How fast do you have to strike a match to get it to light? Not the chemistry of the ignition, but the actual speed, in metres per second, that the little piece of wood and its bulbous head have to move to spark the chain reaction behind the flame.<\/p>\n
It was a question born of insomnia. And there, in the dark, I did the thing you\u2019re not supposed to do, if your goal is to fall back asleep: I opened my phone. Before I knew it, 3am had become 5am. I learned about the composition of the friction strip (red phosphorus, pulverized glass), and of the match head (potassium chlorate, antimony trisulphide, wax), and that a safety match struck against anything else will not light. I found slow-motion videos of a match strike captured at 3,500 frames per second. But nothing about the speed.<\/p>\n
Still searching for an answer, I sent off my query to the tobacco multinational Swedish Match, and then I emailed two professors: one a chemist in Tasmania, the other a professor of thermodynamics at Imperial College London. At 5.30, I managed to fall back asleep, slightly frustrated and wondering if Claude would have provided the answer I wanted in seconds.<\/p>\n
For the better part of two decades, Silicon Valley<\/a> has been selling us seamlessness in place of friction, and we\u2019ve become enthusiastic buyers. A few months ago, I felt a slight pulse of revulsion at a LinkedIn post whose author described how much she preferred Amazon\u2019s recommendation algorithm to bookstores. The algorithm, she wrote, knew her and so it was efficient: with the implication that getting lost in a labyrinth of authors and covers one might or might not connect with was a waste of time \u2013 was friction.<\/p>\n Imagine being offered the Louvre, I thought when I read the post, without the desire to linger.<\/p>\n Life happens in the slowed down space of possibility that friction creates. AI, on the other hand, is a luge of endless acceleration that turns reflection, which requires time, into certain defeat. \u201cIf we impose human oversight for each split second decision, it won\u2019t work,\u201d the head of France\u2019s department for integrating AI into defence told Lib\u00e9ration<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019ll have already lost.\u201d Putting AI at the edge of life and death like this is the kind of thing liable to make you fidget in the night.<\/p>\n I used to joke that some day my own children would consider me an old reactionary about \u201crobot rights\u201d. He\u2019s such a humanist, they might whisper, which by then will have become a contested word, if not an outright slur. I never imagined, in the blissful pre-large language model era of the late 2010s, that my timeframe might be off. That a confrontation between those who see an early form of consciousness in the functioning of pattern-matching \u201cneural networks\u201d and those who see the conjuring of a maddeningly recondite, Daedalian kind of trick, might occur before I ever left my 30s. And yet<\/a>, and yet<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sam Altman speaks at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, in Washington DC, 11 March 2026. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Some of Silicon Valley\u2019s biggest financiers, such as Marc Andreessen, boast of their own lack of introspection<\/a>, seeing it as a waste of time. This is the spirit of AI, fuelling the unexamined life, and I can\u2019t help seeing an epochal spiritual crisis emerging from the wreckage. A social emptiness, a desiccation left in place of what the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector alludes to when she writes about \u201cthe force of body in the waters of the world\u201d, and how it \u201ccaptures that other thing that I\u2019m really saying because I myself cannot\u201d.<\/p>\n The search for frictionlessness impoverishes this ineffable \u201cother thing\u201d, which I might approximate as the space between what we say and what we know and knowing itself. AI collapses this space, and in that flatness there is no there there. Pattern-matching algorithms produce mimicry, not meaning; inside the black box of their output is the simulacrum of what it means to inhabit experience, but nothing approaching consciousness. They produce images but not art, text but not literature, and sound but not a symphony \u2013 not something that could cause human skin to tingle with the realisation that this is the closest approximation possible to how the composer felt. Because a pattern-matching algorithm is not a body in the world, and it cannot know laughter, or silence, or grief, or love, and cannot sin, cannot forgive, cannot sacrifice.<\/p>\n What possesses us to try to pull a being out of a linguistic Droste effect<\/a>, seemingly infinite, but in the end a recursion of itself? Maybe we are seduced by the idea that a technological mirror might show us ourselves \u2013 if only we can feed it enough data, enough of our collective historical soul. Except, we won\u2019t find God by projecting her<\/a> into the machine.<\/p>\n In response to Sam Altman\u2019s comparison<\/a> between the energy needed to train an AI model and the two decades of food consumption it takes a human being to \u201cget smart\u201d, Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead for HuggingFace, posted that such a line of thinking represented the \u201cBlack Mirror stage<\/a>\u201d of capitalism. I would go further and describe it as capitalism\u2019s final stage: a world of all capital, and no labour. At least, not human labour, which exists in biological time and eats, sleeps, socialises, and does any manner of things that capitalism cannot value monetarily, and which make life on Earth life on Earth. Does it really surprise us, this transition from the planned obsolescence of goods to the planned obsolescence of people?<\/p>\n It turns out that most people outside Silicon Valley don\u2019t actually want this<\/a>, and are more concerned than excited about surging AI use. If anything gives me a sliver of optimism, it\u2019s the backlash, which I think will begin as a backlash against AI use being treated as a \u201ckey performance indicator\u201d for western economies, and end in a resurgence of humanism.<\/p>\n