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 4/29/26 Greg Laugero 4/29/26

Intelligence Against Instinct: Why Prediction Is Not Enough

Modern AI equates intelligence with prediction. But intelligence begins when instinct is interrupted—when necessity opens into possibility.

Greg Laugero 4/1/26 Greg Laugero 4/1/26

Intelligence and Instinct II: Contingency and Possibility

Between instinct and action, there is a moment—an interruption. This essay explores how intelligence emerges in that gap, not to return to purpose, but to reshape it, opening time to contingency and new possibilities.