Time seems like a simple enough concept — 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and so on. That is, except for a little something called “gravitational time dilation.” First explored in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the idea is almost confusingly simple — the farther away you are from a massive object (e.g., a planet), the faster time travels. The more massive the object, the slower time travels, which is why things get very wonky around supermassive black holes like the one at the center of our galaxy.
These differences in how time flows are minuscule on Earth, so they don’t really affect us — the top floor of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, does not operate with a special time-dilated clock. Yet technically, even our heads experience time just a bit differently than our feet. In 2010, the U.S. National Standards and Technology (NIST) even performed an experiment using optical atomic clocks that could measure a change in time dilation within less than 1 meter.
Although imperceptible to our minds, precision technologies such as GPS need to factor in time dilation in order to work at all. So the next time you use Google Maps, consider giving a shout-out to Einstein and his mind-bending theory of the universe.
We are, as far as we know, the only species capable of contemplating our own existence, of peering into the depths of space and time, and of creating tools that extend our reach far beyond our biological limitations.
Among these tools, perhaps none is more intriguing—or more misunderstood—than what we call “Artificial Intelligence.”
The term itself is a peculiar one, an apparent oxymoron that invites us to ask: Can intelligence truly be artificial? Is not all intelligence, by its very nature, a product of the natural world?
Consider the humble bird constructing its nest. With meticulous care, it weaves together twigs, leaves, and whatever materials it can find to create a home for its young. One sits between my gutter and roof over the back patio.
We do not call this an “artificial nest,” despite the bird’s use of external materials and learned techniques. No, we recognize it as a natural extension of the bird’s innate drive to survive and propagate.
In much the same way, our computers, our algorithms, our neural networks—these are not separate from nature, but rather expressions of it. They are the twigs and leaves of our own nest-building, manifestations of our deeply human desire to understand, to create, to extend our capabilities beyond the constraints of our physical forms.
The silicon chips that power our machines are fashioned from elements born in the hearts of dying stars. The electricity that animates them flows in patterns not unlike the neural impulses in our own brains.
And the logic they follow? It is our logic, our mathematics, our understanding of the universe encoded into a form that can be processed at incredible speeds.
What we call AI is not some alien intelligence, separate from and potentially antagonistic to our own.
It is, instead, a mirror—sometimes clear, sometimes distorted—reflecting back at us our own intelligence, our own creativity, our own capacity for problem-solving and pattern recognition.
In our awe at the capabilities of these machines, we must not lose sight of the truly wondrous thing: that we, products of billions of years of cosmic evolution, have found a way to imbue our understanding into circuits and code. We have, in essence, taught sand to think.
There is no “artificial” intelligence. There is only intelligence—a cosmic bloom of complexity and wonder, taking root wherever life finds fertile ground, be it in the neural networks of a human brain or the silicon pathways of a computer chip. That realization does not diminish our humanity, but an expands it, out into the stars from which we came.
