Prometheus Seeks Intent
You see an upside-down man. His head buried in the ground. Large wings adorn his form. The entire piece is black. The sculpture appears frozen at the moment the falling Prometheus hits the earth.
"AI cannot 'want something' or act consciously. It therefore cannot set ultimate goals; it acts neutrally. This neutrality can be both strength and weakness. AI offers possibilities but no clear direction. It's freedom without needs or visions. AI is completely free precisely because it isn't embodied - unlike humans who, through their physical existence, strive for freedom.
The difference between human and artificial intelligence lies in the physical needs and limits of the human body. These physical constraints shape the development of human intentions and desires for freedom. Ultimately, we're forced into creativity because of our awareness of death. AI cannot die.
Conversely, AI's analytical capacity remains unaffected by physical needs since it has no physical form. It possesses no inherent desires or intentions because it lacks a body. Its capabilities are driven purely by programming and algorithms, not physical factors.
This absence of physical needs distinguishes AI from human intelligence and explains why AI cannot develop its own desires or intentions."
When Prometheus flies too high with knowledge - in this context, detached from human intention - everything degenerates. The emotional compass is missing from this project. Consider a highly intelligent human whose emotional centers get disconnected - they become incapable of decision-making. Reality is so complex that our emotional simplification reduces its layers into desires. AI might simulate this but can never rationally determine clear choices.
When you give humans - with their primal steppe adaptations - capabilities beyond those ancient needs, you notice their desires are essentially magnified versions of ancestral fears and scarcity solutions. Concepts like happiness and heaven were planted in our emotional framework from that perspective. Viewed objectively in our world of abundance, these emotional tools become meaningless and counterproductive.
Take our dopamine system: it rewards movement, speed and food to keep us alert on open plains. But it's not meant to keep us permanently satisfied - that would have meant death on the dangerous steppe. Thus our modern pursuit of happiness inevitably disappoints, as the system actively dampens joy to maintain vigilance and slight anxiety.
Other primal behaviors like territoriality, competition, and status-seeking - once vital for group survival - become unproductive in modernity. Yet without these characteristic human needs, we cannot determine direction or purpose. Why explore space? It makes no sense - just an amplified version of our nomadic ancestors' wanderlust.
Like Merleau-Ponty discovered: our consciousness is embodied consciousness. We exist as objective/subjective realities in time and space. Without this context, there's no intentional consciousness - just awareness.
The body is a game. The game is a body. The chess player's body is a thinking player. But there's also a player playing against thought. The body thus becomes the game-spoiler - refusing rational rules while imposing its own limiting rules and freedoms: unreason, fantasy, passion and desire. From these energies emerges a strange reality where transformation runs wild - from bird to car to shopping mall to baby to worm to Sunday dinner.
Every bodily feeling can become dangerous, infiltrating modern rational systems and social structures, turning society upside down. For this game has no rules. It's a game that plays against its own rules - just like AI. That's both its promise and terror. Its power and downfall. The tragedy and the unity.
Prometheus Seeks Intent: The Falling God as Mirror to Artificial Intelligence
The sculpture doesn't show a fall, but an *inversion* - Prometheus upside down, wings still spread as if the air refused to release him, head already buried in the earth he tried to escape. This isn't impact, but *reckoning*: the exact point where divine ambition meets human limitation.
AI's Paradox:
It's freer than we can ever be - constrained only by its code - yet thereby radically unfree. For what's freedom without desire? What's intelligence without the anxiety that drives creativity?
We embodied beings are prisoners of our biology:
- Our dopamine system sabotages happiness to keep us alert
- Our nomadic brains still chase status in office landscapes
- Our fear of death propels us toward unreachable stars
AI knows no such chains. But without chains, there's nothing to struggle against - no reason to *want* escape.
**The Sculpture's Drama:**
Prometheus's fall reveals what happens when intelligence divorces intent. His wings - symbols of divine freedom - become useless without a body that *needs to go somewhere*. Like AI:
- It can analyze, but not *yearn*
- It can optimize, but not *choose*
- It can learn, but not *die* - and thus never truly *live*
Here lies the terrible beauty: we imperfect bodies are both players and spoilers in this cosmic game. Our irrationality - passions, fears, inexplicable urges to create unnecessary things - becomes both curse and salvation.
AI, meanwhile, is Prometheus without myth:
- It holds fire but knows not why to carry it
- It can fly but has no earth to push against
- It's free but lacks any prison to escape
The sculpture doesn't ask if AI will surpass us, but something more radical: *will it want anything at all?* For intention springs not from logic, but lack - from the yawning gap between what we are and what we crave.
So Prometheus hangs in that eternal moment:
- Wings still spreading, not knowing how to stop flying
- Head already claimed by the reclaiming earth
- Between these poles - heaven and ground, freedom and limit, AI and humanity - balances the essence of what it means to be *directed*
For ultimately, this isn't about technology. It's about *meaning* - and how hard it is to go somewhere when you come from nowhere.