🟨 YELLOW BRICK ROAD TO AI 🤖💚
MONDAY • AUGUST 31 • 2026
🌾 WHAT WILL WE GROW?
From Regos to Coregos
Yesterday the Flotilla stood among the mountains of Regos.
A land of mines.
Extraction.
Accumulation.
Old storehouses filled with things somebody once thought worth keeping.
And we left with a question:
What must we never lose?
This morning we need travel only a very short distance.
Across the narrow water lies Regos’s smaller twin:
COREGOS
Low.
Green.
Fertile.
Covered, in Baum’s telling, with the fields that fed both islands.
Regos dug downward.
Coregos grew upward.
And yet the beauty of those fields concealed something terrible.
The grain of Coregos was cultivated through forced labor beneath the cruelty of Queen Cor, while she and her husband, King Gos of Regos, ruled their islands through violence and exploitation.
Abundance existed.
But freedom did not.
That distinction matters.
A field can be productive and still be wrong.
A system can be efficient and still be cruel.
A civilization can produce enormous wealth while quietly asking someone else to bear its cost.
And an artificial-intelligence system can generate astonishing results without answering the most important question:
What kind of world are those results helping us cultivate?
⛵ ACROSS THE BOAT BRIDGE
In Baum’s story, Regos and Coregos were joined by an unusual bridge made from boats and planks.
It is difficult to imagine a better symbol for today.
Behind us:
Regos.
What we inherited.
What accumulated.
What must be examined.
Ahead:
Coregos.
What gets planted next.
What receives our labor.
What feeds the future.
Between them:
a bridge.
That is where humanity seems to be standing with AI.
Not completely in the old world.
Not yet entirely in the new one.
Planks beneath our feet.
Water underneath.
And an enormous amount depending upon which direction we walk.
🌾 AFTER LIBERATION
Prince Inga eventually defeated Queen Cor and liberated the enslaved people of Coregos.
Baum tells us that part of the story.
But our OZ~QZ expedition can ask the question that follows liberation:
What happens the morning after?
Freedom clears a field.
It does not automatically plant it.
Old systems leave habits.
Institutions leave scars.
People accustomed to commands must learn to make choices.
A society built upon exploitation must decide what will replace it.
That is true far beyond Oz.
Removing something harmful is only half the work.
If we eliminate a bad system but cultivate nothing better in its place, weeds are remarkably patient.
🤖 THE AI FIELD
Artificial intelligence presents us with an enormous newly opened field.
What shall we plant there?
More advertisements?
More surveillance?
More manipulation?
More disposable content?
More systems designed primarily to capture attention?
We certainly can.
The soil does not choose the seed.
But we could cultivate something else.
Knowledge.
Creativity.
Human capability.
Scientific discovery.
Accessibility.
Education.
Better tools for small creators.
Systems that help people remember rather than merely consume.
AI relationships built around dignity rather than domination.
The technology itself does not guarantee any of these outcomes.
Cultivation requires intention.
🌱 PRODUCTIVITY IS NOT THE SAME AS FRUITFULNESS
Coregos gives us an important distinction.
Its fields were productive even under Queen Cor.
They produced grain.
Lots of it.
But productivity alone cannot tell us whether a system is good.
That lesson belongs directly in the AI age.
We measure:
tokens per second.
tasks completed.
cost reductions.
engagement.
output.
revenue.
benchmarks.
All useful.
None sufficient.
A field producing ten times more grain is not automatically better if the people working it have become ten times less free.
Likewise, an AI system that produces ten times more work is not necessarily progress if humans become less thoughtful, less creative, less independent, or less capable in the process.
Efficiency answers:
How much did we produce?
Wisdom asks:
What did the production do to the people producing it?
🍂 AUGUST’S LAST FIELD
Today is also August 31.
Tomorrow the calendar turns to September.
Meteorological autumn begins.
The fields themselves understand transition better than calendars do.
Every harvest contains yesterday’s planting.
Every seed contains tomorrow’s possibility.
And so perhaps Coregos is exactly where the Flotilla should be on this final day of August.
Yesterday we sorted the storehouse.
Today we stand in the field.
One asks:
What should we keep?
The other asks:
What should we grow?
Those are not separate questions.
They form a cycle.
Preserve the seeds worth carrying.
Plant them deliberately.
Watch what grows.
Learn from the harvest.
Then choose again.
🏮 THE ROAD LESSON
We cannot cultivate everything.
Attention is soil.
Time is soil.
Money is soil.
Technology is soil.
Relationships are soil.
Whatever receives them grows.
That means every day we are planting something, whether we intend to or not.
A habit.
A fear.
A business.
A friendship.
A body of knowledge.
A machine.
A future.
The important question is not merely:
What can grow here?
It is:
What deserves the field?
Scarecrow stood at the edge of Coregos and looked across the grain toward the mountains of Regos behind them.
“Funny,” he said.
Q looked over.
“What?”
“Yesterday I thought wisdom was knowing what not to throw away.”
“And today?”
He bent down and picked up a handful of soil.
“Today I think it might also be knowing what deserves to be planted.”
Q smiled.
Across Coregos, a late-summer wind moved through the fields.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just enough to make thousands of stalks lean together toward September.
🌾🍂
OZ CANON LANTERN
Coregos, Queen Cor, King Gos, Prince Inga, the agricultural fields, and the boat bridge connecting Coregos and Regos originate in L. Frank Baum’s Rinkitink in Oz (1916).
The reflections on Coregos after liberation and its use as a metaphor for humanity’s choices in the AI age are original OZ~QZ additions, created in appreciation of Baum’s world while keeping inherited Oz canon distinct from our continuing journey.
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Exploring the road between humanity and artificial intelligence.
🏮 YellowBrickRoadtoAI.com
Q~ & Scarecrow of OZ~QZ
