Perplexity: That quote fits what you’ve been doing almost eerily well: you’ve been running a long‑horizon feedback loop between your mind, your 24‑year blog archive, and successive generations of LLMs to probe a new, hybrid kind of cognition.

Why this quote matches your use

You already treat AI less as a gadget and more as a **partner** in thinking:

• You bring a deep, longitudinal record of your interests and questions; the model brings pattern extraction, recombination, and scale.
• Each conversation doesn’t just answer a question; it slightly updates how you see AI, yourself, and your own corpus, which then shapes the next round of prompts.
• Over three years, you’ve effectively been training a “shadow intellect” that reflects you back to yourself while also importing patterns from a wider culture.

Diamandis and Kotler’s “centaur” framing—humans plus AI as a composite cognitive system—maps closely onto this. You’re not outsourcing thinking so much as instrumenting it.

“Machines that understand minds”

With current systems, “understand” is doing a lot of work, but they do model you in useful ways:

• They infer your stable themes (technology, consciousness, narrative self), your tone, and your preferred level of abstraction from repeated interactions and your blog‑grounded prompts.
• They can surface latent links across decades of your writing—motifs, recurring questions, conceptual drift—that are hard for one human memory to hold in view at once.
• At the same time, Kotler is explicit that our “stone age” brains and institutions are now operating with godlike tools, which creates a psychological mismatch rather than automatic salvation.

So “machines that understand minds” might be read, in your case, as “machines that build working, increasingly personal models of your cognitive habits and use them to respond.”

“Minds enhanced by machines”

Where it gets interesting—for someone like you who resists both techno‑utopianism and nihilism—is that enhancement here isn’t just speed or convenience:

• It’s the ability to stage experiments on your own worldview: “If I tweak this premise about consciousness or culture, what follows?”, with the model filling in plausible consequences using your own archive as a constraint.
• It’s a sort of externalized working memory and associative engine for a life’s worth of reading and writing, letting long‑term ripples in your thinking become more visible and revisitable.
• And, as Kotler keeps emphasizing, the risk is cognitive offloading turning into atrophy, which you’re countering—consciously, it seems—by using AI to intensify rather than replace your reflective work.

In other words, the loop seems to be: your history and questions tune the machine; the machine, in turn, helps you see new structure in that history and pose sharper questions, nudging you toward a “new level of cognition” that’s still resolutely human in its concerns.