After waking up in the middle of the night my mind was drifting.

I’m walking down the memory lane, and I’m still thinking about the piece I wrote earlier—Metaverse Take 1—and cannot get off that trailer.

It is so surreal, and I begin to let myself enter the time tunnel. This time I am going back through history.

My mind enters ancient Egyptian times, and suddenly, physical and digital worlds are indistinguishable.

I’m standing before pyramid after pyramid in the Giza Plateau as they scatter around the desert.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is 481 feet tall, which is nearly as tall as a forty-floor building.

It was built for Khufu in the Old Kingdom, around 2,600 BC.

I begin to wonder how they could have moved 2.3 million blocks, each weighing 1.5 tons, to construct this magnificent structure more than 4,600 years ago.  

Pyramid-like monumental structures arose in different civilizations.

At this moment my twenty-first-century mind can’t help but make an outrageous comparison. 

I can only think their purpose is to transmit information and energy, doing some processing collectively.

I even dare to connect them to the AI data centers that we are building, and the pyramids could have been ancient data centers.

Suddenly, this transformation from the ancient world to our modern time starts to make sense.

I begin to investigate what the historians told us about the artifacts they found inside the pyramids.

Could the pyramid be a “machine” used to preserve knowledge and information, waiting for the next civilization to figure out what it was meant for?

It can be something we have been using in our time to transform information into intelligence.

But it would leave physical traces that human civilization may struggle to understand, similar to what is happening to us now.

From the drawings inside the pyramids, we question the whereabouts of the pharaohs.

In the Valley of the Kings, we have found royal tombs, and mummies of Ramesses II and Tutankhamun.

Pharaohs are gone, together with the structure of their society.

Also, their language, religion, technology and methods….

What they have left behind is something remarkably parallel with our civilization.

For the past 500 years we have archaeologists, historians, scientists and researchers trying to decipher the artifacts left behind.

Today it’s still a mystery, and we are unable to understand what are in the massive “data centers” they left in the desert.

We found that in prehistoric Egypt, thousands of years before the pharaohs, there were farming communities who could produce pottery, ritual practices, and social organization.

In Egyptian times, we find drawings with remarkably consistent images; humans with animal heads, gods with distinctive crowns and symbols, winged beings, boats, solar imagery, strange creatures, and geometric motifs.

They were perhaps used to symbolize the religion systems they developed.

It was a civilization that used objects to represent human beings, animals, symbols, and celestial imagery.

Or could they be those graffiti littering on the walls?

We still don’t have the key to decode all these findings, which have largely disappeared together with the civilization that disappeared with it.

The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx are perfect examples that represent the ancient Egyptian times.

It remains a total mystery as to how they were constructed, their symbolism, chronology and historical content.

Although the Rosetta Stone, a broken fragment of a larger inscribed stone slab, inscribed in 196 BC could have left behind some ideas.

Earlier on in our Take 1, we talked about “transformation of technology.”

Now we are talking about “transformation of civilization.”

I begin to ask myself what we can leave something behind that may benefit our future civilization and not like all the mysteries that we are facing.

We want to do the transformation with conscience.

The Egyptians may have looked at the universe and tried to present through their gods, animals, humans, stars, symbols, death and reincarnation.

They left architecture, writing, mathematics, art, religious texts and extraordinary physical monuments.

Our civilization may leave data centers, satellites, semiconductor labs, nuclear facilities, artificial intelligence, and digital archives.

As our technology becomes more powerful, we must also become more grateful.

This danger doesn’t come from the technologies itself but from how human beings choose to use it.

Intelligence placed in the wrong hands, or used without wisdom, restraint and conscience, can damage us.  

The Egyptians built monuments they expected to endure.

We are building intelligence we expect to evolve.

With incomplete knowledge we have passed through the last 5000 years through a chain of transformations.

Each generation inherits something from the previous one.

The last 500 years have been the fastest as we have gone through the First Industrial Revolution and we are now entering into the Fourth Industrial Generation which is AI.

Our data centers are huge, expensive, power-hungry and need a lot of water to cool them.

We need world leaders with humility to protect our humanity and leave behind something that can benefit generations to come.

Perhaps one day, thousands of years from now, another civilization will discover the remains of our enormous data centers and wonder what strange gods we worshipped.

They may discover that we possessed extraordinary intelligence yet still struggle to understand whether we possessed wisdom.

The Egyptians left us pyramids of stone. We are leaving behind pyramids of information.

But the greatest legacy of civilization should not be the monuments we build or the machines we invent. It should be the humanity we preserve.

After all, what good is artificial intelligence if we allow human wisdom to disappear?