The Eye of the Hurricane: Art, Trauma, and Being Human When Machines Think

The Eye of the Hurricane

This episode was recorded on a weekend that began with three powerful sweat lodge ceremonies, led by the artist Tolli Morthens at his Bataakademia, in collaboration with the University of Akureyri's continuing education program. There is something about sitting in deliberate discomfort, surrounded by steam and darkness, that strips away pretense and forces you to confront what is actually real. It seemed fitting, then, that our conversation afterward would do exactly the same thing.

This was also the first video episode of Temjum Taeknina, a small milestone for the podcast. But the real milestone was the depth of what unfolded in front of the camera. Early in the conversation, Tolli offered a phrase that would come to anchor the entire discussion. He spoke about finding the eye of the hurricane, that still center within the chaos where clarity and calm reside.

"You know this phrase about being the eye of the hurricane. There is some storm, some tornado happening. How can I position myself within it so that I keep my sanity and my peace?" -- Tolli Morthens

It is a question that deserves more than a clever answer. We are living through what may be the most significant technological shift since industrialization, and the honest truth is that most of us are not in the eye. We are somewhere in the whirlwind, trying to make sense of what is spinning around us.

What It Means to Be Human When Machines Think

There is a historical pattern worth noticing. During the industrial revolutions, we outsourced our muscle to machines. The tractor replaced the plow horse, the excavator replaced the shovel. We adapted. We found new work, new meaning, new ways to define ourselves beyond brute physical labor. Now we are witnessing something qualitatively different: the outsourcing of knowledge itself. Of pattern recognition, of analysis, of creative synthesis. The cognitive faculties we long considered uniquely, irreducibly human are being replicated, and in some narrow domains surpassed, by systems that do not understand what they are doing.

This raises a question that no amount of technical benchmarking can answer: if machines can think, what does it mean to be human? Tolli approached this not as a technologist but as an artist and a healer. He spoke about peeling away the layers of identity, the job titles, the social roles, even the emotions, until you arrive at what he called simply "the one who watches." That irreducible awareness beneath all the noise. If AI forces us to confront who we are beneath our productivity, our output, our economic function, perhaps that is not a crisis. Perhaps it is a gift.

Dr. Audbjorg brought a complementary perspective. She pointed out that we are living in, as she put it, "incredibly exciting times" that are simultaneously "enormously complex." The question is not whether AI will change things. It already has. The question is whether we will use the time and cognitive space it frees up to pursue wellbeing and deeper purpose, or whether we will simply fill it with more work, more speed, more consumption. History suggests the latter. But history does not have to repeat itself if we choose deliberately.

Art and AI: The Irreplaceable Human Moment

Of all the threads in this conversation, the one about artistic creation struck me hardest. There is a widespread fear in creative communities that AI-generated images, music, and text represent an existential threat to human art. Tolli dismantled that fear with a single, luminous idea: AI does not mark the end of creation. It marks the beginning of new creation.

His reasoning was not naive optimism. It came from a deep understanding of what art actually is. A painting is not just pigment arranged on canvas; it is a record of a specific human being, in a specific moment, wrestling with something real. The tremor in the brushstroke, the hesitation before a line, the unconscious choice of color that reveals more than the artist intended. These are fingerprints of consciousness. And consciousness is precisely what AI does not have.

"I will always be a statement about the human moment. AI cannot reach that." -- Tolli Morthens

This is not an argument against using AI as a tool. It is an argument for understanding what makes human expression irreplaceable. When AI can generate a technically proficient image in seconds, the value of human art shifts. It shifts from technical skill toward authenticity, vulnerability, and presence. In a world flooded with machine-generated content, the work that carries a genuine human fingerprint will only become more precious, not less.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Power and Trauma

The conversation took an unexpected and sobering turn when we discussed the Gaza conflict. Here we sat, three people in northern Iceland, discussing the extraordinary potential of artificial intelligence to elevate humanity, while thousands of kilometers away, that same humanity was demonstrating its oldest and most devastating patterns. The contrast was impossible to ignore, and we did not try to ignore it.

Tolli drew a connection that I have continued thinking about long after the recording ended. He spoke about how capitalism, at its most distorted, is driven by greed and fear, and how those driving forces are not merely economic but deeply psychological. He referenced the idea that those who hold the most power in the world are often the most traumatized, people whose unresolved pain shapes decisions that affect millions. The book he alluded to, about the world history of family stories, suggests that the patterns of conflict and domination we see at the global scale are, in many cases, amplified versions of what happens within families.

This is an uncomfortable idea. It means that the question of who controls AI is not just a matter of regulation and governance. It is a question about the inner lives of the people making those decisions. Are they acting from wisdom or from wound? From vision or from fear? Tolli's work with the Bataakademia, helping people confront and heal from trauma through sweat lodge ceremonies and holistic practices, is not separate from the AI conversation. It is, perhaps, the most essential part of it.

Finding Balance Through Self-Compassion

If the scale of these challenges feels overwhelming, that is because it is. And here is where the conversation found its most practical wisdom. Both Tolli and Audbjorg kept returning to the idea that navigating the AI transition requires something that is not typically included in technology roadmaps: self-compassion.

Not self-indulgence. Not avoidance. Self-compassion in the original sense: the willingness to be honest about your own limitations, to forgive yourself for not having all the answers, and to extend that same grace to others who are equally lost. Tolli referenced the Buddha's teaching that if a path does not reduce suffering and increase happiness, it is not worth walking. This is a remarkably useful filter for evaluating technology. Does this tool, this platform, this algorithm reduce suffering? Does it increase genuine human happiness? If not, why are we building it?

"Be the change you want to see in the world. And knowing that the enormous political and social forces in this whirlwind, I cannot touch them -- but I can still believe that I can touch the universe with my prayer, my thoughts, and my behavior." -- Tolli Morthens, paraphrasing Gandhi

Tolli also spoke about Wim Hof breathing techniques and the role of deliberate physical and spiritual practice in maintaining equilibrium. These are not tangential to the AI discussion. They are central. If we are going to navigate a technological revolution without losing ourselves in it, we need practices that keep us grounded in our bodies, in our breath, in the present moment. The eye of the hurricane is not a place you find by accident. It is a place you cultivate through discipline and intention.

Education's Role in the Transition

Dr. Audbjorg brought the conversation back to the institutional level with a clear-eyed assessment of education's role. Universities, she argued, must now prioritize critical thinking above all else. When students can generate a passable essay with a single prompt, the essay is no longer the point. The point is whether the student can evaluate the essay, question its assumptions, identify its blind spots, and articulate what it misses.

"Critical thinking -- this is where it is truly going to come into its own." -- Dr. Audbjorg Bjornsdottir

There is also a democratizing potential that Audbjorg highlighted. AI can serve as a great equalizer, giving people in remote communities, in smaller universities, in underserved populations access to knowledge and tools that were previously available only to the elite. For a university in northern Iceland, this is not abstract. It is an immediate, practical reality. The question is whether educational institutions will adapt quickly enough to harness this potential, or whether they will cling to models designed for a world that no longer exists.

This collaboration between the University of Akureyri's continuing education program and Tolli's Bataakademia is itself a model for what the transition could look like. It is not purely academic and not purely experiential. It is both. It acknowledges that learning to live well in an age of AI requires both the mind and the body, both critical analysis and embodied wisdom.

Be the Change

I walked away from this conversation carrying a tension that I think is productive. On one hand, the scale of the AI transformation is genuinely daunting. The systems are accelerating. The power is concentrating. The ethical questions are multiplying faster than our ability to answer them. On the other hand, the two people sitting across from me offered something that no technology can replicate: genuine human presence, hard-won wisdom, and the courage to sit with uncertainty rather than rushing to false certainty.

Tolli's invocation of Gandhi -- be the change you want to see in the world -- is not a platitude when spoken by a man who runs sweat lodge ceremonies for people healing from trauma. It is a practice. And perhaps that is what this episode ultimately argues: that the most important response to artificial intelligence is not artificial at all. It is deeply, irreducibly human. It is the willingness to do the inner work, to cultivate stillness in the storm, to create art that carries the weight of a lived moment, and to extend compassion to ourselves and others as we stumble through a world that is changing faster than any of us fully understand.

The hurricane is not going to stop. But the eye is always there, waiting for us to find it.

Listen to the full episode to hear the complete conversation. It is not a technology briefing. It is something rarer: an honest attempt to reckon with what it means to be alive at the edge of a new era.