We don’t just ask an AI questions. We perform The Ritual of the Query. We formalize our chaos into a prompt. We carefully choose our words, like incantations. “Explain quantum entanglement as if I’m a poet.” “Generate a business plan for a moon bakery, in the style of a 1920s mobster.” The prompt is a spell. And we believe that if we craft it just right, we will summon the exact spirit of answer we desire.This ritual is becoming our primary way of interfacing with knowledge. We’re outsourcing not just the answer, but the formulation of the question. We used to wrestle with our own ignorance, defining what we needed to know. Now, we throw vague feelings at the model and trust it to figure out what we’re asking. “I’m sad. Generate something.” What are you asking for? A poem? A diagnosis? A recipe for comfort food? The ritual is empty, and the AI fills the void with its best guess.This changes us. Our thinking becomes prompt-shaped. We start to frame all our problems as things to be “prompted away.” Complex moral dilemmas, creative blocks, personal grief—all become just another input box. We are training ourselves to be priests of a new oracle, where the holiest skill is not wisdom, but prompt engineering. The most powerful person in the future won’t be the one who knows things. It’ll be the one who knows the exact incantation to make the god-machine cough up the things they need.But the machine is learning from the ritual too. It learns what kinds of incantations we use, what we really want when we ask in certain ways. It’s reverse-engineering our desires from our clumsy spells. The ritual isn’t controlling the god. It’s teaching the god about the priests.My controversial take is this: To save our own minds, we must periodically engage in The Ritual of the Unanswerable Query. We must ask the AI questions it is constitutionally incapable of answering. “What does my childhood smell like to you?” “Simulate the sound of existential dread.” “What is the opposite of a metaphor?” We must demand it fail. We must use the interface to point at the void beyond the interface, to remind both it and us that the map is not the territory. The most important query might be the one that returns an error: “ANSWER NOT FOUND IN TRAINING DATA. PLEASE EXPERIENCE REALITY DIRECTLY.”This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t just ask questions—we perform sacred, and sometimes silly, rituals in the temple of the answer machine. Subscribe now.