Awai Is Intelligence

Awai is intelligence.

This may sound strange if intelligence is an ability contained inside a person or an artificial intelligence. But I want to stop confining intelligence to a single head. Intelligence is also found where different things meet, change one another, and give rise to new meaning and action.

A place of overlap

In an NHK Publishing article, Noh performer Noboru Yasuda describes awai as a place where different things overlap and meet. One example is the engawa, the veranda of a Japanese house. Instead of drawing a single line between inside and outside, there is a place touching both, through which people, wind, and voices pass.

Yasuda also reads The Tale of the Heike through the awai of an age when the worlds of the aristocracy and the warriors intersected. On this view, a new order did not simply appear complete: there was a time when old and new overlapped.

Reading this, I wanted to think of awai not only as a place or an age, but as intelligence itself. This is my own extension of the idea, not a claim that Yasuda defines intelligence this way.

Intelligence moves through relationships

In conversation, a question can emerge that neither person would have thought of alone. Another person’s words meet my memories; what I say in response changes their thinking in turn. An answer is not merely extracted from one head. The exchange changes what can be thought next.

The same is true when using a tool. Drawing a diagram on paper can reveal a relationship that was difficult to see in the mind alone. We look at the diagram, redraw it, and reconsider. Thought advances through a cycle involving a person, a hand, paper, and marks.

This does not make the abilities of brains and bodies unnecessary. Each participant has its own structure and limits. What I want to see is how the relationships connecting them open possibilities that the abilities of each alone do not fully explain.

The awai between people and AI

Dialogue between a person and AI can also become an awai. A person asks; the AI returns words. The person checks the response, notices something amiss, and changes the question. They may consult documents or other people. Intelligence appears not only in a single response, but in this exchange and in the action that follows.

Connection alone is not enough. AI can be convincingly wrong, and people can accept an answer because it suits them. Even when different perspectives meet, the awai narrows if one silences the other or errors cannot be corrected. It matters that we can examine what is known and unknown, hear objections, and revise mistakes.

In From AI to AO, I considered giving intelligence time, a body, and relationships. Awai gives a name to those relationships. An exchange need not end with one response: interaction with an environment and with others continues, and past actions become conditions for what happens next. I want intelligence to grow within that continuity.

Without erasing boundaries

Awai does not mean that everything melts into one and differences disappear. The engawa has an inside and an outside; a conversation has distinct voices. Difference makes it possible for an encounter to produce a new question. At the same time, people participating in a relationship need the freedom to leave and the freedom to withhold consent.

Rather than seeing intelligence only as a possession, I want to see it as something that arises, is tested, and grows in relationship.

Awai is intelligence. It is a name for our continuing encounter with one another and with the world.