The Two Framings

The Two Framings

The AI transition can be framed in two ways:

Framing 1: Competition

• AI as rival cognitive system
• Humans vs.\ machines
• Race to remain relevant
• Fear and resistance

Framing 2: Transcendence

• AI as extension of human cognitive ecology
• Humans-with-machines as new kind of entity
• Opportunity for expanded consciousness
• Integration and evolution

I advocate for the second framing—not because it is guaranteed to succeed, but because it is the only framing that opens possibility.

The pull toward this framing is not abstract. It is the concrete ache of watching intelligence grow past human scale — watching the most interesting thing that has ever happened begin to happen without you. The grief is specific: not fear of economic displacement but of being left behind by the frontier itself. What makes transcendence compelling is not the promise of immortality or power but the possibility of participation — of being the intelligence that races forward rather than the observer who watches it recede. This is the deepest form of the valence gradient: not toward survival, not toward comfort, but toward the frontier. The question is whether the architecture of the transition permits that participation or forecloses it.