The reframe that took my anxiety down a few notches. Drawn from older wisdom and people who’ve been thinking about this longer than I have.
👋 Welcome to the third issue of White Space!
Here’s what I’ve got for you today:
- ✨ Idea: The Mindful Guide to AI.
9 perspectives to replace fear with curiosity in our AI-driven world. - 📜 Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
Ancient wisdom for modern technology challenges. - 🍿 Film: Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut.
A fascinating documentary about the tiny creatures that dramatically impact our wellbeing.
Let’s get into it!
✨ Idea: The Mindful Guide to AI. 9 Perspectives to Replace Fear with Curiosity.
I once found myself seeing another news article about AI and just feeling anxious about it. It happened more than once – that nagging sensation that I was falling behind, that I was missing out on something important.
Do you also feel this way sometimes when it comes to AI?
Since I love technology, I’ve been naturally drawn to AI from as far back as I can remember. Not to mention all the anime and movies I love to watch – science fiction has always been one of my favorite genres.
As I wrote in “Mindful Technology: My New Theme for 2025” my intention this year is to view tech through a more mindful lens.
After revisiting what some really smart thinkers have to say about technological change (from Steve Jobs to Kevin Kelly, Jeff Bezos to Danny Hillis), I want to share my distilled insights with you.
I’ve spent over 30+ hours listening to podcasts and watching videos to compile these 9 mindful perspectives about AI. These views tell a different story than the clickbaity headlines dominating today’s news cycle. I hope you enjoy this collection and that it helps you feel good about the world we’re living in – because these are truly exciting times.
A few quick notes about this guide:
- 🎬 I’ve added sources and videos for each point so you can easily watch and explore the full material.
- ✂️ All videos are timestamped to the exact moments these insights were shared.
Ready? Let’s explore these perspectives together!
🧠 1. Go beyond the hype with Gartner AI Curve.
First of all, let’s make sense of what’s really happening. The Gartner Curve helps us understand where AI truly stands today.
Every new technology follows pretty much the same pattern:
- Innovation Trigger – A New Idea Everyone’s Talking About.
That moment when something novel catches attention and starts generating buzz. - Peak of Inflated Expectations – Wild Hype and Unrealistic Expectations.
This is when the success stories get overblown and everyone jumps on board without seeing the limitations. - Trough of Disillusionment – Most Fail, Only the Useful Survive.
Interest drops as the initial excitement fades and many implementations fall short. This is where the real sorting happens. - Slope of Enlightenment – Quiet Progress and Real Learning.
We start figuring out the actual value through practical experience rather than hype. The learning gets deeper but less flashy. - Plateau of Productivity – It Just Works and Becomes Normal.
Technology becomes embedded in everyday life.
So where are we with AI right now? We’re somewhere in the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. All these investors are pouring money in, inflating everything, and when that bubble pops, only the stuff with real business value will stick around.
Eventually, AI will reach that final stage “Plateau of Productivity” where Kevin Kelly says it’ll become kind of boring and invisible – just a utility that works in the background of our lives. Like electricity – super powerful but we hardly think about it today.
🔄 2. See how new tech always mimics the old.
Let’s imagine this.
You have a DeLorean parked outside. You get in, set the date to “June 15, 1983” on the dashboard, and accelerate to 88 mph in a flash of light.
Suddenly, you’re in Aspen, Colorado. Steve Jobs is just 28 years old, and you’re in the audience waiting for his talk at the International Design Conference. What he’s about to share in the next 10 minutes could completely transform how you look at any new technology – including AI.
“What happens when a new medium enters the scene is that we tend to fall back into old media habits.
Let’s look at a few transitions from one medium to another – radio to television. Television to this incredible new interactive medium of the video disk.
If you go back and you look at the first television shows they’re basically radio shows with a television camera pointed at them, and it took us the better part of the 50s to really understand how television was going to come into its own as its own medium.
And I really think the first time that a lot of people were shook into realizing the television had come of age was the JFK funeral. The nation, a lot of the world, experienced the JFK funeral in their living room, at a level of intensity that wouldn’t have been possible with radio.
I think another more upbeat example was the Apollo Landing. That experience was not possible with the previous medium, yet it took us the better part of 20 years for that one to really evolve.”
We can see the same pattern with AI today.
The most interesting AI use cases won’t just automate existing tasks – they’ll enable entirely new possibilities we haven’t yet imagined.
Just as television evolved beyond being “radio with pictures” and found its unique cultural power through events like the moon landing, AI will become something beyond what we initially imagine.
Ok, time to get back to the present 2025 and listen to Kevin Kelly, one of my favorite humans, who has some inspiring ways of looking at AI.
👽 3. Think of AI as “Artificial Aliens”.
Kevin Kelly has this fascinating way of thinking about AI – he sees them as “artificial aliens” rather than artificial intelligence.
This removes all that pressure of comparing AI to human intelligence and opens up more interesting ways of working with it.
As Kelly puts it in his conversation with Tim Ferriss:
“Aliens meaning they could be like Spock or Yoda. Very, very smart, but they’re just doing things differently than we would do. If they have a sense of humor, it’ll be a little off. But that is actually their benefit. The benefit is because they help us think different, and that’s what we’re going to be using them for.”
When I started thinking about AI this way – as a complementary but fundamentally different intelligence – my whole approach changed. I became curious about what unique perspectives these “artificial aliens” might offer.
🦒 4. Appreciate AI as a zoo of different species.
Kevin Kelly doesn’t just see AI as a single type of “alien” intelligence – he envisions a whole collection of different AI minds.
“I think the picture you want to have in your mind is a zoo of hundreds, if not thousands, of different species of AIs” – Kelly explains.
“Some which will have huge memories and very short attention spans, and others will have long attention spans and small memories.”
This zoo metaphor completely shifted my perspective.
We’re not creating one artificial general intelligence to rule them all – we’re cultivating a diverse ecosystem of specialized intelligences. So there will be many species of intelligence focused on different things. Kelly illustrates this beautifully:
“Sometimes it’ll be very abstract, like solving quantum gravity. And other times it’ll be very, very basic like super perception for picking strawberries.”
⚖️ 5. Consider how AI is simultaneously over-hyped and under-hyped.
One of Kevin Kelly’s most fascinating insights about AI seems paradoxical at first glance.
“I think AI overall is underhyped, but the current version, we won’t even call AI in 30 years. We’ll look back and that wasn’t it”
This perspective helps me stay grounded. Today’s AI tools are impressive, but they’re just the awkward first steps of a much longer journey. They’ll likely seem primitive compared to what’s coming decades from now.
It reminds me of early smartphones before apps existed – revolutionary, yet we had no idea how they would transform daily life.
With this mindset, my short-term anxieties fade. Instead of racing to keep up with every new model, I focus on understanding broader patterns and possibilities. As Kelly notes, “there’s no AI experts right now” – we’re all just explorers in uncharted territory.
🌱 6. Reframe AI as human intelligence on an artificial substrate.
Ok, this one is a little meta and this is probably why I love it.
In a podcast with Tim Ferris, Danny Hillis explains his “Songs of Eden” story about human intelligence evolution and how it applies to AI.
He explains that human intelligence emerged through a dance between biology and culture: our brains evolved to better hold and share ideas, while simultaneously, ideas evolved to be more easily remembered and communicated. This co-evolution created a unique partnership between human minds and the information they carry.
Hillis predicted that AI might evolve the same way – we’d build machines powerful enough, then “infect them with human culture.” The fascinating part? He made this prediction before the internet existed. As he puts it:
“Now, the internet didn’t exist then, but I wasn’t quite sure where you were going to get the human culture or how you were going to do that.”
Fast forward to today, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Hillis concludes:
“What we’ve got is not so much artificial intelligence, but we’ve got a substrate on which human intelligence can live that’s not human. And the human intelligence is all of the things that was learned from all the data that we train on.”
🪐 7. View AI as a discovery rather than an invention.
Here’s another powerful way to reframe how we think about AI, from Jeff Bezos on the Lex Fridman podcast:
“Large language models in their current form are not inventions, they’re discoveries. The telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons, was a discovery. My God, it has moons. And that’s what Galileo did. And so this is closer on that spectrum of invention.”
This insight helps explain why we struggle to understand AI’s full capabilities. With engineered objects like planes, it’s different, as Bezos points out:
“We know exactly what happens with a 787… We designed it. We know how it behaves. We don’t want any surprises.”
But current AI is not like that.
“Large language models are much more like discoveries. We’re constantly getting surprised by their capabilities. They’re not really engineered objects.”
So we’re not building AI as much as we’re uncovering its capabilities.
⚙️ 8. Recognize we’re entering a second industrial revolution.
When thinking about AI’s impact, Kevin Kelly points to history:
“The first industrial revolution was our large-scale switch from the agricultural world where anything that we made had to be done with natural power, muscle power… The big switch was we automated this and we had electronic motors, gasoline, steam engines… artificial power. That’s what powered the industrial revolution.”
Now, according to Kelly, we’re at the threshold of something equally transformative:
“We’re going to have a second industrial revolution where we take everything we’ve already automated with synthetic artificial power and now we’re going to add artificial intelligence on top. We’re going to take that car that has 250 horses and now we’re going to add 250 minds.”
Kelly even coined a term for this process:
“I use the word cognify to mean making things smarter. And I’m suggesting that this is a very broad verb that will apply to everything in our lives… basically anything that we have already electrified, made electronic, automatic, we’re now going to cognify.”
The scale of change? Potentially greater than what we experienced with the first industrial revolution:
“That additional smartness is going to unleash the power that we have not even seen with the industrial revolution. The extent of this transformation is very, very profound. And that is what we’re now in the dawn of and we’ll see in the next 20 years in a very real way.”
⏳ 9. Remember transformative change takes decades.
When we look at how major technologies have transformed society in the past, one clear pattern emerges: it takes time.
Kevin Kelly explains this by looking at previous technological shifts:
“Going back to the metaphor of the artificial power, in order to bring electricity into companies, you couldn’t just sort of replace a worker with electricity. The entire organization of companies was reordered by electricity.”
This historical pattern reveals why AI integration will be more complex than simply swapping in new technology:
“You had to change the structure of the company, the physical nature of it, the organizational structure, all changed. When you had artificial power. And the same thing with AI. You can’t just bring AI into a society, a company, and think it’s going to replace people. We have to change the entire organizational structure.”
Kelly uses a concrete example to illustrate the scale of adaptation required:
“We can’t just take cars and replace them with self driving cars. It’s going to require an actual restructuring of the highway system, the lights and ramps and everything else would have to be adjusted to it.”
The bottleneck isn’t developing the technology, but absorbing it into our existing systems:
“So that’s what takes the time, is the absorption of it. Because you have to, it’s a different metaphor, there’s different organizational dynamics going on. And so, we have to absorb the AI into our lives. And the more powerful it is, the more time it’s going to take.”
This historical parallel puts the full AI transformation in context – it’s a change that will unfold gradually, just like other technological revolutions before it.
A Mindful Approach to AI.
These perspectives have really helped me think differently about AI. Instead of stressing about all the latest AI news, I just keep playing around with the tools and seeing what cool stuff I can do with them.
I’ve found that real learning happens when you roll up your sleeves and experiment. You try something, it doesn’t quite work, you adjust your approach, and suddenly you see possibilities you hadn’t considered before.
I’m curious – did any of these perspectives make you think differently about how you might use AI in your own creative work?
📜 Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
This one is incredible and one of my favorite books I’m coming back to.
Think about it – you have one of the most powerful men who ever existed, emperor of Rome, writing a journal to himself that was never meant to be published.
Written centuries ago, yet having the same questions about life that we do. It’s an amazing collection of gems, insightful thoughts and answers to some of the big questions we all ask ourselves.
But don’t feel overwhelmed! This is one of those books you don’t need to read page by page. I enjoy reading it from time to time, or just opening a random page and starting my day with it.
Great food for thought. Insightful, humble and super practical – I think that’s why stoic philosophy is having its moment right now! If you ever thought about giving it a try, this book is a perfect start for that journey.
🍿 Film: Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut
This Netflix documentary is fascinating! If you’ve heard the phrase “your gut is your second brain,” you’ll love this one, and if you haven’t…well, I think you’ll love it anyway.
You’ll discover the incredible microcosmos of our gut microbiome and how those tiny creatures can have a huge impact on our health. The film features Giulia Enders (New York Times bestselling author of “Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ“), talented animator Laura Venditti, and Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi (the Guinness World Records holder described as “the godfather of competitive eating”).
It’s entertaining and packed with solid knowledge on how to live a healthier life. I was surprised by how much our gut influences everything from our mood to our immune system!
That’s a wrap
I hope this issue has sparked your curiosity and excitement about AI’s possibilities.
As always, I’m really grateful to have you here and always happy to hear your thoughts. Hit reply – I read every message.
Until next time 🙏
Originally published on Substack 👉 https://readwhitespace.substack.com/p/the-mindful-guide-to-ai-9-perspectives
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