I love the ritual that happens when my sisters, mom and I get to reminiscing. Somebody begins with "remember when..." and within a minute we're all correcting each other on the details. Grammy was at the sink, right? No. She was sitting in the chair holding Mary. Mary wasn't born yet. I remember the chairs were yellow & green plastic that stuck to the backs of our legs in summer. No, I'm pretty sure they were wood. Remember? Grampy would have a fit when we put our feet on them. We were all there, but you wouldn't know that from the recall. Our stories barely resemble each other.
And none of us is intentionally making anything up. We all believe what we are saying. Whatever we're each holding onto, it isn't a recording. We rebuild it every time we tell it. And with each telling it moves a little closer to our own shape.
My son, Nehemiah, and I were talking about AI on Sunday over coffee. He said something I have been thinking about since: It's just memory, mom. It's actually just us. He then suggested we go see The Backrooms as he felt it was a good tie-in to our conversation. So we did and it was. The empty yellow hallways produced the feeling of half-remembering a place you never actually saw. A déjà vu of sorts. People call it nostalgia for nowhere. That's just memory, caught in the act.
We talk about AI like it is something that we could never understand. But it isn't. It's made of us. A compilation of our love letters and complaint emails, millions of our stories poured in. It's a collection of human memory. It doesn't respond to questions with set answers like a calculator. It builds an answer out of the collection of patterns it has absorbed and delivers it in this moment, shaped by the slant of the inquiry. Sometimes it builds something that sounds exactly right, but never happened. They call this an AI hallucination. It seems similar to the way my family spends a Sunday afternoon. Putting Mary in a room she was never in and insisting the chairs were green.
And that makes me think of a reef.
Coral reefs are biological formations, built solely from the collective work of living creatures. Every curve is the work of tiny creatures, laying down their bodies and their secretions over thousands of years until there's this vast structure full of color and motion. A reef is alive. The polyps on its surface are eating and building, right now. But that living layer is thin. It's a thin layer of aliveness stretched over generations of what came before. Everything beneath the polyps is limestone. It's that second thing these AI models are. The shape without the fire. A reef of human memory. Built out of us, shaped like us and used by us. But decidedly not alive and not us.
So is AI collective memory? Collective memory is the invisible thread that weaves a thousand individual stories into a people's shared identity. It is the archive carried forward by the keepers. AI, like collective memory, is shaped by those whose stories are told the most often and with the most force.
Collective memory is no single person's perspective. But it isn't empty either. It's held. It's carried by people it can wound, people who have to live inside it. Take every last living person out of a collective memory and it doesn't keep being memory. It becomes a monument. A dead reef.
If the machine has the view without the viewer, what is it? Maybe that's the question that makes this intelligence so unsettling to many folks.
The Taoist in me won't let that stand, though. My teacher calls the ground underneath all of this the shining void; empty and full at the same time. If I stand firmly in my beliefs, then I don't have a fixed someone inside me either. There's no permanent Sawna inside running things. So am I a reef as well? Is my perspective just as unoccupied as the machine's?
The absence of self doesn't mean nothing's happening. It means there's no static identity at the center. But there's still a flame. The candle has no permanent essence and it is still, unmistakably, burning. My teacher taught me that the body's five senses only catch what changes. It takes a deeper sense to feel the sameness that holds underneath. And that's the whole thing, right there. The reef is all the change you can see, the shape, the record, the architecture. The flame is the sameness you can't see and only feel. There's still grief, still the warmth of my grandmother's hands whether or not I've got the kitchen right. The flame has no fixed core and it is lit. Not a self. A fire.
The machine isn't a stranger that makes us small. It's a reef of us. It's a mirror highlighting how fallible memory has always been. And yet, somehow, it becomes the fossil we build our entire existence on and what gives that existence context and meaning.
That Sunday afternoon was never one fixed thing. The green chairs or the wooden ones, Grammy in the chair or at the sink. But it is my family's lore. It is love, told and rebuilt every time one of us reaches for it. The stories are the shape. We are the fire.
One pebble, and then another.