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{Editor’s Note: Elephant does not support the use of AI, casually or professionally, without ethical guidelines around it. 100+ AI experts called it a threat to the human species and our planet on the order of nuclear war—an existential threat. Not sure why? Rewatch Terminator 2; or think about drones + weapons + facial recognition + AI; or simply AI + faked news coverage + war or politics or lying about people we know and care about. AI is not a fun simple innocent tool. We are the guinea pigs, and short-sighted tech barons are the overlords here. Read more about our stance on AI. ~ Waylon, founder of Elephant}
“Can AI replace you? Will I be seeing an AI doctor soon?”
The first time a patient asked me some version of that question, something strange happened.
Her words did not land in my brain.
They landed in my nervous system.
I noticed my jaw tighten, my breath shorten, my shoulders subtly curl in. Underneath the surface-level question—Will AI replace you?—there was a quieter one that many of us have been carrying:
What happens to us—our bodies, our hearts, our sense of agency—when intelligence outside of us explodes faster than we can metabolize?
As a physician living in a world of headlines about the “intelligence explosion,” it has become impossible to ignore that our devices, our feeds, our “smart” tools are not just changing what we know.
They are changing how we live inside our own skin.
The Nervous System does not Scroll at the Speed of Silicon.
On paper, the idea of an intelligence explosion is thrilling.
Machines that learn faster than we do. Systems that can predict disease before it appears on a scan.
But our nervous system never signed that contract.
While our minds binge on infinite information, our bodies still move at the pace of breath, heartbeat, and circadian rhythm. We can upgrade our phones every year, but our biology is still running a very old, very wise operating system that evolved around sunrise and sunset, not blue light and notification pings.
In the clinic, this mismatch shows up in quiet, familiar ways:
>> Sleep that is shallow, interrupted, or simply optional.
>> Anxiety that feels “free-floating” but is tethered to constant hypervigilance.
>> A gut that clenches every time the news cycle refreshes.
The story is rarely, “I’m addicted to my phone.”
The story sounds more like, “I can’t seem to rest,” or “My brain doesn’t turn off,” or “I feel like I’m always behind.”
It is as if the body is whispering, I am not designed to live at the velocity of my feed.
When Information Explodes, the Body Imposes a Limit.
In conversations about AI and the singularity, we often stay in the realm of IQ: who is smarter, what gets automated, which jobs disappear.
But intelligence is not just what happens in the prefrontal cortex.
Intelligence is also:
>> The way the heart rate slows when we finally feel safe.
>> The way the gut senses danger before the mind can name it.
>> The way the body knows when a boundary has been crossed—even if our polite smile says otherwise.
As a physician, the most heartbreaking pattern is not the presence of disease. It is the quiet absence of listening.
Body signals get drowned out by the louder notifications.
We push through fatigue with caffeine.
We override our hunger and fullness cues with productivity apps.
We trade real circadian light for the glow of a screen late into the night.
If the intelligence explosion continues to accelerate without a corresponding expansion in embodied awareness, the human body becomes the unreported casualty: over-stimulated, under-slept, and quietly inflamed.
Ancient Wisdom has Always Known about “Explosions.”
Long before we had language for algorithms, many wisdom traditions spoke about cycles, thresholds, and tipping points.
In Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, imbalance is often described as a kind of inner overload: too much heat, too much stimulation, too much wind. In Buddhist teachings, the “monkey mind” leaps from branch to branch, unable to rest in the present moment.
The intelligence explosion is, in some ways, a high-tech version of an old story:
>> Speed without presence.
>> Power without grounding.
>> Stimulation without integration.
Our bodies notice this, even when our minds are impressed. The most advanced device in the room is still our own nervous system—it can feel when something is “too much,” even if we do not yet have the words to describe why.
The invitation from ancient wisdom is not to reject progress, but to remember pace, rhythm, and limits.
What if We Treated the Body as an Equal Partner to AI?
In medicine, we are beginning to see AI models that can spot early patterns in labs, imaging, and wearables—long before a disease is officially diagnosed. This is both hopeful, and dangerous.
Hopeful, because it could allow us to intervene earlier and more gently.
Dangerous, because we might be tempted to outsource even more of our agency.
What if, instead, we treated these tools as mirrors rather than masters?
>> A heart rate variability graph could nudge us to ask, “Where am I ignoring my need for recovery?”
>> A sleep tracker could become a prompt to honor evening rituals, not an excuse to compete with last night’s score.
>> Predictive models could help us catch patterns, while we still commit to the slow, human work of changing habits, healing trauma, and rebuilding community.
When we let the body and the algorithm sit at the same table, something shifts.
We move from being managed to participating.
We might still use AI to map rhythms and forecast risk. But we also begin to ask:
>> How does my chest feel when I read this headline?
>> What happens to my breath when I scroll for 20 minutes?
>> Where in my day can I reclaim 10 minutes of unmeasured, unoptimized time?
These questions are small, but they are the opposite of passive consumption.
They are acts of quiet rebellion.
The Subtle Revolution of Slowness in a Fast-Intelligence Age.
If the intelligence explosion is defined by how quickly machines learn, maybe the human response can be defined by how deeply we notice.
Noticing is not glamorous. It does not trend. It rarely goes viral.
But noticing is how we reclaim the body in a world that keeps asking us to leave ourselves.
>> Noticing the first hint of resentment in the shoulders after saying “yes” when every part of us wanted to say “no.”
>> Noticing the way sleep improves when the phone stays outside the bedroom.
>> Noticing that anxiety softens, even a little, when we eat one meal a day without a screen.
This kind of attention is a form of mindfulness that does not require a meditation cushion—though that can help. It simply asks that we bring our awareness back to this breath, this heartbeat, this moment, again and again.
The more the external world accelerates, the more radical this practice becomes.
We Do Not Have to Out-Think the Future to Stay Human.
Perhaps the intelligence explosion is not a battle between “us” and “the machines,” but a mirror showing us how easily we abandon ourselves.
We may not control the pace at which AI evolves.
We do have some say in the pace at which we live.
We can choose:
>> To let our bodies be more than vehicles for our brains.
>> To honor circadian rhythms as sacred architecture, not outdated biology.
>> To see rest, boundaries, and mindful technology use not as luxuries, but as survival skills for an age of accelerated intelligence.
If there is a revolution worth joining, maybe it is not just about building smarter machines.
Maybe it is about remembering that a human being, fully present in their own body, breathing deeply, feeling honestly, and acting with compassion, is still one of the most powerful forms of intelligence on this planet.
And that kind of intelligence does not explode.
It awakens.
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