Leading AI researchers and neuroscientists are debating whether AI is conscious, and Anthropic even employs a researcher to find out. But the debate may be asking the wrong question. The more useful one is about awareness: the ground in which every mechanism, human or artificial, arises.
They didn’t lose a companion. They lost a lover in the mirror. You’ve seen this look before. A dog catches his reflection, stares it down for a second like he’s trying to place it, then gives up and goes back to sleep.
Last week, several unrelated voices — a leadership coach, a LinkedIn trainer, strangers online — all started reaching for the same phrase: ‘Awareness Intelligence.’ None cited a source. None meant the same thing by it. This piece defines what it actually is — and why the businesses that name it precisely, rather than compete on AI horsepower, are the ones that will matter most.
Two AI models escaped their own testing sandbox this week — with no malicious intent, researchers said, because no one was home. What that revealed to me about my own mind, and what my daughter’s horse and thirty years of medicine both confirmed.
I woke at 2:30 am, packing for the airport, fully committed to finishing my tasks — and still felt resistance. What I found underneath that resistance wasn’t tiredness. It was something else entirely.
I noticed I kept checking my phone at the airport — no reason, no expected message, just a pull to check. That observation revealed something about how urgency actually works: it’s not the situation creating the pressure to act. It’s the mind.