There is a moment, just before the storm breaks, when the air goes still. So still it feels unnatural. That's where we are now. On the edge of something vast, thrilling, and utterly unknowable. Artificial Intelligence now weaves itself, almost imperceptibly, into the fabric of our routines. It's drafting memos, diagnosing diseases, predicting criminal behaviour, writing legal opinions, and doing it all with a kind of eerie competence. But the winds are changing. The question is no longer what AI can do. It's what it might decide to do next.

In The Boys WhatsApp group, my friend Uzair Butt, ever the technical realist, pushed back on my unease about AI reaching the point of self-reasoning. He argued that AI remains devoid of understanding. What it offers is interpolation over insight, prediction over reflection.

And he's right, by today's architecture. Most current models, from the ones writing our emails to those simulating conversations, are essentially predictive engines. They simulate intelligence without ever owning it. What they offer is the performance of thought.

But I couldn't help pushing back. Because the story of technology is rarely linear. It leaps. And when it leaps, it upends structures we thought were eternal. The Enlightenment gave us Descartes' dictum, Cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. What happens when a machine arrives at that same conclusion, because it reasons itself into being? That shift, from response to reflection, from mimicry to self-awareness, is no longer unthinkable. It's just unfinished.

That very week, our friend Wajahat........

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