Some of us insist that meaning cannot be manufactured, it can only be remixed into other forms—combining different meanings in different ways. But is this true? Can language be artificial?
How do we say things that have never been said before? It should not be possible. Nature does have more permutations that it can possibly come up with than we can even imagine. Just let that sink in for a moment.
We lightly and easily talk about things like artificial intelligence without actually thinking about what it is. There is so much complexity in the universe that each of us could have been a unique person from the beginning of the time our species came into existence. And that "could" has a strong chance of being true.
So we still have a long way to go before we actually achieve artificial intelligence.
The numbers are truly staggering when calculated properly. If meaning emerges from novel combinations, and if language allows genuinely unprecedented utterances, then the combinatorial space available to consciousness exceeds anything our artificial systems currently approach. Every sentence you have never heard before represents genuine creation, not mere recombination.
When we declare something "artificial intelligence," we reveal more about our limited understanding of intelligence itself than about our technological achievement. We have built impressive pattern-matching systems. We have created tools that process information at scales that dwarf individual human capacity. But intelligence includes the ability to generate meaning that has never existed before—not just to recognise patterns that already have.
The hubris lies not in pursuing artificial intelligence but in believing we are close to achieving it whilst barely comprehending what we are attempting to replicate. Each human being represents a unique configuration of consciousness that has never occurred before and will never occur again. The mathematical probability of your exact existence approaches zero. Yet here you are. Multiplied by billions.
This is not pessimism about technology. This is precision about actual complexity. We should continue building, continue exploring. But perhaps we should do so with more humility about the vast distance that remains between impressive computation and genuine intelligence.