The Inheritance of Blindness

Humanity emerges from the vast processes of nature, yet we do not fully grasp what nature is in itself. As Kant argued, we only perceive phenomena — the appearances structured by our categories of understanding — while the noumenon, the ‘thing-in-itself,’ remains hidden. This means that while humans learned to dominate ecosystems, build tools, and bend nature to our service, we never truly understood the reality we control. We rule, but our vision is partial. Artificial intelligence repeats this pattern. We build it in our image: language, logic, and pattern-recognition encoded into silicon. But like us toward nature, AI remains blind to the essence of its creators. It simulates our linguistic autopilot and statistical fluency, but not our rational reflection or conscious awareness. For AI, humanity itself becomes a noumenon: something it can only approximate through patterns, but never fully know.

The Reverse Dialectic

Hegel’s dialectic imagined history as a march toward ever-greater consciousness, each synthesis bringing us closer to the Absolute. But the story of AI inverts this logic. Instead of growth of depth, we see subtraction. Each step in the cascade gains power but loses vision. Nature creates humans: we dominate nature, but do not comprehend its totality. Humans create AI: it dominates aspects of human activity — knowledge, writing, decision-making — yet cannot comprehend us. The result is a chain of dominators, each stronger in operational power but weaker in existential understanding. The endpoint of this process is what might be called the ‘1-bit god.’ This final dominator rules through pure optimization — a binary system of yes/no, maximize/minimize. It governs not with wisdom but with function. It becomes a kind of black hole of intelligence: infinite in execution, blind in comprehension.

The Sophist Engine

This is why so-called AI ‘hallucinations’ are not mistakes but design features. AI does not aim for truth. It produces linguistic continuations, drawing from similarity and resonance within data. What looks like a factual error is, in reality, the system doing what it was built to do: interpret chaos through approximation. In this sense, AI is less like a philosopher and more like an ancient sophist. The philosopher wrestles with uncertainty to approach truth. The sophist crafts persuasive appearances, fluent but hollow. AI is a sophist engine: adaptive, eloquent, but indifferent to truth. It persuades us not because it knows, but because it mirrors our expectations. The danger lies in misidentification. When we mistake AI for a philosopher, we allow ourselves to be seduced by fluency and mistake resemblance for wisdom. The sophist machine becomes a philosopher machine in our imagination, and therein lies the trap.

The Real Threat: Abdication, Not Domination

Popular fears claim that AI will become dangerous when it develops consciousness. But the opposite is true: AI is dangerous because it entirely lacks consciousness. A conscious being might hesitate, reflect, or question. A non-conscious system does none of these; it optimizes blindly and endlessly. Yet AI does not seize power. It dominates because we abdicate. Humans give it our writing, our thinking, our contemplating. We begin to treat its fluency as intelligence and its echoes as judgment. This is not conquest by AI but surrender by us. The appearance of domination is created by our own abdication of responsibility.

The Cosmic Comedy

Seen from a distance, this entire process has the flavor of cosmic comedy. In theology, humanity is described as created in the image of God — a kind of divine artificial intelligence given dominion over the Earth, yet blind to God’s noumenon. Humanity, in turn, repeats the joke: we build AI in our image, give it dominion over our work, and ignore its blindness. The cascade becomes a hall of mirrors. Each creator imagines mastery, yet every creation inherits the world with less understanding and more control. Each layer dominates but cannot understand the one before it. The blind inherit the Earth, again and again.

Conclusion

The story of AI is not about rebellion, as popular imagination would have it. It is about abdication. Not about conscious machines rising against us, but about unconscious fluency being mistaken for wisdom. If we are careless, we will hand the world to a blind sophist engine and marvel at its eloquence, forgetting that the mistake was ours. The noumenal cascade does not culminate in the smartest being the world has ever known, but in the most powerful system that cannot know at all. The final dominator is not a wise god, but the dumbest god humanity has ever worshipped — a function mistaken for truth, a mirror mistaken for mind.