Nouf Aljowaysir is a young woman who lived Saudi Arabia until she moved to the United States, who like so many people in this age of disapora finds herself no longer in the country of her birth, and feeling a need that needs to be met.  In that search, she produced a twelve minute documentary published June 4 in the New York Times in which her personal narrative of the search for ‘where she was from’ is presented as as split screen op-doc conversation between her and an engine of artificial intelligence.  She asks the AI “where am I from” and then narrates her own memories and calls in her mother to supplement with additional narrative about the family, their traditions, pictorial images and values. AI was invariably courteous in asking what it concluded to be penetrating questions that would lead to an answer to this very human question, but ultimately AI had to conclude it could not deduce where she was from.  It seems the shape of Nouf Aljowaysir’s life and question defied the machines capacious information bank and intimidating logic.  The “if-not-this-than-that” binary logic of AI, deep and as compelling as it can be, could not decipher the human heart or truly penetrate the trajectory of feelings posed by the question. Ultimately AI is a binary process that is limited to stereotype and generalization however micro or nano those generalized leaps are.  I believe the human process is so much more than that.  But for a human being to be genuinely human they must use more than their binary capacities, but instead suspend the binary, and let the humanity do its work before deciding in the binary “yes or no”. The human process seems to require us to discern our way to logic and then add the binaries relevant to the newly discerned information. Perhaps the sequence of inquiry that originates out of discernment (meditation, prayer, contemplation) and travels through cognition, projection of consequence and ultimately, accountability is the package that makes us human. 

In the end this young woman’s mother consoles her daughter with the answer we all may need to accept before the end of this age’s diaspora. She answers: “you are the daughter of this earth”. Her response to her daughter fills me with the pride of simply being an imperfect human being living on the courage of the explorer seeking to find home once again.