Recently, Oren and I went backroad four-wheeling in Baja. Between the topes (speed bumps) and rugged dirt roads, we got jostled. For some reason, this phrase kept coming up for me, “That tope turned my toupee topsy-turvy.” It got a chuckle from Oren – even though I have no hair replacement rug on my head – and then I kept saying it over and over again. It grew old, but when we got home I asked AI to create a graphic showing my experience and almost immediately (less than a minute), I received this image. Not bad, right? When you see this kind of AI response, it’s no wonder we’re becoming more and more AI-reliant and more graphic designers (and others) are losing their jobs. But, AI can only hallucinate the experience Oren and I had that day.
A few years ago, I learned something fascinating about language that now feels strangely relevant in the age of AI. In both Spanish language and French language, there are two different verbs for “to know.”
In Spanish, it’s saber versus conocer. En français, savoir vs connaître.
One means knowing facts. The other means knowing through experience.
You saber that Santa Fe sits at 7,000 feet.
You conocer Santa Fe because you’ve cried in the high desert after a transformational workshop and bought an overpriced turquoise bracelet you absolutely did not need.
One is informational.
The other is relational.
And suddenly, I realized: this may be the perfect distinction between what AI knows and what humans know.
AI is astonishing at saber.
It can synthesize millions of articles in seconds. It knows the population of Botswana, the plot of obscure Icelandic films, and probably the average lifespan of Peruvian alpacas. It can summarize research studies faster than most academics can locate their reading glasses.
But AI does not conocer.
It doesn’t know heartbreak because it sat in a parked car for an hour after hearing devastating news. It doesn’t know awe because it watched the sun rise over the Baja coast while realizing life is both fleeting and unbearably beautiful. It doesn’t know grief because it slept in its dead mother’s bed two nights after she passed away.
Humans know in the body.
We know through scar tissue. Through embarrassment. Through joy. Through repetition. Through failure. Through being humbled by life over and over again until wisdom slowly seeps in through the cracks of our certainty.
In other words, AI can scan the menu. Humans have tasted the meal.
And honestly? Midlife is often the transition from saber to conocer.
In the first half of life, many of us are rewarded for accumulating knowledge. Degrees. Expertise. Titles. Achievement. We become walking LinkedIn profiles with lower back pain.
But somewhere around midlife—often after a divorce, a diagnosis, a death, or a profound disappointment—we start asking different questions.
Not:
“What do I know?”
But:
“What have I lived?”
That’s a very different inquiry.
I’ve noticed this in my own life lately as I deal with cancer while simultaneously helping lead Modern Elder Academy.
Cancer has no interest in my résumé.
Mortality is the great editor of abstraction.
You stop caring quite so much about appearing intelligent and start caring more about being real. More present. More loving. More awake to the preciousness of ordinary moments.
And here’s the irony: at precisely the moment AI is becoming superhuman at informational knowing, many humans are becoming increasingly disconnected from experiential knowing.
We scroll past sunsets while reading productivity hacks. We optimize our sleep while losing touch with our dreams. We know the neuroscience of awe, but haven’t actually stood beneath enough stars lately.
We are overdeveloped in saber and undernourished in conocer.
Which may explain why so many people secretly feel exhausted despite being endlessly informed.
As the philosopher Michael Polanyi famously said:
“We know more than we can tell.”
That’s the territory of lived experience. Of intuition. Of embodied wisdom.
It’s also why elders matter.
Not because they know more trivia than ChatGPT. Trust me, AI wins that contest every time.
But because people who have lived deeply carry a different kind of knowing:
- the knowing that comes from burying parents,
- raising children,
- surviving failures,
- forgiving betrayals,
- rebuilding after loss,
- falling in love again,
- and discovering that life remains mysteriously beautiful despite all evidence to the contrary.
AI may someday outperform humans intellectually in many domains.
But it will never know what warm bread tastes like after getting lost on the way to dinner with someone you love. It will never know the backroads of Baja, nor will it have the dust in its hair and the lilt in its heart after a four-wheeling adventure. We just need to develop a better language for what humans know. And, that’s why the humanities will be making a comeback in the next few years.
That’s conocer.
And honestly, that’s the good stuff.
-Chip