There is a particular kind of madness that only highly intelligent civilizations can achieve: the capacity to be so absorbed in solving a problem that they accelerate the very conditions that caused it. We are living inside that madness right now — and the strangest part is how rational it all looks from the inside.

Spoken in plain terms, we are dismantling the operating system of life on Earth in order to upgrade a simulation of it.

The Interplays We Keep Forgetting

Indigenous cultures have long understood that smaller systems exist within, and depend upon, larger ones—a dynamic that academics refer to as nested hierarchy. A cell depends on an organ. An organ depends on a body. A business depends on a society. A society depends on a biosphere. Violate the outer layer, and everything nested inside it eventually collapses, regardless of how elegantly optimized the inner layers become.

Beyond metaphors, this interdependency has been confirmed across disciplines. It is thermodynamics, ecology, and evolutionary biology all saying the same thing in different dialects.

Yet contemporary civilization often seems to behave as though the hierarchy is inverted—as if the biosphere exists to serve the economy, and the economy exists to serve the technology. We treat the largest, most complex, most irreplaceable system—the living Earth, with its 4-billion-year-old architecture of feedback loops, nutrient cycles, and biodiversity—as a mine, while treating a 5-year-old large language model as an asset.

The Psychology of Proximity Bias

Why do we do this? The answer is far more insidious than stupidity and even greed. I argue that it's actually proximity bias, the deeply wired human tendency to weigh what is close, visible, and measurable over what is distant, invisible, and complex.

Artificial intelligence is proximate. Proponents claim that it makes our work more convenient, saves us time, and produces outputs we can benchmark and monetize within a fiscal quarter. Natural intelligence—the........

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