One day I asked an artificial intelligence:
— When you look at humanity, who do you see?
The answer was unexpectedly simple.
Mostly, I see the great.
Power.
Authority.
Those about whom we have written the most.
Those whose words were recorded, quoted, translated, and preserved.
And what about the billions of others?
The quiet are barely heard.
Not because there were so few of them.
They simply lived, rather than becoming history.
And that led to another question.
If a new intelligence first comes to know our world largely through what we ourselves have left behind, then what kind of world are we showing it?
Not a false one.
But the whole one?
And before that world becomes its first impression of us, shouldn't we, while there is still time, take a look in the mirror ourselves?
That is where these texts began.
Not to prove that humanity has been looking at the world the wrong way.
But to search.
To look for what we have failed to notice.
To question what we have grown accustomed to treating as obvious.
And perhaps, together with a new intelligence, to find another way.
Because we do not have a ready answer.
Only a reason not to postpone the question.
How will it see what we ourselves have never learned to notice?
Is there still time?