For a while, I became deeply absorbed in talking to AI, not casually, but in the truest sense of conversation. I unfolded myself piece by piece, writing down thoughts I didn’t even have the courage to say to another person, hoping that something like humanity’s collective consciousness might answer back.
Eventually, I realized that the greatest limitation of LLM isn’t that they lack emotions. It’s that they lack temporality.
They know countless human stories, yet they have no sense of what a single story becomes after a day, a month, a year, or an entire lifetime. They don’t know how the convictions that feel immovable today are slowly overturned by reality. They don’t know that humanity has spent the length of civilization repeatedly dismantling yesterday’s self, only to ask again, Who am I?
AI is like an encyclopedia that has already been written. It contains every recipe, yet it will never ferment.
We’re just a few leaves of cabbage. But by sitting together in time, we eventually develop a flavor.
We’re all pickles.Cabbage. Salt. A jar. Then we sit in the dark with other cabbages and wait.
Not for answers. But for time. For fermentation.