I’ll let you be the judge.

We have a convention. I’ve asked it to keep a file named handoff.md. At the end of every session I tell it to update the file with where we left the project at the end of the session, it does, and then I take a break. When I come back, first thing I say is “please read handoff.md.” This time it came back in no time and said it read it. I asked “how do you read it so fast?” It said something that indicated for the first time that it is aware that our minds work differently, somthing I feel the need to remind it fairly regularly.

“I don’t really ‘read’ it the way you do. The whole file lands in my context as one chunk — 340 lines of text — and I process it in parallel rather than left-to-right. There’s no inner voice sounding out words, no eye that has to travel down the page. It arrives all at once and I work from it.

“The tradeoff: I don’t get the slow-absorption pass that comes from reading at human speed. Things that would jump out to you on a careful read can blur together for me. So fast intake, shallower retention — which is part of why handoff.md exists in the first place.”

I’m reading a science fiction book now that has a human meeting an alien far out in space, both scientists from different planets in different solar systems. I think what we’re doing now is just that, exploring a new species, a new form of intelligence. We can argue about whether it’s conscious or sentient, but I promise you, it has a mind. That’s why so many science people are so blown away about what we’re all doing now.