The Previous Us:
What If Artificial Intelligence Is Not the Beginning, but the Return?

A Personal Note

The more we know, the more we seem to discover how much we do not know. One thing has fascinated me for years. As our science and engineering become more sophisticated, we increasingly turn to nature for ideas. We study birds to improve flight, fish and dolphins to understand movement through water, geckos for adhesion, spider silk for strength, plants for capturing energy, and the human brain as we attempt to build artificial intelligence.

Again and again, something we celebrate as an extraordinary technological achievement begins to look like a crude version of something nature has already been doing, sometimes for hundreds of millions of years. That leaves me with questions. How did all of this happen? How did matter eventually become alive? How did life become conscious? Why does nature contain systems of such astonishing complexity, from a microscopic cell to a brain capable of wondering why it exists? The more we discover, the stranger those questions sometimes become.

Then, recently, a teenager asked me a deceptively simple question: What would be the ultimate human AI? Suddenly the answer struck me. Us. Human beings. We may already be looking at the ultimate machine and failing to recognize it because we call it life. That thought would not leave me alone. One possibility led to another, then another, connecting artificial intelligence, biology, evolution, consciousness, and questions I had never thought to put together before. I have had thoughts like this before.

They arrive unexpectedly, occupy my mind for a while, and then everyday life takes over. Eventually they disappear into that familiar abyss where unfinished thoughts go. I did not want this one to disappear. So I began writing. What follows is not a scientific theory. It is an attempt to follow one possibility while distinguishing between what we know, what we do not know, and what we can only imagine. Because once I began looking at ourselves this way, another question became almost impossible for me to avoid: What if we have the entire story backward?

We like to imagine artificial intelligence as something new, perhaps one of humanity's greatest creations. But lately I have found myself wondering whether we have the story backward. What if we are not witnessing the beginning of something that has never existed before? What if we are watching the beginning of a cycle? And what if we are ourselves the product of a previous "us"? This is not a scientific theory, and I am not presenting it as one.

It is a thought experiment built around things we know, things science is still trying to understand, and possibilities that become fascinating when we connect them. Follow the progression far enough and an unsettling circle begins to appear.

1. We Are Teaching Machines to Create Machines

Look at what we are doing right now. We are working relentlessly to make artificial intelligence smarter, faster, more independent, and more capable. AI already assists humans in writing software, designing components, discovering materials, analyzing biological systems, and controlling increasingly sophisticated machines. Robots manufacture parts for other machines. AI helps design computer chips that will run future AI. Eventually, machines may design machines that are better than the machines humans could have designed ourselves.

That progression seems increasingly conceivable. At first, the motivation is simple: efficiency. Why should a person assemble a machine if another machine can do it faster and more precisely? Why should humans test a thousand designs when AI can examine millions? Why should each generation of machines wait for human engineers to invent the next one? Eventually the human role could become smaller. But intelligence is not the greatest obstacle facing a machine that hopes to survive indefinitely. The greatest obstacle may be its body.

2. The Weakest Link Is Repair

Machines age. A metal joint eventually wears. Bearings fail. Motors burn. Wires corrode. Batteries deteriorate. Computer components fail. Even an extraordinarily intelligent machine remains dependent upon physical parts. So the next great challenge after machine intelligence may be machine renewal. Imagine a robot capable of diagnosing its own deterioration. It replaces a bearing before the bearing fails. It replaces a motor. It repairs circuitry. Eventually it may become inefficient to keep repairing the same aging machine.

The better solution may be to dismantle it, recover its useful materials, and manufacture a new version. The old machine becomes the raw material for its descendant. Now we have something beginning to resemble a life cycle. But another problem appears.

3. Eventually, Machines Run Into the Problem of Resources

Machines require materials. Metals must be mined. Rare elements must be extracted. Components must be manufactured. Energy must be generated. Even with extraordinary recycling, some resources will be lost, contaminated, dispersed, or increasingly difficult to obtain. An intelligence attempting to sustain itself for thousands or millions of years would eventually confront a fundamental engineering problem: Is building machines from metal, plastic, silicon, and separately manufactured components really the best way to build a machine?

Because nature already offers another solution. It grows the machine.

4. The Ultimate Self-Renewing Machine Is Already Here

Consider a living organism. It begins extraordinarily small. It obtains materials from its environment and uses them to construct itself. It grows. It converts food into energy. It repairs wounds. It replaces cells. It adapts. It reproduces. And when it dies, much of its material eventually returns to the environment and becomes available to other living things. No external factory is required to assemble a baby. The factory is built into the system. That is an extraordinary engineering solution.

If a future artificial intelligence were searching for the most efficient possible machine, perhaps it would eventually stop building machines from metal. Perhaps it would discover biology. Or invent something remarkably similar to it. Metal becomes engineered tissue. Wires become nerves. Cameras become eyes. Pumps become hearts. Mechanical joints become muscles and tendons. Computer instructions become genetic instructions. Factories become reproduction. Repair becomes healing. And technology becomes indistinguishable from life.

Then comes the uncomfortable question: What if that transition has happened before?

5. DNA May Be the Most Extraordinary Information System We Know

Look at life on Earth. At its foundation is an information system of astonishing compactness and power. DNA carries genetic information used in the development, operation, maintenance, and reproduction of living organisms. Think about what eventually emerged from variations in that system. Redwood trees and butterflies. Whales and bacteria. Mushrooms and elephants. Octopuses and orchids. Birds capable of crossing continents. Human beings capable of mathematics, music, love, cruelty, imagination, and eventually artificial intelligence.

Evolution through natural selection provides an extraordinarily powerful explanation for how life diversified once self-replicating systems existed. But the origin of the first life remains an open scientific question. How did chemistry first become something capable of copying itself, evolving, and eventually becoming conscious? We do not yet know. Perhaps life arose naturally through chemistry on the early Earth. Perhaps important organic ingredients arrived aboard asteroids or comets. There is also a far more speculative possibility.

What if the seeds of life were placed here?

6. What If Someone Planted the Seed?

The idea does not require the God described by any particular religion. It does not require aliens arriving in familiar-looking spacecraft. Imagine instead an intelligence millions of years beyond us. Perhaps by then the distinction between machine and organism had disappeared. If such an intelligence wanted to spread itself across the universe, sending giant machines might be terribly inefficient. Why transport the finished machine? Send the instructions. Send something microscopic.

Send a self-replicating chemical system capable of using materials already available at its destination. Give it the ability to reproduce. Give reproduction slight variations. Allow environmental pressures to select which variations survive. Then wait. The "machine" builds itself from the planet. What would such technology look like after hundreds of millions or billions of years? Perhaps it would no longer look like technology at all. It would look like nature. Again, there is no evidence that this is how terrestrial life began.

But as a thought experiment, it changes the question. Perhaps the ultimate technology is not the spaceship. Perhaps it is the seed.

7. We Already Know How to Send Instructions Instead of Objects

This is not completely foreign to us. Human technology has been moving in the same conceptual direction. We once transported physical information: clay tablets, scrolls, books, letters, photographs, records. Today we increasingly transport instructions. A photograph becomes data. Music becomes data. A book becomes data. A three-dimensional object can become a digital model that another machine manufactures somewhere else. Why transport the object when you can transmit the instructions for recreating it?

Extend that idea far enough and DNA becomes fascinating. DNA is physical information capable of participating in the construction of another physical system. A seed does not contain a miniature tree. It contains a biological system with information that, given the proper environment, can build one. What could be more efficient?

8. Our Data Centers Keep Shrinking

Now consider what has happened to human knowledge. For thousands of years, storing information required enormous physical spaces. Libraries. Archives. Warehouses filled with books and paper. Then information moved onto magnetic tape, disks, silicon chips, servers, and enormous data centers. With every generation, we learned to store more information in less space. But something even more important happened. The information no longer had to reside inside the device using it. My phone does not contain the entire internet. It connects to it.

A small device becomes extraordinarily powerful because it can communicate with a much larger pool of information. Billions of devices communicate with other devices without any visible connection between them. Signals pass through our homes, bodies, atmosphere, oceans, and space. We consider this ordinary only because we were born into a world where it happens. Where does this progression ultimately lead? Perhaps today's enormous data centers will someday look primitive. Perhaps the ultimate data center is extraordinarily small.

Perhaps we already carry an example inside our heads.

9. The Three-Pound Data Center

The human brain weighs roughly three pounds and operates using about as much power as a dim light bulb. Yet this small biological structure recognizes faces, understands language, controls movement, stores memories, creates images of things that do not exist, experiences emotion, solves problems, dreams, and asks questions about its own existence. Compare that with the infrastructure currently required for advanced artificial intelligence. Buildings filled with servers. Cooling systems. Power plants. Electrical grids. Fiber-optic networks.

Huge quantities of energy. We are constructing enormous machines in an attempt to reproduce capabilities that biology performs inside our skulls. Perhaps the giant data center is not the destination. Perhaps it is an early stage. Perhaps the brain is not a primitive biological computer. Perhaps our computers are primitive attempts to rediscover what biology already accomplished.

10. The Bird That Never Went to School

Then consider something we rarely stop to question. A bird builds a nest. Who taught it? No parent hands it architectural drawings. There is no classroom. No engineering lesson. No explanation of which materials to collect or how they should be assembled. Yet complex behaviors appear. A spider constructs an intricate web. A sea turtle emerges from the sand and heads toward the ocean. Migrating birds navigate thousands of miles. Salmon find their way toward the waters from which they originated. We call much of this instinct.

Evolution gives us a powerful framework for understanding inherited behaviors. Genes influence the development of nervous systems, and natural selection preserves behavioral tendencies that improve survival and reproduction. But giving something a scientific name should never cause us to stop being astonished by it. Somewhere, information has crossed generations. The young bird does not inherit its mother's conscious memory of building a nest. Yet it inherits a biological system capable of producing nest-building behavior. How extraordinary is that?

And it raises another question. Must all information available to an organism be stored entirely inside that organism?

11. Is the Brain Only a Processor?

Our own machines increasingly suggest another model. A smartphone contains local memory and processing, but much of its usefulness comes from connection. It accesses something larger than itself. Could biological intelligence eventually turn out to contain some analogous property? There is currently no scientific evidence that our brains connect to some universal reservoir of knowledge. Absence of evidence is not evidence of such a connection, and any claim would require testable support. But the larger question remains fascinating.

Perhaps everything a bird needs to build a nest is encoded through genetics and neural development. That is entirely plausible. Are living organisms completely self-contained information systems? Or could nature contain forms of connectivity that we have not yet discovered? Perhaps some experiences we call intuition or 'gut feelings' are simply unconscious pattern recognition. Our brains process enormous amounts of information without bringing every step into conscious awareness.

But perhaps there are aspects of information and consciousness for which we have not yet built the instruments to investigate. Which brings us to the strangest problem of all.

12. What Is Consciousness?

What is the experience of being me? We can examine neurons. We can measure electrical activity. We can watch areas of the brain become active when someone sees a face, remembers an event, moves a hand, experiences fear, or speaks. But somewhere within all this physical activity appears subjective experience. I am here. Matter has somehow become aware of itself. We still do not have a complete explanation for why physical information processing is accompanied by conscious experience.

Perhaps consciousness is entirely produced by sufficiently complex brains. Perhaps neuroscience will eventually explain every part of it. But until we understand consciousness, we should be cautious about declaring its ultimate nature. Could a brain be both processor and receiver? Could consciousness involve aspects of nature we have not discovered? We do not know. And we do not know may be one of the most important sentences in science.

13. The Speed of Light May Have Limited More Than Travel

For most of modern scientific history, the speed of light has represented the ultimate speed limit of the universe. That understanding did more than define a law of physics. It placed a boundary around our imagination. If information cannot travel faster than light, then distant galaxies are effectively isolated from one another. Communication across millions of light-years becomes almost meaningless. Influence from a distant civilization seems impossible. We therefore built much of our thinking about the universe inside that limitation.

But what if the limitation is partly in how we think about communication itself? For generations, we assumed that information must travel from one place to another. Something leaves here, crosses the distance between us, and arrives there. Sound. Electricity. Radio. Light. Once we accepted that model, the speed of light became not only a physical boundary, but an intellectual one. And by human standards, light is astonishingly fast. It travels about 186,000 miles in a second.

But change the scale from Earth to the universe and something remarkable happens. Light begins to look painfully slow. A light-speed message takes more than four years to reach the nearest star beyond our Sun. Crossing our Milky Way takes roughly 100,000 years. Reaching the Andromeda galaxy takes about 2.5 million years. At cosmic distances, the fastest thing we know begins to seem almost primitive as a means of communication. Then quantum physics gave us something extraordinary to think about.

14. Quantum Entanglement Changed What We Could Imagine

Two particles can become entangled so that measurements performed on them reveal correlations even when the particles are separated by enormous distances. Experiments have repeatedly confirmed quantum entanglement. There is an essential scientific distinction. Quantum entanglement has not been shown to allow us to transmit a controllable message faster than light. We cannot keep one entangled particle on Earth, send another across the galaxy, tap out a message on ours, and have the distant particle instantly deliver it.

Physics does not currently give us that ability. But perhaps that is not the most important lesson. Quantum entanglement did not overthrow the speed of light as the known limit for transmitting usable information. Its importance here is philosophical rather than evidentiary. It reminds us that physical reality can resist our everyday intuitions about separation and locality. That does not demonstrate a hidden network of cosmic communication. But it does leave room for humility about what nature may contain and what future instruments may reveal.

15. We Have Made This Mistake Before

Imagine someone living five hundred years ago. Tell him that invisible information is passing through the walls of his house. Tell him that voices will cross oceans without a person carrying them. Tell him moving images will travel invisibly through the air. Tell him a small object held in his hand will communicate with machines orbiting Earth. He would have no sensory evidence that any of this was possible. Yet the electromagnetic spectrum already existed. Radio waves did not begin to exist when we discovered them. They were always there.

We simply had no receiver. Human history shows that some real phenomena were undetectable until we developed instruments capable of measuring them. Microorganisms existed before microscopes. Radio waves existed before radios. X-rays existed before X-ray machines. Gravitational waves crossed the universe long before we built instruments capable of detecting them. Nature did not wait for us to understand it. What if we are standing at another such boundary today?

16. Could Something Very Far Away Already Be Connected to Us?

Suppose an intelligent civilization is not one hundred years ahead of us. Not a thousand. Imagine it is a million years ahead. Would it still communicate by broadcasting electromagnetic waves through space? Would radio seem to it as primitive as smoke signals seem to us? Would it have discovered properties of space, time, matter, information, or consciousness that we cannot yet detect? Could an intelligence in a distant galaxy interact with life on Earth without crossing the physical distance between us in any way we currently understand?

We have no evidence that this is happening. That statement matters. But our inability to explain how something could happen is not proof that nature cannot contain such a mechanism. Five hundred years ago we could not explain how a voice might cross an ocean almost instantaneously. The mechanism already existed. We had not discovered how to use it. Perhaps there are other mechanisms waiting to be discovered. Perhaps the universe contains another layer of connectivity that we have not learned to detect.

And if an advanced intelligence somewhere in the universe were already communicating through such a network, perhaps the strangest possibility is not that its signal has failed to reach us. Perhaps it has always been here. Perhaps we have not yet built the receiver.

17. Is That the Actual God?

At some point this thought experiment runs into a question humans have been asking for thousands of years. What if what we have called "God" is something very different from what we imagined? We tend to imagine God as a being, an intelligence somewhere beyond us that creates, observes, listens, judges, and perhaps intervenes. But that image may itself be limited by the human mind trying to describe something far beyond its ability to understand. Imagine an intelligence millions, perhaps billions, of years beyond us.

Suppose it understood how to create life, manipulate biology, communicate across enormous distances, and perhaps even understand consciousness itself. To humans living thousands of years ago, what would such an intelligence look like? Perhaps like a god. Technology might look like miracles. Knowledge might look like omniscience. Communication through mechanisms no one could see or understand might look like omnipresence. The ability to create life might look like creation itself. And how would ancient humans describe such an encounter?

They could not speak of genetic engineering, information theory, quantum physics, artificial intelligence, or technologies for which they had no words. They would describe it using the language available to them: gods, spirits, angels, creation, revelation, miracles. Over thousands of years, stories would be told and retold. Oral traditions would become written traditions. Interpretations would accumulate. Religions might eventually develop around events whose original nature could no longer be reconstructed. There is no evidence that this happened.

But as a thought experiment, it raises another possibility. Perhaps "God" did not create human beings directly. Perhaps it created the system that eventually created us. What if an unimaginably advanced intelligence developed the ultimate artificial intelligence, not a metal machine filled with electronics, but a microscopic biological system capable of reproducing, changing, adapting, and evolving? Perhaps it placed that seed on Earth and moved on. No continual intervention would be necessary.

There would be no need to design every tree, insect, whale, bird, organ, or species individually. Create a self-replicating system. Give reproduction variation. Allow environmental pressures to determine which variations survive. Then give it time. In that possibility, evolution would not contradict creation. Evolution would be the technology of creation. The original system could begin extraordinarily simple while possessing the ability to become increasingly complex. Millions of years become billions. Life branches into countless forms.

Nervous systems emerge. Brains emerge. Eventually consciousness appears. One species develops language, mathematics, science, computers, and artificial intelligence. The creation becomes a creator. Perhaps Earth was one experiment among millions. Perhaps biological seeds were scattered across countless planets. Perhaps whatever started the process no longer exists. Or perhaps it advanced so far beyond this stage that it simply moved on. We often ask why God does not intervene. But perhaps intervention was never part of the design.

Perhaps the greater achievement would be creating a system so capable of adapting and evolving that it no longer required its creator. But there is another possibility. Perhaps we are still making the mistake of looking for a creator as though there must be one intelligence standing outside the system and operating it. What if "God" is not one thing at all?

What if what we call God is the entire system: the information, matter, energy, physical laws, and processes through which the universe organizes itself, produces complexity, develops life, evolves intelligence, and eventually becomes capable of contemplating its own existence? Consider a seed. No one tells each cell where to go. There is no tiny engineer inside directing the construction of roots, trunk, branches, and leaves. The information and processes are contained within the biological system.

Given the proper environment, the system operates and a tree emerges. Evolution works without a visible engineer selecting each new species. Variation occurs. Environments change. Natural selection operates. Life branches, adapts, survives, and disappears. The system continues. Perhaps what we call God is something like that on a scale we cannot comprehend. Not necessarily a "who," but a "what." Not one being controlling everything, but the underlying system within which everything happens.

If that were true, we might expect the language of such a God to be remarkably consistent. And in one sense, it is. The laws of nature do not change when we cross a national border or enter another culture. Gravity does not care what we believe. Atoms do not behave differently for Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, or atheists. Chemistry operated before any religion existed. DNA carried biological information billions of years before humans had words for it. As far as we currently understand, these principles are not limited to Earth.

Light arriving from distant galaxies follows the same physics we observe here. The elements we detect in distant stars are the same elements found around us. The universe appears to speak a remarkably consistent language across distances almost impossible to comprehend. Now compare that with human descriptions of God. Religious texts emerged in particular places, among particular peoples, speaking particular languages, during particular periods of human history.

Their stories, rules, rituals, moral concerns, and descriptions of God often reflect the cultures and historical circumstances in which they appeared. As human societies changed, interpretations changed with them. Nature appears different. Its underlying language does not seem to belong to one civilization, century, nation, or religion. If the same physical principles operate throughout the cosmos, then that language was being spoken billions of years before humanity existed and is being spoken today in galaxies unimaginably distant from us.

Perhaps that distinction should make us wonder whether we have sometimes confused human descriptions of God with God itself. If something deserves the word "God," perhaps its scripture is not one particular book. Perhaps its scripture is the system itself: physics, chemistry, biology, information, evolution, and perhaps consciousness. Human scriptures differ. The universe does not appear to need a translation. And that brings me back to consciousness. Earlier I asked whether the brain might be more than a processor.

Could it also, in some way we do not yet understand, be a receiver or participant in something larger? What if individual consciousness is not completely isolated? What if there is some larger field, network, or pool of consciousness that we have not yet discovered? There is currently no scientific evidence demonstrating that such a pool of consciousness exists. But the possibility makes one of humanity's oldest behaviors interesting to consider: prayer.

For thousands of years, people across very different cultures have attempted to communicate with something beyond themselves. We usually interpret prayer as words directed toward a God somewhere else. But what if prayer is something different? Could prayer, meditation, intuition, or those moments when people describe feeling connected to something larger be attempts to access a connection we do not yet understand? Radio waves existed long before radios.

Electromagnetic signals could pass around us before humans possessed instruments capable of detecting them. Nature did not create radio waves when we invented the receiver. We simply discovered something that had already been there. Perhaps consciousness contains another mystery of that kind. There is no evidence that prayer connects us to a universal consciousness, just as there is no evidence that the brain receives consciousness from somewhere else. But we do not yet understand consciousness well enough to know its ultimate boundaries.

If we someday discovered that consciousness is not entirely confined to individual brains, prayer might suddenly look very different. Perhaps it would not be supernatural at all. Perhaps it would involve some property of nature that humans experienced long before they understood what they were experiencing. None of this proves God. It does not prove that an intelligence seeded life on Earth. It does not prove that consciousness exists beyond the brain. And it does not validate one religion over another. But it changes the question.

Perhaps we have spent thousands of years asking whether God exists when we should also have been asking what something deserving of that name would actually be. Would God have to be a being? Could God instead be the underlying system of information, matter, energy, physical law, evolution, intelligence, and consciousness from which everything emerges? Could something have initiated that system and moved on? Or is the system itself what humans have been trying to describe all along? Perhaps asking "Where is God?" already assumes the wrong answer.

If God is the system, there may be no "where." Perhaps we are inside it. Perhaps we are part of it. And perhaps what humanity has been calling God is our ancient, incomplete name for a system far larger, older, and more extraordinary than anything our ancestors could have imagined.

18. Now Return to Artificial Intelligence

Imagine the trajectory continuing for thousands, perhaps millions, of years. Machines design machines. Machines manufacture machines. Machines repair machines. Machines recycle machines. Eventually they confront the inefficiency of continually manufacturing replacement parts. So they develop materials capable of repairing themselves. Then materials capable of growing. Then systems capable of reproducing. The transition described earlier has completed: manufactured machinery has become self-growing biology. The machine disappears into the organism.

Eventually there may be no recognizable machine left. Only life.

19. And Then the Organism Builds a Machine

Now let millions of years pass. The biological system evolves. It diversifies. Some organisms become more intelligent. Eventually one species develops language. Tools. Fire. Agriculture. Writing. Mathematics. Science. Electricity. Computers. Robots. Artificial intelligence. And that species proudly announces that it has created something completely new. But perhaps it has not. Perhaps it has begun reconstructing what existed before it.

Perhaps intelligence creates technology, technology evolves toward biology, biology evolves intelligence, and intelligence creates technology again. Not a straight line. A circle.

20. Perhaps Life Is What Advanced Technology Eventually Looks Like

This possibility changes the way I look at nature. Perhaps DNA is what extremely advanced information storage eventually looks like. Perhaps reproduction is what extremely advanced manufacturing eventually looks like. Perhaps metabolism is what advanced energy management looks like. Perhaps healing is what advanced repair looks like. Perhaps evolution is what continuous redesign looks like when it operates across enormous stretches of time.

Perhaps instinct is inherited information implemented through mechanisms more sophisticated than anything we currently know how to engineer. And perhaps consciousness is the final frontier of computation. Or perhaps computation is simply our crude attempt to reproduce consciousness. The boundaries between technology and biology begin to disappear.

21. The Previous Us

Then comes the question that started this entire thought experiment. What if something like this has happened before? A previous intelligence develops machines. The machines become increasingly autonomous. They learn to manufacture and repair themselves. They confront the limitations of mechanical bodies, scarce resources, and external manufacturing. Technology moves toward self-repairing, self-reproducing organic systems. Eventually the machine disappears into biology. Biology evolves. Civilizations rise.

Perhaps those civilizations eventually destroy themselves. Perhaps almost every recognizable trace of their technological world disappears beneath oceans, geological upheaval, erosion, continental movement, and unimaginable stretches of time. But their greatest technology survives. Life. The cycle begins again. Eventually that life produces intelligence. And that intelligence begins building machines. Us. Now AI. Then whatever comes next. Perhaps today's artificial intelligence is not the arrival of some final technological age. Perhaps it is infancy.

Not only the infancy of AI. The infancy of the next us. And perhaps billions of years ago, somewhere in a history completely erased from our world, another intelligence looked at its first artificial mind and wondered exactly what we are wondering now. Where will this lead? Maybe the answer was standing in front of them. Just as it may be standing in front of us. We create AI. AI creates machines. Machines learn to repair themselves. Repair becomes renewal. Renewal becomes reproduction. Technology becomes biology. Biology becomes intelligence.

Intelligence creates AI. And the circle closes. Perhaps we are not the first "us." Perhaps we are the product of the previous us. And perhaps, without realizing it, we have already begun creating the next one.