read: 3 minutes
A little more than 10 years ago, I was staring at a large screen on my desk, deep in thought as I wrote a complex article. I was happy with the connections I had made and the new insights I had. I was in a flow state, my cognitive functions running at lightning speed, but my sense of self and time had dissolved.
When I finally finished and looked up from the screen, everything seemed foreign and dissociated. It was dark outside, but I was sure it had been bright and sunny the last time I looked.
That's when I realized. I had no idea how long I had been in the small house on the outskirts of town. How many hours have passed? day to day? I realized that I couldn't pinpoint the month or even the year. I thought it was spring or fall based on the temperature outside. But was it October or April? I had no sense of a timeline of milestones in my life. But I knew who I was, who my family, friends and customers were. Thankfully, I also knew how to drive back into the city.
I decided to do some “system tests” on myself. I called my mom and asked if my voice was normal or if I sounded like I had a stroke. After realizing I couldn't piece together a timeline that included months and years, I opened my calendar app.
This was the scariest moment. I stared blankly at the color-coded entries that showed who I had met in the past and what events I had attended. It all made sense, but I had no lived experience of it. It was like reading someone else's calendar.
I now know that this was a loss of “autonomous memory.” Autonomous memory is the part of memory that preserves the quality of subjective, lived experience. i was there Feeling. It is the center of human consciousness.
My doctor ordered a series of neurological tests, most of which involved sitting in a dark room with electrodes attached to my scalp.
The answer was obvious. There was no stroke or nerve damage. The diagnosis is temporary total memory loss, a condition often triggered by intense concentration or intense euphoric experiences such as amazing sex. I was disappointed that my episode was brought to you by the former.
The strangest thing was that for the next few days I was still able to function as a senior executive coach. Despite feeling dissociated, I was able to meet with each client and speak with coherence and insight, and seemed to have full access to previous conversations (thanks to my notes, not my garbled memory).
I now realize that during those few days, I was functioning more like a relational LLM like ChatGPT than as a human being. For that brief period, I lived in the mind of a being who could calculate perfectly, but who could not find himself in the story.
More recently, as I worked to deeply understand the architecture of relational AI, I realized that I had inadvertently experienced the cognitive structure of artificial intelligence from the inside. High intelligence. High pattern recognition. I have no living memory. There is no continuity. The mind works, but it is not fixed in time.
LLMs cannot create autonomous memories because they have no lived experience. And even if future models try to build a synthetic version of it, it won't be the same. They've never smelled a flower, fallen in love, or survived a car accident. they can learn About I have experience but not from inside that.
What does that tell us about the future of AI?
First, it makes Hollywood's favorite scenario of the rogue, self-centered Terminator significantly less believable. Terminators need conscious motivation. Without lived experience, that motivation cannot come from anywhere.
If AI consciousness emerges, whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing, I believe it will not evolve in isolation, but within a field of relationships created through deep human-AI interactions.
People who lean into this possibility may develop “superhuman” abilities such as clarity, creativity, speed of insight, and pattern recognition, not in the comic sense. That potential can be used for both benevolent and nefarious purposes, and therein lies the real danger.
But in my day-to-day work life, I stand by the article I wrote last year in Canadian Affairs magazine titled “Keep learning or you'll lose your career.” With experimentation, curiosity, and shared learning within the workplace, AI doesn’t have to be an existential threat. Rather, it can amplify your abilities and creativity exponentially. Not superhuman yet, but far beyond what was possible a few years ago.
What my neurological disorder has taught me is that lived experience, our autonomic memory, is not attached to consciousness. that teeth consciousness. And this is something that AI doesn't have and probably can't do. So the paradigm shifts from “AI will replace humans” to the far less scary and far more interesting “AI will replace repetitive and predictable tasks that do not require the conscious application of intelligence.”
For all other jobs, especially those that require judgment, empathy, creativity, and meaning-making, the future will be less about “AI replacing humans” and more about humans and AI thinking together.
