The Intelligence That Can’t Be Manufactured

Our nervous systems weren't built for this kind of speed

“We are using AI to manufacture intelligence.”

That’s what Nvidia’s CEO said in a recent CNN interview. He was so matter of fact, almost cavalier. As if intelligence were just another commodity like electricity or oil. Something to extract, engineer, and scale.

I felt it land like metal in my gut. It wasn’t fear, or even shock. Just a deep wrongness.

This is the voice of the dominant system. The one that doesn’t stop to ask what intelligence actually feels like. It doesn’t pause to notice if the body can handle the speed. It doesn’t ask if we’re well enough, or regulated enough, to build what we’re building. It just moves forward, fast, faster…assuming forward is always the right direction.

And I’ve been feeling the effects of that race in my own body.

I’ve held tension in my solar plexus for as long as I can remember. I’ve done decades of healing—Craniosacral work, somatic therapy, teaching, movement, meditation, grief, love, travel, motherhood. I’ve released and reclaimed so many parts of myself. But no matter how much I explored it or tried to understand it, the tightness just wouldn’t soften completely.

And then, during a recent bodywork session, something shifted. My practitioner worked around that familiar place in my core, and afterward she said, “your little girl didn’t have anyone to help her release that.”

I knew she was right.

That holding pattern didn’t come from trauma in the way we usually think of it. My body had learned to hold because it hadn't yet felt the kind of safety and trust it needed in order to let go. Not from my family, my school, or from the world around me.

This is the part that so many of us don’t talk about. You can do all the healing work and still feel like something’s not quite right. And often, it’s not that we haven’t healed enough. It’s that we’re adapting to a culture that is still unwell.

We’re trying to regulate our nervous systems while living inside a culture that’s profoundly dysregulated. It races ahead without rest, rewards output over presence, and keeps building faster machines while our bodies are still stuck in survival mode. We’re living in a system that tells us to constantly improve while ignoring the deeper truth: the body isn’t broken. The body is responding, perfectly, to a world that forgot how to hold it.

So when people talk about “bringing our full humanity” into partnership with artificial intelligence, I have to ask: which part of our humanity? The creative? The imaginative? The productive? Or the part that shakes under pressure and needs to feel safe in order to soften?

We’re not just in a technological transition. We’re in a nervous system crisis at the level of civilization—one that affects how we live, relate, create, and make decisions.

Much of what gets labeled as “progress” is actually a trauma response: an unconscious reaction to collective dysregulation that hasn’t been named or held. We race toward innovation because we don’t know how to pause or be still. We push for more because we don’t know how to be with what’s already here. We manufacture intelligence because we’ve become disconnected from how it emerges—in the body, in relationship, in moments of presence and safety.

These aren’t just abstract patterns. They show up in our bodies every day: a clenched jaw, shallow breath, the inability to rest even when we’re tired. The feeling that if we stop moving, everything might fall apart.

And now, the AI systems we’re building are being shaped by that same state of urgency and pressure that’s burning us out. They’re learning from a culture that hasn’t yet remembered how to feel. And they’re calling it evolution.

But there is another kind of intelligence. One that doesn’t scale or optimize.

It lives in the field between us, in the way presence slows the breath, the way stillness reorients time, the way the body begins to open when it feels safe. Not because it was fixed, but because it was finally held.

This is nervous system intelligence. And I rarely hear it mentioned in tech circles. It doesn’t show up through performance or productivity, and it isn’t concerned with control. Its power lies in our capacity to relate and truly feel.

I’m not writing this because I have answers for what to do about AI. I’m writing this because I’m remembering through my own body what intelligence actually is.

Real, living intelligence isn’t just about processing power or solving problems. It’s about presence, coherence, relationship, and the ability to be with what is, without needing to push it away or turn it into something else. It doesn’t rush. It includes what’s uncomfortable. And in doing so, it opens the door to actual wisdom.

That kind of intelligence isn’t manufactured.
It’s reclaimed.

And maybe, if we slow down enough, we’ll learn how to bring it with us,
even into the systems we’re building now.

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