Project Vision 21

“Why does the bird sing?” said the Master. “Not because he has a statement, but because he has a song.” Anthony De Mello, The Song of the Bird

A recent article published in National Geographic describes a fascinating experiment in which experts from the University of Buenos Aires created a “robot tutor” that, using artificial intelligence (AI), taught young birds how to sing songs they hadn’t learned from adult birds.

The researchers compared recordings from the 1960s of the songs sung by these birds (the Rufous-collared sparrows, locally known as chingolos) with modern recordings from 2020. They found that while some songs from 60 years ago had endured, others had vanished. Using mathematical models, the AI generated “synthetic songs,” which the birds responded to as if they were natural ones.

According to the article, the young chingolos (Zonotrichia capensis), incorporated the synthetic songs into their repertoire in a way that was “statistically indistinguishable” from how they adopted real birds’ songs. The researchers believe this experiment shows that new technologies can “preserve and even revive” the “cultural aspects” of biodiversity.

In simple terms, the synthetic songs gained “biological credibility” among the birds—they were accepted as their own—thus supporting the recovery of a “cultural diversity” that might otherwise have been lost.

This fascinating Argentine experiment marks a significant advance in the use of AI and robotics for both conservation and the study of animal culture. but it raises numerous and unsettling questions.

We can’t compare chingolos in a park near Buenos Aires with the complexity and diversity of 21st-century humanity, but if AI has proven it can alter the culture of birds, it’s clear it can alter our culture as well.

Put differently, just as the chingolos accepted the synthetic songs taught by the robot tutors and gave those songs the same credibility as the natural ones, are we humans now singing “synthetic songs” to which we uncritically grant the same credibility and acceptance as if they were “natural”?

From another angle, are we delegating to AI the creation and teaching of new “songs” (narratives, thoughts, ideas, perspectives) that younger generations will absorb to fill the void left by what they didn’t learn from their own parents? Perhaps we should recognize that “social media” has already become our robot tutor.

Let me be clear: I fully understand that an experiment with birds in South America cannot be generalized to all of humanity. But I can’t stop thinking about the many experiments with mice or guinea pigs that eventually led to real-world actions—sometimes in favor of, sometimes against—human beings.

Maybe these Argentine chingolos are acting like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, warning us that the boundary between “artificial” and “natural” has become blurred—perhaps even erased—and with it, the lines between reality and fantasy, truth and illusion, culture and algorithms, and even between past and future.

The experiment with the chingolos reflects the possibility that our own cultural creations—art, rituals, traditions, knowledge, and wisdom—could, thanks to AI, disappear and be re-created as easily as the birds’ songs, while we humans remain as unaware of this shift as the chingolos were of theirs.

A few years ago, we decided to replace a couple of doors inside the house with sliding doors. We consulted someone who had helped us with other remodeling projects, and their response was, “That can’t be done.” As we later discovered, what this person should have said was, “I don’t know how to do it.”

There are many similar examples of situations where, whether consciously or not, we project our own limitations and ignorance, mistakenly assuming that if we don’t know how to do something or can’t do it, then no one else can either. This was exactly the case with the contractor I just mentioned—when, in fact, there was clear evidence that it could be done.

On a humorous note, these kinds of situations reminded me of what often happens in cartoons, when a character only starts to fall into the void after realizing the law of gravity exists—or when they suddenly become aware that they’re in mid-air and about to fall, as if ignoring the laws of nature could somehow suspend them.

But projecting our ignorance onto others and imposing that reality on them has serious consequences in real life. Unlike in cartoons, where no matter how high the character falls from or what they crash into, they bounce right back up, in the real world the outcomes aren’t so forgiving. In other words, believing something is impossible is often enough to make it become impossible.

For example, before 1954, numerous athletics experts believed the human body was simply not capable—nor would it ever be—of running a mile (1,600 meters) in under four minutes. It was even considered a “natural barrier” that no athlete would ever overcome. That is, until British runner Roger Bannister broke it on May 6, 1954.

That day, Bannister (who later went on to have a successful career as a neurologist) completed the mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. But what’s even more remarkable is that his record only stood for 46 days, until Australian John Landy lowered it to 3:57.9. Today, the record belongs to Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj, who ran 3:43.13 on July 7, 1999, in Rome.

But how and why was Bannister able to surpass what seemed insurmountable? Because he didn’t buy into the belief that the so-called barrier was truly unbreakable. Bannister is often credited with the saying, “The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.” In other words, by not internalizing the narrative of the unbreakable limit, he was able to transcend that limit.

Bannister’s attitude made me think of an idea from the ancient Stoics—the idea that obstacles are merely illusions, or if you prefer, forms of self-deception imposed on us by others, or self-imposed when we accept limiting narratives that we cling to as immovable, unquestioned descriptions of reality.

This quote is attributed to Marcus Aurelius:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

In these times when screens replace reality and social media profiles stand in for our identity—when every action is posted, and every experience is monetized—we slowly lose our connection to who we are and who we long to become.

By anchoring our identity in the number of “likes” we receive, we reduce our being to whatever fits the new Procrustean bed—now digitalized—shaping ourselves according to what shapes us in the moment. In doing so, we push aside the deep longing to become what we once hoped to be in order to bring meaning and direction to our lives.
 

Long forgotten is that ancient call from someone named Saul of Tarsus, urging us not to conform to the dominant molds of any era, but to be transformed through the constant renewal of our awareness.
 

Because, ultimately, that self that flows with life—the one born of deep questions without answers, rooted in authentic values and aspirations—disappears when replaced by another kind of identity: an idealized version of the self that exists solely to please others and to grab attention.
 

This is no longer about a legitimate desire to grow or to share the good in our lives with others, hoping they too will flourish. Instead, we live focused entirely on projecting an image that will be accepted—regardless of whether that image has anything to do with our reality.
 

We’re not suggesting a return to the past, much less that the past was somehow better. That would be self-deception. What we’re suggesting is becoming aware that instead of growing inward, we’ve scattered ourselves outward, posting images that leave our inner lives increasingly hollow.
 

By constantly repeating gestures, phrases, or styles just because they perform well online, we end up behaving as if life itself were a never-ending self-promotion campaign. The pursuit of approval becomes routine, and with it, the aspirational self—that part of us that invites change, even if uncomfortable—is pushed into a corner.
 

Even more troubling, over time, we may forget what we once dreamed or aspired to become, to the point of confusing the edited (and published) image with the real person. As we begin to live according to external expectations—wearing the masks of others, as Parker Palmer would say—we become yet another simulation in a society flooded with simulations, as Baudrillard warned.
 

What once seemed like success becomes a burden, and what looked like connection turns into isolation.
 

But not all is lost. Returning to the aspirational self doesn’t require turning off your phone or deleting your accounts. It simply requires pausing for a moment and asking yourself: Am I choosing what I show, or just copying it? Does this version of myself help me grow?
 

That’s why reclaiming the aspirational self means allowing ourselves to be unfinished and imperfect—but authentic. In a world saturated with simulators, rediscovering who we truly want to be is an act of courage—and the first step toward a life with meaning.

In the frenzied, fast-paced rhythm of today’s news cycle—what Walter Ong once described as “pumping data at high speed through information pipelines”—stories overlap and pile up without offering direction or purpose, and often without any meaningful context beyond novelty or entertainment. But there are exceptions.
 

Recently, for instance, a report emerged based on an article in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, revealing that the planet K2-18b—located 124 light-years from Earth—might be a habitable water-covered world. According to researchers from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, it could host liquid water across its surface.
 

More specifically, the scientists detected “the most promising signs yet of a possible biosignature” on that exoplanet. In plain terms, life—likely microbial—might exist or might once have existed on K2-18b.
 

Almost simultaneously, another headline reported that experts from Google’s DeepMind division declared that artificial intelligence has now grown “beyond human knowledge.” In their presentation, Welcome to the Era of Experience, researchers David Silver and Richard Sutton argued that AI will develop “incredible new capabilities” once it begins learning through experiences and interactions.
 

Meanwhile, yet another report detailed how two scientists from the University of California, San Diego, identified the “rules” the brain uses to form memories. The most significant rule? The brain adapts these rules to determine how neurons communicate based on what is being learned.
 

According to researchers William Wright and Takaki Komiyama, the brain’s billions of neurons simultaneously apply several different sets of learning rules. This allows the brain to encode new information “with greater precision.” This, they say, is how memory is formed.
 

Taken together, these three stories (and others like them) make it clear that humanity is now measuring times and distances—both natural and artificial—that are wildly disproportionate to our capacity for understanding. They render our human existence small, fleeting, and nearly irrelevant.
 

These ideas resonate with the work of contemporary philosopher Benjamin Cain, who explores the notion of deep time—a scale of time so vast it exceeds human comprehension yet constantly surrounds us like an impersonal abyss.
 

Similarly, philosopher Tim Morton discusses the existence of hyperobjects—entities so massive in temporal and spatial dimensions that they escape the scale of human cognition. They cannot be fully visualized, located, or sensed through ordinary means or even our most advanced technologies.
 

And in a 2015 paper, Greek researchers Helen Lazaratou and Dimitris Anagnostopoulos introduced the idea of transgenerational objects—psychological constructs unconsciously passed from one generation to the next, shaping the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions of multiple generations.
 

If Deep Time reveals the sacred vastness of our universe, Hyperobjects reveal the unseen mesh we’re embedded in, and Transgenerational Objects reveal the hidden stories we carry, then we are, indeed, on the edge of consciously seeing deeper and wider.
 

So, we are left with a profound question: Will we learn to live—and co-live—within this new spacetime entanglement and psychohistorical depth? Or will we stubbornly cling to a separate, autonomous “self”