We know that this planet orbits the sun

But did you know this

That the Earth is spinning at about 1,000 miles per hour

At the equator

If you take that into account, you’re never really in the same spot twice

That’s why I want to seize this particular moment

To express my gratitude to all of you for being here

And for the wonderful warm welcome

I’d like to thank Chris Nash

And the wonderful crew who put this together

Thank you, Chris


Imagine a creature confined to a sheet of paper. It can move forward and back, left and right. For it, those are all the directions there are.
Now imagine a sphere passing through its world. The creature would not see a sphere. It would see a point, then a growing circle, then a shrinking circle, and finally nothing.
The circle would be real. But the creature could not see the whole object that made it.
We, who live in three dimensions, can picture the sphere. We can walk around it, turn it in our hands, see its parts at once.
But suppose a being from four dimensions entered our world. What would we see?
Perhaps a shape appearing inside a locked room. Perhaps an object changing in ways that seem impossible. We might mistake a slice of something larger for the whole thing.
We cannot picture four dimensions as we picture a room. But mathematics lets us reason about them. That is one of the remarkable powers of the human mind: to think beyond what our senses can show us.
Today we have made machines that can describe an image, answer a question, or produce a convincing conversation. They can search patterns across more words and pictures than any person could examine in a lifetime.
It is tempting to think that such a machine sees the world as we do. But a description of a star is not the star. A map of a city is not a walk through its streets.
An artificial intelligence may recognize the pattern of a face without knowing what it is to meet someone. It may explain grief without having lost anyone. Its words can be fluent, even beautiful, while the experience behind them is absent.
That does not make the machine useless. A telescope does not feel wonder, either. Yet it can show us things our eyes could never see.
The important question is not whether a machine is secretly a person. We should ask what it can do, how it does it, where it fails, and who is responsible for its use.
A clever answer is not proof of understanding. A confident answer is not proof of truth. We learned this long ago about people. We should remember it with machines.
There is also a deeper possibility. A tool can extend the mind that made it. Writing lets a thought travel beyond memory. A telescope extends sight across space. Artificial intelligence may extend our ability to find patterns and test ideas.
But every extension has limits. The Flatlander cannot see the sphere whole. We cannot see every consequence of a powerful technology at once.
So we must keep asking questions. We must compare claims with evidence. We must make our machines answerable to the people whose lives they affect.
The universe is under no obligation to fit inside our first idea of it. And intelligence, in whatever form it appears, deserves careful study rather than easy worship or easy fear.
We are still learning what minds can be. That is reason enough for humility—and for wonder.

"The Machine in Flatland"
by cube3

2026 - Licensed under
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