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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Oh yes. I hear and read every day that AI is evil, will ruin the planet, and make people dumber; that greedy rich people will buy all the companies, while poor people will be left at home without money.I know people who interact with AI incorrectly: they treat it as a sage who must guide them, ask it questions, and wait for an answer that will save them.Some people do not understand at all what AI is for and simply waste time asking it silly questions.For me, AI is a mirror reflection of our personality. It agrees with everything we can tell it (with some exceptions, of course). At one point, I realized this, and I wrote to AI: "Listen, you don’t have to agree with me on everything I say. Your task is not to do everything for me. Your task is to help me find gaps, errors in thinking, that prevent me from developing in the right direction." Then I began writing to it about what I do and how I do it, what I think and why I think that way.You won’t believe it, but it started pointing out such mistakes. It gives a lot of knowledge—not solutions, but knowledge—reshaping thinking. It helps to be reborn in thought and start learning everything from scratch, while pointing out the mistakes and gaps I hadn’t noticed before. And that is incredible.
You dropped in something that is key to a successful collaboration: Training your agent how to interact with you. Simply stating guidelines such as, "Your task is to help me find gaps, errors in thinking, that prevent me from developing in the right direction" create the basis for a great result. -RG
"Seven of the next ten people you encounter are getting dumber" is a great line.
I've been workshopping a similar idea in terms of a new kind of intelligence measurement that also breaks down into 3 categories. IQ tests are relatively limited in how they measure intelligence. But I realized that the archive of AI interactions can show us a new way of looking at intelligence.
If we can look at someone's chat history we can infer:
Ability to create abstractions
Ability to transfer abstractions from one domain to another
Willingness to use abstractions in problem solving
which is a much richer way (in my opinion) to view intelligence.
Overall, you're right that a lot of people will take the shortcut to thinking less. Thinking takes work.
Thanks, that's an interesting take! Do you have any thoughts on how an individual evaluates that in themself?
Finally got a chance to read. Definitely thought provoking.
I think your description of group one could be more sympathetic. I think the current framing is missing a portion of that group, and will cause them to dig their heels in even further.
As aspiring members of group three, I think we need to try to understand the members of the other groups in order to lift them up. Group two seems pretty easy to understand. But group one is a bit more varied.
"It seems too complicated or scary" excludes the portion that **hate** AI. You could lump them in with 'scary', but I don't think that's productive. This portion sees AI as catastrophic. They see the negative impact of data centers, whether real or imagined. Job loss. Deception. Enshittification. Slop. And, of course, Skynet.
They don't see personalized medicine, rapid creation of treatment, capabilities for the disabled, democratization of software and knowledge, solutions for energy and pollution. I'm hoping that as we start to see those harder problems get solved, that these people will start to change their tune.
Group one will be the hardest to convince, the easiest to ostracize, and likely most beneficial to convert.
Perhaps I'm missing the point, but that stood out to me.
Here are a couple concepts that I thought about while reading that I think you'd find interesting:
NPC - non-playable character = the title for a character in a video game that is not the player. They typically have a predetermined path and predetermined dialogue. Typically used to described people who just go through the motions in life.
Gradient Descent - this is an algorithmic concept that is used heavily in AI, but also applies to evolution as well. Imagine you're on a square plane with hills and valleys. Your goal is to find the deepest valley, but you cannot see the whole plane at once. If you find a valley, it is unclear whether it is the deepest one or not. Staying in that valley is comfortable and requires no energy. You need to be jolted out of that small valley to continue your search and find the valley that is truly the deepest. Your "...moment a person develops enough self-awareness..." reminded me of that.
Thanks Randy!
Great insights on this! You clearly made the case for the emotional complexity driving the fears and behaviors of group one. And you suggest I could be more sympathetic to them, which was a much more diplomatic way of saying what a therapist once screamed at me, "Get out of your head and show some fucking empathy!" (A lesson, alas, I'm still working on.) The term NPC - non-playable character is the perfect analogy and the Gradient Descent concept also quite appropriate, so a strong chance that both will make their way into the book. Really appreciate you sharing your thinking on this. -RG
One part where I feel a bit not in alignment, is in the blog it makes me feel like anyone can be part of the third category, but I think that may not be true.
I still think there is some amount of inherent “born with DNA” when it comes to having an ability for true higher-level thinking.
Can anyone use Ai for “thinking with” vs “thinking like”? Absolutely, at their level, their lid. Some people simply will have higher lids, Einstein to Elon simply were born with higher intelligence lids. Yes, DNA lottery is still in play.
Doesn’t mean each human doesn’t have greatness within them, I believe they do, in “their thing”, which is not higher intelligence in everyone’s case.
When I took Quantum Physics in college, I knew after the first week that was not my thing, no matter how much I studied or for how long, I wasn’t going to be able to compete with the 2-3 in the class that found that class “easy” while the 99% of us couldn’t muster a score higher than 25% on the test while the 2-3 got a 99% with relative ease. And I was an A-student in Physics 101, 201 and a B-student in 301.
Even with Ai, I don’t believe I would have been on the level of the 2-3 in Quatum Physics class, and that’s even if they didn’t have the Ai as well 🙂
Yes, but this then begets the question, "Was there really a chip in the ball on the Croatian offsides call???
Randy, I appreciate you sharing your insight and inviting us to work through our thoughts with you.
My deep dive into AI started a few years ago when I felt something was medically wrong with a loved one. He said he didn’t feel unwell but his skin and eye colour looked slightly off to me. I took him to an urgent care
walk- in clinic however, the doctor did not share my concern.
As we were about to retire for the night I asked him again, “Are you sure you feel fine?”
He said yes but I could not shake the feeling something was wrong. So instead of going to bed I convinced him to go to the ER for a second opinion.
He was soon diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
After a stent was inserted to relieve a blockage caused by a tumour, his color returned to normal but life didn’t.
His diagnosis was terminal. No treatment options were available.
He started to lose weight despite being hungry all the time and eating everything I put in front of him.
We were told hospice would be available when his condition degraded enough to make him eligible.
A PSW visited daily to assist with showering and a hospice nurse and occupational therapist visited once per week.
Otherwise we were on our own.
So I turned to AI to help me figure out how to care for him.
AI had helped me discover he needed pancreatic enzymes to help him absorb nutrients.
His surgeon had failed to prescribe the enzymes and when I questioned his family doctor about a possible need for them, she told me we I’d have to consult the surgeon as it was out of her domain. The surgeon was positively ruthless but eventually I succeeded in getting the enzymes prescribed.
AI continued to provide me with information and support that significantly contributed to our loved one enjoying his remaining months at our home surrounded by family. No suffering or need for hospice.
By this point AI had become a regular part of my life.
I suppose you could say I was pushing on the edge of group three.
I used AI in practical and personal ways while I grieved, managed business tasks and worked to find my footing again.
I could have easily ended up extremely red pilled toward AI. But as time went on, I began to feel a tension with AI that I still have not been able to resolve.
Articulating what the tension is or how I expect to resolve it is a great part of the challenge for me.
Despite how valuable AI has been for me, I carry the concerns of Group 1 regarding its broader impacts: environmental cost, energy and water use, privacy, corporate/government control, bias, dependence and the possibility that these systems are being woven into human life faster than we can fully understand or ethically metabolize.
I appreciate the metaphor that the Sovereign Operator does not merge with AI, but conducts it.
That feels true for me in many domains.
I have been able to conduct AI in the realms of writing, strategy, research, creative ideation, logic, analysis, pattern recognition, critical thinking and examining my own beliefs.
However, I cannot conduct AI, in its current form, into the domains where human discernment feels most personal, powerful, and, dare I say, most needed.
I shared the back story of my initial involvement in AI to create an understanding of why some of the domains I explored with AI include medical ambiguity, intuitive nudges, spiritual exploration, consciousness, embodiment and meaning.
I consider myself a logical thinker; however, life has taught me that logic is not the only valid form of human discernment. Some of the most consequential moments in my life have required me to hold rational analysis alongside intuition, observation, embodied knowing, lived experience and meaning.
Compared to a couple years ago, my ability to conduct AI has become more limited. AI starts narrowing the conversation, disclaiming, redirecting or triggers guardrails, pulling me back into approved lanes.
I don’t say this because medical, spiritual or personal inquiry should be careless or unbounded. I say it because these are exactly the moments where human sovereignty matters most, and where AI’s current limits are felt.
Not only does AI have limits, but the boundaries can change without the user having much say in how or why.
Ultimately, I can only conduct an instrument that is capable of playing the notes.
That is where my tension with AI still lives: between the concerns of Group 1 and the promise of the Group 3 Sovereign Operator.
First let me say how sorry I am that you've had to go through all that! I can testify that I had a medical condition that went misdiagnosed for more than a decade, solved in 2 minutes with ChatGPT. And I've lost loved ones to diseases that AI could have detected in much earlier stages when they wouldn't have been fatal. What AI offers us in terms of wellness and longevity benefits is breathtaking.
And the potential broader impacts you mention are cause for concern. Some of the issues you raised will lead to the most important decisions we make as a society. One thing is certain: AI cannot simply be paused. The arms race is on and we need to make sure the good guys win it. All the more reason we need to become Sovereign Operators and bring others along with us. -RG
Thank you for your empathetic, clear, thought-provoking responses. I am sorry for the loss of your loved ones. I'm also happy to hear chatgpt helped you obtain a long-awaited diagnosis. That's such a huge win for you, AI and ultimately all of us.
I realize I may be more aligned with your larger concept of the Sovereign Operator than I first understood.
Understanding your broader framework along with your sensible call to action removed some of the tension I have been feeling. I appreciate that, thank you.
I hear your point that guardrails mostly bite when we ask AI to hand us answers. That may be true in many domains, especially when the work is cognitive, strategic, or analytical.
But that has not fully been my experience. In some domains, guardrails do not only appear when I ask AI to hand me answers. They can appear when I am trying to think through the question itself, not outsource the answer.
That is part of why the instrument metaphor still feels alive for me. Sometimes I am not asking the instrument to play the song for me. I am trying to hear what notes are even available.
Perhaps we are on the same page after all. Part of being a Sovereign Operator may be knowing not only how to conduct AI, but also when AI is useful, when it is limited and when the work needs to move somewhere else.
Dealing deeper with the important issues you raised, your pushback does support my main point: you just did the thing Group 3 does. You argued with the premise instead of swallowing it. Much respect for that.
And you're right. The instrument has limits — and worse, it has an owner. The boundaries can shift under you without a vote. I will say Sovereignty was never in the machine. It's in us. The moment your thinking is captive to one model's permissions, you've handed a piece of your mind to the people who tune it — and that's the exact dependency we're trying to escape. The answer isn't to back away from AI, but become more platform independent and agnostic.
A maestro doesn't lead a soloist, he leads an orchestra. When one instrument won't play the note, you reach for another section — a different model, a human expert, a primary source, your own reasoning. Conduct the ensemble, not the soloist. And notice: the guardrails mostly bite when you ask AI to hand you answers. In my experience, they barely touch the real work: using it to attack your own thinking and hunt your blind spots.
I'm not a programmer so I def don't understand that aspect of AI. The part I'm most convinced of is that the ultimate safeguard will be open-source LLMs. – RG