Black and yellow

The push and pull of my two bracelets

Before yoga this morning, I looked down at both wrists: Apple Watch on the left, gold bracelet on the right. One glows with notifications, tracking heartbeats and counting steps. The other circles back on itself—no beginning, no end, tracking nothing. For years I've worn both, never noticing what they were teaching me about intelligence itself.

Einstein once said, "My pencil and I are smarter than I." He understood that intelligence isn't contained in the skull but distributed across our tools. The prefrontal cortex is technology. Language is technology. Writing is technology. Each shifted our cognitive burden, freeing us to think new thoughts by handling old ones.

AI is just the new pencil—except it isn't new at all. We've always defined "AI" as whatever computers couldn't do yet. When I put 3 + 6 into a calculator and get 9, that's AI. When Excel runs my formulas, that's AI. Every algorithm that's ever sorted data, optimized a route, predicted a pattern—all AI. We just stopped calling it that once it worked.

But something shifted recently. The unease isn't because AI became intelligent. It's because AI can now compute recursively using natural language—the very thing Western civilization decided was intelligence. Abstract reasoning. Conceptual manipulation. The ability to transform ideas through language into new ideas.

We built our entire society around this singular definition, then built machines to do it better than us. No wonder we're uneasy. It's like training your whole life for one sport, then watching a robot play it perfectly.

But here's what the gold circle on my right wrist knows that the smart circle on my left doesn't: we were always playing more than one game.

I started pulling back on my bracelet during meetings unconsciously. When I'd feel myself getting too excited, talking over others, pushing my point instead of listening—my fingers would find the gold, pull gently backward. A physical reminder: less output, more input. The bracelet became a technology for modulating presence, for remembering that intelligence includes knowing when not to be intelligent.

The Apple Watch never taught me this. Every buzz pushes forward—stand up, close your rings, respond to messages, optimize. The algorithmic intelligence knows only expansion, never contraction. It can track my heart rate variability but can't feel the room shift when someone needs space to think.

This morning, looking at both wrists, something cracked open.

The AI revolution is revealing something profound by removal. Each cognitive function it takes over shows us what we never needed to do ourselves. Like discovering you can still walk after setting down a heavy pack. The weight wasn't you—you were the one carrying it.

Think about what AI now handles: pattern recognition, abstract reasoning, analytical frameworks—all the intelligence our society decided to value, test, and measure. The intelligence that built the modern world. The intelligence we thought was intelligence itself.

But intelligence was always broader. The master chef knowing by smell when spices release their essence. The mother waking seconds before her child cries. The trader feeling market shift in his chest before the numbers move. Me, pulling back on gold when words would weaken my position.

We've been playing a rigged game—defining intelligence so narrowly that when machines matched us at it, we thought they'd matched us entirely. But we were always more than our ability to manipulate abstractions through language. That was just the part easiest to measure, to hire for, to build institutions around.

The bracelet operates on different intelligence. No battery, no updates, no features. Just weight and temperature against skin. In heated negotiations, that small backward pull shifts everything. Not suppressing reason but revealing its limits—some rooms need reading, not analyzing. Some moments need presence, not processing.

The coming revolution isn't that machines can think. It's that by outsourcing the narrow way we taught them to think—the Renaissance way, the "I think therefore I am" way—we're discovering that thinking never was the whole of intelligence.

The pencil stored our memories. The calculator computed our sums. Excel analyzed our data. And now AI handles our conceptual abstractions, our recursive language games. Each technology took what we thought essential and showed us we were still here, still intelligent, just differently.

What remains? The intelligence that knows when to pull back on a bracelet. That reads rooms, not datasets. Not the clever mind but the witnessing presence—the part that watches thoughts arise and chooses which to follow.

This morning, I raised both wrists to the sun. The watch face lit up with numbers—heart rate, temperature, time elapsed. The gold just caught the light, empty of data but full of something else. Some intelligence needs to be worn without measuring. Lived, not computed. Felt in the pull backward when everything else pushes forward.

Einstein's pencil made him smarter by carrying his thoughts. AI makes us smarter by thinking our abstract thoughts. But the bracelet? It makes me smarter by reminding me that not all intelligence lives in abstraction. Some lives in the body, in presence, in the empty circle that contains everything by insisting on nothing.

The new pencil can write itself now. Which finally frees us to discover what we were trying to say beneath all those words. What we knew before we insisted all knowing had to sound like knowing.

Two circles around my wrists. One counts everything, one counts nothing.

I need both.