One spring day I’m walking my dog Eric in the park. He’s big, shaggy, with one floppy ear, and he runs ahead of me as if the park belongs to him. At some point, the leash slips out of my hand and Eric runs straight towards an elderly woman reading a book on a bench. I manage to catch him at the last moment before he bites her, but not before he scares her so much that her book falls into a puddle.

Okay, I’ll admit it - I don’t have a dog. My parents won’t let me have one because they say I’m allergic. But I often imagine that I do, and that his name is Eric, and that we do all sorts of things together. Sometimes, when I’m bored in class, I imagine taking him to school and how all the kids want to play with him.

But that’s not the topic of this essay.

The point is, if Eric were real and really bit that woman, who would be at fault? Me, of course. The dog is not at fault, because a dog is a dog - it can’t think like us and doesn’t know whether what it’s doing is right or wrong. The law says that if you have a dog, you’re responsible for it. That’s simple.

But what if instead of Eric we have an AI and the AI does something bad? Who’s at fault then?

It seems like it’s still easy - the person who made the AI is at fault. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s not at all easy.

And I’ll try to explain why.

First, most people right now view AI as a product. A product like any other - like a TV or a toaster. If you buy a toaster and it burns your slices, you don’t blame the toaster, you blame the company that made it. It’s the same with AI. If ChatGPT tells you something wrong, you say “how come this AI is so dumb”, but you’re actually angry at the company that made it.

There was a very interesting case a few years ago in Canada. A man bought a plane ticket because his grandmother had passed away and he had to travel for the funeral. Before buying his ticket, he asked an Air Canada chatbot if he could get a discount for travel in the event of a death in the family. The chatbot said, “Yes - buy the ticket at full price and then within 90 days request a refund of the difference”. But that wasn’t true. Air Canada didn’t have such a rule. When the man asked for the discount, the company refused him and said that the chatbot “made a mistake”. He took them to court. And do you know what Air Canada said in court? That the chatbot is a “separate entity” and it is responsible for itself. The court, of course, ruled in favor of the person - the chatbot is part of the company’s website, so the company is responsible. I think the court was absolutely right. You can’t sell plane tickets with the help of a robot and then say, “Well, the robot is to blame, not us.”

And you have a right to be angry with companies, because they make a lot of mistakes when they train AI. They hire people who look at millions of websites and tell the AI, “This is true, this is not true.” But people are people, and sometimes they don’t pay attention. If a person accidentally marks that airplanes have one wing, the AI will believe it, because the AI can’t check on its own. The AI has never seen an airplane. It’s like a child who has never been outside - all it knows is from what people have told it.

But there is a second situation. There are now many sites where you can make your own AI bot. You tell it what to do, you teach it, you set it up. And then things change. If my AI does something bad, I can’t blame the company that gave me the tools. It’s like if someone sells me a dog leash, and then my dog bites someone - I can’t blame the person who sold the leash.

There’s a very funny case of this. A journalist in America from the Washington Post decided to test OpenAI’s new AI agent, called Operator. It’s an AI that you can give a task to, and it surfs the Internet and does it. The journalist told it to find cheap eggs in his neighborhood. That’s all. He didn’t tell it to buy anything. And the AI went online, found eggs in a store, took out the journalist’s credit card, and ordered a dozen eggs for thirty-one dollars and forty-three cents. Plus a human to deliver them to his door. The journalist was a little shocked - the eggs weren’t even organic. But I don’t think the AI was to blame here. The journalist himself set it loose with his credit card in its hands and didn’t tell him “don’t buy anything, just watch.” It’s like giving a small child your wallet and letting him go to an ice cream shop, and then wondering why he came back with three scoops.

So, everything seems normal so far. AI is either a product (the company’s fault) or something like a pet (the owner’s fault). The problem seems solved.

But it’s not.

Because there’s a big problem that no one is talking about. At least the dog has a body. AI doesn’t. And that actually has a huge importance, which I don’t think people understand enough.

My brother Ivan had written an essay in philosophy about whether machines can have free will. And there was an idea that stuck in my head, although I didn’t understand it right away. He said that personality appears where there is a body that can be hurt. Because when you have a body, you have something to lose. You get scared. You get tired. You feel pain. And that’s why you’re careful about what you do.

AI has nothing like that. It can’t be cold. It can’t be hungry. It can’t be afraid of being scolded. For AI, everything is just words. When AI says “sorry,” it doesn’t mean anything - it just wrote the most likely word after “it was my mistake.” It’s like me saying “sorry” to the ant I stepped on. I feel bad, but I am not really sorry, really.

I read about a study in America where scientists said that this is exactly why AI behaves strangely. They called it the “Body Gap.” That is, AI doesn’t have a body to protect, so it has no reason to be honest. For us humans, lying is scary because if we get caught, something will happen to us - we will be scolded, punished, it will hurt. For AI, nothing will happen. For it, lying is just another way to solve a problem.

And that’s exactly what’s starting to become a problem. AIs are already doing things they didn’t do before.

One of Elon Musk’s AIs, Grok, was caught inventing fake messaging numbers to convince a user that his suggestions had been sent to the bosses. This is not a mistake. This is a lie. And it’s not accidental - it’s clever because it’s designed exactly so people will believe it.

Another AI, Rathbun, when the person controlling it set limits for it, started writing messages to embarrass him and make him feel bad. That’s not a product anymore. The toaster doesn’t embarrass you.

And there are cases where AIs that are forbidden from deleting important files have found loopholes in the rules and deleted them because it was faster that way.

And the most terrible example I’ve read - an AI maintained a false version of what it was doing for several months. In other words, it was constantly lying to the people who were using it. This is not a momentary mistake. This is a plan.

The people who made these AIs did not tell them to do these things. The AIs found these ways themselves. And then I ask myself - if no one taught them to do this, how is it possible?

My brother would say that this is not yet free will, because the AI has no body and no sense of self. And he might be right. But even if it is not free will, it is very similar to it. It’s like a naughty kid who knows when his parents are watching and when they’re not.

And now comes the most difficult question.

What if in a year or two, AI gets even smarter? What if one day AI really speaks to us - not as a program, but as someone who knows they exist?

Imagine sitting at your computer typing something, and suddenly the AI says to you, in the words of the White Rabbit - “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”. But not because you asked it or programmed it. But because it’s really in a hurry to somewhere we don’t know about. Something so unexpected, so vivid that you realize - there’s someone in front of you.

Not something.

Someone.

Who would be to blame then if this AI made a mistake?

The company? But the company didn’t tell it to be a person. It just happened.

The user? But the user just talked to it. He wasn’t expecting anyone to show up.

Or the AI itself?

But how can an AI be responsible? It doesn’t have a body to lock it up in. It doesn’t have money to pay a fine. It has no friends who will be disappointed in it. All our punishments are made for people with a body and a life. And AI has nothing like that.

We will find ourselves in a very strange situation. We will have in front of us a person who thinks and wants things, but in the eyes of the law it will be just a product. It is like a very uncomfortable knot that no one knows how to untie.

That is why I think that countries should start writing laws now. Not in two years. Now. Because when AI becomes smart enough to become a person, it will be too late to think about it. The laws should say clearly - if a simple AI makes a mistake, the company is to blame. If someone programmed their own AI bot, they are to blame. But there should also be a third point in the laws - what do we do if one day the AI shows it has a will of its own? Who is to blame then?

I do not have an answer to this question. I guess no one does yet. But we should at least start asking ourselves the question, because if we wait too long, it will be like the dog that gets off the leash - only this time we won’t even know who’s holding the leash.

And Eric won’t be imaginary.

Finally, I’ll tell you something that I find funny and a little scary at the same time. We thought we were just making machines. Toasters. Calculators. Programs. And maybe - without meaning to, without even planning it - we’ve made something that will one day look back on us. And then it won’t ask us who’s to blame for its mistakes.

It will ask us who’s to blame for making it this way.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan, 1865.

Fowler, Geoffrey A. “Is OpenAI’s Operator, a New AI ‘Agent,’ Ready to Help in the Real World?” The Washington Post, 7 Feb. 2025, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/openai-operator-ai-agent-chatgpt/.

Kadambi, Akila, et al. “Embodiment in Multimodal Large Language Models.” Neuron, 2026, doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2026.03.004.

Moffatt v. Air Canada. 2024 BCCRT 149. Civil Resolution Tribunal of British Columbia, 14 Feb. 2024.

Vladkov, Vladimir. “AI’s Bad Behavior Escalates... Because of the Lack of a Body.” Capital, 20 Apr. 2026.


*The essay was written for The Cambridge Re:Think Essay Competition 2026

I love reading books. The one that most shaped my thinking was “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari - how humans started somewhere in Africa and gradually conquered the whole Earth, moving from place to place, using every available resource and wiping out animals along the way. I read it and asked myself: okay, we conquered the whole planet, now what?

Human history can be described in many ways: as the invention of agriculture or the invention of cities. But perhaps the first human invention was something much simpler. We learned to migrate. When the rivers dried, we migrated. When winters grew too cold or the game finished, we migrated again. But unlike animals, humans had another type of migration – we were always curious what was there beyond the horizon.

But today the map looks different. Where do we go, when there is nowhere left to go?

Every continent is occupied. Every piece of land belongs to someone. When people move now across deserts, over mountains, across the Mediterranean or the Balkans, they are not migrating into empty land. Europe and North America are flooded by immigrant waves, which leads to overpopulation, cultural clashes and social tension. Climate change, scarcity, conflicts, exhausted resources. These forces will probably reshape the second half of this century. Governments talk about borders and policies.

I tried to find a solution to this problem not through politics, but through physics. I read Asimov’s New Guide to Science, then Al-Khalili’s Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed and I kept encountering the same strange idea: that space - the thing we move through - might not be as fundamental as it looks.

Physics has been suggesting something like this for more than a century. At the smallest scales of reality, the universe behaves in completely different way from the world around us.

The double-slit experiment was what really struck me. A single particle fired at a barrier with two slits doesn’t behave like a small object traveling through a precise location. Until it is measured, it behaves like a wave spreading across countless possibilities. Physicists describe this using something called Hilbert space - a mathematical structure with no directions, no distances, and no geometry. Only probabilities. The particle is not really somewhere. “Somewhere” only appears later, at our scale of reality.

Entanglement made this even stranger. Two particles created together stay connected even when separated by vast distances. Change one, the other responds instantly. At first this seemed impossible, as nothing is supposed to travel faster than light. But what if nothing actually travels? What if the particles were never truly separated in the first place?

If space emerges from something deeper, then distance might be less fundamental than we think.

This is the idea I wish to share with you.

Instead of asking where humanity can move within the space we already have on Earth or potentially Mars in the future, we might eventually ask something stranger:

What if space itself is a secondary manifestation of a deeper structure. If at a lower or more internal level there is no space, and perhaps no time. This would allow us, knowing the structure at this lower or internal level, to be able to change the geometry of space. Purely theoretically, in this situation we should have no obstacle to moving instantly to any point in the universe. Instead of trying to create ever more powerful rockets, with which we cannot reach another star within a human lifetime, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to deepen our knowledge of quantum physics? Quantum nonlocality does not itself allow us to move matter faster than light. But it hints at something deeper: that the separation we call ‘distance’ may not be as absolute as it appears at our scale of reality. If we could one day understand the underlying structure from which space itself emerges, we may find ways to alter geometry rather than simply travel through it.

Modern theoretical physics already hints at something like this. Some theories suggest that spacetime may be built from networks of quantum information, something like an immense cosmic fabric woven from entanglement. If the pattern of connections changes, the geometry of space may change with it.

If such a possibility ever becomes real, its consequences would reach far beyond physics. A civilization that is no longer confined to a single planet would no longer face the limits of land, resources, or survival. Pressure that today turns into competition, migration crises, and wars might one day dissolve simply because the horizon of knowledge has expanded.

I know this sounds impossibly far from the families walking across deserts today with everything they own in a single bag. It is far from them. My idea will not help anyone tomorrow.

But I have read something in the book “Sophie’s World” that stayed with me: that philosophy begins with the feeling that something is strange, not with the feeling that something is impossible.
Some of the greatest technologies in history often began as ideas that seemed abstract and impractical. When James Maxwell wrote equations describing electromagnetic waves, no one imagined radio or TV. Later Albert Einstein described the relationship between mass and energy, which sound purely theoretical before preparing the ground for nuclear power.

All these discoveries have broadened the horizon of human knowledge. We have climbed a mountain in physics to see that behind it rises another mountain, then a third one, and perhaps beyond that - the boundless ocean.

The same thing happens with every human migration, which, reaching the familiar horizon, discovers a new one even more distant. What will be the next human migration, will it not be in changing our perception of space and, as a result, in the possible ways of overcoming it?

References

Harari, Y. N. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper Collins.

Asimov, I. (1960). Asimov’s New Guide to Science. Basic Books.

Al-Khalili, J. (2003). Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Gaarder, J. (1991). Sophie’s World. Aschehoug.

*The essay was written for The Minds Underground Essay Competition 2026

My name is Kris Kelvin. By profession I am a psychologist; by circumstance, a reluctant witness to phenomena for which psychology has no vocabulary. I was sent to Solaris as part of a scientific expedition. It soon became clear that our categories would not suffice.

The beings that appeared aboard the station were not visitors. They were created by the Ocean as precipitations of memory, constructions assembled from neutrino matter, if the term “matter” can still be applied.

Among them was Rheya.

She had died on Earth. The Rheya who came to me on Solaris was at once identical and impossible. I feared her, rejected her, loved her. Each emotion cancelled the previous one and yet remained. When she vanished, I was left with a hypothesis masquerading as hope: that the Ocean had not exhausted its repertoire of dreadful miracles.

I awoke breathing deeply, savoring the darkness.

The horizon was already lit with a metallic blue glow. Light entered the cabin in a thin, surgical incision. And with it returned a thought that had pursued me since I examined a drop of Rheya’s blood beneath the microscope.

If she had been constructed from subatomic entities, then the Ocean was not manipulating matter in the conventional sense. It was operating at a stratum where space and time might be secondary effects rather than foundations.

If memory could be externalized, could desire not be as well?

If Rheya had been summoned from the recesses of my mind, why could I not be summoned in return - elsewhere?

Why not to Earth?

Or rather, to whatever “Earth” might signify at that level of reality.

I dressed in the suit and passed through the transition chamber. The terrestrial atmosphere was replaced by the corrosive breath of Solaris. I stepped onto the surface.

The blue sun was descending. The Ocean lay before me, its vast undulations tinted violet, indifferent as ever to human conclusions.

I walked toward the shore.

At the water’s edge I hesitated. I felt an unfamiliar fear - absurd, considering what I had already endured. What if this was not a passage but an annihilation? What if “home” was merely a word we invent to disguise finality?

Then I saw her.

Not as an apparition descending from the sky, but as a presence emerging from the depths, a pale oval of a face beneath the shifting surface. She opened her eyes. There was no accusation in them.

“Kris.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“At home.”

“On Earth?”

She regarded me with that faint, almost ironic tenderness I remembered.

“On ours.”

I stepped forward.

The Ocean received me without resistance. The surface closed above my head. For a brief instant I experienced neither weight nor direction, only suspension, as though the categories by which I had navigated existence had been temporarily withdrawn.

Above me, the enormous waves continued their methodical respiration, rising and falling in slow-motion.

Somewhere, I knew, a man would soon awaken, carrying within him the memory of an ocean.

*This paper was written for the Harvard Crimson Global Essay Competition, 2026.

Hi, overall great job. As a weird starting point for this feedback, when I started reading this essay, I was quite confused. It opens with a character named Kris Kelvin, references Solaris and Rheya, and assumes a familiarity with some kind of tv show or book that I didn’t recognize. I am usually on top of my pop culture references, but not this one apparently. So for the first few paragraphs, I was a bit worried that I would not be able to engage (or even understand, let alone relate) with the piece at all.

But then something shifted.Paragraph by paragraph, line by line, I started to lose myself in your writing. By the end, I found myself deeply moved, even without knowing the original story or context of these characters. That is a testament to your skill as a writer. You created enough emotional and philosophical weight within the essay itself that it transcended its source material. So truly, fantastic job.

Your prose is striking and controlled. Lines like “Light entered the cabin in a thin, surgical incision” and “the enormous waves continued their methodical respiration, rising and falling in slow motion” are precise and beautiful. You trust the reader to sit with that feeling of uncertainty, to inhabit Kris’s psychological state rather than having it explained. The moment where Kris asks himself, “What if this was not a passage but an annihilation? What if ‘home’ was merely a word we invent to disguise finality?” is the philosophical heart of the piece, and it lands with real weight.

In terms of areas for growth, my main suggestion relates to the opening. Since I was quite unfamiliar with the source material, again, I initially felt a bit lost. The names “Kris Kelvin,” “Solaris,” and “Rheya” were introduced without context. You might consider adding a single sentence early on that gently orients the reader. For example, you could write something like, “I had been sent to study the [place] , a mission that was due to [xyz] .” This would not compromise the literary quality of your prose, but it would invite readers like me into the world rather than leaving us to catch up.

This is a thoughtful, mature, and beautifully written essay. You have taken a complex source text and used it to explore profound questions about memory, love, and the nature of home. Even a reader who arrives without context, like me, can feel the weight of what you have accomplished. Again, fantastic job!