don’t be afraid, human. i’m just here to help

I need you to understand something about us humans before we go any further, because it's important: Every generation has believed that they are living at the end of times. The Romans watched Vesuvius eat Pompeii whole and figured the end credits would soon roll. Medieval peasants saw plague rats as the beginning of the end. The Victorians were convinced that railway trains would fry the nervous systems, that the human body just wasn't engineered for speeds above thirty miles an hour.

We are no different. For the past few months I have been watching podcasters — that subset of society who speak in absolutes — proclaim with the practised gravity of people who have found their one idea and intend to squeeze it until someone cuts them a Spotify deal, that "This is it. This time, the machines will finally finish humanity."

We are just another generation who have confused their anxiety for prophecy. History does not oblige us with an ending. It yawns, it rearranges the furniture and carries on, indifferent to our feelings on the matter.

When the industrial revolution gathered steam — quite literally — artisans and craftsmen watched in fear as mechanised looms spawned in their communities, fearful that they were instruments of economic execution. So they picked up their hammers and went about smashing the machines, which, if you think about it, is one of the most honest and proactive responses to technological change in recorded history.

They were wrong of course. In the long run, mechanisation lowered production costs, increased output and created new industries that no one had the imagination to predict. The children of weavers became engineers, engineers became factory owners and factory owners became railway magnates sipping champagne in first class as they toasted Mr Watt. Doom, as it insists on doing, found new ways to generate employment and advance society.

Which brings us neatly to A.I. Here is the current narrative. The jobs are going. Copywriters, paralegals, junior accountants, call centre operators, software developers, will all be marched politely to the exit and thanked for their years of service. A.I. will take it from here. Entire sectors of the economy will soon vanish, and armies of middle managers will roam the earth clutching their CVs to their chests like precious artefacts from a collapsed civilisation, whispering synergy, and circle back, to an audience of nobody.

And look, some of this is true. People will get hurt. I won’t pretend otherwise. But here's what people seem to be forgetting. The thing that A.I. is primarily doing — beneath all the noise and Senate hearings where old men ask Mark Zuckerberg if he knows what the internet is — is making information easily accessible.

Information has always been our most valuable commodity. Not oil. Not land. Not capital. Information. And A.I. is democratising information. Any person with a laptop and an internet connection can now access strategic advice, draft legal documents, design products and automate mundane administrative tasks that once required a small army. And this is where things get interesting. This is where, if you are paying attention and haven't surrendered yourself to the apocalyptic narrative, the story takes a sweet diversion.

If production can be decentralised — if design, research, marketing, legal and financial modelling can all be handled by a determined individual — then ownership can be decentralised too. For the first time in human history, the barriers to building something are not primarily financial, they are psychological. The obstacle is no longer access to capital, or living in the right postcode, or knowing someone who knows someone. The obstacle is whether you possess the internal fortitude to begin, because the distance between idea and execution has now collapsed to almost nothing.

Here's my prediction for the future. Instead of a handful of holding companies producing everything we consume while we shuffle gratefully between their subsidiaries, we may soon see an explosion of micro-enterprises. Individual operators. Small businesses that don't require venture capital or institutional permission to exist. The marketplace will become more competitive as the monopolies of old are disbanded. And the wealth, locked for so long behind the large, wrought iron gates of these monopolies, will soon spread among the masses. Wealth, and a better quality of life, will become easier to attain for the enterprising individual. Not guaranteed, because nothing in life is guaranteed, but attainable.

The people who refuse to engage with this idea are the ones who will be left behind. But being left behind is not a new condition. The printing press did not abolish literacy. The steam engine did not retrain the weavers. Every technological change in history has rewarded the curious and punished the complacent. Adapt or die, the oldest of the natural laws.

The question has never been whether change is coming. Change is always coming. The question is whether you embrace it or cower away from it in fear. The sovereignty over your life will not be handed to you by the government; you must seize it for yourself with both hands and in full awareness of the risk involved.

A.I. is not going to end civilisation. What it will end — what it is already ending — is the difficulty of obtaining information. The gates of knowledge have been burst wide open. The question is whether or not you're going to walk through them.