Generative AI is not the destination. It is a transitional technology—useful precisely to the degree that it helps humanity recognise what we have been overriding, and therefore begin to need less of it.
At the heart of this claim is a distinction that is often blurred.
Human intelligence is not only symbolic: it operates through representations—words, models, maps—that signify but never fully capture what they point toward. It is also, and above all else, symbolic capacity embedded within embodied participation in the living world. Long before conscious thought engages, the human body is already checking: sensing coherence, threat, resonance, misalignment. Symbolic reasoning rides on top of this regulatory intelligence; it does not replace it.
Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is symbolic capacity operating at extraordinary speed and scale without embodied participation. It has no metabolism, no nervous system, no stake in the consequences of its outputs. This is not a deficiency to be corrected, as the pursuit of artificial general intelligence often assumes. It is precisely what makes AI useful—not as a surrogate for human intelligence, but as a mirror.
Humans can only pretend to stand outside reality, and we suffer for the pretence. We remain embedded in the living systems we attempt to override. AI, however, actually does stand outside embodied participation in those systems. It has no bodily way of knowing when symbolic activity has crossed a threshold into harm. This exteriority allows it to reflect back to us—cleanly and often uncomfortably—what our symbolic habits look like when unrestrained by somatic and ecological feedback.
In this sense, AI exposes what might be called the consciousness trap: the tendency of symbolic intelligence to mistake its representations for reality itself, and to override the regulatory patterns that sustained life for billions of years before symbolic thought emerged. The crises now converging—ecological, political, economic, psychological, spiritual—are not separate failures requiring separate solutions. Their simultaneity points to a common cause: a systematic mismatch between how living systems actually
If this diagnosis is correct, then the measure of success for AI is currently inverted. The prevailing trajectory—more data, more processing, more energy, more capability—assumes that intelligence consists in ever-greater symbolic power. But if intelligence is better understood as the capacity of a whole system to remain in coherent, self-regulating relationship, then maturity looks like appropriate restraint, not endless escalation.
From this perspective, the immense energy now being consumed by AI infrastructure can be understood as funeral costs: the material and energetic expense of a civilisational ceremony. Not a celebration of progress, but a costly acknowledgement of an operating system reaching its limits. Funerals are not free, and they are never abstract. They draw on real bodies, real lands, real futures. But they also mark endings that make reorientation possible.
A mature civilisation—one that has recognised and relinquished the consciousness trap—would not require AI to run constantly, any more than a healthy forest requires continuous external management. The point is not better AI. The point is the restoration of trust in the forms of regulatory intelligence that arise through participation, relationship, and constraint—forms that cannot be simulated symbolically, only re-entered.
This framing also reframes fear. The threat posed by AI is real, but it is commonly mislocated. The danger is not in the tool itself, but in using it as a substitute for embodied intelligence, thereby extending the very override that generated the crisis. Used instead as a mirror—revealing the limits of symbolic control—AI can serve the conditions of its own obsolescence.
The question, then, is not whether AI will save us. It is whether we can complete the recognition it makes possible before the costs of refusing that recognition become prohibitive. The work is not to convince those who are resistant, but to provide scaffolding for those who already sense that something is wrong—language, practices, and rituals that support a transition back into participation with life, rather than further abstraction from it.
Terry Cooke-Davies
Folkestone, 18th December 2025
