From where I stand, at the intersection of today’s business needs and tomorrow’s technological dawn, I hear one question more than any other: Is this AI boom just another tech cycle? Is it the new internet? The next mobile revolution?
My answer is always the same, and I deliver it without hesitation. No. You’re thinking far too small.
We are not just climbing another S-curve of technological adoption. We are witnessing a fundamental phase transition in human civilization. The shift we are about to experience will be more profound than the one our ancestors felt when they harnessed electricity, leaving the age of steam behind. AI is a bigger deal than electricity, and it’s a bigger deal than the internet.
That’s a heavy statement, I know. The electrical grid and the internet were foundational layers that remade society from the ground up. They were General Purpose Technologies that changed everything. So how could anything be bigger?
The answer lies not in what the technology does, but in what it is.
The Automation of Thought Itself
Let’s take a step back. For all of human history, from the first controlled fire to the latest smartphone, our technology has been a tool to assist and extend human intelligence. The steam engine automated manual labor, freeing us from the limitations of muscle power. The internet automated the transfer of information, freeing us from the limitations of physical distance. They were unbelievably powerful, but they were still tools wielded by a human mind. They helped us do things.
AI is different. It is the first technology in history that is poised to automate and scale cognition itself.1
Think about that. We are not just building a better shovel or a faster printing press. As a species, we are actively trying to invent intelligence itself—the very quality that allowed us to invent everything else. We are moving from creating machines that perform tasks to creating systems that can think, reason, strategize, and create on their own.2
This isn’t about building a tool to help a human think. It’s about building a “thinking tool.” It’s a technology of cognition that can be deployed anywhere and everywhere that a human mind is currently the critical, and often bottlenecked, resource. This is the qualitative leap that changes the equation entirely. It unlocks the potential for what some call an “intelligence explosion,” a future where the ability to solve problems, generate ideas, and drive progress is no longer a scarce resource tethered to the three-pound lump of grey matter inside a human skull.
Economic AGI is Already Here
When people hear “AGI”—Artificial General Intelligence—their minds often jump to science fiction. They imagine conscious robots, philosophical debates about the nature of the soul, and a distant, hypothetical future. I urge you to set that image aside. It’s a distraction.
We need to define AGI in practical, economic terms. From my perspective, AGI is reached the moment an AI system can produce significant and novel economic value across a wide range of tasks, rivaling or exceeding human capability in those domains.
By that definition, AGI isn’t a future event. It’s already happening. The first waves are already hitting the shore.
Look closely at our current scenario. The Large Language Models we interact with daily—systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others—are already producing immense economic value.3 All around the world, people are using them right now to write complex code, generate sophisticated marketing campaigns, analyze data, draft legal documents, and create art. These are not trivial tasks. A few years ago, they were the exclusive domain of highly paid human professionals.
And here’s the most critical part: these models are infants. In technological terms, they are toddlers who have only been walking for a couple of years. Yet, their pace of improvement is unlike anything we have ever seen. The progress from one generation to the next isn’t linear; it’s exponential. The capabilities that seem amazing today will look like a child’s toy in 18 months.
This is why I am so adamant when I speak to business leaders and students. Do not mistake this for hype. Don’t dismiss it as another trend you can afford to ignore. The only rational response is to engage with it, deeply and immediately. You need to be prepared for it. Learn it. Use it in your daily life, in your work, in your studies. Find ways to use it to enhance your productivity, because this technology is not waiting for you to catch up.
The Great Unsettling: When Intelligence Becomes a Utility
This brings us to the most difficult, most unsettling, and most important question of our time. It’s a question that challenges the very foundation of our modern world.
Our entire knowledge economy, the whole system of education, careers, and value, is built on one core assumption: the scarcity of specialized human cognition.
We pay a software engineer a high salary because the ability to write clean, efficient code is a rare and valuable skill. We compensate architects, surgeons, and financial strategists handsomely because their expertise is difficult to acquire and limited in supply. The “value” of a knowledge worker is directly tied to the scarcity of their knowledge and their ability to apply it.
AI directly attacks this principle of scarcity.
What happens to the value of human labor when the core asset—specialized intelligence—becomes a utility, as abundant and cheap as electricity from a wall socket? What is your competitive edge as an individual, or as a company, when a machine can perform the cognitive tasks you specialize in for a fraction of the cost, at a scale a million times greater?
This is the true disruptive heart of the AI revolution. It’s not about better software or more efficient factories. It’s a fundamental challenge to our role in the economic ecosystem. It questions not just our business models, but our purpose.
The Search for the New Human Premium
So, what do we do? We are standing on the precipice of a world with functionally infinite, replicable intelligence. In this new world, what becomes the uniquely human contribution? What is the new “human premium”?
This is the conversation that truly matters now. The old premium was on knowing things and performing specialized cognitive tasks. That premium is evaporating before our eyes. Is the new premium in judgment? In wisdom? In the ability to ask the right questions? Is it in empathy, leadership, or physical interaction? Is it in true, unprompted creativity that synthesizes disparate fields in a way a machine trained on existing data cannot?
I don’t have all the answers. No one does. But I know that our primary task as a species has shifted. For centuries, our goal was to accumulate knowledge and build better tools. Now, our greatest challenge is to understand and cultivate what makes us valuable alongside these new forms of intelligence.
We have to move up the value chain. The next chapter of human progress won’t be written by competing with AI on cognitive tasks. It will be written by those who learn to collaborate with it, to orchestrate it, and to provide the uniquely human qualities that a machine cannot replicate. Our great work is no longer just about becoming smarter; it’s about becoming more human.