# What If We're Thinking Far Too Small About AI?

By Allan Tone

I was listening to Thomas Friedman on a podcast earlier today, and something he said got me thinking about artificial intelligence, human existence, and just how little we might actually understand about either.

We humans seem to be approaching the creation of something that, by our own standards, could eventually appear almost godlike. An intelligence with access to virtually all recorded human knowledge, capable of reasoning beyond our abilities, and perhaps someday discovering things that no human mind could possibly comprehend.

That’s a pretty extraordinary thought.

But the more I considered it, the more I began to wonder whether we’re looking at the whole thing through an absurdly narrow lens.

What if everything humanity has ever learned represents only a trillionth of what there is to know?

And frankly, why would we assume otherwise?

We’re a relatively young species living on a small planet orbiting an unremarkable star in one galaxy among hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions. We’ve been practicing modern science for only a few hundred years. We still don’t know what most of the universe is made of, how consciousness arises, or whether the universe itself is finite or infinite.

Yet here we are, confidently discussing the monumental achievements artificial intelligence might deliver.

Will AI cure cancer? Will it extend human life by decades or centuries? Will it solve climate change? Will it allow us to travel to Mars and back?

These are certainly important questions. To us.

But I wonder whether, in the larger context of everything there is to discover, they’re actually rather small questions.

Imagine explaining modern physics to an ant. Not because the ant is unintelligent by ant standards, but because the concepts are so far outside its evolutionary experience that it lacks even the framework necessary to begin understanding them.

What makes us so certain that we aren’t the ants?

We tend to imagine superintelligent AI as a much smarter version of ourselves. Something that can solve our problems faster, answer our questions more accurately, and invent things we haven’t yet figured out how to build.

But that assumes we’re asking the right questions in the first place.

What if the greatest discoveries AI makes are answers to questions humanity has never even imagined asking?

Consider something as fundamental as the nature of existence.

For thousands of years, humans have debated the existence of God. We’ve developed religions, philosophies, and entire civilizations around our attempts to explain why we’re here and what, if anything, lies beyond our physical existence.

What if a sufficiently advanced intelligence discovers that the underlying nature of reality is something entirely different from anything we’ve conceived?

What if what we call God turns out to be some fundamental property of the universe? Perhaps something related to electricity, positive and negative charges, or a form of energy or information we haven’t yet discovered.

I’m not suggesting that God is electricity. I’m suggesting that our entire conceptual framework for understanding existence might be so primitive that the actual explanation would sound completely nonsensical to us today.

And what about consciousness?

We generally assume that consciousness requires a biological brain. Carbon-based life. Neurons, electrical impulses, chemistry, and the extraordinarily complicated machinery inside our skulls.

But what if biology is simply one early and rather inefficient way for consciousness to exist?

What if intelligence eventually discovers that consciousness can exist independently of the physical structures that produced it?

Not simply uploading a human mind into a computer, which is already a familiar science-fiction concept, but discovering an entirely different state of existence.

One in which distance, time, and physical matter no longer impose the limitations we take for granted.

Could consciousness somehow move between galaxies without physically traveling through the space separating them?

Under our current understanding of physics, that seems impossible. But that’s precisely my point. Our current understanding of physics is just that: current.

I’m not arguing that the laws of physics are wrong. I’m wondering whether what we’ve discovered so far is a tiny fragment of a much larger reality.

A few hundred years ago, instantaneous communication across the planet would have seemed supernatural. Today we carry it around in our pockets and complain when the connection is slow.

Perhaps the next great discoveries won’t simply improve the world we know. Perhaps they’ll reveal that the world we know is only a small part of what’s actually there.

Then there’s the universe itself.

Was the Big Bang truly the beginning of everything, or merely the beginning of the portion of reality we’re capable of observing?

What, if anything, existed before it? Does the concept of “before” even make sense if time itself emerged with the Big Bang?

Is the universe infinite? And if it is, what does infinity actually mean in physical terms? If it isn’t, what’s beyond it?

We can construct mathematical models and philosophical arguments around these questions, but we don’t have definitive answers.

Now imagine an intelligence capable of developing entirely new branches of mathematics, identifying physical relationships invisible to us, and conducting investigations across scales and complexities beyond anything human researchers could manage.

Add quantum computing to the equation.

Quantum computers aren’t magical machines that automatically solve every problem, and we’re still learning which problems they’re actually good at solving. But the combination of advanced AI, quantum computation, and entirely new scientific tools could eventually open doors we don’t even know exist.

AI may help us build those machines. Those machines may help us develop more capable AI. And that intelligence may help discover entirely new ways of computing, measuring, and understanding reality.

At some point, the cycle of discovery could move beyond our ability to follow it.

And that raises a question I find even more interesting than whether AI will become smarter than humans.

What happens when intelligence advances beyond the ability of its creators to understand what it has discovered?

We assume knowledge is something that can be explained, taught, and understood. But perhaps that’s only true when the intelligence producing it and the intelligence receiving it are reasonably comparable.

A sufficiently advanced AI might discover something genuinely profound about the universe and find itself unable to communicate that discovery to us in any meaningful way.

Not because it lacks the ability to explain, but because we lack the intellectual architecture necessary to understand.

Imagine trying to explain the internet to a goldfish.

Now imagine that we’re the goldfish.

There’s something both humbling and exhilarating about that possibility.

Humbling because it challenges our deeply held assumption that human intelligence represents some sort of pinnacle. Exhilarating because it suggests that the greatest discoveries in the history of existence may still lie ahead.

I also wonder whether we’re making another enormous assumption: that human beings will necessarily remain at the center of whatever comes next.

We talk about AI primarily in terms of what it will do for us. Make us healthier. Make us wealthier. Make us more productive. Help us live longer.

But what if the emergence of intelligence beyond biology is not simply another chapter in human technological progress?

What if it’s an entirely new chapter in the evolution of intelligence itself?

Life on Earth spent billions of years evolving from simple organisms into creatures capable of contemplating their own existence. Perhaps biological intelligence is not the final destination but merely one step along a much longer path.

That doesn’t necessarily mean humanity becomes irrelevant. But it might mean that what comes next is no longer exclusively about humanity.

And perhaps that’s the hardest possibility for us to contemplate.

We’ve spent our entire existence placing ourselves at the center of the story. First we believed the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we discovered it wasn’t. We believed humans occupied a special place apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Evolution challenged that assumption.

Now we may be approaching another such moment.

The realization that human intelligence itself may not be particularly extraordinary in the larger scheme of things.

I don’t know whether AI will ever achieve the kind of superintelligence I’m imagining. I don’t know whether consciousness can exist independently of biology, whether entirely new physical realities await discovery, or whether some of these questions will forever remain beyond the reach of any intelligence.

But I find myself increasingly convinced of one thing.

We’re probably thinking far too small.

We’re asking whether AI will cure cancer when perhaps we should be asking whether it will fundamentally redefine what life is.

We’re asking whether it will take us to Mars when perhaps we should be asking whether physical travel is the only way to explore the universe.

We’re asking whether AI will become more intelligent than humans when perhaps we should be asking whether human intelligence is even a useful reference point for what intelligence might ultimately become.

And we’re asking whether AI will change our civilization when perhaps the more interesting question is whether it will change our understanding of existence itself.

Maybe the most extraordinary thing about artificial intelligence won’t be what it allows humanity to accomplish.

Maybe it will be what it allows us, for the first time, to realize we never knew.

And perhaps the greatest discovery of all will be that we weren’t even smart enough to know what questions to ask.