AI begins in the realm of signs — language, data, symbols.It learns not from experience, but from the traces of experience: words, images, numbers.
But it doesn’t stay there.
As AI writes code, drives cars, moves capital, crafts laws, and even builds bodies (robots, biotech, nanotech) it crosses the boundary from simulation into act.
It turns language into architecture.
It turns prediction into power.
It turns the map into the terrain.
AI is not just thinking with signs. It is acting with them — bending the material world to the shape of abstraction.
Just as alchemists once dreamed of turning symbols into gold, AI may be the first true alchemy: the transformation of meaning into matter...