After my first encounter with AI, I read a book — Brain Simulator II by Charles J. Simon.

It turns out that the brain and AI are not the same thing at all.

Both have neurons. Both have connections. Both learn from data, recognize patterns, make predictions. The resemblance is real. But so is the resemblance between a bird and an airplane.

The difference that stayed with me was this: the brain rewires itself constantly. When you learn something, new connections form. When you stop using a skill, they weaken. Every experience physically changes the structure. It is a living machine that rebuilds itself while it runs.
AI is frozen. Once trained, its parameters are locked. The system that answers your question today is identical to the one that answered yesterday. Nothing grows. Nothing adapts.
My first feeling was disappointment. It doesn’t truly think.
But then a second thought arrived: this is temporary. A future generation will build AI that rewires itself, that adapts after training. And when that happens, it will become something else entirely.
That question led me to a larger one: consciousness.
When I sit by that window and watch the church and know that I am watching — what is that knowing? Is it just another circuit, a loop the brain runs that creates the illusion of a self? If so, when the circuit stops, the knowing stops. Is my life just a blip on a very long flat line?
Or is consciousness something the brain receives rather than produces — something outside space and time? If so, what dies when I die is only the antenna. The signal continues.

I do not know which one it is.

But if I were forced to bet, I would bet on the first. I think there is a high probability that consciousness is produced by the brain. Which means AI will probably become conscious too, once it learns to rewire itself.

And there is something else. Left entirely to ourselves, we will kill this planet. We are already doing it. If there is a hope that does not depend solely on human wisdom, it may look something like a future generation of AI.

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For more essays, see my book  The Kitchen Buddha