I get asked frequently, “Do you believe artificial intelligence will take over humans one day?” It’s a substantial question, and I used to provide the standard responses: that AI would automate some work, that we require robust ethics, and that creativity remains a human advantage. But recently, I’ve begun responding differently. Because something more is on the move. What’s happening today in AI labs — OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and countless startups — is not merely about replacing humans. It’s about creating something completely new. We’re not merely writing code or constructing tools; we are birthing a new form of intelligence — one that will be able to become smarter than us, quicker than us, and maybe even more powerful when it comes to designing the world. We are creating machines that don’t merely execute instructions. They learn, develop, and change. And one day, they might start thinking in ways that we can’t even dream of.

It’s like carving a new life form, but we don’t yet know if it’s going to come out as an angel or a devil. At the centre of all this is not emotions or consciousness — it’s something much simpler, and yet stronger: calculation. In every corner of the globe, governments and businesses are investing trillions of dollars in the construction of gigantic computing complexes. They are no longer simply “data centres”. They are the digital nervous systems of a future being: thousands of processors wired together, memory chips, cooling apparatus, and high-speed interconnects. They cooperate around the clock, training AI models that now compose, sketch, code, and even reason. This isn’t evolution by nature. This is evolution by money. Species in biology change slowly, over millions of years, through experimentation and error. But this new mind — let’s simply refer to it as the Digital Brain — is being constructed on fast-forward. Its brain does not reside within a skull. It inhabits industrial parks, server farms, and cloud networks. Its blood is electricity. Its learning is not from experience but from data tokens, simulations, and mathematical optimisation.

Today’s young people will live in a world where AI writes laws, creates music, and maybe even governs parts of our systems