The Day the Human Race Forked…

Seven of the next ten people you encounter are getting dumber. Yet a lot of them fervently believe they’re getting smarter.  

Why?

We’ll get to that in a bit, but first let’s discuss the three others. What would you think if I suggested that this 30 percent group of individuals might be the precursor to a new movement of superhuman thinkers who will help reset our society? 

Even sexier, let’s explore which group YOU are likely to be in, and how that determination actually gets made.

When you look back on history, it’s easy to see the seminal moments when one conventional and highly accepted theory displaced another. Like when Copernicus posited the crazy idea that Earth was not the center of the Universe, or Einstein replaced Newton's theories of physics with general relativity. 

It's not as easy to recognize those seminal moments when you’re starring in them.  Like you and I are right now.  

Yes, I really do believe that we’re experiencing one of those seismic shifts right now. One that leads to what I will call…

The Great Divergence 

We’re about to enter a new era of human development, an evolutionary movement that will split humanity into three factions.  There will be disruption, followed by chaos, and ultimately the rise of an advanced society. The type of society we dreamed of when we read Asimov’s Foundation series, Banks' Culture, or Ender’s Game. Or the worlds we imagined when we were captivated by Gene Roddenberry’s vision of an optimistic future in which humanity has outgrown poverty, war, racism, and greed, uniting across all races (and species).

This is the place I believe we ultimately end up: a unique new manifestation of humans. Before I reveal what this will look like, let’s set the stage with the process that I believe is making this inevitable.  (And what we’re going to have to endure first.) 

For all of human history we believed intelligence was determined by genes, IQ, schooling, or even luck. That old paradigm says your mind is pretty much a fixed inheritance. 

The new paradigm says your mind is now a daily construction project — and for the first time in history, you can see (even design) the blueprint.

For as long as there have been people who wanted more, there has been a single promise at the root of virtually every life philosophy, scripture, and dog-eared success book passed on from one generation to the next…

Change your thinking and you change your life.

This has probably always been true since our days as cave dwellers. Unfortunately, while the principle has been true, only a few people out of every hundred have been able to create this reality.  The rest slide back to the predetermined lives they had unknowingly been programmed to sleepwalk through. I’ve spent the last three decades of my life obsessed with helping expand that percentage of people who change their thinking and breakthrough to the lives they want and deserve.

Along the journey, I’ve seen the almost miraculous ways a human being trapped in poverty, addiction, or the prison of a programmed mind can claw their way out and become someone previously unrecognizable. I did it myself and one day I'll tell you that whole story, because it's uglier and more useful than you'd expect. I've been blessed to help thousands of others do it. And in every single case, the escape came down to one event, one of the rarest experiences in the universe: 

The moment a person develops enough self-awareness to start questioning their inherited beliefs, stop subconsciously reacting to memes, then mindfully rewire their operating system, and become the thinker of their thoughts.  

That has been the endgame for thousands of years. But in the span of about the last twenty-four months, something happened that no prophet, sage, or author in that long lineage ever considered…

We built machines that think.

Or at least closely resemble the process. And this has exposed a truth that I have received scorn, ridicule, and even hate for suggesting in several of my books: 

That truth that most people were never really thinking in the first place. 

I posited that millions were running inherited scripts, installed before they were eight years old by people who never met the adult they'd become.  (What I define as Inherited Memeplex Encoding or IME, described in this post.)

As long as most everyone was running scripts, it was difficult to tell the difference between the person who was actually thinking and the person who was merely performing the appearance of it. 

Now AI has changed the game forever…

Almost overnight, the appearance of intelligence became available to anyone, infinite, on demand. And the instant the appearance became worthless, the only thing left with any value was the real thing. What I define as a Sovereign Operator. The individual with a mind that can do what the machine cannot: judge, originate, defy, mean it.

This should have been the most liberating moment in the history of the human mind. 

The escape hatch I've spent decades pointing at — the one that only a small percentage ever found — just dropped into every pocket on earth. The teenager in the favela, the Uber driver in Detroit, and the billionaire in Dubai, holding the identical key.

It is this development that causes me to be extremely red pilled toward AI.  I fervently believe AI will allow us to have a greater future than we could create without it.  

But here’s the catch: Just because you hand every human being on Earth an incredibly powerful tool, that doesn’t guarantee you get a planet of geniuses. Instead, what I believe is happening is that there is a divergence in the path of the species.  

The road forks into three. Two possibilities lead backward. One produces an enlightened strain of human. And our hope for a better future on Earth is dependent on that one group becoming Sovereign Operators.  We will then need those Sovereign Operators to reach down and help elevate the other two groups.   

AI doesn't choose the paths. Each human chooses their own path – but most don’t even know they’re doing it.  

The groups are already forming, the paths are being traveled, yet most of the affected people are oblivious to the journey they’re on.   

Group One is comprised of humans who have decided to shun AI.  It seems too complicated or scary so they crawl under the covers hoping they can retire or die before serious change becomes necessary.  

The people in this group face a steady path of declining relevance and quality of life. Every month they hold out, the world moves further past them — not because the machine got smarter, but because they stopped having to, and a mind that stops reaching begins, quietly and obediently, to shrink. 

Group Two is initially headed on an opposite path, but it circles around and also ends up going backward.  This group embraced AI all the way. Too far. They handed it everything — their questions, their words, their decisions, and finally, without ever deciding to, their thinking. 

Why strain toward an answer when a flawless one arrives in four seconds? Why endure the discomfort of not-knowing when the not-knowing can be deleted on command? Every frictionless answer felt like a gift. No one told them the friction was the workout.  Or that a muscle never asked to lift will waste away with perfect cooperation. 

The people in group two are getting weaker while feeling efficient.  They’re actually in a more dangerous place than the first group, because they’re slowly losing IQ points but earnestly believe they’re getting smarter.

And then there is Group Three. 

As they discovered AI, they unleashed it in a way almost no one thinks to do. They didn't use it to escape thinking. They used it to think harder than any human in history could ever think alone. 

They questioned the premise, turned AI on their own beliefs and then ordered it to attack. They made it argue the side they hated. They used it to hunt the holes in their own logic, to drag them out of every comfortable conclusion and limiting belief they'd been hiding inside for years. 

They didn't outsource their minds. They started a robust daily routine of mental aerobics with AI as their personal trainer.  

And something extraordinary is happening: They’re getting sharper. More original. More dangerous. Not artificially — permanently. They are rewiring their own skulls, creating new neural pathways, while the other two groups quietly power down.

What I am about to suggest next could blow your mind and the way you see the world forever.  Or equally as possible, you’ll simply dismiss me as a delusional kook. 

Choose mindfully.  

Because I posit that we are in the midst of developing a breed of “superhumans” who develop hyper-intelligence because they use AI as a tool to challenge their beliefs, create new neural pathways, enhance lateral and critical analysis skills, and become greater "thinkers of the thought.” 

Please don’t lump me with Kurzweil, Elon, and the implant crowd. That's not what I’m talking about.  (Not that I’m denying what they’re suggesting won’t happen. It’s highly likely as well.) 

But the merge I’m suggesting here is symbiotic, not surgical. 

You're not becoming the machine. You're forming a dyad — a new unit of cognition where the human supplies judgment, taste, sovereignty, and the will to be challenged, and the machine supplies accumulated knowledge and tireless adversarial pressure. Thinking with, never thinking like. 

The Sovereign Operator doesn't merge with AI. He conducts it. AI is not the stimulant, your mind is. 

Three groups. Three minds. Three different human futures — splitting apart in real time, right now, in the minutes it's taking you to read this.

So you'll face the only decision that matters in this generation. Not which career, city, or strategy. That stuff is minuscule.

You need to decide for the remainder of your one and only life, whether you intend to be a person who thinks — or a person who is had by their thoughts, fed to them on a loop by a machine, a tribe, or a fear, until the day your body finally catches up to a mind that quit years earlier.

Too many of the hot takes about AI today are fear porn or techno worship. Don’t fall prey to either.  Be a critical thinker: Think about AI the way you think about electricity, fire, and nuclear.  They all pose danger, but when they’re harnessed, can enhance your life in almost limitless ways.  

I envision a world that shows how humans and AI merge to create a more prosperous future, led by the new wave of Sovereign Operators who model the example for humanity to follow.  

This is, I believe, the next great movement in human history.

The world needs more Sovereign Operators.  The world then needs those Sovereign Operators to reach out to the other two groups, and heal the divergence back to convergence.  Which leads us to the next inescapable conclusion…

The world needs YOU to be a Sovereign Operator.  

This is the work I’ll be dedicating the rest of my life to.  Plan to hear lots more from me here, in my next book, and in my Breakthrough U Entrepreneur Accelerator program. 

Please share your thoughts on all this in the comments.  And if you’d like to join me on the journey, please say so!

Peace,

- RG

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