For most of modern history, intelligence has been expensive. Depending where you grew up, you were either reviled or hailed for your smarts. You, your books and your glasses would grow up as a scarce, sought after resource that eventually made your way into and mark on industries built on that scarcity. Consultants, lawyers, analysts, strategists and marketers all created value because they possessed knowledge that was difficult to acquire and even harder to scale.
AI flips that equation. We all know why. Every 2 weeks there's a model that's getting smarter and faster. We know where this ends. Eventually, we'll have a model that knows all of human knowledge across all of human specialization sitting on our desktops and phones. Maybe in our ear. People argue as to when this will happen. Estimates are by 2030.
I predict 27th November, 2027. But, I'm no Kurzweil.
With each arrival of another model that’s faster, cheaper and more capable than the last, the direction of travel is clear: intelligence is becoming commodity.
Someone sent me a WhatsApp message the other day that read "you know you were the original gpt?" She wasn't lying. Many people prided themselves on their breath of knowledge or depth of skill. It was the price to pay for attention and relevance: the brilliance of their flow, the depth of their cognitive inventory, their numerical acumen, their breadth of historical knowledge, the height of their scientific understanding. These were the ones who sounded smarter even before they got up to addres the room. The ones who had the best presentations. Remember Hans Rosling's TED talks? The ones whose eloquence was only surpassed by their ability to tear down quadratic equations. These were the most interesting people in the room in the good old days when what we called intelligence was scarce.
Those days, are dead. I’ve found documents I spent days crafting and laughed maniacally at how inconsequential it all seems now - the sheer effort and grit expended on something I can now do in mere minutes.
Inconsequential. Or was it?
For the many around the world who’ve borne the brunt of pursuing knowledge and sharpening craft, what we have inadvertently gifted ourselves, is the power of judgement. A Knowing that can only come from minds that have been put through their cognitive paces. Like a well trained athlete who goes on to become a world class coach, you're infused with a certain ability for better judgement, a knowing. The knowing as I have come to understand it, develops from some weird combined formula of grit, skill, repetition, failure, improvement, dehydration and time that people who are good at what they do have accumulated. I will call it judgement for my purposes here, although it's a bit of a more intuitively led sense than that.
Artificial Intelligence may produce 10 possible strategies. Judgment knows which one an organisation should pursue. artificial Intelligence can analyse every available data point. Judgment can see which signals matter and which are merely noise. Like a mother with her newborn.
Much of the current conversation assumes AI changes work by automating tasks. Draft the report. Summarise the meeting. Review the contract. Produce the presentation. Those gains are real, but they are only the first-order effect.
The second-order effect is that organisations themselves will begin to reorganise around a different scarcity.
When every employee has access to abundant, democratised intelligence, competitive advantage no longer comes from knowing more than everyone else. It comes from making better decisions than everyone else. Seeing patterns where others can't. Instinctively knowing because one has a wealth of accumulated experience to draw from. The centre of gravity inside organisations will start moving away from producing information and towards interpreting it, prioritising it and acting on it, or not.
Institutions are already creating Chief AI Officers and AI governance leaders, because someone has to decide where AI should be trusted, where it should be constrained, how accountability changes and how risk should be governed. Those are not engineering questions. They are judgment questions.
The same logic is beginning to reshape leadership more broadly. The executive leader of the AI era is less likely to be the person who can produce the most work and more likely to be the person who can orchestrate the most intelligence human, artificial and organisational. Their value lies in framing problems, making trade-offs, allocating capital, recognising weak signals and knowing when not to follow what the machine recommends.
The Industrial Revolution reduced the value of physical labour and increased the value of coordination. The Information Age reduced the cost of information and increased the value of networks. The AI era appears to be reducing the cost of intelligence itself.
If that’s true, then the premium of this era drastically shifts from knowing to deciding.
The organisations that understand that distinction will be first to resource accordingly. That is where winning in this era will start from. That is what future readiness looks like today.
But the point of this is not about organisations. It's about knowing that your hard work hasn't been in vain. You've built a knowledge system mixed with your own DNA. The uniqueness of your corporate, personal, or entrepreneurial journeys fused with your human experience gives you a sense of knowing that makes you even more primed for the days ahead. The only caveat, is that up to this point, you must have actually done the work.
Interesting days ahead. Buckle up.
-For Uncle Charlie and Baaba.