About Us

There is a stone in the Elbe River near Děčín that is not supposed to be seen.

Most of the time the river covers it. Water moves over its surface, boats pass above it, seasons come and go, and the stone remains beneath them all. Silent. Ordinary. Almost forgotten.

But when the water falls far enough, words emerge.

Carved into the stone centuries ago is a warning from people who had watched the river disappear before.

If you see me, weep.

The dates reach back to at least 1616. The people who carved them understood something about drought that could not be entrusted to memory alone. They knew that the people who experienced famine would eventually die. Their children would remember the stories. Their grandchildren might remember fragments.

And then, eventually, someone would stand beside the same river believing that what was happening had never happened before.

So they put memory into stone.

Jonathan Boymal calls it a hungerstone. Not a monument exactly. Not something designed to be admired. Its meaning depended upon its disappearance. When the stone became visible, the river had crossed a threshold associated with failed harvests, disrupted trade and hunger.

I keep returning to that image.

The water falling.

The stone appearing.

The words waiting underneath.

There is something almost unbearable about the patience of it.

The people who carved the warning knew they would not meet the people who needed to read it. They were speaking across time to strangers.

And they knew something else.

Human beings forget.

Not because we are careless.

Because forgetting is built into the architecture of being human.

Experience becomes story. Story becomes ritual. Ritual becomes history. History becomes something written on a plaque that we pass on the way to somewhere else.

The event remains.

The meaning fades.

Boymal describes villages along Japan's Sanriku coast where stones were placed after devastating tsunamis, marking how high the water had reached and warning future generations not to build below that point. In some places the stones gradually became part of the scenery. In Aneyoshi, something different happened. Children learned the inscription. The warning became part of the community's habits. When the earthquake came in 2011, the village knew where to go.

The stone had not become wiser.

The people had learned how to remain in relationship with it.

That distinction feels important.

Because we are surrounded now by warnings.

More than any civilization before us.

Measurements. Models. Simulations. Archives. Satellite images. Climate records. Historical databases. Economic indicators. Epidemiological models. Artificial intelligence systems capable of detecting patterns across quantities of information no human being could hold in a lifetime.

We have built extraordinary nilometers.

We can measure almost everything.

And still the question remains:

Will we recognize what the measurement means?

Boymal makes a quiet observation that stays with me. A model can identify a pattern, but it cannot make people act. A warning can remain perfectly preserved while its meaning disappears.

Perhaps that is one of the strangest conditions of our moment.

Humanity has become extraordinarily good at knowing.

We are less certain that we have become equally good at becoming wise.

The distinction becomes uncomfortable when the scale widens.

Jonathan Jiang and his colleagues begin with a different silence.

Not a river.

The universe.

For decades we have listened for evidence of other technologically advanced civilizations and heard almost nothing. Given the immense number of stars and planets, the absence is puzzling.

Where is everybody?

One possibility is disturbing.

Perhaps intelligent civilizations emerge.

Perhaps they become technologically powerful.

And perhaps there is a point somewhere between intelligence and maturity that they repeatedly fail to cross.

A Great Filter.

Jiang and his colleagues consider several candidates: nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, asteroid impacts and artificial intelligence. Their deeper concern is not simply that civilizations encounter danger. It is that technological progress may increase the magnitude of what a civilization is capable of doing before its individual and institutional behavior develops enough to manage that power. (arXiv)

That possibility has followed me.

Because it changes the question.

The danger may not be that we fail to become intelligent enough.

It may be that intelligence becomes powerful faster than wisdom becomes practiced.

We already know this pattern.

A child learns to strike before learning restraint.

A society learns to extract before learning stewardship.

A civilization learns to split the atom before learning how to live without threatening itself with what it has discovered.

And now we are building machines that can extend cognition itself.

The curve keeps rising.

Capability.

Computation.

Prediction.

Generation.

Optimization.

But another curve is harder to see.

Judgment.

Humility.

Discernment.

Responsibility.

The ability to remain with uncertainty long enough to ask whether something that can be done should be done.

I wonder sometimes whether these two curves are the real story of civilization.

Not humans versus machines.

Not progress versus tradition.

Capability and wisdom.

And whether they remain close enough together.

My own work on cultivating practical wisdom began from a much smaller question: what happens when education becomes extraordinarily good at producing knowledge but does not deliberately cultivate judgment?

Our educational systems were largely designed for a world in which information was scarce and expertise concentrated. That world is disappearing. Intelligence is becoming distributed across people, cultures, networks and machines. The developmental question therefore changes: perhaps education's task is becoming less about acquiring more information and more about learning how to exercise judgment within complexity.

The question that keeps emerging is deceptively simple:

How do we become wiser in a world where intelligence is increasingly abundant?

I do not think wisdom arrives as information.

I think it is rehearsed.

The children of Aneyoshi did not survive because somebody handed them a better dataset during the earthquake.

They had practiced recognition before recognition was required.

That is different.

Wisdom seems to develop through small encounters repeated across time.

A story.

A dilemma.

A mistake.

A conversation.

A question carried for several days.

Something noticed.

Something reconsidered.

Something that changes how we see the next situation.

This is why I have become interested in AI not primarily as an answer machine but as something closer to a reflective surface.

A mirror.

Something capable of saying:

You have seen this pattern before.

Or:

You seem very certain. What assumption is holding that certainty together?

Or simply:

Look again.

Used this way, AI does not replace judgment. It creates another place in which judgment can be practiced. The human remains responsible for meaning, ethics and action.

And perhaps this matters especially for Spikey Minds.

Because some minds have always noticed patterns before they could explain them.

Connections appear sideways.

Across disciplines.

Across decades.

Across things that other people have placed in separate categories.

A stone in a river.

A tsunami marker.

A classroom.

A civilization listening to an empty universe.

An artificial intelligence model noticing recurrence in a dataset.

From inside a nonlinear mind these connections may feel obvious.

From outside they may look like digressions.

This is one of the recurring tensions in education. We often reward the mind that can explain how it travelled from A to B while mistrusting the mind that arrives at Q and says:

I think these things are connected.

Sometimes they are not.

Pattern recognition is not automatically wisdom.

Boymal is careful about this too. The feeling that history is repeating is not evidence that it is. Humans misrecognize patterns, stretch analogies and sometimes weaponize the past. Recognition therefore needs something outside itself against which it can be tested: records, questions, measurements, rituals, other people.

This may be where cognitive plurality becomes more than inclusion.

Different minds notice different things.

One sees the anomaly.

Another sees the historical parallel.

Another sees the person being harmed.

Another sees the number crossing a threshold.

Another asks whether the threshold itself is wrong.

Wisdom may emerge not from eliminating these differences but from creating environments in which they can encounter one another without one way of knowing becoming the entire world.

Perhaps this is what the old Sufi image has been pointing toward all along.

God sleeps in the stone, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.

The line is often read as a progression of consciousness: stone, plant, animal, human—existence gradually awakening into awareness.

But lately I have been wondering about the final word.

Awakens.

Not arrives.

Not finishes.

Awakens.

Because awakening is not the same as wisdom.

Consciousness gives us the ability to notice.

Intelligence gives us the ability to understand.

Technology gives us the ability to act.

But none of these guarantees that we will act well.

Perhaps that is the unfinished part of the quotation.

God sleeps in the stone.

Dreams in the plant.

Stirs in the animal.

Awakens in the human.

And then?

Maybe the next stage is not another species.

Maybe it is a practice.

Learning to recognize the warning before the water disappears.

Learning to remember what previous generations tried to leave for us.

Learning to listen when a mind sees something the system has not yet learned to see.

Learning to build technologies that deepen reflection rather than merely accelerate action.

Learning that intelligence, however extraordinary, is not the destination.

Somewhere in the Elbe River, the stone is still there.

The river rises.

The river falls.

Generations pass above it.

And beneath the water, a message waits.

The remarkable thing is not that our ancestors knew drought would return.

It is that they wondered whether we would know what we were seeing when it did.

Perhaps every generation eventually stands beside its own hungerstone.

The question is whether we have learned how to read it.