There’s an old saying: don’t build castles in the sky. It’s a warning, really — a gentle nudge back to earth, a reminder that dreams too lofty are destined to crumble. The idiom has been around for centuries, evolving from the French bâtir des châteaux en Espagne (building castles in Spain), a place where, as the story goes, there were no castles to be found. To build castles in the sky is to chase the impossible, to daydream about possibilities beyond our current reality. That dream is christian centric. As the Moorish people couldn’t possibly build a castle with their very similar religion that shares the same god.
But here’s the thing about impossibility: it has a terrible habit of becoming possible. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are much more similar than they ever like to consider themselves.
They call it the cloud. In a physical sense, it’s a metaphor that originated with network engineers in the late 1970s, who would draw the internet as an amorphous, cloud-like shape on their diagrams to represent something complex and distributed that they didn’t need to fully explain. In a metaphorical sense, the cloud represents abstraction — the obfuscation of massive, energy-hungry infrastructure behind a single, virtual object. It’s both everywhere and nowhere, tangible and ethereal.
The future is uncharted. And our technology is simultaneously the most spectacular it’s ever been and the most controlling it’s ever been. That tension is real, and it’s worth sitting with. But this isn’t a doom post. Quite the opposite.
The Discourse Trap
Most discourse around AI is fear mongering. I could make derivative content around that ad infinitum — especially because the models are trained on that kind of thing. They’re really good at saying the same thing a billion different ways and tricking you into thinking it’s an original take.
But the world doesn’t need more fear. What the world needs is the stuff in your head that you wish you were hearing on the news. The wow, that’s cool or interesting stuff. The I had no idea it worked like that or that it can do that type of thing.
Fun facts. Unbelievable facts about every major and minor discipline. That’s the stuff that gets me going and wanting to create.
So let’s talk about what’s actually happening out there. Not the dystopian headlines. The castles.
The Castles Being Built Right Now
Here’s a small sampling of what’s emerging from laboratories and hackathons around the world, right at this moment:
An AI-powered autonomous lab recently navigated through billions of potential material synthesis recipes to identify brighter, lead-free light-emitting nanomaterials — in just 12 hours. That’s not incremental progress. That’s the kind of discovery that used to take years, compressed into a single workday.
Scientists are now powering AI with human brain cells. A biological data center has opened in Singapore, marking a phase where human brain cells replace chips to power AI from a petri dish. This isn’t science fiction — it’s happening now, advancing biological computing as a potentially more adaptive and energy-efficient complement to conventional silicon-based infrastructure.
At an MIT hackathon, students built a wearable system called “Human Operator” that uses voice commands and electrical muscle stimulation to control movements in a person’s fingers and wrist — technology that could eventually help people with limited movement control.
An AI system developed by physicists is helping explain why neutrinos have mass.
Researchers in China used an AI large model to discover over 60,000 new marine natural products directly from microbial gene sequences, revealing previously hidden biosynthetic potential in the world’s oceans.
Another AI agent predicted 68,000 possible superconducting materials, and four entirely new ones have already been synthesized and confirmed to exhibit superconductivity.
And perhaps most strikingly: DeepMind’s Gemini LLM achieved a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad — the world’s hardest high school math competition — nearly 20 years earlier than experts had predicted was possible.
This is the stuff that doesn’t make the fear-mongering headlines. This is the wow.
The Original Thought Problem
So much new, cool stuff is just beyond our reach. But most of us don’t pursue it because it might be niche or uncharted territory. We tell ourselves we’re not experts. We tell ourselves someone else is already working on it. We tell ourselves it’s probably not that important anyway.
But here’s the secret: when you have an original thought, write it down. In a journal. In a notes app. Chat with an AI bot about it. You will learn something new.
Does AI make mistakes? Of course. But so do people. The nice part of AI is that there is no shame in asking dumb questions.
I wish society didn’t treat naive questions that way. Because that’s how everyone learns. And likely, the person who asked that question knows a lot more than you think. They have the confidence to not get crushed by embarrassment. It wouldn’t surprise me that they know a lot more about other topics than you do.
There’s research to back this up. People who are willing to ask “dumb” questions and think “stupid” thoughts end up understanding things much more deeply over time. The benefit of asking a stupid-sounding question might be small in any single instance, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large. As one observer put it: “Very often the dumb question that is sitting right there that no one seems to be asking is the smartest question you can ask”.
The Freedom of Not Knowing
No one likes to be a nag. No one wants to make people answer a million trivial questions. But that’s precisely what we’re offloading to AI — and that’s one of the many positive factors.
Think about what that means. For the first time in human history, you can ask any question, any time, with zero social cost. You can be completely, embarrassingly, fundamentally naive about a topic and explore it anyway.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a revolution in how human beings learn.
The cloud, for all its abstraction and obfuscation, is also a place where castles can be built. Where the infrastructure of knowledge is available to anyone with curiosity and a connection. Where the only thing standing between you and understanding is the willingness to ask.
The Sky Isn’t the Limit
So build your castles in the sky. Build them with reckless abandon. Because the sky, it turns out, isn’t the limit — it’s just the beginning.
The technologies we’re building are extraordinary. They’re not just controlling us; they’re enabling us. They’re letting us do things our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of. And they’re letting us ask questions that would have gotten us laughed out of the room just a few years ago.
The future is uncharted. That’s not a warning. That’s an invitation.
What’s in your head that you wish you were hearing on the news? Write it down. Ask the dumb question. Chase the niche curiosity. Build the castle.
The cloud is waiting.
Originally published on Medium. It lives here now — new essays land in the Journal first.
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