For the past three years, my reading has taken me on an unexpected journey. It began with curiosity about artificial intelligence, but somewhere along the way I realized I was no longer simply reading about technology. I was reading about civilization trying to understand itself.

The books came from many directions. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson on evolution and cooperation. William Gibson’s imagined futures. AI 2041. Co-Intelligence. And now The Optimist, a biography of Sam Altman. At first glance they seem to have little in common. Yet, one after another, they kept returning me to the same question: How does individual intelligence become collective intelligence?

I don’t remember when that question first began to reveal itself in my work. Perhaps it was hidden in my installations with living ants and fish. Perhaps it emerged later through community building, artpaper, Artnetweb, or the long conversations with Rob Murphy that eventually led us into network culture. More recently it has found its way into the Mary Shelley Letters and what I have begun calling GlobalGPT. Looking back, I realize I have been circling the same mountain for most of my life.

Reading Chapter 10 of The Optimist gave me an unexpected feeling. It was as if I had finally reached a ridge and, for the first time, could see another group of climbers approaching the summit from the opposite side.

Their trail looked nothing like mine. Mine was marked by sculpture, artists, conversations, communities, and questions about culture. Theirs wound through computer science, venture capital, startups, Reddit, Y Combinator, and the engineering of intelligence itself. I will never fully understand their journey, nor do I particularly want to. It is not my mountain to climb.

Yet standing on that ridge, I recognized something familiar. For years I had assumed I was asking an artist’s question while they were solving engineering problems. Suddenly I realized our questions had begun to converge. They were asking how intelligence might be built. I had been asking what happens when intelligence becomes something we create together. Those are not the same question, but they meet.

One of the reasons I found The Optimist so compelling is that I was not reading it as a story about technology. Jonathan Haidt permanently changed the way I read biographies. I now look less for heroes or villains and more for moral intention. Whether Sam Altman ultimately succeeds or fails is still an open question. History will decide that. What interested me was something more modest and perhaps more important: the impression of a young man sincerely trying to find a moral path while carrying extraordinary responsibility.

Power without moral imagination has always frightened me. The history of technology offers enough reasons for caution. Yet cynicism is no answer either. If we begin by assuming that everyone building the future is driven only by greed or ego, we stop listening before the conversation has begun.

That realization brought me back to the Mary Shelley Letters. When I began writing those letters, I thought they were about artificial intelligence. I now think they are about something larger. They are about the relationship between intelligence and humanity. Engineers quite rightly ask how to align increasingly capable AI with human values. Artists have a different responsibility. We ask what those values should become, how they are expressed through culture, and how imagination prepares us for futures that engineering alone cannot define.

Perhaps the alignment problem has never belonged exclusively to engineers. Every civilization that creates a powerful new technology must also create the stories, the ethics, the metaphors, and the conversations that allow human beings to live wisely beside it. That has always been the work of artists.

Looking across that ridge, I felt something I did not expect.

I felt less alone.

Not because I had found people who think like artists. I hadn’t. Nor because I suddenly wanted to become an engineer. I don’t.

I felt less alone because I realized that, from opposite sides of the mountain, we had all been climbing toward the same horizon. The view from each trail is different, but perhaps the future requires both.

Perhaps that is where artists are meant to meet the engineers—not at the beginning of the climb, but together on the ridge, where each can finally see what the other has been searching for.