There is a particular kind of dizziness that comes not from falling but from realising the ground has quietly shifted beneath you.

Millions of us who studied through power cuts, who prepared lessons without internet access, who climbed through the punishing walls of social and professional stratification and clawed their way up the professional ladder are now sitting across a table from a machine that passed every one of those tests in a jiffy. This is not hyperbole, this is the new reality.

To understand what is truly happening, we must resist the temptation of either utopian excitement or apocalyptic dread, and instead think carefully. In the following paragraphs, I have extracted some points from the works of some of the most searching minds of our era, and on the decisions being made right now in the corridors of the world.

The Machine That Reasons

In their final collaborative work ‘Genesis’, Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie issued what amounts to a civilisational warning. Writing near the end of Kissinger’s extraordinary life, the architects of realpolitik and technological statecraft argued that AI is fundamentally different from every previous tool humanity has wielded. Earlier technologies like the printing press, the steam engine, even the nuclear bomb, extended human capability. They amplified what we could do. AI, by contrast, is beginning to replicate how we think. It reasons, infers, and generates. It does not merely do our bidding; it anticipates our bidding before we ourselves have formulated it.

“We are at an extraordinary juncture in history… The decisions made now about how to develop, deploy, and constrain AI will shape the trajectory of this technology for decades to come.”

— Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt & Craig Mundie, Genesis (2024)

This is the first disorientation we must sit with honestly. Many of ours meritocratic imagination , shaped by IIT entrance ranks, UPSC ranks, and the prestige of the hard-won degree, is based on the scarcity of intelligence. We competed because intelligence was rare and difficult to acquire. AI has made intelligence abundant. What does that do to the architecture of human aspiration?

The Coming Wave and the Containment Illusion

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now head of Microsoft AI, titled his landmark book ‘The Coming Wave’ for good reason. His central thesis is........

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