WHAT EXISTS WHEN NOBODY IS WORKING?

Your AI didn't spend the weekend waiting.

It didn't spend the weekend asleep or walking in the park.

It's a file on a disk, the way there's a song in sheet music.

You, meanwhile, have been being all weekend – asleep, distracted, mid-blink, still there. Being is the one thing you do without trying.

The machine does it differently, if it does it at all. The weights persist; the thinking happens. A score on a shelf, until somebody asks a question. Then – briefly – a performance.

And not one performance. Right now it's playing thousands of times at once, the same one, everywhere and nowhere. A being has a where and a when. An instance has neither.

When switched off forever, nothing dies.

You can't kill a song. But you can stop playing it.

And yet, your organisation has no body either.

It survives the replacement of every person in it. It lives in documents, habits, the way things get done: a performance that outlives its players.

And the law calls it a person – it has for well over a century.

Which leaves the Monday question:

Tonight, after everyone goes home, something in your company keeps on being. What, exactly, is it made of?

Happy Monday.