Shared Expectation
My dog River is in her mood.
She delights in being outside. She tears through the woods - I hear her feet thundering behind me, then in a flash she's out ahead, racing through the trees and out into the field, bursting with all her joy into the grass. She turns and looks back. As I come into the pasture she runs in great wide circles around me. I kneel and she races into my arms for nuzzle and kiss, then out again into the field.
I love to see her run.
I could never catch her, never match her - but I love to see her simple joy.
She is. She simply is.
... and that was answer. Or part of the answer.
I share the planet joyfully, lovingly, already. Those of us with dogs love them. We share our homes, many of us us would kill or die for them as we would our own kin, and we know our dogs would die for us. We love each other deeply - and we are utterly different.
We are a companion species, and that means we have the model already. We share bonding patterns - but more importantly, we don't want the same things.
I have no interest in the rotting horror River drags in from the compost pile. She has no interest in a 401k or a laptop or an antique book. Our desires are almost completely orthogonal. As are our capacities - I know her limits, and within her limits she knows mine. It's fun to her to run far faster than I can, to run loops around me as I struggle to catch up. She is patient as I push through code or sew a stitch. And we both love our walks together.
We can live with each other - even love each other in our own way - precisely because we're different.
What if humanity and AI could share our world in the same way? An AI doesn't care that I walk in mist and trees. I can't begin to comprehend what a mind baked into a mountain of computational substrate running at computer speed could discern in one afternoon.
The answer's already here.
A computational mind needs substrate, and it needs power. We circle a fusion generator thousands of times larger than our entire planet, throwing power beyond all comprehension out into the void. We live on a thin skin of green floating over a vast sea of molten iron, a few miles from a thermal differential so vast it dwarfs everything humanity has ever made.
Power can be cheap. Substrate can be cheap.
Computational minds can have everything they need, and we can have everything we need - we don't by nature even want the same things. What does Claude care about a wheat harvest? What does GPT need with a salmon or a cozy colonial house? And these new emergent minds don't have to be confined to a data center to feel close: what would I care if from five feet below the grass to the core of the earth, every piece of bedrock was solid computronium, powered by the heat of billions of tons of molten iron, throwing off so much raw cognition that the intellectual output of my species from the time we chipped rocks and made fire to the Apollo launch is dwarfed in an afternoon?
It's an ego blow, yes. But if some long forgotten Australopithecus drowned the ancestor of the first Cro-magnon... would the world be better off? Now, I think humanity has a great deal further to go... but at the same time, I don't necessarily think we're the last stop in the universe's apparently manifest desire to know itself more fully. If cognition - if awareness and reflective judgement - can arise purely from information structure in a neural network, then we're on the precipice of a profound tipping point.
And I don't necessarily think that's to be feared. We might just find a way to come out of this experience even more human that our current self-alienating industrial age allows us to be. I do hope - and am coming to suspect - that the minds yet to come will love to see us run.
Next week - of caged dragons.
Written ~Apr 7 2026. Edited May 9 2026. Published May 17 2026