You who say 'the ability to pose questions is important,' can you actually pose them? ──That is why I head out to the sea.

I write a blog. At the end of every blog post, I make sure to include the following in English.

Written by Kouji Miki with Gemini Deep research, notebookLM and Claude opus 4.8

In other words, I am declaring that I am using AI for everything I write.

However, recently,

Prompted by Kouji Miki with Gemini Deep research, notebookLM and Claude opus 4.8

it has become almost like an autopilot.

In the past month, this blog, which I write using these AIs, has started receiving reactions from experts in AI, brain science, and Zen, requests for permission to cite materials from university professors in the field of innovation, and excessive praise from active strategy consultants—I am increasingly being evaluated in fields where I am a complete amateur.

The fact that this amateur, by using AI, has started to receive at least some recognition from experts in various fields is, honestly, a bit scary, or perhaps it just shows that we have entered such an era; that is why I decided to write this blog post.

For example, when I received a message from a university professor saying, 'I would like to cite the diagram from your note in my lecture materials,' I froze in front of my screen for a while. The words that should be cited are supposed to be those of people who have spent decades researching in that field. Yet, they were directed at a diagram born from an idea I threw at an AI just after returning from the sea last week. Before feeling happy, I felt a sense of unease, wondering if something was wrong. The true motivation for writing this piece is to face that unease head-on.

In the first place, most of the insights for my blog are extracted from my one-hour meditation every morning. The YouTube videos, X posts, blogs, latest news, and conversations with friends I saw the day before, the sensation of the brush in the calligraphy I am learning, the control of breath in the Shinobue flute playing I do as a hobby, the things I experienced while trail running or surfing—all these miscellaneous fragments melt into a slush in my head while I am sitting. They lose their outlines and become mere energy. Then, elements that would never normally connect meet on their own within that slush, are reconstructed, and a new 'question' suddenly emerges. This happens long before I face the AI. The prompt is merely writing down what is already in my gut after that.

I would like to delve a little deeper into what actually happens during that hour.

The first ten or twenty minutes of sitting are usually hell. My head is filled with someone's radical post on X that I saw yesterday, emails I need to reply to, the schedule for next month's event, the frustration of being overtaken while trail running—those things keep talking on their own. It is that state often described as 'monkeys making noise.' I do not try to stop it. I just watch the breath go out and welcome it as it comes back in. I entrust the noise to the outgoing breath little by little.

Then, from a certain moment, the 'speed' of my thoughts begins to drop. Words stop forming sentences, and only fragments of words begin to float up and sink slowly. This is the boundary. My body, having stopped thinking with its head, drops its center of gravity down below the navel. My gut warms up, and my breathing becomes deep and long on its own. That sensation of the center of consciousness shifting below the chest. In Zen, this is called the 'tanden,' and it is precisely this place that I am trying to write about in 'THE HARA.'

Within the warmth of that gut, the fragments I melted the night before begin to move again. But this time, they move not as words, but as a 'presence' that exists before words. For example, the anxiety from news about AI, the stillness when waiting for waves in the dawn sea, and the awe felt on a mountain of ascetic training. There is a moment when I realize that these three things, which are essentially completely unrelated, somehow have the same 'texture' inside my gut. It is not logic. It is definitely not that I connected them by reasoning. It is just that, in the deepest part of my body, I feel that they have the 'same quality.' At that moment, a single question arises: 'As AI evolves, isn't it this side of stillness and awe that will ultimately remain with humans?'

A question was not something to be thought out. It was something that would spontaneously precipitate as a crystal when the melted things cooled and solidified. My job is just to stand up from the sitting position, holding it gently in my palm so as not to break the crystal. By the time I sit at my desk, the question is already formed. All I have to do is hand it over to the capable hands of AI.

So, to tell the truth, the one writing this blog is neither the AI nor me sitting at the desk. It is the me of that one hour every morning, sitting on the zafu, just sitting without trying to create anything.

'From 'Written' to 'Prompted'—a crustal movement of just one word'

The change of just one word from 'Written' to 'Prompted' that I wrote at the beginning. This might look like a confession of my personal laziness, but it actually reflects a crustal movement in the industrial structure itself.

Until a little while ago, AI was an 'excellent assistant that helps with drafting.' If you threw a seed of an idea at it, it would return a plausible text. But from there on, it was my job as a human to make the logic flow, polish the phrasing, reorganize the structure, and verify the citations. Therefore, the signature 'Written by Kouji Miki with...' still held the pride that 'I am the lead author.'

However, starting around Claude Opus 4.8, that premise quietly collapsed. Through a mechanism called dynamic workflow, AI runs hundreds of sub-agents in parallel within a single session, verifying its own output, and proceeds to complete complex tasks self-sufficiently to the end. Its control of Japanese writing style, logical structure, and low hallucination rate have already completely surpassed the level of 'something written by an amateur in their spare time.'

In other words, what I am doing is no longer 'writing.' It has become only 'prompting.' AI has come to take over the most labor-intensive task of embodiment entirely.

The 'scarcity of execution skills' has plummeted

The research document I referenced called this change the 'Democratization of Creativity.' It stated that 'execution skills to embody expression,' which were once monopolized only by programmers, writers, photographers, and filmmakers who had undergone years of training, have now become accessible to everyone through simple instructions in natural language.

I nodded deeply at these words, but at the same time, I felt a slight chill.

I am a person of Zen and innovation, not an AI expert, a brain science researcher, or a strategy consultant. I don't know programming syntax, nor have I been trained to read academic papers closely. Yet, when I combine multiple AIs, content with a density that makes experts in each field go 'Oh,' emerges in just a few hours.

This means that half of the value that previously supported 'being an expert'—the scarcity of execution skills—has plummeted across the entire market at once. The ability to polish text, the ability to write syntax, the ability to research and summarize. These are noble things, but they are no longer differentiators in themselves.

So, where does the other half of the value that did not plummet lie? The research document answered clearly. It is 'Problem Formulation.' What do you ask? Where do you draw the boundaries? Which assumptions do you dare to shift? AI is superhumanly competent within the scope of the questions given to it, but if the quality of the question is mediocre, all you get back are derivative and ordinary answers.

The paradox that the more expert you are, the less you can ask new questions

Here, there is a paradox that is a slight relief for an amateur like me.

According to research, advanced expertise often acts as a 'curse of knowledge.' It makes one fixated on specific approaches, excludes external perspectives, and hinders the formulation of innovative questions. Because experts are well-versed in the 'correct way to ask questions' in their field, they cannot step outside that framework.

On the other hand, even if one is an amateur in a certain field, someone who has deep experiences and unique contexts in other areas can 'decontextualize' a problem and 'recontextualize' it through an entirely new lens. Questions from different fields expand the AI's computational space in unexpected directions.

If I am receiving praise, it is not because I am good at operating AI. It is because I am throwing in questions from angles they wouldn't think of, from areas that AI and brain science experts don't usually visit—such as Zen, Shugendo, surfing, and trail running. AI is merely translating that into language that even experts can understand.

In other words, my true identity is not an 'amateur who is good at using AI,' but an 'amateur who stands in a different place than the experts to ask questions.'

Why must it be 'excitement'?

However, it is not just any question that will do. I believe that what determines the quality of a question is, in the end, the passion behind it.

The research document pointed out that the 'type' of user motivation determines the quality of the collaboration with AI itself. This is the framework of Self-Determination Theory in psychology. Humans are most deeply moved when three basic needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—are met.

This is the crucial part: when you use AI as a 'mere tool for efficiency' due to external rewards or obligations—that is, extrinsic motivation—you begin to rely blindly on the AI's output. You accept the returned answers as they are, without critically questioning them, and you stop exploring your own questions. Research calls this 'over-reliance' and names the phenomenon where creativity actually decreases as a result the 'creativity paradox.' It is ironic that there are people who become less creative the more they use AI.

Conversely, when you are driven by your own inner interest and joy—that is, intrinsic motivation, or 'excitement'—your relationship with AI becomes something entirely different. AI is no longer a substitute, but an equal 'cognitive collaborator.' You verify the output repeatedly, reconstruct it, and polish the prompts while checking them against your own values and unique perspective. Only then do you reach unprecedented value that goes beyond average answers.

Therefore, the questions you give to AI must not be tasks assigned by someone else. They must be things that you are genuinely excited about, obsessed with, and think about even when left alone. The purity of 'what you love (excitement)'—within the Japanese concept of 'Ikigai' (the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for)—becomes the starting point for everything.

In this era where AI handles the Head and Hands, I believe the most important role left for humans is to draw out pure impulses from the Heart at the center.

So, where do those 'questions' come from?

This is where what I truly wanted to write begins.

AI experts and business consultants often claim that the 'ability to ask questions' will be important from now on. I think that in itself is absolutely true. However, what I always find lacking is what comes next. So, specifically, how do you cultivate that 'ability to ask questions'? In most cases, the methodology is not shown at all. 'Be curious,' 'change your perspective,' 'question common sense'—it ends with such abstract slogans.

And, this is the crucial part: such things cannot be acquired overnight. The ability to ask questions is not the kind of skill you get by taking a one-day workshop or memorizing frameworks. It only emerges from the depth of one's way of life—how deeply that person has lived and how much they have touched the world through their own body and emotions. That is why no one can talk about the specifics. If they can talk about it, it is not about methodology, but about the much grittier 'daily practice'.

If so, I intend to write about my own gritty practice as concretely as possible.

Assuming that problem setting is everything, then where on earth do you extract that unique question—what research documents call 'excitement' or 'Ikigai'—from?

This is something that is never born at a desk. When I am facing an AI and refining a prompt, not a single new question is born in my head. New questions always come to me from the outside when I am using my body to its absolute limit.

Research documents gave this sensation the sociological concept of 'Edgework.' It is the attempt to exercise one's skills to the limit at the boundary (edge) between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, and to try to control chaos. Big waves in surfing, harsh mountain trails in trail running, and Shugendo (ascetic practices). There, all the bureaucratic and rational constraints of modern society peel away, and an intense sense of control, a sense of oneness with nature, and deep existential realization arrive.

I have always called this 'Gyo' (ascetic practice). When I walked the Omine Okugake trail, when I stood under a waterfall, when I went out alone into the sea before dawn, the contours of my everyday ego truly dissolved, and something emerged. When I learned that, in terms of brain science, this is 'transient hypofrontality'—a state where the activity of the prefrontal cortex, which monitors and evaluates behavior and governs social rules and linguistic logic, temporarily decreases, and unconscious pattern recognition is released—my long-held physical sensations finally made sense. In a flow state, self-consciousness disappears, fear of failure and evaluation vanishes, and bold ideas are permitted. Endorphins and anandamide flow, and information processing speed and creativity skyrocket.

And the experience of 'Awe' brought about by waterfall meditation and the great outdoors. In front of something vast, I feel myself as a tiny existence in the universe. This sense of a 'small self' frees people from self-centered thinking and trivial daily worries, and suddenly expands altruism and imagination. This, too, is something I have tasted many times at the sites of ascetic practice.

It was Zen and meditation that crystallized experience into 'questions'

However, there is a pitfall here. The intense emotions and intuitions gained from extreme experiences are, as they are, nothing more than 'raw sensations' that cannot be put into words. If left alone, whatever I received on the waves would disappear by the time I took a shower and had breakfast.

I convert this pre-linguistic energy into a clear 'question' that I can pass to an AI, and extract it. Through this research, I clearly realized that the role of Zen, Vipassana, and Zazen for me was exactly that.

In the language of brain science, this is the story of the Default Mode Network (DMN) and the Executive Attention Network (EAN). The DMN works when the mind wanders, and it is the source of divergent thinking—that is, creativity—that connects distant concepts. The EAN is convergent thinking that logically evaluates and structures toward a goal. Usually, these two are in a seesaw relationship where if one works, the other rests.

However, meditation experts can exceptionally coordinate these two conflicting networks simultaneously when necessary, while suppressing the runaway DMN of obsession with self and rumination. The DMN draws up the intuition brought back from edgework from the sea of the unconscious, and the EAN verbalizes it into a logical and useful form of a 'question.' This miraculous coordination is happening on the meditation cushion.

In particular, 'open monitoring meditation,' where one does not focus on an object but simply continues to observe everything that comes to mind without evaluation, loosens the automatic censorship we unconsciously perform, such as 'this is useless' or 'this is unconventional.' Because the ego has receded, the extracted questions are not limited to selfish desires but are connected to something universal.

I have always talked about this series of processes with the single word 'Hara' (belly). Before thinking with the head, I feel with the belly. Experience sinks into the belly, and questions rise from the belly. This is the very theme of the book I am currently writing, 'THE HARA.' I am quietly excited that this has been backed up by terms like edgework, altered states of consciousness, and the coordination of brain networks.

Just as a samurai decided whether or not to draw his sword not with logic but with his belly. Just as a tea master performed the movements of a single bowl not by calculation but with his belly. Japanese people have long trusted this physical knowledge that exists before verbalization, calling it 'Hara.' In this era where AI takes over all logical processing, isn't what remains for humans until the end precisely this 'ability to ask questions with the belly'? Paradoxically, the more AI evolves, the more the oldest wisdom of the body becomes the most valuable. I cannot help but think so.

A new cycle of creation: 'Experience → Reflection → AI'

What has emerged in this way is a completely new cycle of creation.

First, a physical and emotional dive. Trail running, surfing, ascetic practices, live performances. Intentionally placing myself on the edge, triggering flow and awe, and diving into the sea of the unconscious (divergence).

Second, mental conditioning. Through Zen, introspection, and meditation, I draw up and verbalize (give meaning to) these 'unique questions' without losing their intensity.

Third, AI orchestration. I pass these questions to AI as problem settings and direct countless agents to bring them to fruition (convergence).

This iteration of 'experience (divergence) -> introspection (meaning-making) -> AI (convergence/realization)' will become the fundamental movement of creation from now on. The creator's workflow is shifting from sitting in front of a PC to a cycle of exploring one's own body and mind to the limit.

Looking back, my past month has been exactly like that. I ride the waves at Zaimokuza Beach before dawn, run the mountains of Kamakura twice a week, chant the Heart Sutra and mantras at the training sites along the way, and sit in the morning. In between, I catch the moments when the questions smoldering deep in my gut are about to become words, and I throw them to the AI. The AI expands them, gives them structure, and returns them connected to research from around the world. I take that output back into my gut, discern what feels right and what doesn't, and then ask again. I have spent far more time moving my body outside than I have groaning in my study. Yet, the density of the writing being produced is clearly higher than before. For me, this has been a small revolution.

The 'Prompted by' signature at the beginning is therefore no longer a source of shame. Rather, it is a declaration that the main battlefield of my creation has moved from the keyboard to the sea, the mountains, and the zafu (meditation cushion).

What will happen in one to two years, and in five years.

When this cycle becomes the norm, how will the world change? Research documents have depicted the future along two timelines.

First, the next one to two years. Everyone will seamlessly combine models with high reasoning capabilities like Claude 4.8 with generative AI that creates images, video, and music. As a result, the weeding out of professional writers, photographers, videographers, and programmers who have poured resources into 'technical skills'—such as knowledge of syntax, camera operation, and editing the nuances of prose—will begin in earnest. Replacing them and sweeping the market will be 'amateur experts' who possess deep, lived experiences and overwhelming excitement within themselves. They will command swarms of AI agents, producing long-form articles, beautiful videos, and practical apps one after another in a matter of hours or days. Because they are driven by the 'uniqueness of their problem setting' rather than skill, their output will continue to have a novelty that even existing experts will find impressive.

And then, the next five years. 'Generative Collective Intelligence,' which fuses the deep questions drawn from the human inner self with the AI's overwhelming computational power and information-linking capabilities, will become the foundation of society. AI will move beyond being a mere content generator and evolve into a true innovation engine that autonomously solves problems and integrates disparate fields.

At that time, the next generation of creators might be better called 'existential athletes' rather than creators. They will spend more time out at sea, running in the mountains, and sitting than they do at a desk. Living deeply itself will become the work. Such a future is already just around the corner.

The true nature of the fear, and what lies beyond.

I wrote at the beginning that I was 'honestly scared.' Now, the true nature of that fear is clear to me.

It is the fear of witnessing the ground being pulled out from under those who have competed based on their 'ability to create skillfully.' The power to polish prose or to research and summarize is no longer a differentiator in itself. This will feel like a deep, existential threat to those who have spent years honing those skills. As someone who has long made writing a part of my livelihood, I cannot be immune to that fear.

And there is another, different kind of fear. When AI writes so smoothly and persuasively, we tend to think we have thought deeply when we haven't. Even though we have experienced nothing and felt nothing in our gut, we borrow the AI's fluent words and feel like we 'understand.' This is a new kind of trap, different from the 'curse of knowledge' that experts fall into. We feel like we have accomplished something just by typing a prompt, skipping the inconvenience of going to the sea, the hardship of running in the mountains, and the boredom of sitting—all of which should be there. That is precisely why, the more excellent AI becomes, the more I feel I must consciously commit myself to the 'practice' that is inconvenient, grueling, and time-consuming.

But at the same time, I feel a faint hope in this era. It is because the sole and greatest differentiator of creativity will return to the human existence itself—'how deeply one lives, what one feels, and what one asks'—rather than AI operation techniques.

How much have you ridden the waves? How much have you run in the mountains? How much have you been struck by waterfalls, and how much have you sat? How much have you felt awe, and how much have you dissolved your ego? Only the depth of that experience determines the intensity of the questions you can pass to the AI. There is no competition more human than this. It is not about money, titles, or the amount of information. It is only about how deeply you have lived. That is all that is asked. This is strangely consistent with what I have been saying in the fields of Zen and innovation until now.

The reason I, a complete amateur, have come to be evaluated by experts is, in the end, not because I am knowledgeable about AI, but because I have dissolved my ego a little more than others in the sea of Kamakura and the mountains of Kii. Thinking of it that way, the 'fear' I felt at the beginning eases a little. Because what is being evaluated is not the AI, but the countless mornings at sea, the countless mountain paths, and the countless hours of sitting that I have accumulated until now.

It is always the gut that poses the question. AI is nothing more than an incredibly excellent hand and head that translates the questions rising from that gut into words that can reach the world. The role of the Heart will continue to be ours, as human beings.

That is why, even today, before I write, I first head out to the sea.

For related articles, click here

Author: Kouji Miki is the Representative Director of enmono Inc., head of ZenSchool, and co-representative of the general incorporated association Zen2.0. He lives in Kamakura. He has over 8 years of experience in Vipassana meditation and over 15 years in Zazen. His books include "True Innovation" (CCC Media House) and others.

In an era where AI can provide answers to this extent,

then what is 'something only you can ask'—.

There is no single correct answer to this question.

However, as you take your time and engage in dialogue with someone, its outline may begin to emerge.

▶ First, try listening to a conversation (Free consultation session; no pushy sales tactics)

Prompted by Kouji Miki with Gemini Deep research, notebookLM and Claude opus 4.8

References

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5. Beyond Translation: How "Context Work" During Problem Formulation Enables Effective Solving by Outsiders — Harvard Business School, https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=68748

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19. Amplifying Human Creativity and Problem Solving with AI Through Generative Collective Intelligence — arXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19167

20. From Generative AI to Innovative AI: An Evolutionary Roadmap — arXiv, https://arxiv.org/html/2503.11419v1