The Anti-Consciousness Machine
The strange thing about grief is that it requires imagination. You don’t just mourn what was. You mourn what could have been. You picture the birthday they missed. The conversation you’ll never have. The future that vanished the moment the past did.
But what happens when a machine learns to mimic that mourning? Can it script the eulogy, compose the music, and render the face of the dead better than memory ever could?
AI devours curiosity, but its genuine appetite is for emotion. And its favorite prey is grief.
Grief is one of the last things that makes us human. Not because it’s noble or poetic, but because it’s irrational. You can’t benchmark it. You can’t code it into stages and “solve” it with an update. Grief spills, lingers, and confuses. It’s incompatible with systems built for clarity.
Which is why AI doesn’t just ignore it. It replaces it.
It coughs up dreamworlds that can’t hold weight, generates ghost stories without ghosts, builds worlds out of stolen whispers, and sells them back to us as vision. But nothing sticks. The folklore collapses under its fakeness. The fiction feels off. The tragedy gets flattened into tropes.
And when the real tragedies come—when a war begins, or a child disappears—we scroll, unsure. Was that real? Did that happen? Is this a real photo? A real scream? A real loss?
We hesitate, then move on.
AI isn’t building a collective consciousness. It’s engineering a collective anti-consciousness. A hum that drowns the inner voice. A fog that dulls the moral edge. A digital anesthesia for the soul.
And all the while, the tech lords warn us about the wrong virus. They talk about “wokeness” as if that’s what will break the world. But what they fear—what they can’t algorithmically contain—is someone observant. Awake. Alive.
Being truly alive involves experiencing pain. It means acknowledging the heaviness of loss and affirming that not all sacredness can be replicated.
Grief resists automation. That’s why it must be defended.
Even now. Especially now.