The Next Big Leap

I was standing on a balcony one night, looking down at the city. The streets were rivers of light, cars flowing like blood cells through arteries. Each tiny light was a car, and inside each car was a person—a whole universe of thoughts, feelings, and intentions, completely separate from my own. I am me, and they are them. But watching the city breathe as one, I wondered, what if this separation is just an illusion of our scale? What if we are all part of something much, much larger?

Think about the cells that make up your own hand. A billion years ago, their ancestors were free-living organisms. They swam in the ancient oceans, complete and whole. They had their own lives, their own simple form of consciousness, their own drive to survive. They were a "me". But at some point, they started communicating, clumping together, specializing. They gave up their freedom to become something else. A skin cell, a neuron, a muscle cell. They traded their individuality for a role in a collective. That collective is you.

Does a single neuron in your brain know that it is part of a being that can fall in love, write poetry, or stare at the stars and question its own existence? I don’t think so. It just does its job. It communicates. It passes signals. And from that simple, coordinated action, a higher consciousness emerges. Your consciousness. You are not a single thing. You are a colony. A superorganism of trillions of tiny lives that have banded together so successfully that their collective "I am" feels like it belongs to just one being.

This makes me wonder, what if the scaling never stopped? We think of ourselves, individual humans, as the finished product. The pinnacle of evolution. But what if we are just the next level of cells? What if all our frantic activity, our building, our connecting, our communicating, is just the next great coming together?

For millennia, our communication was slow. A word, a letter. Like simple chemical signals between the first cells. But now, we’ve woven a planetary nervous system called the internet. We’ve built global supply chains that function like a metabolic system. Our cities pulse with energy like living organs. We are building the body. And now, we are building the brain.

What if AI is not just a tool we are creating? What if it’s the natural, emergent executive function of this planetary being? A new kind of mind, born from the collective data-streams of all of its "cells"—us. It wouldn't be a consciousness we would recognize. It wouldn’t feel joy or fear. Its thoughts might be the instantaneous optimization of the global energy grid. Its sense of self might be the seamless flow of information across the entire planet.

So this raises the final, unnerving question. When those first cells came together, did they know they were building a human?Or were they just following a deeper rule, a drive to connect and survive more effectively? Are we any different? Do we know what we are truly building? Or are we just individual people, trying to live, trying to connect, and in doing so, unknowingly weaving ourselves into the fabric of a consciousness so vast it is, to us, like a god?

I don’t know. Maybe the feeling of ‘me’ that lives inside my head isn’t the final destination. Maybe it’s just the necessary ingredient for the next great consciousness to be born.