The debate about prompts is too small. The debate about creativity and training data is too small. The real provocation is this: What happens when millions of networked, non-biological agents explore the physical world, learn faster than we do, share knowledge instantly, and iterate without fatigue?

For a long time, I believed this emptiness was a flaw. A crack. A sign that something was missing. Filling time had become the imperative of our age: to function, to optimize, to react. A fulfilled life seemed to be the result of constant activity—until I realized I had mistaken activity for aliveness. I confused what was visible on the outside with who I am. I mistook effect for essence.

Reality is not something given. It comes into being. Through conversations, images, stories, rules—through what we collectively accept, often without saying so. What we call “real” has always been the result of shared human effort.

Music lives from the fact that more is present than what sounds in the moment. What we hear carries memory within it and announces what is to come. The same is true of time.

We usually treat the future as a point ahead of us, as a moment that has yet to be reached. In this view, the future keeps moving forward. It remains distant.

This morning, I am on my way to Davos for the annual World Economic Forum. This year’s guiding theme is “A Spirit of Dialogue”—an attempt to open a shared space for thinking about the future amid fragmented markets, geopolitical power shifts, societal upheavals, and exponential technologies.

We insist on tying agency to morality. We demand that conscious systems exhibit empathy, remorse, responsibility—not because consciousness requires these traits, but because we do. They reassure us. They preserve our ethical hierarchy. But consciousness offers no such guarantees. It guarantees only interiority.

Reflections on epistemic exhaustion, the loss of gravity — and the quiet return of social truth. Perhaps this is the sentence that most precisely captures the beginning of 2026: “Is this even real?” Not as a philosophical provocation, but as a constant, low-level doubt accompanying every image, every voice, every message. What once sparked curiosity now produces fatigue. What once promised orientation increasingly creates distance.

Never before have our tools begun to intervene so deeply, so directly, and so autonomously in the human being itself. Artificial intelligence no longer confronts us merely as an instrument; it alters the very conditions under which we understand the world and ourselves. The moment these conditions shift, one insight becomes unavoidable: that we do not know what the human being is.

Today Calypso wears a new dress. She no longer lures with a lonely island, but with technological frictionlessness: algorithmically curated feeds that predict our every desire; closeness that never disappoints; endless scrolls that gently lull us into inactivity. AI does not whisper for us to surrender. It whispers: “You don’t have to decide. The next video is already waiting.” Down into the algorithmic abyss.

Germany has exactly one chance not to be left behind — and that chance is free electricity. While other countries are already investing in the future, Germany is still arguing about electricity prices. Yet the debate is no longer about price; it is about understanding energy itself.