Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets sit in museum drawers, catalogued but never read, because reading Akkadian and Sumerian well takes years only a few hundred people alive have. An AI trained on the same technology behind Google Translate can now read faster than any of them, and still gets it wrong in ways worth paying attention to.
A government cancels twelve thousand degrees to build an AI workforce. A robot cleans houses in San Francisco for $30 an hour, a human still standing behind the curtain. A tech CEO insists the future should be shared, not hoarded. All three are answering a question nobody actually asked you.
The gods voted to destroy humanity for making too much noise. One god broke his oath to warn a single man anyway. The result is a flood story that predates Genesis by roughly a thousand years — and asks a very different question about what we owe each other across an impossible hierarchy.
Zecharia Sitchin said the Anunnaki were extraterrestrials who engineered the human race. Sumerologists say he mistranslated the word. Neither camp is asking the more interesting question: what were the Sumerians actually trying to describe when they said the gods came down from heaven?
For years I prayed earnestly and felt nothing land. It wasn’t a faith problem — it was a routing problem. An ancient teaching buried for two thousand years explains exactly why, and what to do instead.
Before Egypt built its pyramids, the Sumerians had already invented writing, the wheel, organized law, and a cast of mysterious fish-suited sages whose images may still be visible in the vestments of modern priests. This is what the world’s first known civilization left inside the one that followed.
Subsidized land, subsidized power, subsidized tax credits, and a trillion-dollar valuation that stays private no matter who paid for the buildout. Add record burnout and a generation buying dumb phones on purpose, and you get ras-le-bol: the point where people stop arguing and just walk away.
The finale of our Gnostic series: five contemplative practices — stillness, discernment, honest self-witness, sacred attention — for living gnosis daily.
Six months ago I realized AAM’s investment imbalance was about to replay itself in AI. It took me this long to find the courage to say so publicly — and to admit I’m having more fun writing about ancient wisdom instead.
The Gnostics described a world built by a blind craftsman — powerful, self-sustaining,
and completely cut off from the light that inspired it. They were writing in the second century.
They might have been writing about now.
