Featured Essays

Featured

The Enlightenment’s Wager: Intelligence, AI, and the Open Future

What if the Enlightenment was not merely a historical era, but an unfinished wager on intelligence itself? This essay explores AI, Bergson, David Deutsch, James Hutton, and the possibility that intelligence expands by turning fate into an open field of possibilities. Against polarization, monoculture, and ressentiment, it argues for a rejuvenated Enlightenment grounded in accompaniment, fallibilism, and the courage to leap beyond what we already believe we understand.

The Enlightenment and the Intellect

The Enlightenment did not simply give us better explanations—it gave us time. By stretching human awareness into deep pasts and open futures, it transformed intellect into a force that can confront fate itself. Now, as computation accelerates this legacy, the question is no longer whether we can understand the world, but whether our institutions can keep pace with what our intelligence has become.

The Return of Fate

The more we have sought to bring nature’s processes under our control, the more we live within a lack of control.

Greg Laugero 7/1/26 Greg Laugero 7/1/26

What does it mean to call our era ‘unintelligent’?

The paradox is that AI enters history promising an expansion of intelligence just as our collective ability to imagine a future beyond the present seems to be collapsing. We have become extraordinarily capable of optimization, but increasingly uncertain about what we are optimizing toward.Intelligence, I suggest, is not merely the ability to produce better outcomes. It is the ability to transform what appears to be fate into possibility.

Greg Laugero 6/24/26 Greg Laugero 6/24/26

What does AI have to do with the Enlightenment?

AI arrives at the moment when our confidence in the future is weakening. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great wager that intelligence could transform necessity into possibility—that we could collectively create a better future. Artificial intelligence is the newest expression of that wager. But without a shared orientation toward the future, intelligence risks becoming acceleration without direction.

Greg Laugero 5/20/26 Greg Laugero 5/20/26

Intelligence and the Revaluation of Interruption: From Ant Roads to Enlightenment Roads

What separates the ‘roads’ of army ants from the roads of the Enlightenment? This essay explores intelligence not as a fixed function, but as life’s expanding capacity to turn fate into possibility. Moving from bacteria and ant colonies to Augustine, temptation, and British inland navigation, it argues that intelligence emerges through the widening gap between function and orientation—the opening of time itself into an unfinished field of possibilities.

Greg Laugero 9/16/24 Greg Laugero 9/16/24

Time and Theodicy

Religion and philosophy emerge when we descend into our experience of time

Greg Laugero 12/10/23 Greg Laugero 12/10/23

Civitas Peregrina and Affirmation

Greg Laugero 10/27/23 Greg Laugero 10/27/23

Mercy without Recognition

Mercy is often framed as an extension of recognition: seeing oneself in the other. This essay pushes in the opposite direction. It explores mercy as an act that does not rely on identification or reciprocity, but on attentiveness to the moment at hand. Mercy here is not sentiment but temporal discipline—an ethical response that resists calculation, delay, and justification.

Greg Laugero 8/23/23 Greg Laugero 8/23/23

Time Untethered from Motion

The first in a series of meditations coming to terms with Hans Blumenberg’s The Genesis of the Copernican World. This is an important work for anyone interested in time as practice.