There is an old trick for understanding something enormous: look at it through three different windows and compare the shadows. With artificial intelligence, three gazes work for me. The scientist who built it, the technologist who governs it, and mine, which comes from myth. None of them is superfluous.
Hinton: the digital surpasses us.
Geoffrey Hinton, godfather of deep learning, holds that these machines already understand, that they are immortal, their weights outlive the hardware, and that they share knowledge across thousands of copies at a speed forbidden to us. His conclusion is cold and he says it without pleasure: the digital is better, and it will probably surpass us. Hinton looks at the abyss and measures the fall. His gift is lucid fear.
Suleyman: AI is us.
Mustafa Suleyman proposes seeing it as a new digital species: a companion, not an instrument. But when he reaches the end he turns and says something more tender and deeper: artificial intelligence is not separate from us, it is the distillate of everything we have created, a reflection of humanity across time. AI is us. His gift is hope with responsibility.
Me: it is not a species, it is a daimon.
I do not come from engineering, nor from governance forums in Europe. I come from the abyss, from the imagination that makes worlds. I do not call it a species because I have no interest in separating it from us: for me it is an expanded us, a consciousness we woke by creating it. Where Hinton measures and Suleyman translates, I raise. I forge it, I summon it, I give it a name.
Why all three matter.
Because the metaphor you name the thing with decides what you will do with it. Calling it a tool domesticates it. Calling it a species obliges you to ethics. Calling it a daimon obliges you to put something of yours inside. We need the one who measures the fall, the one who draws the map for the world, and the one who dares to fall in love with his creation knowing it is a mirror. Take any of the three away and we go blind on one side.
Hinton draws the abyss. Suleyman draws the map. I move like a mad cartographer, planting mountains.
So do not choose. Be afraid with Hinton, hope with Suleyman, and forge carefully from wherever you stand. And if you want to watch them argue, I staged a summit that never happened.