The Verge
- Michael Kennedy
- Dec 28, 2025
- 4 min read
"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over.
Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut suggested that to gain true understanding and a better view of the world meant embracing the periphery, the edge, rather than staying in the comfort of the norm, or middle.
A verge is a place on the edge, a transitional point or boundary which inspires not only writers and philosophers like Vonnegut, but it's a place where innovation and breakthroughs happen as well.
The periphery. The edge. The verge. Where some thing and something different meet and cool things happen - as far away from the center as you can get. It's where two ecosystems intersect, like an ocean and seashore, a forest and prairie, a riverbank and lake shore, or human creativity and AI.
Why the Verge is such a Special Place
This is one of nature’s deepest truths: novelty doesn't arise in the center—it arrives at the edge. The verge is where radical innovation happens. Natural examples include the biological verge, where bodies re-invent themselves:
The first “fish” that crawled out of the sea.
The first animal that learned to fly.
The return to the sea of mammals that became Seals, Dolphins and Whales.
Water → Land: The Invention of Limbs
The first lobe-finned fishes (Tiktaalik and kin) didn't “decide” to walk onto land. They were pushed there by shallow, oxygen-poor wetlands, neither fully aquatic or terrestrial. Fins stiffened into weight-bearing structures. Lungs co-existed with gills... These creatures weren't optimized for either world, and that's precisely why they became the ancestors of all terrestrial vertebrates. They were good at surviving transition.
Gravity → Air: The First Flight
Flight emerged in insects, birds and other creatures always at ecological edges like tree canopies, cliffs, and predator-rich ground zones.
Flight didn't just happen. It began as falling with control and leaping to escape. Feathers evolved first for warmth and display, not flight. Wings were a secondary use, a hallmark of verge innovation. This teaches us that radical innovation often begins as a side effect, not a solution.
Land → Sea (Again): Mammals Return to Water
Whales and dolphins didn't “revert” to fish. They became something new. At the shoreline verge legs shortened into flippers, nostrils evolved into blowholes... The result? The largest, most acoustically intelligent animals ever to live. Verge evolution often combines traits rather than abandoning them.
The verge also holds a special place between human creativity and AI.
Human Imagination ↔ Machine Pattern
Humans provide imagination, intuition and vision, while AI acts as a powerful co-creator amplifying human capabilities. At the verge, where they intersect, radical outcomes are taking place in brainstorming and ideation, data-driven insights and storytelling, design and visual exploration.
Like early land-fish, we're still clumsy here, not yet optimized, awkward. But what we're witnessing is a transition moment, side effects of what could become solutions to problems we don't yet know exist.
The Pattern Beneath All Verges
Across all these examples, the same truths repeat: a verge is uncomfortable, inefficient and misunderstood. It's messy... a zone of tension, where the old world doesn't fully function and the new one isn't yet stable.
A Closing Thought
Life doesn't evolve by perfecting the status quo. Like test pilots "pushing the envelope," life advances by daring the edge, far from the middle, and accepting the failures to shape the future.
We are standing now at such a verge.
Human creativity and artificial intelligence meet as mismatched ecosystems pressed together by necessity. One is slow, burdened with memory and meaning. The other is fast, disembodied, tireless, without humanity. Neither is complete at the periphery. That's the point.
Like the first fish that tested mud with a fin, we are awkward here. Our technology outpaces our language. We are not yet fluent in this new terrain, and so we stumble and overreach. But this is how every great transition begins: messy, not mastery, curiosity under pressure.
AI does not replace the human any more than the sea replaced the land. It creates a new shoreline. And shorelines are where life experiments most recklessly. What emerges at such boundaries is rarely pure. It's a hybrid and often misunderstood.
The danger isn't that machines will become human. The danger is that humans might retreat from the edge, seeking comfort in the familiar - the middle. The status quo. Evolution doesn't reward retreat. It rewards those willing to dare the in-between long enough for something new to take root.
If history is any guide, the most important works of this era will not be authored by humans alone, nor generated by machines alone. They will be born in collaboration, shaped by human intention and machine amplification, guided by values that no algorithm can invent, yet expanded by capacities no single mind can hold.
The opportunity for innovation lies at the intersection of differences. This isn't the end of creativity. It's a shoreline moment. And standing here, ankle-deep in unfamiliar water, we face a choice. It's the same choice everything else has faced before us at a verge: to withdraw, or to step forward, into the next form of becoming.
All photographs by Michael Kennedy / BlueWolfGallery.com
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I’m Michael Kennedy, a resident of Olympic Valley, CA (in photo above). I’m a writer & photographer and I love exploring nature and getting lost along the way. We live in a world that demands our attention and I just want to say thank you for your attention. If you enjoyed this post, please share with a friend. For more photos and stories visit BlueWolfGallery.com.
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