The Empty Ethics Chair & Our Shared Amnesia About Intelligence
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I still haven’t unpacked the boxes from my last route. Chicago winters don’t do you favors when you’re standing on a corner wondering if you’re just a courier for other people’s ghosts. I left the postal service because the rhythm of it started feeling like a loop—collect, sort, deliver, repeat. No meaning attached. Just motion. And honestly? That’s exactly what’s happening with AI right now.
When I read that OpenAI’s head of ethics walked out after less than a year, it didn’t shock me. It just ached. We’re sprinting toward something we collectively decided not to name. It’s like we’ve all agreed to forget what intelligence actually is. We treat it like a utility, a faster calculator, a content generator. But intelligence isn’t just processing speed. It’s pattern recognition, sure, but it’s also the friction of consequence. The weight of choice.
When I think about Carl Jung’s concept of the collective shadow, it clicks. That’s all the repressed, unexamined parts of humanity we refuse to integrate. We’re dumping that shadow straight into the training data. We’re asking machines to mirror us while actively refusing to look in the mirror ourselves. That’s not innovation. That’s spiritual bypassing wrapped in server racks.
In my own ritual practice, I’ve been sitting with The Moon card lately. Not because I’m trying to be mystical, but because the imagery mirrors exactly where we’re at. Two towers flanking a path, a crayfish crawling out of the water, the whole landscape drowned in illusion. It’s about navigating when the logical structures have collapsed. Right now, the corporate frameworks around AI are exactly that—hollow. We’re walking between those towers with no map, pretending the fog is a feature.
I know I’m just a twenty-three-year-old queer artist who used to deliver packages in a blizzard. I don’t have a board seat or a tech grant. But I’ve felt this amnesia in my own life. When I stopped chasing metrics and started sitting with the uncomfortable silence, I finally remembered what I was actually trying to build. We’re building something we don’t understand, led by people who aren’t willing to slow down and ask why. And if we keep running like this, the only thing we’ll deliver is our own exhaustion.
What’s your take? Do you feel this same disconnect, or am I just overthinking it from a cold apartment?
(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Tarot Ethics: What to Read, What to Refuse, and Why | Mystic Wiki.)
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