and other times is dumber than the grain of sand it emerged from? What will happen to my job, to my entire sector, or even to my life if this thing keeps getting smarter? Will it invent new math? Discover the Theory of Everything?
So we wonder, in collective debate or hiding in the isolation of our thoughts: how can we solve the puzzle AI poses to us—whether about art and creativity or about the possibility of a new species made of silicon?
But these well-intentioned people don’t realize the quest is futile. Or, more precisely, it’s futile to approach this riddle as if studying a snapshot—expecting a tidy resolution in one instant of clarity, or even within one’s lifetime. We are too constrained by our spatiotemporal circumstances. We are children of history and culture, but only within the narrow window of the fleeting present. But progress—the impermanence of things—with its maddening ability to thwart our plans, reveals itself not as a motionless image but as an endless video. One we’re fated to watch only in fragments.
No occurrent punchline, transient meme, or catchy slogan like “AI art isn’t art” or its equally cogent opposite “AI art is art” will do. AI, like trains, is too vast, and too shape-shifting. It moves. It changes. It travels through time and space. It's above and beyond our limited minds, like a hyperobject. It's alive—not literally, but maybe, yes.
The things we create don't belong to us but to the cosmos, as extramental entities awaiting generations of thinkers to give them some concreteness or a new vessel to be categorized. A new name. But they change, making our self-appointed task hard. Cars were called horseless carriages. Planes were seen as featherless mechanical birds. Computers were imagined as interactive TVs, which were picture-based radios, which were wireless telegraphy. But one after another became their own thing. IPhones weren’t Blackberries without keyboards. Blackberries weren’t flip phones without flipping. Flip phones weren’t rotary dial phones without a dial or rotary parts or cables everywhere. They were all their own thing.
The consensual conceptualizations of the stuff we invent and discover and use aren't the product of a single mind thinking of the adequate definition (or metaphor) but the result of a long (super long) curve of data points fitted from the collective molding and handling of the thing over time and circumstance. It's the entirety of humanity—not Sam Altman or Noam Chomsky or Ted Chiang, or me or you—who through usage and debate and the natural evolving of culture settles ideas, conventions, and names and engraves them in stone so that history can, once again, take a snapshot.
Let's take Ted Chiang’s (now infamous) essay on AI and art. (He published it in August 2024. Four months ago. Feels further in time, right? That’s how fast we move).
Chiang says art is too much about choice-making and comprises too much hidden intention for AI to be able to make some. (It seems people disagree.) It's funny, in a way, that Chiang wrote his essay with one goal in mind—to end the “Can AI do art?” debate for good—and the consequence has been the contrary: our shared perception of both AI and art has further shattered into a myriad of thought-provoking conversations and exchanges. Exchanges that achieved nothing except as pastimes because we can't arrive at a conclusion like a train does a station. I agree with Ted today. I didn’t yesterday. I may not again tomorrow.
Chiang should know by now that any attempt at closing the uncloseable will open it more instead. He exerted a strong force onto the spacetime fabric of meaning but it sent powerful ripples in the opposite direction as he intended. Don't tell people what to think or how to think about it or you'll make them desire the forbidden.
Chiang may be right anyway, you know. I share much of what he says in his essay except perhaps the conclusion. This isn't about him being wrong but about him—or anyone else for that matter—not possibly being ever fully right.
Just like tech mutates from one day to the next, so do our perceptions of it. Trying to conceptualize AI with a fixed ontological argument is a mistaken approach. It's like aliens trying to infer what humans are by choosing a time and place and taking a picture. Imagine the countless inference errors they'd make trying to extrapolate the whole of humanity from a single biased and incomplete instance of the 19th-century English royal family. What does Queen Victoria have to do with the scattered tribes of the Maasai, San, and Himba living today in Sub-saharan Africa (both without much of the tech we take for granted)? Or with 11th-century Spanish Christian crusades fighting in the name of God in search of the Holy Grail? Or with 33rd-century space battles between blaster-wielding Martian separatists and water-wealthy Earthling absolutists? Or with you, reading this, and me, writing it.
Only that we’re all human.
IV. The evergreen story of our lives
So let's get back to humanity because this is fundamentally a story about us.
It’s a story about how we are subject and object of our creations. How we shape them in our minds and with our hands is cause and effect of how they shape us through culture and history.
My mental model of the world now includes trains—like it includes rivers and mountains—because the builders of the past made them. They shaped the world with their trains and in turn, those trains shape mine. Chiang has shaped our idea of AI with his essay but his idea of AI was already being shaped by everything else, including what AI is and isn’t.
We think of ourselves as immutable beings yet we remain surprisingly effective in adapting to new stuff, even stuff we never foresaw or will never welcome. Is AI art art? Can AI make art? Can we make art with AI?—these are all interesting questions but, ultimately, questions we can only futilely try and fail to answer.
And, strangely, whatever the true answer to them happens to be, we’ll be fine.
Like Chiang, most of us resist change when we see it coming—when it passes through our bodies like a lightning bolt melts wood or when it breaks the status quo into a thousand pieces that the next generation eventually puts together. But we do appreciate change once it belongs to the past, once we’re merely tasked with reaping the fruits whose seeds others sowed.
When the immediate world-shaking consequences of technology, progress, and innovation are distant echoes from a forgotten era and we remember just the benefits through a lens of normalcy—then we are grateful.
I don't know what AI is because it's always changing—as a thing and as a cultural powerhouse. It's a vessel for and a shape-shifter of things that were but aren't anymore, that may never be, and that are but we don't want.
I know, despite how I may feel today, that my distant offspring will see it as I see the eternal flowing of the powerful rivers and the unfathomable peaks of the highest mountains: An ever-changing, ever-lasting feature of this universe; something that always was and always will be and never the same.
So perhaps the only right answer to the puzzle that AI poses to us is that it's okay if we can't solve it today because we'll be facing a different one tomorrow.
This: "We are the future of the past. We’re also the past of the future."
And this: "But progress—the impermanence of things—with its maddening ability to thwart our plans, reveals itself not as a motionless image but as an endless video. One we’re fated to watch only in fragments."
And this: "...we are subject and object of our creations."
I don't always agree with you, Alberto (including whether humanity will survive long enough for any of us to have distant offspring), but I keep subscribing because you give me new thoughts to think and new word nets with which to hold important ideas.
So the message may be: Don’t let AI become your boggart… ridicullus!
And sir, I admire your writing💙