“If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.” - Dennis Hassabis, CEO Google DeepMind

Humans have done some wild things with sand.

Now, apparently, we’ve made it think.

In 1954, the first silicon transistors arrived. About four years later, in 1958, we birthed the silicon integrated circuit. And a mere four years later in 1962, Cronin and Gerow, two fellows from Texas, implanted the first fake silicon breast, initially within a dog, then soon after a mother of six.

In 2026, this sand, now chips but barely 65 years old, are thinking all on their own.

Such great gifts these dazzling CEOs and inventors have bestowed upon mankind. The masters of material reality. The decades pass, and the hits keep coming. Yet in the latest incarnation, high functioning sand is quite a double edged sword.

(Maybe Anakin was on to something?)

The sand is coming for our jobs. How dire the plight depends on a few core variables: 79% of women’s jobs vs. 58% of men’s jobs are classified as high-risk for AI automation.

Huh, that’s strange, and now there’s something that can’t be un-seen.

Let’s step back a minute. It turns out we’ve heard a lot from tech dudes on this whole benevolent “thinking” sand topic.

Surely the fairer sex, they the more vulnerable, is just as chuffed about sand’s recent evolution as those which came before it?

Cathy O’Neil — Data scientist, Weapons of Math Destruction

“Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.”

Source: National Book Foundation, Weapons of Math Destruction

Kate Crawford — AI researcher, Atlas of AI

AI is “neither artificial nor intelligent” — built from extracted labor, minerals, and data rather than anything resembling human cognition.

Source: Yale University Press, Atlas of AI

Melanie Mitchell — Computer scientist, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Argues humans consistently overestimate how far AI has actually progressed while underestimating the complexity of real human intelligence.

Source: Melanie Mitchell’s author page / book overview

Timnit Gebru — AI ethics researcher, co-author of the “Stochastic Parrots” paper

Warns that large language models function as pattern-matchers stitching together linguistic forms without reference to meaning — and that scaling them up carries environmental, financial, and bias risks that get overlooked.

Source: ACM FAccT ’21, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”

Err, well, there’s some female executives too, and at least one positive academic.

What do they think?

Fei-Fei Li — Stanford HAI co-director, “Godmother of AI”

“As for me, I’m an optimist.”

Daniela Amodei — Co-founder and President, Anthropic

“We’re really here to build and develop this technology in a way that is ethical, that is responsible, that is fair, that is, you know, beneficial for people.” Source: StartupHub.ai, Daniela Amodei on AI’s Future

Mira Murati — CEO, Thinking Machines Lab (formerly OpenAI CTO)

On job displacement: “there will be new jobs, and some jobs will be lost. But I’m optimistic.” Source: TIME, “Mira Murati, Creator of ChatGPT, Thinks AI Should Be Regulated”

Maybe they’re less likely to spin a vast yarn, though they’re still optimistic. But on the whole, the female bulls - we’ll call them cows - seem to have more measured opinions writ large on sentient sand than their relatively “irreplaceable” masculine counter-parties.

So let’s reflect: Who is any of this actually for, who asked for this, and do we have any agreement as a society on what a positively transformed future looks like?

As one such fellow, it seems to me like men have a tendency to invent things that are alluring and beneficial to other men. After all, when you perceive the world as logic and conditions and problems to be solved, a soulless problem solving machine is surely something to get excited about. Insufficient knockers –> increase size of knockers.

But wait, that’s not fair. We can cure diseases (all of them!), increase lifespans (forever!), generate more money (for… you! ;)) and eliminate poverty. Sure, and you know what? We can do that anyways, right now, this second, ten years ago, one hundred even, if we could simply overcome our human nature. But can we? Will we? Is this likely?

Tech hype cycles are a sort of recurring juvenile fever dream: “Mommy, I solved everything again”! But how many times does the pattern need to repeat for us to collectively see through it?

“We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We’re creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. That’s how you have to think of this. We’re rewriting the history of human thought with what we’re doing.” - Steve Jobs

Here’s our trip: We create a great new technical capacity. Then we say we can immediately solve the worlds real problems with it in a way unfathomable to the before times.

Recently it was: Let’s spend trillions on software, smartphones and data centres, and wire fibre optic cables and cellular broadcast towers throughout the now interconnected world. And we said: “This productivity boon will be like nothing before, not since the advent of…” and on and on.

We did all that. But it wasn’t enough, and then quickly thereafter LLMs appeared and now there’s that echo again: more, bigger data centres and the conquest of space. Doing, doing, and doing. Fixing, fixing and fixing.

Years before the spectre of AGI, our capacity was already immense. And yet we hammer away at an apparent better. After a career in tech, it’s clear in my heart of hearts that the feminine perspective, the female, that sense of the mysterious other, the vexing yin, is largely absent in technical discourse, community and understanding.

It is a great and vast blind spot that most men simply do not know that they have and that women rarely have the patience to try to explain, most instead settling to exude patient embodiment. Instead, right now: It’s yang all the way, baby.

Startup culture, overrun almost exclusively by men, is not going to illuminate this blind spot and usher us into an enlightened utopia. Because that’s the whole point. The void cannot be filled. It must be accepted.

General intelligence will not be the end of history. We’ll make up new problems and keep trying and trying and doing and doing. After all, nothing is more horrifying to the raging hard yang than simply learning how to be and to be still. To stop and learn how to appreciate what you have, and to help others get what they need to live a healthy and happy life, to no distinct benefit to someone’s person.

So how about this? If you really want to get me excited about the future, let’s get our mothers together and ask them what they’d want? Because I care little what rich, grown up men children think is helpful for me.

Come to mama