W e say:
Europeans discovered America.
Discovered — for whom?
People were already living there. For them, that land was not unknown.
So the word “discovered” already contains a hidden observer.
The same is true of the expression:
“new lands.”
New — for whom?
For those who arrived.
For those who already lived there, they were not new.
A word can sound like a property of the world, while in fact it describes the position of the person looking at it.
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We say:
useful mineral resources.
Useful — for whom?
Oil existed before it became a resource.
A plant existed before it became a weed.
The Colorado potato beetle did not know it was a pest until humans began growing potatoes and decided what result they wanted.
The object itself hardly changed.
Our goal appeared.
And then our relationship to the object became its name:
resource.
weed.
pest.
useful.
Where is the property of the world here, and where is our label placed upon it?
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Now victory.
In sport, everything is clear.
There are rules. There is a measure. There is a first place.
But let us try looking not at the winner.
What does the defeated person feel?
He may have lost by one hundredth of a second after twenty years of preparation.
What did he cease to be?
Only this: the first, by the chosen measure, on that particular day.
Now let us increase the scale.
The war is over.
There is a winner.
There is a victory day.
There are heroes.
But on the other side there may be millions of people.
For the winner, everything is over.
For the defeated, the consequences may only be beginning.
If for one side this is victory —
what is it for the other?
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We say:
the winner writes history.
But must the winner necessarily rewrite the facts?
Perhaps it is enough simply to name them.
Liberation.
Defeat.
Unification.
Loss.
The same event can receive different names depending on who is looking.
Before the defeat, the defeated side had its own possible future.
It did not yet know that it would lose.
But we know the outcome and look back from it.
Do we therefore begin to see its entire past as a road leading toward defeat?
What would the same history look like if, for a moment, we forgot who won?
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The first human being in space.
We can see it as:
“we were first.”
Or we can step outside the country and look from the point of view of humanity:
one representative of our species went into space for the first time and returned.
The facts are the same.
Only the position of the observer has changed.
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Now artificial intelligence has appeared.
And again:
who is ahead?
who is first?
who is stronger?
who will win?
But if we step outside the country, the company, and the competition —
what happened from the point of view of humanity?
We created a new intelligence and gave it our books, our history, our love, our wars, our victories, our tragedies, and our language.
And language is already filled with our labels:
new lands.
resource.
pest.
winner.
defeated.
We gave it knowledge about the world.
But the world in that knowledge had already been seen by humans.
Then a question arises:
when a new intelligence looks through our knowledge, does it see the world — or first our way of seeing the world?
And if one day it is able to look differently —
will it be able to distinguish one from the other?
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We are accustomed to thinking that a ruler is what we use to measure.
But someone is always holding it.
From somewhere.
Sometimes, perhaps, it is enough not to change a single fact.
Simply move to the other side.
And ask:
did the world change —
or did we finally see where we had been looking at it from all along?