D. Scott Phoenix

AI is the oxygen crisis of our era, and it's coming whether we're ready or not.

So what do we do?

When a lot of people think about AI, they think about what it will do to us, what jobs it will take, what we should do to slow it down or regulate it, and those are important questions.

But they're actually downstream of a much deeper question, which is, what happens if AI stays separate from us?

Right now, your AI lives on the other side of a screen.

You ask it a question, it answers.

You close your laptop and it's gone.

But while your laptop is closed, the AI keeps getting better at your job.

And if we stay separate, the AI is not your tool, it's your replacement, one that gets smarter and faster and cheaper every week.

It doesn't take much to notice what happened the last time a new apex intelligence arrived here on Earth.

That intelligence was us.

And since we got here, we've driven to extinction every competing intelligence between homo sapiens and pantroglodytes.

Today, we keep our closest animal ancestors, chimpanzees, in reserves for their protection from us.

Without a merger, AI isn't a partner, it's a rival.

So what's the good news?

The good news is a merger isn't something we need to decide to start.

It's something we need to notice that we are already in.

When did you stop remembering phone numbers?

There was no moment you decided to forget them.

They just moved from your head to your pocket.