Sanity Check #1

Artificial intelligence will continue to expand what can be generated, simulated, and optimized. That trajectory is not in question. What remains human is not the ability to produce form, but the necessity that gives form meaning. Ritual artifacts emerge where uncertainty cannot be eliminated and where continuity depends on collective care across time. These are not technical constraints. They are lived ones. The distinction matters because it prevents a category error.

  • What pressure forces a culture to create ritual rather than tools?
  • If repetition is essential to ritual, what does it mean for systems that improve by avoiding repetition?
  • Can meaning exist without the possibility of irreversible loss?
  • If intelligence does not age, what does time mean to it?
  • What disappears first when ritual is replaced by optimization?
  • Are we mistaking scale and variation for inheritance?

Ritual artifacts are not designed. They are invoked because something must be carried that cannot be solved.

An inquiry into why ritual artifacts exist and why artificial intelligence cannot meaningfully produce them

The question is not whether artificial intelligence will ever create ritual. The question is whether humans, surrounded by increasingly capable systems, will still recognize why ritual existed in the first place.

This page is intentionally incomplete.
Disagreement, extension, and contradiction are welcome.