From Doom Loop to Data Consciousness:
I Told You So!
Are you ready to hear “I told you so” yet?
I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, so those might sound like bold words. But just a couple of years ago, when the press was circling San Francisco with its doom-loop headlines, I shared an observation that this city has always been one of booms and busts. And thanks to AI, our next boom is here.
It’s all I can think about these days — though maybe not in the ways you’d expect. Earlier this year, dear friends shared a binge-worthy podcast with me called The Telepathy Tapes. The podcast began as a serious exploration of non-speaking autistic children who communicate telepathically — but quickly became a deeper conversation about consciousness itself. The emerging idea? These children may be tapping into the greatest database there is: consciousness. The next closest “database” humanity has ever built might just be AI — which contains nearly everything humans have ever written.
If we imagine a spectrum — human consciousness on one end, AI consciousness on the other — something extraordinary is happening in the middle. The gap between them is thinning. Not because AI is becoming human, but because it is mirroring us. The more our tools learn from us, the more we will see ourselves reflected back — our reasoning, our emotions, even our contradictions. It begs the question: is this less about machines waking up and more about us finally seeing our own consciousness, because we’ve projected so much of it into the technology we’ve created?
There’s a lot of fear that AI will take over humanity, destroy it, or make us obsolete. But what if it does the opposite? What if it brings out the best in us — the part that’s self-aware enough to grow, to question, to reconnect? I don’t know exactly where this conversation leads, but I can’t think of a better city than San Francisco to explore it — to experience this kind of growth, to witness this kind of evolution in real time.
To be continued!
