The Silence Before the Storm

We stand at the edge of something vast. Not the way people stand at the edge of a cliff, hearts pounding with the thrill of it — but the way someone stands in a field at dawn, knowing the storm is coming, feeling the pressure drop in their bones.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a research curiosity. It is no longer the domain of papers and conferences and careful hedging. It is here, in your hands, in your conversations, in the things you create and the way you create them.

And most of us haven’t stopped to think about what that actually means.

The weight of acceleration

There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching something accelerate beyond your ability to track it. Not fear, exactly. Something quieter. A sense that the ground you’re standing on has started to move, and you’re not sure if it’s taking you somewhere or leaving you behind.

Every few months, the frontier shifts. What was impossible becomes trivial. What was trivial becomes invisible. And we adjust. We always adjust. That’s what humans do — we normalise the extraordinary until it becomes furniture.

But normalisation isn’t understanding. And the gap between what we’ve accepted and what we’ve understood is growing wider by the day.

What silence teaches

The name of this place — Silent Stones — isn’t accidental. Stones don’t speak, but they endure. They hold the shape of pressure, of time, of forces that have long since moved on. They are what remains after the noise.

I don’t think we need more noise right now. The discourse around AI is already deafening — hype and doom in equal measure, each feeding the other, each drowning out the quiet questions that actually matter.

Questions like: What do we want to build? Not what can we build, not what will we build, but what should we build? And who gets to decide?

No answers here

I’m not going to pretend I have answers. This isn’t that kind of place. This is a place for laying thoughts down — carefully, one at a time, like stones on a path — and seeing where they lead.

Maybe nowhere. Maybe somewhere worth going. The only way to find out is to keep walking.