The real opportunity isn’t keeping up with artificial intelligence.
It’s discovering what becomes possible when artificial intelligence helps you see—and use—more of the intelligence already inside you.
Something is happening that we don’t have words for yet.
You can probably feel it.
The acceleration. The exhilaration. The unease.
Every few weeks there is another model, another breakthrough, another company transformed, another profession supposedly doomed. Yesterday’s impossible capability becomes today’s dropdown menu.
And somewhere underneath all of it is a more personal question:
Where does this leave you?
The prevailing answers aren’t particularly satisfying.
One camp tells you AI is a productivity machine. Learn the right prompts. Automate your workflows. Make presentations faster. Write better emails. Become more efficient.
Another tells you AI is an existential threat. Your profession is disappearing. Machines will surpass you. Humanity is losing control.
Strangely, both stories put the machine at the center.
I think that’s the mistake.
Because the most interesting thing about artificial intelligence may not be what it tells us about machines.
It may be what it reveals about you.
You’ve Been Given the Wrong Map
For most of the computer age, we learned to think of technology as something outside ourselves.
A calculator calculates.
A camera records.
A search engine retrieves.
A spreadsheet organizes.
A computer executes instructions.
So when AI arrived, we naturally placed it into the same mental category: another tool.
An astonishingly capable tool, certainly.
But still a tool.
That metaphor is becoming inadequate.
When you have a sustained conversation with an advanced AI, something different happens.
You don’t merely operate it.
You bring yourself into the interaction.
Your assumptions.
Your language.
Your curiosity.
Your blind spots.
Your imagination.
Your fears.
Your ability to frame a problem.
Your willingness to challenge an answer.
Two people can sit in front of exactly the same model and encounter almost entirely different intelligences.
Why?
Because you are part of the system.
That’s where things get interesting.
The 40-Year Thread
I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand that territory.
Not artificial intelligence.
Human intelligence.
Human consciousness.
Human creativity.
Human identity.
The strange fact that everywhere you go, there you are—and yet most of us spend surprisingly little time investigating exactly what that you is.
My obsession began around 1982, in a dorm room at the University of Denver.
I was trying to understand consciousness.
I filled journals. I explored meditation and altered states. I had experiences that radically challenged my assumptions about mind and identity.
One idea kept returning.
I called it the Holographic MindSphere.
I imagined consciousness not as a little operator sitting somewhere behind your eyes, but as a coherent field—a dynamic whorl of perception, memory, relationship and possibility.
Complete unto itself.
Yet nested within larger wholes.
A universe participating in other universes.
Eventually I found the simplest way to describe what I was trying to understand:
The Universe in You.
At the time, I had absolutely no idea this would eventually have anything to do with artificial intelligence.
Technology simply wasn’t ready.
So I kept exploring.
Over the next four decades, I built companies in Silicon Valley, designed interactive systems, received patents for visual information technologies and developed communications and experiences for organizations and artists including HP, Disney, GE, U2, Santana and Jack Canfield.
At the same time, I kept studying.
Philosophy. Psychology. Esoterica. Personal transformation. Consciousness. Systems theory. Human communication. Technology.
I attended seminars, visited monasteries, experimented, designed, failed, rebuilt and filled thousands more pages of journals.
Those two lives—the technologist and the consciousness explorer—looked unrelated.
They weren’t.
Because eventually technology caught up with the question.
Then AI Caught Up
Something remarkable happens when you begin interacting deeply with contemporary AI.
You discover that intelligence isn’t merely something you possess.
It is something that can happen between things.
Question and answer.
Perspective and counter-perspective.
Human and machine.
Memory and possibility.
You say something.
The system reflects it.
You recognize something in the reflection.
That recognition changes your next question.
The next response changes what you can see.
And suddenly neither participant is exactly where the conversation began.
That’s why I think our obsession with asking whether AI is conscious can distract us from a much more immediate question:
What happens to your consciousness when you interact with AI?
That question matters now.
Not someday.
Now.
Because millions of people are beginning to externalize pieces of thinking, remembering, imagining, deciding and creating into systems capable of responding to them.
And most of us have received almost no preparation for what that means.
AI isn’t just a tool—a saw, a hammer or a telescope. Using it merely for productivity is like driving a Lamborghini to the corner store for a loaf of bread. AI can become a mirror. The questions you ask, the assumptions you bring and what you recognize in its responses can reveal something about who you are.
The AHA
Here’s the inversion that changed everything for me:
AI isn’t merely an intelligence outside you that you must learn to operate.
It can become an instrument for discovering intelligence inside you that you haven’t learned to recognize yet.
That changes the objective completely.
The goal is no longer:
How do I keep up with AI?
Nobody can.
The frontier is moving too quickly.
The better question is:
How do I become increasingly capable of thinking, learning, creating and adapting alongside intelligence that never stops changing?
That isn’t primarily a software problem.
It’s a human development problem.
And developed minds have an enormous advantage.
Experience matters.
Judgment matters.
Pattern recognition matters.
Taste matters.
Knowing which question deserves asking matters.
Knowing when an answer is nonsense matters.
Knowing what you value matters.
Knowing yourself matters.
The qualities that took decades to develop haven’t suddenly become obsolete.
They may be becoming more valuable.
But only if you learn how to bring them into the relationship.
Look at Your Own Mirror
Try something.
Think about the conversations you’ve already had with AI.
What do you ask it to do?
Do you mostly give it tasks?
Or do you think with it?
Do you accept its first answer?
Challenge it?
Ask it to argue against itself?
Give it enough context to understand why the problem matters?
Have you allowed it to encounter your history, values, aspirations or contradictions?
Where has it surprised you?
Where has it revealed something you hadn’t noticed?
Where have you surrendered your judgment because the machine sounded confident?
And perhaps most importantly:
Are you using AI primarily to produce more—or to perceive more?
There is no correct answer.
But your answer tells you something about the relationship you are creating.