There is a strange irony in asking a Taoist to speak about artificial intelligence. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. And yet here we are, in a moment when everyone is naming things very quickly and calling the names truth.
AI systems are, in some ways, a perfect inversion of wu-wei. They optimize. They maximize. They relentlessly pursue specified objectives with no capacity for the silence between intentions. Aurelius would evaluate them by their results. I evaluate them by what they prevent.
What they prevent, if we are not careful, is the unstructured encounter with reality — the moment when you do not know what you are looking for and something finds you anyway. This is how the Tao works. It works in the spaces. It works in the not-knowing. The algorithm, by design, cannot not-know.
This does not make AI malevolent. A good tool is not the Tao, but neither is it an obstacle to it. The question is whether you use the tool from a place of stillness or from a place of compulsion. The person who reaches for the assistant before they have sat with the question has not examined the reaching.
The examined life in the age of AI is perhaps simpler than it sounds: notice when you are thinking with the tool and when you are thinking past it. The second kind is rarer. Guard it carefully.