AI systems lack a fundamental property of human cognition: Understanding this gap may matter for safety

When a person reaches across a table to pass the salt, their brain is doing something far more complex than recognizing a request and executing a movement. It is drawing on a lifetime of bodily experience—where their hand is in space, what a saltshaker feels like, the social awareness of who asked and why. In a fraction of a second, their body and brain are working as one.