We ask AI to find meaning in our data — but the authentic story was gone before it ever looked

In What We Lost When Datum Became Data, I traced how a word that once meant "something given" shed its own etymology and became a synonym for "values in a system." Along the way, the who, the why, and the context quietly disappeared. I used the Groningen definition, the Employee-Person example, and the metadata stack to show where those losses happen.

That argument had its own reasons. It has sharper ones now.

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A Word That Carried Its Own Philosophy

In Dutch, the everyday word for data is gegevens. It is not a technical term. Any citizen uses it naturally, without a second thought. And yet it encodes something profound: gegevens are things given — handed over, recorded, established by someone, for someone, with intent.

The English word 'data' has the same Latin root. Datum means 'something given'. But that etymology is effectively dead in English practice. Nobody says "one datum" anymore. Nobody asks "given by whom, for what?" The word has shed its own origin.

What remained is a term that implies objectivity, neutrality, and independence from any observer. Data just exists. It is out there. You collect it, store it, analyse it. The act of creation — the who, the why, the context — has quietly disappeared.

That disappearance has consequences.

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What Ancient Wisdom Teaches Us About Working With AI

The Oldest Observation

Ancient Hebrew texts describe the moment before creation as tohu va-vohu — formless and void. Not empty in a trivial sense, but charged with potential. What is striking is not the nothingness itself, but that it was considered real enough to name, to describe, and to stand in relation to.

The Kabbalistic tradition deepens this with Ayin — the nothingness that precedes all being. The void is not the absence of reality. It is a different kind of reality.

Now consider your own experience of not knowing something. It is not a blank. It has texture. It draws you toward it. You can dwell inside it, sit with it, let it work on you. Unknowing is not the opposite of knowing — it is a generative state, a threshold, a beginning.

This is a profoundly human capacity. And it is precisely what AI cannot do.

Understanding the difference — and learning to use it deliberately — will make you a better user of AI, and a better information modeler.

..you can inhabit it. And when you do, you change what AI can do for you..

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