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Earlier this month, OpenAI published an intriguing statement. It was called Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.

In this report, the company lays out a vision for how we should reorganise our economies around the arrival of superintelligence. The authors float a number of ideas, including higher taxes on corporate profits, and a four-day work week. They also suggest a new Public Wealth Fund — seeded with capital from government and the big AI companies — that would invest in the AI growth story and distribute the returns directly to citizens. Essentially, then, a form of universal basic income.

Step back for a moment, and notice what is happening here. The world’s most prominent AI company is saying, essentially, ‘our technology will prove so transformative that we’ll need to rewire capitalism.’ In an interview around the launch of the report, CEO Sam Altman framed it as a ‘New Deal moment for America’.

And mostly, the world shrugged and moved on.

OpenAI aren’t the only ones walking into this kind of territory. Anthropic are also hiring economists and researchers whose entire job it will be to figure out how superintelligence will reshape the broader economy.

A few thoughts on all this.

First, the OpenAI report contains some proposals we should take seriously. I’ve been writing for a while now about what I call post-human economics. The core idea is much in alignment with all this. It is that we’re heading towards a radically new kind of economy. One in which machines do much of the work that has, until now, been the province of human beings. And one in which the old metrics we use to understand economic life fall into incoherence. When humanoid robots can do much of the physical labour currently done by people, and when billions of AI agents transact with one another every day, what does GDP really measure? My answer, in short, is nothing meaningful.

It’s hard for us to see the outlines of what comes next. But one thing seems clear to me. We are going to need radically new social and economic forms to allow human beings to flourish inside what is coming. The institutions we have — the tax systems, the welfare states, the labour markets — were built for an economy of human inputs and conditions of material and labour scarcity. That world is ending. Not tomorrow, but soon enough that we need to start thinking about it.

This is why I find the most radical of OpenAI’s proposals — the Public Wealth Fund — genuinely interesting. Sure, it’s not a solution to everything that is coming, or anything close to that. But it gestures in a helpful direction. If machines owned by an infinitesimally small number of people are going to generate vast levels of wealth, then we’ll need mechanisms to share that abundance more widely. I just can’t see a way around that.

And there’s a huge opportunity here. It is that the machines, combined with some new form of redistribution, can liberate people to do forms of work that the market has never valued. Care work, above all; looking after children, and looking after the elderly, of whom we have many and will soon have many more. These have always been among the most important things human beings do. In the economy that is coming, we might finally be pay attention to these kinds of work.

But my second, and more important, thought: we shouldn’t leave it to a few giant technology companies to tell us all how this goes. We need more research, led by independent people. If you want to read beyond OpenAI’s recent report, then check out The Digitalist Papers Volume 2. This series of essays was convened by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University: the world’s leading expert on the collision of emerging digital technologies and the economy. As it sounds, Brynjolfsson was inspired by The Federalist Papers. He is an Alexander Hamilton for the AI age.

Slowly, then, mainstream economics is catching up with the world it purports to study. But in the end, the questions we face now can’t be settled by frontier AI labs, or even by academic economists. They must be settled by us. These questions are not technocratic in their nature. They are political.

So the urgent challenge we face now is to fire up a broader democratic exercise around the questions posed by superintelligence. So far, mainstream politics has said little of any value on the subject. But the Trump administration’s acrimonious dealings with Anthropic — which saw them fall out over military use of Anthropic’s models — is an early signal of a far deeper entanglement to come. Frontier AI labs and government are going to wrestle with one another for control of a epoch-shaping technology. And there is going to be an almighty argument over the new social and economic realities we should build around it.

The AI labs have done nothing to avoid this power struggle. In fact, they’ve done everything to bring it upon themselves. You can’t build a technology that you claim will lead to mass unemployment — a technology that you explicitly compare to nuclear weapons — and expect the governments of the Global North to just sit back and see how it all plays out.

Politics is coming to the Intelligence Age. We must raise our voice; we should Not Throw Away Our Shot to shape what is coming.

It’s going to be a wild ride. I’ll be back next week,

David.

This was #26 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is The Pond (1950) by LS Lowry.

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I want to tell you about something I’ve been building this year.

As we make our way through the 21st-century’s third decade, we can all feel that something is happening to us. We do not yet have a name for it. But in a million ways, we’ve been searching for that name. We’ve been searching for understanding.

I’m talking, of course, about the revolution happening now via the emergence of powerful machine intelligence, and other technologies of vast power.

Everyone is talking about the new Intelligence Age. I’m surrounded by that conversation every day. My work is about helping some amazing people — including some of the world’s most famous investors, and senior leaders inside household-name brands — understand what is happening, and what it means.

But that work also sees me address a set of deeper, and sometimes more personal, questions. What does this mean for how I navigate a career? For how I raise my children? What about my family’s financial security? Can the society I live inside survive what is coming? What will it look like on the other side?

Some people believe that the transition we’re now living through will lead us all to unprecedented new highs. Others are certain it will be catastrophic. In truth, no one can know everything about what is coming.

That means that the people best able to navigate this moment will be those able to sit with uncertainty. Those equipped with frameworks that empower them to explore multiple futures, and make better decisions. And those with access to a network of brilliant peers, and subject matter experts.

Exploring the future that lies ahead — and understanding what it means for you — has always been what New World Same Humans is about. But at the end of last year, I wanted to go deeper.

So I gathered a small group of people together, and made a space for us to explore these questions across 2026. I call it the Future Fellowship.

Right now, the Fellowship is in its infancy. We started earlier this year with a small, hand-selected founding group: CEOs, founders, creatives and more. I lead us in a monthly online get together, and we’ll meet several times in-person across the course of the year.

We share the questions that are on our minds, the experiences that are reshaping the way we think, and the answers we’re coming to. We’re working through what this technology revolution means in practice: work, health, family, legacy, and more. Meanwhile, we’ll also hear from some brilliant outside experts; people in my network who can help us go deeper on a specific slice of the future.

The conversations we’re having are of a kind that I haven’t experienced anywhere else. What’s emerging is something even deeper than I expected: a living record of what it feels like to navigate the most disorienting transformation in human history.

So why am I telling you this now?

Over time, we want to grow the Future Fellowship. We’re going to move slowly on that; but right now, we’re ready to bring in a small number of new members. That means people who are, like us, on a quest to understand what is happening now, what it all means, and how they can flourish inside it.

Spaces are very limited, and this isn’t for everyone. But if it sounds as though it could be for you, we’d love to hear from you. Just take a moment to fill in this form, and we’ll start the conversation.

As I said in the last postcard, at times such as these what we most need is each other. That is, people who are living through the same mixture of challenge and opportunity, and who want to make sense of it all. The Future Fellowship is my answer to that imperative; I couldn’t be more excited to see where it leads.

Thanks for reading; I’ll see you all next week,

David.

This was #25 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is Hypertopographics #9 by Edward Burtynsky & Alkan Avcıoğlu.

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A quote has been reverberating through my head recently.

‘This is how a species prepares to depart for the stars. You don’t depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions. It’s a fire in a madhouse.’

That’s Terence McKenna, the counter-culture philosopher and mystic who was active from the 1970s until his death in 2000 at age 53. McKenna had a great interest in philosophy, nature, and psychedelics. But when he spoke this quote in a wide-ranging interview in 1998, he was in a phase of his life during which he was reaching for new ways to understand the technological liftoff that seemed to be firing up around him.

Of course, that liftoff is now somewhat further along. This quote is almost 30 years old, but its power has only become more visceral.

Via the AI revolution we’re living through, we are all bearing witness to a kind of progressive enweirdening. McKenna’s fire is raging harder than ever. Every week brings a new frontier model, a benchmark shattered, or yet another trillion-dollar commitment to AI infrastructure.

Amid all this, we want to make sense of what’s happening. Our need for explanations — for some kind of stable ground — is becoming acute. And there is no shortage of media on hand to help us. The very AI revolution we’re trying to describe is also helping us to pump out every more analysis and explanation on what AI can do now, what it will be able to do soon, and what all this means for the economy and the future of work.

We know that the capability of frontier models continues to accelerate. Last week we learned — via what seems to be a leaked draft of a blog post — that Anthropic will soon release Mythos, a massive new model that, so runs the post, represents another giant leap forward in capability.

But despite their growing power, there’s something the machines still can’t help us with. In fact, they’ll never be able to

A machine can help analyse the transformation for us. But no machine can ever know how it feels to be a person living through this fire in a madhouse. Only another human can understand this, and can commune with us on the basis of that shared understanding.

In times like these, what we need most is each other. That is, we need other people who know how all this feels. Who are living through the same mixture of disorientation, exhilaration, and terror.

This taps into a deep truth. It is this: authentic connection to other people is not an incidental feature of our existence. Rather, it is fundamental. It makes us who, and what, we are. Via other humans, whose mode of being is human like ours, we construct a shared view of the world that is the foundation for the very possibility of meaning. Human fellowship is the ground we stand on.

And that leads to a realisation that, for me, is running deep.

As the machines grow more capable and the fire burns hotter, we’re going to need — and to seek out — human connection with a new urgency. We’ll build communities of all kinds to help us get through this period of growing weirdness. We’ll gather in small groups — around dinner tables, in nature, in corners of the internet where the conversation is real — because the alternative is to face the madhouse alone. And that is intolerable.

The technologies are going to be astonishing. But in the end, they will lead us back to a powerful truth.

That is: that our connection to the given world, and to one another, is sacred. To get through what is coming with intelligent machines, we need to strengthen those bonds. We need to build a Republic of Being Together.

I’ve got some plans on that front. Plans, that is, to build our own Republic of Being Together here at New World Same Humans. I’ll say more in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, be well,

David.

This was #24 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is Everyone Had Tarantism by Joe Roberts

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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World models are having a moment. This week, a quick thought on where they’re taking us.

World models are AI systems that accurately simulate physical reality. How objects move and collide, for example, or how light behaves, or liquid flows. Google DeepMind recently released the astonishing new Genie 3 model; Demis Hassabis calls world models a crucial part of anything we can call true AGI. OpenAI is rumoured to be building a rival. Yann LeCun — Meta's AI chief for years — has left the company to launch his own world model startup.

I recently wrote about all this for Global Macro Investor. My research for that essay kept leading me back to a simple and strange idea. One I want to share here.

Time is, in some deep sense, the ultimate constraint. Everything we want to do — understand, build, create — must happen inside time. Want to run an experiment on a new material? That takes time. Want to train a robot to navigate new spaces? You let it fail over and again; that takes a lot of time. You’re trying to discover a new therapeutic molecule? You run experiments for months, or years.

Time is the container for all human effort. And it’s the medium we can’t escape. Everyone has the same 24 hours.

But now, that can change. World models can simulate physical reality with increasing accuracy. And when you can simulate reality, you can run thousands of realities at once. The result is massive acceleration. A century of robot training, compressed into a week. A decade of materials science, compressed into an afternoon. A thousand crash tests, done in an hour.

DeepMind's Genie 3 can generate playable, interactive 3D worlds from a single text description. Describe the video game you want, and it's ready to play. But these worlds can also be used as simulated realities, in which we can do all kinds of science; DeepMind is already using these new worlds as environments in which to train next-generation robots.

What’s happening here? At some deep level, it’s this: we are learning how to convert energy and compute into time. World models are machines for generating synthetic time. They do that by allowing us to create multiple realities that we can run in parallel. We can then mine those realities for knowledge, and import it back into this world.

In other words: world models are a lever on time.

We’ve always known that energy can be converted into other things. Heat, light, motion. Now add time to the list. This can mean explosive progress in everything from drug discovery to robotics to materials science. So many processes can be accelerated.

As so often when it comes to what is made possible my machine intelligence, the challenge will be our ability to process all this.

When we can play out 1,000 years of physical reality in a few minutes, what deep patterns become available to us? How do we find the time to explore them all? Will we even be able to understand them? Or will the machines simply do that part for us, too?

This was #23 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is a print by the 20th-century Japanese artist Hiroshi Yoshida.

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Last week Sam Altman stood before a room of infrastructure investors and described a future in which intelligence is a utility. People will buy it on a meter, he said, like electricity or water. He even borrowed an old phrase from the nuclear age: intelligence, he said, will one day be too cheap to meter.

We’ve come to expect clever rhetoric from Altman, and this was another example. He was speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, and telling the room exactly what it wanted to hear: that intelligence is becoming infrastructure, and that infrastructure is a thing you can build, own, and bill for.

His statement taps into a framework I’ve been developing for a few years now. I call it AI as electricity, AI as magic. The core idea is that machine intelligence will manifest in two fundamentally different ways. On one side, AI becomes something akin to a new form of energy: a commodity fuel that powers everything happening in the future taking shape around us. On the other, AI becomes a kind of magic: tools, services, and experiences that are so useful, so context-aware, and so adapted to us that they feel like they work by enchantment.

Altman’s vision of intelligence on the meter maps neatly onto the electricity side. And there’s something real here. Intelligence really is becoming an abundant resource that flows through everything. It will power the agents doing our knowledge work, the robots stacking our shelves, the cars driving on our streets. It will seep into a billion connected objects.

But there’s a problem for OpenAI. One that becomes easier to see via the AI as electricity, AI as magic framework. The electricity business is a commodity business. There are now a host of powerful AI models — Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek, Anthropic’s Claude, and more — and they are all good enough to do most of what anyone needs. If you’re simply selling access to intelligence, you’re locked in a race to the bottom on price. That’s a brutal place to be.

The real winners of the intelligence revolution will be those who deliver AI magic. That means leveraging intelligence to build tools that serve people in powerful ways. Think apps that know your context, anticipate your needs, and act on your behalf. Or an Everything Companion that acts as an everyday assistant, counsellor, and philosopher to you. Magic requires not just a model, but a deep relationship with users — an understanding of their contexts, behaviours, and preferences — and the ability to distribute at massive scale.

OpenAI knows all this. The $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive’s io is a bet on a magical kind of AI experience via hardware and product design. See, also, last month’s acqui-hire of Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, the viral AI agent that does things on your behalf. It’s another attempt to vault from the electricity side of the ledger to the magic side.

But here’s the thing. OpenAI is competing against Alphabet, which has unmatched distribution via Search, Android, Gmail, Maps, and YouTube, and near-unlimited resources. It’s competing against Apple, which owns the device in your pocket. These companies already have deep, daily relationships with billions of humans.

When you understand the quest for AI magic that the world’s leading technology companies are engaged in now, you see that OpenAI, for all its fame, faces a challenging future. I certainly wouldn’t write Altman off; he’s proven himself canny, determined, and ruthless. His challenge, now, is to turn electricity into magic.

This was #22 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is Magic Fish (1925) by the Swiss-German painter Paul Klee.

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What can technology do for us? For decades now, one of the most prominent answers has been: it can deliver us into more free time. As we all know, Keynes imagined a 15-hour work week. The futurists of the 1960s pictured a Jetsons-style civilisation of leisure.

I think about this promise a lot at the moment. I spend most of my work time researching, thinking, and writing. And if you do this kind of work or many adjacent kinds of knowledge work — and I know that plenty of you do — then you’ve just been handed an absurdly powerful productivity tool.

I don’t know about you, but I can report from my own personal front line: the leisured life has not arrived. In fact, quite the opposite.

I use LLMs every day, and across the last few months — since the launch of Opus 4.5 — the outputs have astonished me. I don’t want AI to write my work, of course. But I can research a topic, spar with a great thinking partner, and outline a complex argument at a pace that would have seemed impossible even two years ago. I should be finishing by lunchtime and spending my afternoons playing tennis, right?

Instead, I’m working harder than ever.

So what’s going on? The problem, paradoxically, is that the models now work so well. When I wake up and realise I can now produce a research note that would once have taken a week, I don’t think: wonderful, I’ll take the rest of the week off. I think: what else can I do? I could respond to that essay, write that thread, build that dashboard, explore that idea. The sheer expansion of what’s possible creates a kind of obligation to pursue it.

This is the strange secret of the productivity revolution. I’m starting to suspect that the tools won’t liberate us from work; instead, and in many cases, they’ll become a vector for lots more work, because they’ll reveal how much output was previously left on the table. Every hour of effort now yields so much more that it feels wasteful not to invest it. The opportunity cost of rest has gone vertical.

I feel this acutely, and I know I’m not alone. Friends in technology, media, and finance are all saying the same. There is a sense of being supercharged, exhilarated even; and also, somehow, more pressed for time than ever before.

I know that this is a limited sample. And that it’s all drawn from people doing a certain kind of cognitive work. Still, there’s something deep here, I think. Something about the psychology of abundance that we haven’t reckoned with. We assumed that when certain constraints fell away — when it became possible to produce more knowledge work in a day, or a week — we’d relax. But I think it turns out that, often, humans don’t respond to the lifting of constraints by doing less. Instead, we push back the horizon of our ambitions.

So far, for me at least, the arrival of Intelligence Age isn’t a story about having more time. It’s a story about having more capability and becoming obsessed with using it. In the end, this feels a continuation of an ongoing trend. The internet changed the way we work, but no one thinks it helped us to work less hard. Phones certainly didn’t.

Perhaps this is what it means to be a creature wired by evolution to strive, now equipped with weird new superpowers. The technologies change; the restlessness remains. New world, same humans.

This was #21 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is Mean Time Exposure by the New Zealand artist Brent Wong.

One of the projects that’s been keeping me busy? It’s Full Moon, the strategy, trends, and futures thinking service I launched recently with Mark Curtis.

Mark, the former Global Head of Thought Leadership at Accenture, just published a brilliant essay on the human quest for relevance and what it means for brands and businesses. If you’re trying to craft products, services, campaigns and more that people love, you need to read this:

Take me to the article

Watch out for some exciting announcements on Full Moon!

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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In the 20th-century, we realised that nature was in trouble.

We didn’t come to that realisation suddenly. It happened slowly, then all at once. People noticed that the local river was dying. That birds and fish were vanishing. That the air in their city was becoming unbreathable. For a long time, most did nothing. This was the price of progress.

But eventually, a critical mass of people looked at what was being lost and said: no. These people realised that we were about to lose central features of the world that was given to us, and that once lost those features would never come back.

And so the conservation movement was born. It became one of the defining moral commitments of the last few decades. We built institutions around it. We changed laws. We shifted the way our cultures thought about our relationship to the natural world.

I think we’re about to enact a similar process. Only this time, the precious entity that needs conserving isn’t nature. It’s us.

We humans are under threat from emerging technologies of vast and transformative power. I don’t mean threatened in the way we keep hearing about these days; that is, in an existential way. I’m not one of those who believes that AI will soon turn us all into paperclips. I mean something more nuanced than that. My contention is this: the technologies emerging now pose a deep challenge to everyday human ways of living and being, and to the the organically-evolved norms and institutions that have long shaped our lives.

At the heart of this threat is the rise of superintelligent machines.

AI is, for example, about to reshape the job in a violent way. Not in the way previous technologies reshaped it — by automating physical tasks — but by colonising cognitive and creative territory we assumed was ours. It is reshaping the media we consume; already we are drowning in algorithmically-served content that targets our impulses with unhuman precision. It is beginning to reshape our most intimate relationships. The AI companion — endlessly patient, always available — is arriving. It will be the most potent form of synthetic intimacy ever created. There is someone reading this whose child will tell them, ten years from now: I’m dating an AI, and I want you to be happy for us.

I could go on. And these are just the early tremors. The end game here is far deeper. In the end, these technologies pose a threat even to the human person itself, and to the uniquely human way of seeing the world. A growing faction — often found in Silicon Valley and adjacent communities — now seriously propose that we should soon merge with our machines, and become something else. Something, as they see it, more.

These people want to push us beyond the limits of biology, and the constraints of the body. Beyond, in the end, the condition of being a human at all.

That position is becoming increasingly influential. But it won’t be left unchallenged. An all-consuming battle is coming between those who seek technology-fuelled transcendence, and those who utterly reject that vision of our shared future. Those who want to remain resolutely human. Who believe that mortality, embodiment, and the whole package that is our messy, organic existence is not a limitation to be transcended but something precious that must be protected. These people will scream back: it is our limits that make us what we are.

Those people don’t yet know they are a movement. But soon enough, that awareness will emerge. Because they will come to recognise that they share a common cause: it is conservation. The conservation of the human way of living and seeing the world amid the rise of new, machinic realities.

We built a conservation movement around the natural world. We did it because we saw that something irreplaceable was under threat from the white-hot fire that is technological modernity, a force that seems to melt everything in its path.

In so many ways, that was just a trial run. What we’ll fight for next is the conservation of the human. It’s now clear that the first conservation movement was not an overwhelming success. Let’s see how we do with this one.

This was #20 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is She Did Not Turn (1974) by the British painter David Inshaw.

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Over the Christmas break I wrote a long essay on AI and education for Global Macro Investor.

My research for that essay sent me back to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And particularly to his famous treatise on education: Emile

Rousseau wrote Emile in 1762, just as modernity was heaving into life. The printing press was remaking culture. Rapid urbanisation was underway: his adopted city of Paris was growing fast and would soon reach 600,000 people. Early commercial capitalism was taking hold; the city was becoming a world of freely trading artisans, merchants, and hustlers serving a newly-emerging consumer class. And the culture was in a deep state of flux, too. Ancient sources of wisdom — primarily that meant the Bible and adjacent religious texts — were being challenged by the new power of the scientific method.

The old rules were being shattered. Everything seemed up for grabs. No one knew where the vast technological and economic forces being unleashed might take humanity.

Sound familiar?

Rousseau watched it all. And he brought it all to bear on his thinking about education.

His deepest concern wasn’t classroom tactics. It was, rather, around a set of deeper questions. What does it mean to be a human being inside this version of modernity? What gifts does technological change give us, and what shadow costs does it impose? How do we shape people able to remain authentically free, and authentically human, in the fullest sense?

These are exactly the questions we face now, as intelligent machines arrive.

To answer these questions, Rousseau invented the idea of childhood. That is, the idea that childhood is a legitimate lifestage in its own right, with both its own imperatives and profound consequences for the rest of life. And he criticised the way children were prematurely forced into adult modes of thinking. It was wrong, he said to force-feed children facts, abstract principles, and rational techniques before they’d had a chance to ground any of it in lived experience. The result was a hollow parody of real thought. Children educated in this way, he said, performed a kind of empty ventriloquism, repeating correct answers without understanding them.

AI vastly accelerates our capacity to make this mistake.

It outputs a constant stream of fluent explanations, frameworks, and answers. The danger is that we immerse children in these outputs before they can make sense of them. They might remember the answers. They might get good at generating similar ones. But we’ll be creating the appearance of thought rather than the reality.

My instinct: for the youngest children, minimal AI. We don’t want them locked onto screens in dialogue with unhuman forms of intelligence. We want them talking to each other and to human teachers. Learning to attend. Learning to listen. Learning to see themselves as sites of rational and creative judgement.

This reminds me of the attitude that Steve Jobs famously took to his own inventions when it came to children. When asked how his children liked the iPad, he explained that they hadn’t used one. We don’t really spend time at home using those devices, he said. We talk to one another about art and history.

As for older children, the current conversation about AI and education tends to revolve around tactical questions. How do we stop students using AI to do their homework? How do we teach them to use AI tools, and which ones? How do we prepare them for the jobs that will be left once AI eats most knowledge work? Will there be any jobs left?

These questions matter. But they are downstream of deeper and more important ones. The kind Rousseau wanted to answer. What kind of society do we want to forge? What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? What does it mean to be a whole human being?

Rousseau’s greatest insight was the realisation that any meaningful thinking on education is always downstream of an underlying theory of the human. Before we can answer how to educate, we must answer: what kind of human beings are we trying to create?

Via the rise of intelligent machines — machines that seem to be colonising territory we once thought belonged only to we humans — we now face that question anew. And it’s becoming urgent. As intelligent machines enter the picture, we must ask: what is a human being? How do we remain authentically free amid the conditions that are emerging now?

Rousseau’s gift to us is the insight that education is the operating system for humanity inside conditions of civilisational rupture. What we need now is nothing less than a rethinking of human ways of living and being in an age of intelligent machines. An account of what remains distinctly ours when superintelligence arrives. An articulation of what about we humans is worth preserving, and why.

In other words, to figure out education, we must first figure out us. Let’s get to work.

This was #19 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH.

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Last year I began a series of Postcards from the New World, which I know proved popular with many readers. They’ve been on a pause for a while, but this instalment marks their reintroduction. Expect a postcard in your inbox every Sunday from now on.

Here’s the question underneath all the anxiety about AI and its implications for us: what is a human being for?

If the deepest point of human beings is to be good at maths and science, then soon there will be no point of us. If the point is to be efficient creators of economic value, likewise. If our existence is about being smart or knowing things, likewise. If any of that is the end-goal point of being human, then soon we may as well hand over to the machines wholesale.

Under that view of the human, we are defunct. Our time is over.

In the end, almost no one believes that. Even people who claim they do would find, if they looked deeper inside themselves, that they don’t.

So what is special about us? Why are we humans worth saving?

I keep coming back to a simple but arresting truth: a machine can never be a human being. It can be smarter than us. A more efficient economic actor. More productive. It can eat pretty much every domain of intellectual activity. But the one thing it can’t do? It can never participate in the unique, peculiarly human way of seeing the world that is ours.

We are part of a community of language bearers who make reference to a uniquely human kind of subjective experience. Our personhood is entangled with that community of shared meaning. That is to say: we are human persons because of and through our immersion in a community of other humans who see us as such.

The specifically human way of seeing: that’s what is unique about us. That, alone, is what can never be colonised by other beings. That is what we must lean into.

Once we understand this, truly understand it, the implications are vast. We come to understand that if we try to train ourselves to compete with intelligent machines, or even to be only optimised users of them, we are playing the wrong game. We are setting out on a highway towards human obsolescence. Across any domain of intellectual activity that can be made legible to a machine, we simply will not be able to compete with superintelligence.

We must cultivate something else. And that starts with coming to understand that our deepest value comes not via knowing stuff, or being smart, but via membership of a community that shares a unique — and so uniquely precious — way of seeing.

Yes, intelligent machines will soon supersede us in a whole range of ways. But we are still the creatures who created, and listen to, the Brandenburg Concertos. Who read Shakespeare. Who marvel at nature. Who can say to one another: I know how you feel.

Perhaps in time, and via the new machine lifeforms we seem to be creating now, the world in which all that happens may indeed pass into history. But we don’t have to embrace that outcome, or hasten it. We can fight for the human way of seeing. And if we fight, I think we’ll find a way through.

This was #18 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is Crescent Blue (2023) by the American generative artist Emily Xie.

A few days ago, I published a new essay over at Full Moon. It starts like this:

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a theme park so compelling, one that delivers such a powerful form of magic, that you’d be happy to stay there for the rest of your life.

This theme park knows you so well. It listens to everything you say, and watches every choice you make.

The park never forgets. It knows your history, every ride you’ve been on, every snack you’ve consumed. And over time it builds a model not just of what you’ve done, but of who you are; the deep, underlying beliefs, values, and preferences that drive your behaviour. It even uses sensors and AI to interpret your eye movements and your pulse, so it knows when you’re excited, bored, or sad.

And via all that, the park can anticipate your every desire. It sometimes seems to know what you want even before you do. And then it delivers: endlessly, and instantly, without you ever having to ask. You never wait in line. You never feel frustrated. The next novelty will always be announced, just as the last falls away. Everything just flows.

It’s almost like a waking dream.

Now look up from the screen. This isn’t a thought experiment. You’re already in the park. You have been for years. And you know it.

From there, the essay builds an argument. That is, that we inhabitants of technological modernity now live inside an all-encompassing machine for the instant satisfaction of our every preference, impulse, and whim. Algorithms, delivery networks, streaming platforms, AI assistants: all working ceaselessly to serve us. Consumer culture sold this to us as ultimate freedom. Have what you want, when you want it.

But lately a strange feeling has grown acute. Our deep fear is that we’ve become something akin to zombies, mindlessly wandering a theme park of endless consumption. Scrolling, clicking, tapping our way from one dopamine hit to the next. Never quite experiencing any of it.

Here’s the thing, though. Something is shifting. In 2026, the zombies — that means me, you, all of us — are waking up. And that has profound consequences for businesses, brands, and creative and knowledge work professionals.

If this sounds intriguing, I hope you’ll head over to Full Moon to read the essay. A preview is available for free; the full piece is for paying members.

Take Me to the Essay

A subscription to Full Moon is £15 a month, or £150 for a year. You’ll be part of a growing community of founders, corporate leaders, marketers, consultants, designers, strategists, creatives and more who have joined our journey of exploration and understanding.

If you’re trying to build products, services, and experiences that matter in 2026, I think you’ll find great value in the subscription.

Thanks for reading,

David.

Welcome to this special update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 30,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

Subscribe now

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a little quiet around here recently, but that’s all about to change.

And to get us started, here’s an essay of mine that I think will be right up your street. This essay was published in The Exponentialist, the technology-focused research service I founded with Raoul Pal. It went to those readers a while back, and it really struck a chord; it’s still one of the essays I get asked about most often. The ideas in it remain deeply relevant as 2026 gets underway.

This piece is called What Do I Tell My Children? It’s about navigating the wildly new future that intelligent machines are building around us.

Enjoy!

Introduction

My working life consists of lots of research and a ton of writing. That’s the part you see here in The Exponentialist.

But in addition to that, for years now I’ve done a lot of public speaking. The year just passed was no different. Among others, I went to speak to the C-suite of a UK-based challenger bank. To the C-suite of a high street health and wellness retailer. And to the marketing team at a global media network.

And they all had one request: talk to us about AI.

That was no surprise; it’s been this way for the last three years or so, ever since the ChatGPT moment. Every business is struggling with the same questions: what does AI mean for us? How can our people put it to work? How will it change our customers?

These are the questions I address when I speak.

But at the end of these talks the same thing happens; almost infallibly. I take some questions, and then there’s a pause. Amid the silence, someone will tentatively raise their hand, as though they are unsure whether they’re allowed to do what they are doing. And then they’ll say something like this:

‘That was all very interesting. But having listened to your vision of what is coming, I’m deeply worried.

I’m the parent of an eight-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy. My head is spinning on what this world is going to mean for them. If AI is going to be as powerful as you say, if it’s going to do so much of the work currently done by humans, if AIs are going to start businesses, and discover new scientific theories, and run financial markets, what role does this leave for my children? What kind of career are they going to pursue? What kind of life can they build? What am I supposed to tell them?’

Across the last 20 talks I’ve given, I’ve got some version of this question almost every time.

That’s totally understandable. I know firsthand: once you have an inkling of the vast changes that are coming, then as a parent it’s impossible not to have deep concerns.

And, of course, you don’t have to be a parent to be worried about these issues. The AI revolution is unfolding at lightspeed; if you plan to be alive ten years from now, then it’s going to have a profound effect on your working life, too. You’ll be asking: where is all this going? How will it affect me? What can I do to prepare?

Many of us are old enough to remember — just about — a form of working life and attendant social conditions that have now passed into history. I mean the form of life that is latent in a picture such as this:

We all know what a picture such as this signifies.

That is, the age of the prosperous middle class existence built on one ordinary salary. The corporate job for life; one in which ageing middle managers were not booted out as soon as they stopped being productive, but instead eased respectfully towards retirement in their early 60s. A retirement, by the way, funded by a generous pension that would allow them to maintain their standard of living.

That world, as we all know, is already long gone.

But what fewer people understand is that change is coming that will make that transformation look small indeed. Pretty soon, the working lives and attendant social conditions that exist now will seem as archaic as those in the picture above. And that will be just the start.

Nevertheless, I am fundamentally optimistic about what is coming.

We humans are fantastically adaptable. Each of us is a wellspring of infinite, insatiable wanting. And there are many things we’ll always want from each other. These three truths will form the basis of a new kind of economy. Yes, it will be an economy that is changed beyond all recognition — one we’d barely recognise as an economy now. But even in that new world, there will be many ways for humans to create and exchange value with one another.

So there will still be opportunities for your children — and your future self — to carve out a meaningful working life, and to build a wider life of joy and purpose. It will just all look much different to the typical careers, and routes through life, that we’ve lived through across the last 30 years or so.

In this essay, I want to go deeper on how I see all this playing out.

So this is my first properly codified, longform answer to the question I’m asked most often by the senior professionals I speak to: what do I tell my children? Remember if you have no children, the principles I’m about to lay out will still be deeply useful to you. Either for when you do become a parent, or as you plan the next five, ten, or 20 years of your life.

I’ve cultivated seven core principles to help prepare children for the coming Exponential Age.

But before I dive into them, I want to take a minute to define the challenge those principles address. That is, to define the set of conditions that I believe is coming.

The Coming Economic Singularity

We’re talking, in this essay, about how to prepare our children for what lies ahead with AI. So before we get into how to do that, we need to be sure we have some shared sense of a prior question: what, exactly, lies ahead?

After many essays, we’re all steeped in Exponential Age thinking. So I’ll keep this brief — a reminder of the AI-fuelled world that I have been writing about here for two years and more.

One glimpse of the world that is coming? Look at the results people are achieving with Claude Code. Look back, even, to OpenAI’s o3 model, released in December 2024. It can solve problems included in the Frontier Math Benchmark, a test designed to test AI models against the bleeding edge of mathematics. These are problems so hard that no ordinary person can come close to understanding them, let alone offering a solution.

In short, it seems likely now that we’re at the foothills of superintelligence — and something we can meaningfully call AGI — within the next five years. Perhaps far sooner.

What does that world look like? For our purposes, three major pieces of the puzzle are relevant:

• AI is capable of performing 99% of the cognitive and knowledge work currently performed by people. We have near-infinite, superhuman knowledge workers.

• AI is at the intellectual frontier. It is making new discoveries in science, maths, engineering, and tech, and transforming our view of the world around us. But we are struggling to understand much of what AI is uncovering.

• AI can converse like a person (this has pretty much happened already) and autonomously perform complex and longrange tasks. Billions of people run their lives through an AI virtual companion that knows all about their tastes, preferences, and lifestyle.

I’ve written about a coming Economic Singularity. These three realities will form a key part of it. They will fuel change so vast it is hard for us, now, to envision what lies on the other side.

AIs will build startups in a day, launch tokens, take profits, and disappear. AIs will transact with other AIs. Big corporations — Accenture, Unilever, Disney and the like — will have vastly reduced need for human knowledge workers and creative talent. It goes on and on.

At some point — and this could happen quite suddenly — we’ll wake into a world in which all the old models and frameworks we’ve to make sense of the economy simply no longer function. We won’t exist in anything we currently recognise as an economy.

This famous image from Wait But Why captures something of the essence of what we’re talking about:

This is the vision that so worries the professionals I speak to.

It is a vision of a world utterly changed — in all kinds of ways. But when these professionals raise their hand and ask about the implications of all this for their children, it’s the career and economic implications specifically that they are asking about. The seven principles I’m about to lay out, then, focus on that. But everything, of course, impacts everything else, so via my seven principles I’ll also touch on broader social and personal implications of what lies ahead.

Okay, we’ve laid sufficient groundwork. Let’s get into it.

Designs for Life

Yes, vast change is coming. But amid it all, we can still help to prepare our children and our future selves.

Put these principles into action, and I believe you’ll build skills, behaviours, and attitudes that will empower your child to flourish in the new world that is coming.

The principles, of course, cannot be foolproof or comprehensive. They are my best early attempts to address a challenge that is in its early days, and evolving fast. I try to apply them as best I can as I raise my own children — twin 11-year-old boys — here in the UK.

I’ll lay out the principles one by one, and along the way we’ll develop a picture of the world I believe is coming.

Given the people I speak to and the nature of our economy, these principles are weighted somewhat towards parents who imagine a knowledge work future for their children. Many argue that in a world of AI, manual tasks — think gardening, or plumbing, or physical therapies — will skyrocket in value. There may be some truth in that in the short term. But given the pace at which humanoid robots are advancing it seems to me that the future of gardeners is also not clear.

So I’ve tried to develop principles that can provide a foundation to build on, whichever direction your child takes in the end.

1. Build your child a surfboard

This one is simple, but deserves some space.

At the deepest level, the challenges our children will deal with as they hit the labour market are twofold. They are lightspeed change fuelled by technology, and attendant deep uncertainty.

AI will be transforming the economy. No one will fully understand what is happening. No one will know how it is all going to turn out. In this environment, our children will need to draw on immense reserves of adaptability and resilience. So we need to cultivate those virtues now. This is the most common advice given when it comes to how to prepare children for the age of AI. But it’s true.

In the old economy, we told children to develop one set of professional skills and expertise — in law, say, or medicine — and then to deploy those skills and expect a secure career as a result. In the world that’s coming — in which AI does the work of millions of lawyers, doctors, consultants, and more — that route will be available to very few.

Instead, far more knowledge and creative workers will be independent or freelance, seeking their own opportunities, moving from project to project. And wave after wave of technological and social change will continue to disrupt the ways in which those workers can bring value to others.

So those workers will need to be able to shapeshift, to spot ways to deliver value, to create opportunities for themselves, and to rapidly learn the skills needed to deliver.

Think of the old economy as a bit like driving a car. You learn to drive once, and then you set off down the road. You get a better car every so often, so as you go you can drive faster. But fundamentally, you’re driving down the same kind of road and it will carry you to the end of the journey.

The new economy will be much more like surfing. Opportunities will rise and fall like waves (I’ll say more later on what those opportunities will look like). You’ll need the ability to spot a wave when it is coming, to discern its nature, and then — if it’s the right wave for you — to ride it. You can’t know in advance when a wave will come, or what it will be like. You need to be flexible, and ready to ride.

So how do we cultivate this kind of flexibility and resilience in children?

Part of the answer lies in very familiar parenting advice. Build emotional security in and around your child, such that they feel they have permission to take an exploratory view of life: to experiment, fail, and try again (more on failure later). I know what you’re thinking: every parent strives to build these foundations — it’s easier said than done. But in the new economy that’s coming, these virtues will be crucial.

A more straightforward tactic: talk to your children often about the kind of working lives I’m outlining here, and the age of AI more broadly. Make them understand that the kind of single-track careers they see on TV or hear about in school — the kind that many of us have had — aren’t really going to exist in the future they’re heading into.

I talk to my children a lot about my existence as an independent researcher and writer on technology, surfing the waves I find, and building my own opportunities. Not (only) because I like to Bore Them Into Submission With Stories About Dad, but because I think it’s highly likely that they’ll have a similar kind of independent, wave-surfing working life.

Think of all this as building a surfboard for your child.

Fundamental to the kind of adaptability our children will need is the ability and appetite to always be learning. Surfing the waves that rise and fall will mean rapidly learning new skills.

And on that front…

There are six more principles in the full essay, including Teach your child to speak human, and Let your child lean into their weirdness. To keep reading for free, just click through to the version of this essay that stands online:

Keep Reading Online

Welcome to this special update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 30,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

Subscribe now

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a little quiet around here recently, but that’s all about to change.

And to get us started, here’s an essay of mine that I think will be right up your street. This essay was published in The Exponentialist, the technology-focused research service I founded with Raoul Pal. It went to those readers a while back, and it really struck a chord; it’s still one of the essays I get asked about most often. The ideas in it remain deeply relevant as 2026 gets underway.

This piece is called What Do I Tell My Children? It’s about navigating the wildly new future that intelligent machines are building around us.

Enjoy!

Introduction

My working life consists of lots of research and a ton of writing. That’s the part you see here in The Exponentialist.

But in addition to that, for years now I’ve done a lot of public speaking. The year just passed was no different. Among others, I went to speak to the C-suite of a UK-based challenger bank. To the C-suite of a high street health and wellness retailer. And to the marketing team at a global media network.

And they all had one request: talk to us about AI.

That was no surprise; it’s been this way for the last three years or so, ever since the ChatGPT moment. Every business is struggling with the same questions: what does AI mean for us? How can our people put it to work? How will it change our customers?

These are the questions I address when I speak.

But at the end of these talks the same thing happens; almost infallibly. I take some questions, and then there’s a pause. Amid the silence, someone will tentatively raise their hand, as though they are unsure whether they’re allowed to do what they are doing. And then they’ll say something like this:

‘That was all very interesting. But having listened to your vision of what is coming, I’m deeply worried.

I’m the parent of an eight-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy. My head is spinning on what this world is going to mean for them. If AI is going to be as powerful as you say, if it’s going to do so much of the work currently done by humans, if AIs are going to start businesses, and discover new scientific theories, and run financial markets, what role does this leave for my children? What kind of career are they going to pursue? What kind of life can they build? What am I supposed to tell them?’

Across the last 20 talks I’ve given, I’ve got some version of this question almost every time.

That’s totally understandable. I know firsthand: once you have an inkling of the vast changes that are coming, then as a parent it’s impossible not to have deep concerns.

And, of course, you don’t have to be a parent to be worried about these issues. The AI revolution is unfolding at lightspeed; if you plan to be alive ten years from now, then it’s going to have a profound effect on your working life, too. You’ll be asking: where is all this going? How will it affect me? What can I do to prepare?

Many of us are old enough to remember — just about — a form of working life and attendant social conditions that have now passed into history. I mean the form of life that is latent in a picture such as this:

We all know what a picture such as this signifies.

That is, the age of the prosperous middle class existence built on one ordinary salary. The corporate job for life; one in which ageing middle managers were not booted out as soon as they stopped being productive, but instead eased respectfully towards retirement in their early 60s. A retirement, by the way, funded by a generous pension that would allow them to maintain their standard of living.

That world, as we all know, is already long gone.

But what fewer people understand is that change is coming that will make that transformation look small indeed. Pretty soon, the working lives and attendant social conditions that exist now will seem as archaic as those in the picture above. And that will be just the start.

Nevertheless, I am fundamentally optimistic about what is coming.

We humans are fantastically adaptable. Each of us is a wellspring of infinite, insatiable wanting. And there are many things we’ll always want from each other. These three truths will form the basis of a new kind of economy. Yes, it will be an economy that is changed beyond all recognition — one we’d barely recognise as an economy now. But even in that new world, there will be many ways for humans to create and exchange value with one another.

So there will still be opportunities for your children — and your future self — to carve out a meaningful working life, and to build a wider life of joy and purpose. It will just all look much different to the typical careers, and routes through life, that we’ve lived through across the last 30 years or so.

In this essay, I want to go deeper on how I see all this playing out.

So this is my first properly codified, longform answer to the question I’m asked most often by the senior professionals I speak to: what do I tell my children? Remember if you have no children, the principles I’m about to lay out will still be deeply useful to you. Either for when you do become a parent, or as you plan the next five, ten, or 20 years of your life.

I’ve cultivated seven core principles to help prepare children for the coming Exponential Age.

But before I dive into them, I want to take a minute to define the challenge those principles address. That is, to define the set of conditions that I believe is coming.

The Coming Economic Singularity

We’re talking, in this essay, about how to prepare our children for what lies ahead with AI. So before we get into how to do that, we need to be sure we have some shared sense of a prior question: what, exactly, lies ahead?

After many essays, we’re all steeped in Exponential Age thinking. So I’ll keep this brief — a reminder of the AI-fuelled world that I have been writing about here for two years and more.

One glimpse of the world that is coming? Look at the results people are achieving with Claude Code. Look back, even, to OpenAI’s o3 model, released in December 2024. It can solve problems included in the Frontier Math Benchmark, a test designed to test AI models against the bleeding edge of mathematics. These are problems so hard that no ordinary person can come close to understanding them, let alone offering a solution.

In short, it seems likely now that we’re at the foothills of superintelligence — and something we can meaningfully call AGI — within the next five years. Perhaps far sooner.

What does that world look like? For our purposes, three major pieces of the puzzle are relevant:

• AI is capable of performing 99% of the cognitive and knowledge work currently performed by people. We have near-infinite, superhuman knowledge workers.

• AI is at the intellectual frontier. It is making new discoveries in science, maths, engineering, and tech, and transforming our view of the world around us. But we are struggling to understand much of what AI is uncovering.

• AI can converse like a person (this has pretty much happened already) and autonomously perform complex and longrange tasks. Billions of people run their lives through an AI virtual companion that knows all about their tastes, preferences, and lifestyle.

I’ve written about a coming Economic Singularity. These three realities will form a key part of it. They will fuel change so vast it is hard for us, now, to envision what lies on the other side.

AIs will build startups in a day, launch tokens, take profits, and disappear. AIs will transact with other AIs. Big corporations — Accenture, Unilever, Disney and the like — will have vastly reduced need for human knowledge workers and creative talent. It goes on and on.

At some point — and this could happen quite suddenly — we’ll wake into a world in which all the old models and frameworks we’ve to make sense of the economy simply no longer function. We won’t exist in anything we currently recognise as an economy.

This famous image from Wait But Why captures something of the essence of what we’re talking about:

This is the vision that so worries the professionals I speak to.

It is a vision of a world utterly changed — in all kinds of ways. But when these professionals raise their hand and ask about the implications of all this for their children, it’s the career and economic implications specifically that they are asking about. The seven principles I’m about to lay out, then, focus on that. But everything, of course, impacts everything else, so via my seven principles I’ll also touch on broader social and personal implications of what lies ahead.

Okay, we’ve laid sufficient groundwork. Let’s get into it.

Designs for Life

Yes, vast change is coming. But amid it all, we can still help to prepare our children and our future selves.

Put these principles into action, and I believe you’ll build skills, behaviours, and attitudes that will empower your child to flourish in the new world that is coming.

The principles, of course, cannot be foolproof or comprehensive. They are my best early attempts to address a challenge that is in its early days, and evolving fast. I try to apply them as best I can as I raise my own children — twin 11-year-old boys — here in the UK.

I’ll lay out the principles one by one, and along the way we’ll develop a picture of the world I believe is coming.

Given the people I speak to and the nature of our economy, these principles are weighted somewhat towards parents who imagine a knowledge work future for their children. Many argue that in a world of AI, manual tasks — think gardening, or plumbing, or physical therapies — will skyrocket in value. There may be some truth in that in the short term. But given the pace at which humanoid robots are advancing it seems to me that the future of gardeners is also not clear.

So I’ve tried to develop principles that can provide a foundation to build on, whichever direction your child takes in the end.

1. Build your child a surfboard

This one is simple, but deserves some space.

At the deepest level, the challenges our children will deal with as they hit the labour market are twofold. They are lightspeed change fuelled by technology, and attendant deep uncertainty.

AI will be transforming the economy. No one will fully understand what is happening. No one will know how it is all going to turn out. In this environment, our children will need to draw on immense reserves of adaptability and resilience. So we need to cultivate those virtues now. This is the most common advice given when it comes to how to prepare children for the age of AI. But it’s true.

In the old economy, we told children to develop one set of professional skills and expertise — in law, say, or medicine — and then to deploy those skills and expect a secure career as a result. In the world that’s coming — in which AI does the work of millions of lawyers, doctors, consultants, and more — that route will be available to very few.

Instead, far more knowledge and creative workers will be independent or freelance, seeking their own opportunities, moving from project to project. And wave after wave of technological and social change will continue to disrupt the ways in which those workers can bring value to others.

So those workers will need to be able to shapeshift, to spot ways to deliver value, to create opportunities for themselves, and to rapidly learn the skills needed to deliver.

Think of the old economy as a bit like driving a car. You learn to drive once, and then you set off down the road. You get a better car every so often, so as you go you can drive faster. But fundamentally, you’re driving down the same kind of road and it will carry you to the end of the journey.

The new economy will be much more like surfing. Opportunities will rise and fall like waves (I’ll say more later on what those opportunities will look like). You’ll need the ability to spot a wave when it is coming, to discern its nature, and then — if it’s the right wave for you — to ride it. You can’t know in advance when a wave will come, or what it will be like. You need to be flexible, and ready to ride.

So how do we cultivate this kind of flexibility and resilience in children?

Part of the answer lies in very familiar parenting advice. Build emotional security in and around your child, such that they feel they have permission to take an exploratory view of life: to experiment, fail, and try again (more on failure later). I know what you’re thinking: every parent strives to build these foundations — it’s easier said than done. But in the new economy that’s coming, these virtues will be crucial.

A more straightforward tactic: talk to your children often about the kind of working lives I’m outlining here, and the age of AI more broadly. Make them understand that the kind of single-track careers they see on TV or hear about in school — the kind that many of us have had — aren’t really going to exist in the future they’re heading into.

I talk to my children a lot about my existence as an independent researcher and writer on technology, surfing the waves I find, and building my own opportunities. Not (only) because I like to Bore Them Into Submission With Stories About Dad, but because I think it’s highly likely that they’ll have a similar kind of independent, wave-surfing working life.

Think of all this as building a surfboard for your child.

Fundamental to the kind of adaptability our children will need is the ability and appetite to always be learning. Surfing the waves that rise and fall will mean rapidly learning new skills.

And on that front…

2. Encourage your child to tinker with AI

Who will be the best learners in the Age of Intelligence? The answer: those able to leverage AI to supercharge their learning.

So a broad-based education for your child should include building familiarity with AI knowledge tools in their current incarnation. ChatGPT is a great place to start.

Don’t get hung up on them learning the ins and outs of ChatGPT itself, or any particular AI tool. They will all change. The idea here is to embed in them a deep appreciation of what becomes possible when they use AI as a thought and learning partner. When, in other words, they bring their own intelligence and creativity into collision with machine intelligence.

Set your child up to explore ChatGPT or another powerful LLM-based app. Let them go wherever they want with it: learning to code, writing stories, exploring the past, researching gadgets to buy, whatever. The subject matter is not important. What’s important is that they build a relationship with AI as a thought and learning partner.

The LLMs we have now are incredibly powerful learning tools. No one in my house can code (I can manage a few lines of Python). But my son Leo is teaching himself to code using ChatGPT, and it’s been incredible watching it happen. To my initial surprise, it’s really worked.

Here he is learning the input function:

Don’t worry, it’s not all as educational as this. Examine the chat logs and they reveal that later the conversation took a different turn:

That’s 11-year-old boys for you.

I doubt that Leo will end up using much of the coding he’s learning now. AIs will do the coding for us. But learning to code is still great for your brain. And, crucially, he’s getting a powerful lesson in what he can learn when he harnesses the power of AI.

All this goes even beyond being a great lifelong learner. Cultivating the right relationship with AI will be central to carving out a successful working life for most in the Exponential Age.

Many people right now — including many educationalists — are keen to keep children away from AI tools such as ChatGPT. They worry that these tools will encourage children to be lazy — to expect to push a button and get the answer, no thought required. Of course, we don’t want that.

But what we do want is to encourage children to see how AI can supercharge their own thinking, learning, and outputs. The message to them is: use AI, but bring yourself and your unique creativity and ideas to the party. Few schools will deliver that message effectively, but you can do it at home.

In the new economy returns will flow to those who do just this. This brings me to a central feature of the new world that is coming; one you need to understand, and make your child understand:

Everyone will have access to AI tools. The outputs produced by these tools will be tap water: they will be ubiquitous and without market value. At the same time, very few people will be able to create outputs better than those created by AIs. So the only standout and valued work — intellectual, creative, analytical, and so on — will come from people and AIs working together. In other words, it will come from those people best able to coax the best outputs from AI and enhance those outputs with their unique perspectives.

Cultivate this in your child.

I know what you’re thinking: but pretty soon, according to you, AIs will be SO much better than us at everything that human involvement will make no difference! They’ll have totally eclipsed anything we can do, or anything we can add! What then!?

Yes, true. But remember, even in that world humans will still prize outputs produced by other humans. We care about other people, what they’re doing, how they’re thinking and feeling — and that is a deeply embedded part of our nature. It won’t go away.

In all this we can glimpse far broader truths about the post-Economic Singularity world. Let me turn to those truths now.

3. Teach your child to speak human

This one is vital. It’s the centre of gravity around which all my other principles orbit.

We’ve established the idea that much knowledge work currently done by people — all those consultants, managers, investors, bureaucrats and more — will eventually be done by AI. All through history, intelligence has been scarce: the preserve of we humans. In the new world, intelligence will be abundant and on tap. That is head spinning.

The central question we must ask ourselves, then, is this: when intelligent machines can turn pretty much every domain of human intellectual activity into replicable technique, what remains to us?

The answer is: it remains to us to do the things that a machine can never do. And what a machine can never do, quite simply, is to be a human being. One that truly sees us, shares in our experiences, and understands how we feel.

We humans are deeply social creatures, intertwined with one another at a fundamental level. We need the presence and understanding of others — we need what Hegel called recognition from our fellow humans — in order to develop a coherent sense of self and function in a society. We need status, friendship, empathy. Even in the age of AGI, that aspect of our shared nature is not going to change.

And my big takeaway from all that? Much more of the economy will shift towards the serving of these higher-order human needs.

In other words, much more of the economy will shift towards services where being a person is an inherent part of the service being performed.

In practice, this will mean activities such as counselling and life guidance — in a huge variety of guises. The creation of all kinds of art and entertainment. And roles that rely on embodied and human characteristics, such as charisma, persuasiveness, and gravitas.

Think about it: even if a superintelligent AI were available now, if you were worried, say, about your child’s behaviour, you’d want to speak to a human about that. You’d want someone who understands how it feels to be experiencing this challenge. Someone who has lived through it, and can speak from experience. Only another person can do this.

Equally, we’ll always want art and entertainment created by others who understand how it feels to be a human being — a fellow person, sharing an experience of these times with us. Even in an age of AGI, people will still want to be fans of other people. They will still want someone they can look to and say: I love X, he’s so funny/cool/good looking, I love his take on the world, he really understands me.

I’m not saying everyone is going to be some kind of online influencer or entertainer in the commonly understood sense.

Rather, there are near-infinite ways in which people will deliver counsel, guidance, empathy, and entertainment to highly niche communities and audiences. We’ll create new jobs around all this, with value exchange around activities that until now have been considered incidental.

Let me give an example…

Think about the process of buying a house, and the role that lawyers play in that process. Pretty soon an AI will handle the endless paperwork and legal technicalities. There will be no need, then, for all those mid-rank conveyancing lawyers. The economy around house buying will shift towards empathy: people will pay for experienced counsellors to help them through the stress and aggravation of moving. To help them turn moving into a joyful experience.

That might seem, to you, a paper thin basis for an exchange of value. But that’s because you don’t live in a world of abundant machine intelligence that is capable of performing all our knowledge work for us. In that world — a world in which the paperwork is already done — people will exchange value around a higher order set of needs.

This shift will play out in millions of ways, across pretty much every industry.

This has always been the process of capitalism. It ruthlessly commodities everything, and pushes value towards higher-order human needs such as status, social connection, and happiness. A world of abundant intelligence is, in some deep sense, the end of that long journey. When all the ‘brainwork’ problems are solved, what’s left is feelings.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is these days, and justifiably, felt to be an imperfect model of human motivation. But it’s a decent rough guide. What I’m saying is that ever more of the economy will shift towards exchange of value around the top three segments:

What does this mean for what you tell your children?

The world that’s coming is one that prizes emotional intelligence, empathy, and embodied skills such as one-on-one conversation and public speaking. Find ways to cultivate these in your child. Drama and the performing arts are wonderful ways to do this. So is a debate club. So are music lessons, because they require deep listening and attentiveness to another person.

One thing I’m sure of: in an age of superintelligent machines, the ability to speak human — to be a compelling, persuasive, charismatic storyteller — is gold dust. Encourage your child to overcome any fear and seize opportunities to stand in front of others and speak. Encourage them to become persuasive, engaging writers. If you can put text online that others find compelling, then you will be able to carve out a role for yourself in the age of AGI. If you can stand in front of others and persuade them — sell to them — then there will be a role for you.

There’s a tendency among some to dismiss the kinds of things I’m talking about here as soft skills.

I can’t stress this enough: AIs are conquering the so-called ‘hard’ stuff. For most, apart from a tiny cognitive elite who work with AI at the intellectual frontier, opportunities and career paths will increasingly be found around the human stuff: feelings, experiences, fandom, and more.

In truth, this shift will only be the acceleration of a process that has long been in train. Teenagers who want to be YouTube influencers instinctively understand that an increasing portion of the economy is becoming about connection to a fellow human being who you believe gets you.

So I want to talk, in a moment, more about that. But first, a quick interlude.

4. Look again at the humanities

This one can be short. But it can help guide decision-making around academics and lifelong learning.

The humanities — literature, history, philosophy and more — have had a tough couple of decades. For various reasons, their reputation is at a low.

But I think these disciplines are due to make something of a comeback.

As per my thesis above, in an AGI world an increasing amount of knowledge work will become about the things only we humans can do. And part of that will be around the making of value judgements. How should our company treat the environment? What does a good healthcare industry look like? How should we order our society?

Insofar as there is still a human cognitive elite in the world that is coming, much of its work will be around making these kinds of judgments. People who are trained in thinking deeply about ethics, conflicting values, and unstructured human problems — and who can call on the history of thought around all that — will be of value.

What’s more, people who are steeped in our shared history and culture will be among those most able to coax the best outputs from AI models.

So encourage your child to read widely in the humanities. Fiction, philosophy, the history of art: it is all valuable. The AIs we’re building are mirrors of ourselves and our shared past and culture. Those who are steeped in that culture will be able to dive deep into the worlds contained inside these AI models; those who are not can only skim the surface.

If your child is going to study a STEM subject, great! But they can still supercharge their value by immersing themselves in these subjects too.

And for those wondering: in an AGI world, is it still worth it for my child to go to college?

My view: yes, absolutely. The life skills and confidence they’ll gain, and the social capital they’ll gather, are just as important as any subject-specific content they’ll learn. That has probably always been the case — but in an AGI world life skills, confidence, and social capital are even more important.

5. Encourage your child to think audience and community

I’ve established the idea that ever-more of the economy will shift towards human connection: counsel, advice, empathy, entertainment, fandom.

How will that look in practice?

For many, it will mean building an audience or community who connects with them and loves their take on a particular subject or issue. Essentially, about building a community of fans.

I know what you’re thinking: but my child can’t expect to be Taylor Swift, or Mr Beast! They can’t earn a living from fans! That’s not realistic!

I get it. But you’re stuck in an old one-to-many media model.

No, our children (probably) won’t be global pop sensations or online influencers with hundreds of millions of followers. But there will be a billion tiny niches — and each one will have its Mr Beast. Rising numbers of people will earn a decent living serving entertainment, empathy, and human connection to their own tiny community.

The child that once would have become a successful lawyer or consultant is now just as likely to end up a creator and community builder around say, personal finances, or retro Lego sets, or wild swimming — the list is endless. Those micro-communities will be more about the sharing of experiences, and empathy, and feelings, than they are about the transfer of information.

AI will play the matchmaker, helping consumers find the communities and creators that they want to connect with.

The brilliant novel Super-Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, captures this coming world. In that novel, people are constantly streaming their lives to one another and accepting micropayments in exchange for the value, empathy, and good vibes they provide. I really believe a large part of the coming economy looks like that.

This mindset will be valuable even to those knowledge workers who are employed by larger organisations. Inside those organisations, there will be far less call for workers who are simply delivering rote knowledge work; the AIs will do that. Instead, all the value will shift up the chain to those who can cultivate communities, reach out to new customers and clients, and persuade.

Think about a major global consultancy such as McKinsey. Across the next ten years, much of the PowerPoint-jockey work done by the lowly associates will be automated. The human roles left inside the organisation will go to those who can build community, who are charismatic, engaging storytellers and persuaders. They will be the human face to a whole lot of AI-delivered analysis.

So my advice?

Encourage your child to have a creator mindset when it comes to the internet. Let them safely experiment with creating content — articles, audio and podcasts, and video — and putting it online. Talk to them about the power of building a small community that values your unique perspective on the world.

My boys create short videos and upload them to YouTube — skits, puppet shows, product reviews. The subject matter, and even the quality, aren’t really important. No one watches them anyway (apart from us).

The point is that I’m endlessly telling them: don’t be only an internet consumer, be an internet creator, too.

And when your child creates content for the internet, it allows you to ram home another powerful lesson. That is: remember, anyone can put ANYTHING online. A lot of it will soon be AI generated. Watch with a critical eye.

6. Let your child lean into their weirdness

Again, I’ll keep this one short. But it’s so important.

As per the above, many ways to deliver value in an AGI world will revolve around finding a tiny niche and cultivating a community or audience of fellow travellers who love your unique take.

How do you find that niche? How do you engage those fellow travellers? How do you cultivate a unique take? The answer in all three cases: lean into your weirdness. In other words, into what makes you uniquely you.

In the AGI world that’s coming, outsize returns will flow to those who are willing to be odd, to stand out, to be weird. And who are able to communicate that weirdness in compelling, persuasive ways.

This is the opposite of the approach we’ve taken to children across the last 200 years. Our education system is still built around the factory line; a form of work in which humans are interchangeable parts, each performing the same task over and over. The experience of school irons out difference and standardises our children; meanwhile, we instil in them the idea that it is better to be silent than to be wrong.

In an AGI world, the virtues that this approach breeds — mainly, the ability diligently to perform a standardised intellectual task over and again — won’t be of much use. AIs will do that work. People will look to people for compelling points of view.

Your child’s weirdness is in there somewhere. Find ways to help them let it out.

Start by asking some age-appropriate form of this question: what is one thing you believe to be true that very few others do? Why do you believe this? Why do you think others don’t?

7. We must cultivate our garden

And so we come to my final principle.

I’ve gone on longer than I expected. And yet I feel I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what is coming, and how we should prepare ourselves and our children for it.

As it sounds, the Economic Singularity will be a bewildering time to be alive.

The nature of economic activity is going to change — perhaps beyond all recognition. And there’s no getting around it: this could mean significant social upheaval, and perhaps a fullscale breaking and remaking of the socio-economic conditions we live under.

During the period of transition there will be vast disruption when it comes to labour and working lives. Many will find it hard to navigate a path through all this.

AGI is likely to mean vast returns to the owners of capital. As corporations and states come to rely less on the labour of humans, the social bargaining power and relevance of ordinary people in the face of these institutions will diminish. This threatens to upend our democracies.

You get the picture. It’s going to get weird.

Perhaps the powers-that-be will choose to distribute the rewards of AGI via some form of universal basic income. Perhaps we’ll build a world of shared abundance. Perhaps we’ll choose to double-down on democratic forms of political organisation.

But perhaps not. And even if so it is possible — I would say probable — that some great convulsion is ahead before we get to the promised land.

As I said at the start, emotional resilience will be key. There will be so much about what is coming that none of us can control, or even understand.

In that environment, we need to teach our children to Cultivate Their Own Garden. This iconic closing sentiment from Voltaire’s Candide is one of my favourite lines in all literature, and it contains so much wisdom for us today.

The message is this: the world is chaotic, unstable, and often brutal. Amid all that, all you can do is tend to the parts of this world that you can have some control over. That means your deepest connection with close family and friends. And the tiny part of this planet that you spend your days in.

Instil in your children the idea that the fabric of their lives won’t be woven via their role in the ‘economy’, but via their deep relationships with those closest to them. Build around them an atmosphere of mutual support and understanding. Overcome any petty family differences if you can.

I know, all of this is easy to say and hard to do. But in the world that is coming, you are going to need each other. The institutions and support systems that have been in place in the Global North in the post-WWII era are going, at the very least, to go through a period of severe stress. You need your family to be an enclave of support and safety amid all that.

A quest to have a great impact on the world can be a wonderful thing. But teach your children, too, that in a world of overwhelming complexity, small is beautiful. That comes via connection to a meaningful micro-community. Connection with nature. A sense of self that transcends their life as a professional.

This is the foundation on which everything else can be built.

The World is Yours

So there we have it.

I started this piece by saying that I’m fundamentally optimistic about what’s coming. That might seem strange, given the scale of change I think is ahead and the grave challenges I just talked about in my final principle.

But my optimism, as I hope I’ve made clear, is grounded in a simple truth. We humans care, in all sorts of ways, about other humans.

That truth will form the basis of the economy — if that’s still the right word for it — that is ahead. It can, and should, form the basis of the routes our children try to carve out for themselves, and the ways they try to live their lives.

The comic actor Jim Carrey might seem an unlikely source of wisdom in a piece such as this, but a while back he said something that strikes me as profoundly true. He said that a life spent making people laugh has taught him one lesson: the impact you have on others is the most powerful currency there is.

In the end I think that this is the foundational, immutable currency: impact on others. All other currencies are only a proxy for this. It’s the currency that is certain to survive, even beyond the event horizon of the Economic Singularity.

So embed deeply in your child an understanding that if they proceed with that truth in mind, they can build a life full of opportunity, meaning, and joy. As Raoul likes to say:

We’re in this together. In the end, we all realise that the experiences we shared were the point all along; the journey we took was the destination. Deep connection to each other, and to the world we find ourselves in, is at the heart of everything.

I believe the changes that are coming — and most of all an AGI world — will in the end do even more than fuel head-spinning economic change. They’ll lead to something akin to a spiritual transformation among us. One that leads us back to these core truths.

But now I’m drifting to a different domain altogether. If you’re interested in coming on that journey with me, then check out my other essay in this month’s edition: Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Prepare for what is coming with The Exponentialist. Subscribers get monthly deep dive essays, live fireside chats with me and Raoul, expert guest video interviews, an investment portfolio, and more.

In this brilliant piece my Full Moon co-founder Mark Curtis goes deep on the present and future of design. If you're on a quest to make products, services, campaigns and more that people love in 2026, you need to read this.

To jump straight to the full piece, just hit the button:

Take me to the full essay

The full essay is for paid members. But you can read a preview of it below. If it resonates, just click through to sign and keep reading.

Remember, subscribers to Full Moon get a monthly deep dive essay, as well as a monthly podcast, regular live Q&As with me and Mark, and the weekly Ideas newsletter. They can also choose someone aged 28 or under to receive one year’s complimentary membership.

Without further preamble, then, here is that preview. Over to Mark…

Introduction

AI is a game changer for how we conceive of, create, and sell products and services, whether we like it or not. That’s because it makes everyone a designer.

This massively affects how we are going to make great things we love in the next 10 years. And what we will then experience as humans.

I am going to unpack three big issues – who will make winning experiences, what they will make and why will we care. This is all about how you get to be different in the age of AI.

It is already way easier than ever to start a business, to create experiences. Yet power is concentrating in the hands of a few giant tech companies. How will those two statements balance out? Sheer levels of competition to make things, and deliver great experiences will be insane, chaotic.

So how do you get to great and stand out? Winners will have a clear intent behind what they make – difference will matter more than ever, delivered through a clear mission and the highest possible product quality.

The design of AI output itself is still in its infancy. We often imagine we are at maturity years before it actually arrives – we have a long way to go and the key to unlock this is asking: is any manifestation of AI a product or a feature? Trust and taste will be critical.

And last, humanity needs to be at the centre – not just of the whole AI project but each successful manifestation. Authenticity will command a premium, and that depends on humans being able to find a back story, satisfy themselves it is real, and revel in the delight of the new.

Let’s dive in and explore why how to be different is the key AI design question.

Like it or not, AI is going to be at the heart of how we make things. I’ve personally been in hand to hand combat with this conclusion for a while. At Accenture Life Trends (was Fjord Trends previously) we spotted the significance of GenAI pretty early in our 2023 report, published in 2022. We knew it was big. That was clear from the moment Midjourney, Dall E and Stable Diffusion emerged in the spring and summer of that year and changed visual creation for ever. Then we got lucky with our publishing schedule, launching soon after ChatGPT and able to make timely comment on it. As we said at the time:

“As we went to press with this report, ChatGPT emerged, suggesting a big leap forward in AI’s ability to create accurate and useful text, which may become a major challenger to search engines.”

We also predicted issues around people’s fears of being made redundant, and what a world with limitless content would look like. We didn’t foresee therabots.

We’ve all been swept up in the drama since then. There is a lot about AI I am deeply concerned about – notably the way privately held companies have taken all the world’s content for free, diverted energy, water and investment from elsewhere for a technology that doesn’t always work, and the long term effect on society if we surrender many jobs and divert our attention even more to digital conversations, and away from each other.

In my last piece, which looked at how we designed the last 30 digital years, I said

‘You may be thinking, yep but I am not a designer. Truth be told, despite what my career signals to date, neither am I - strictly defined. So I am consciously using ‘design’ to mean a very broad scope here. Anyone who plays a role in building and delivering products, services and experiences over digital channels, plays a ‘design’ role – even if they do not wield a fistful of Crayola or use Figma.’

The difference now is we can all do design – or try to anyway. As ex-colleague and friend Andy Polaine used to say (somewhat caustically) ‘just because you can dance, doesn’t make you a dancer’. Nonetheless the new tools permit everyone to have a go. Some will use them well, some badly. So how we do we think about ‘design’ if we want to do it well? Does it matter? Is there a role for people who have ‘design’ in their title?

I’m going to show why the answers to these questions really do matter to everyone, especially those who create or reinvent products and services in the era of AI. There are three parts:

• How AI changes design (it’s about driving intention)

• The need to design the output of AI (it’s about the inherent need for differentiation)

• Putting humans at the centre (it’s going to be about authenticity)

Part 1: AI Changes the Game of Design

If you want to understand what is happening to design, listen to what designers are saying.

Nic Roope, ex Antirom and former colleague, pointed out to me something in plain sight: AI has consumed the entire quantity of all human design so far.

This on its own facilitates the notion that everyone can be a designer, because they can draw on the sum total visual, service, interaction, experience design and art as seen through the lens of a diffusion or large language model. Before you object violently to this statement, I don’t really think it’s as simple as that. Some critical things are missing, and we will come on to what. However, if the AI labs have not yet got all of design to date under their belt, they soon will. And that is a core issue to deal with.

Sidepoint: a lot of web and app design – which mediates how most people experience digital products – reached maturity in the late 2010s. What I mean by that is that we knew by then, after a 20 year process of trial, success and failure, what a ‘good’ responsive website looked like, or where to signal ‘other things’ in an app (think top left hamburger icon). AI has ingested a lot of know how that is provenly replicable. Hold that thought for what comes next.

Just as importantly, AI changes the tools and practice of design. Tom Webb, one of the most thoughtful young designers I worked with at Fjord, is very clear – ‘the process we defined and knew is gone. Now we can imagine, create and iterate on the go – then play with it on the device’. There are a multiplicity of tools to help with this, for example: Canva, Figma, Adobe Firefly, let alone directly in the leading LLMs. Indeed Canva now advertise their brand in public spaces: recently outdoors at Waterloo Station, London. According to Little Black Book ‘It’s a bold, tongue-in-cheek celebration of how Canva empowers anyone, at any skill level, to design with ease, creativity, and impact.’

Using a combination of tools Tom ‘can create a full stack product’. But he warns you still need to understand what is happening underneath – a significant caveat. The result is that time to output has declined drastically. In a single day you can create concepts, define user journeys, bring these to life and A/B test with ‘synthetic’ audiences. Not only might this have taken weeks just three years ago, it can now be done by one person, not a team.

In fact the sequencing of when design is done may also have changed. Luke Wroblewski argues that as developers are moving at 10x their previous pace (I’ve heard this number from others too) they sprint ahead of designers who now ‘fix’ the UX, as opposed to the classic model, developed over the last 30 years, where designers define UX first and developers try to implement. Another, maybe bigger, impact might be removing layers of unnecessary process in large organisations as decision making could go from committee to individual. Back to this in a moment.

Years ago when I ran a mobile dating start-up, I saw for myself the quality improvement when a developer and a designer worked physically alongside one another on product rather than sequentially. Wroblewski sees this happening now, and in some cases:

‘an increasing number of designers are picking up AI coding tools themselves to prototype and even ship features. If developers can move this fast with AI, why can’t designers? This lets them stay closer to the actual product rather than working in abstract mockups.’

This is the direction people like Tom Webb have been moving in for a few years now, where designers also do some coding. Yet again design lines are getting blurred, as we saw in my last essay on digital design across the last 30 years.

What’s the end game here? Two trends to consider.

Let’s put ‘design’ aside for a second. What does all this mean for anyone who is making things? For entrepreneurs, products, service owners, brands?

To answer this, we need to look at two seemingly contradictory long term trends…

To learn about those two trends, why humans must be at the centre of design in age of AI, and much more, head over to Full Moon and subscribe:

Take me to the full essay

Remember, subscribers to Full Moon get a monthly deep dive essay, as well as a monthly podcast, regular live Q&As with me and Mark, and the weekly Ideas newsletter. They can also choose one person aged 28 or under to receive one year’s complimentary membership.

Thanks for reading, and see you over at Full Moon!

As you know, Full Moon is a new research service at the intersection of technology, business, and creativity. I launched it with the brilliant Mark Curtis, former Head of Thought Leadership at Accenture, last month.

Our debut podcast episode plants its flag firmly on the terrain we intend to explore. Given it is our first outing, we start by sharing more on why we started Full Moon and where we want to take it.

Watch the Full Moon podcast

After that, we dive into our launch essay: Where is Design Heading? That means reflections from me and Mark on:

• Why we’re approaching a crucial time for design. And why we’re all designers now.

• How it felt to be designing the early days of digital in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

• The lessons we can draw from that era to help us design in the age of AI

...and much more!

Dive in, and if you find it valuable don’t forget to sign up for more. The second essay will go live to paid members on the night of the full moon in January.

Happy watching! See you by the light of the moon,

David.

A few days ago I launched Full Moon, a new research service that exists at the intersection of technology, business, and creativity.

I’m so excited to finally bring this project to the world. And I can’t think of anyone better equipped for the mission we’ve set ourselves than my partner in this enterprise, Mark Curtis. He is the co-founder of Fjord — the world’s largest digital design agency — and former Global Head of Thought Leadership at Accenture.

Full Moon is a space for unfiltered thinking from me and Mark. Our aim is a bold one. We want to fuel you in your quest to make sense of the world, see what’s coming next, and do work that matters.

If you’re a marketer, strategist, designer, or foresight professional, then this is for you. Ditto innovators, consultants, founders, and knowledge workers of many varieties.

Our launch essay is by Mark. In it, he takes aim at a vast question: how can we craft a version of the AI future that is worth living in? To answer, he draws on lessons learned across 30 years at the coalface of digital design. Yes, he says, much will change. But feeling, relevance and human consequence will matter more than ever.

The essay is called Where is Design Heading? I encourage you to check it out: it’s a brilliant and deep piece of work. You can read for free, and sign up for more, here:

Take Me to Full Moon

Mark and I will be discussing the essay, and our ambitions for Full Moon, in our debut podcast later this month: watch out for updates on that.

See you by the light of the moon,

David.

It’s a collaboration with the brilliant Mark Curtis, co-founder of Fjord. And it’s called Full Moon.

Mark and I have each spent years exploring — from different angles — a world changing fast around us. Full Moon is the culmination of all that. We’re creating a space for deep thinking at the intersection of humans, technology, and business.

It’s for designers, marketers, strategists, and creative professionals. Founders, consultants, and knowledge workers of many varieties. Anyone who needs to keep pace with changing consumers and clients, and build work — product, service, campaign — that makes an impact. Anyone seeking to forge their own path through the rapidly changing world of knowledge work.

It will be anchored around a deep dive essay published every month on the night of the full moon. We launch today by publishing our first: Part I: Where Is Design Heading?

In this piece, Mark draws on 30 years of experience in digital design to ponder the future of design in an AI age. His core message? Yes, lots will change. But feeling, relevance and human consequence matter more than ever.

This essay is deep, mind-expanding, and practical. I can’t wait for you to read it. And you can do so for free; just dive in.

Take me to Full Moon

Part II — where Mark explores what happens next — arrives for paid members in early January, at the first full moon of 2026.

From here, Full Moon becomes a home for unfiltered thinking from me and Mark. A research service on trends, technology, business and creativity. A place to think with others who care about where all of this is heading.

Paid subscribers will get the monthly deep-dive essay, a monthly podcast, regular video Q&As with me and Mark, shorter Ideas, and early access to future in-person events.

And one last thing...

When you become a member, you can give someone aged 28 or under a free year’s membership — extending the conversation to those who’ll shape what comes next. Now more than ever, we think that’s important.

A big lunar adventure lies ahead. I hope you’ll join us. See you by the light of the moon,

David.

P.S yes, this newsletter will remain active! But for my deepest thinking — and Mark’s — at the intersection of technology, business, and creativity, Full Moon is the place.

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I’m obsessed with emerging technologies and the way they reshape the cultural, social, and economic world around us.

Recently, I’ve been exploring all that with my brilliant friend Mark Curtis. As many of you know, Mark co-founded the iconic design agency Fjord — one of the first, and eventually most consequential, digital agencies to come out of Europe. When Fjord was acquired by Accenture in 2013, Mark became Head of Thought Leadership at that company, and led work on Accenture’s landmark annual Life Trends report.

Our conversations over the past months kept circling back to the same point. We’re living through a moment where long-established norms are shifting, powerful new technologies are accelerating, and people everywhere are trying to make sense of what it all means.

Those conversations grew into an idea.

To create a new space for thoughtful analysis and exploration. A space at the intersection of technology, business, culture, and creativity. And one that makes room for a little wild, lunar energy.

That project is now almost ready. And on Thursday 4 December, we’re going to launch it into the world.

If you’re a designer, marketer, or strategist, this is for you. If you’re a consultant, foresight practitioner, innovator or founder: you too.

This will be for anyone on a quest to understand how the overlapping spaces of business, brand, tech and culture are transforming. Anyone who needs to keep pace with rapidly changing consumers and clients, and build work — product, service, campaign — that makes an impact. Anyone seeking to forge a path through the enweirdening world of knowledge work.

If you’ve ever asked about a paid version of this newsletter — thank you! — this is definitely for you.

More will be revealed on 4 December: the night of the full moon. I can’t wait. See you then.

David.

Well, now I can! I’ve sold a book proposal; one based on an idea that first took shape inside this newsletter. The deal was announced recently in Publishers Marketplace:

The book has sold to The Bodley Head in the UK, and Crown in the US. Both are part of Penguin Random House, and both veritable non-fiction titans that brought us such recent delights as The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar, Technofeudalism, by Yanis Varoufakis, and On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, among many others. There are also translation deals in place with equally brilliant publishers in the Netherlands, Hungary, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Brazil.

It would be fair to say that I am quite excited.

Regular readers will already be familiar with the creature vs machine argument. It is that an all-encompassing cultural, social, and political clash is coming. That clash will be between those, on the one hand, who want to accelerate the technology revolution, liberate humans from all limits, and, ultimately, merge with the machines. And those, on the other, who want to halt that process of transformation, and instead lean into familiar modes of human living and being — into our creaturely and embodied selves. I’ve come to refer to these two emerging coalitions as the party of creatures and that of machines.

I’ll argue that the conflict between these two belief systems will do much to shape the years ahead. I’ll say that the framework we moderns have long used to make sense of our collective choices — that is, the conservative vs progressive framework — is no longer a coherent response to the conditions we find ourselves in. And in its place, a new primary division is emerging: that between creatures and machines.

The book takes its name from an eerily prescient statement made by the great American farmer-poet Wendell Berry. In an essay called Life is a Miracle, he said: ‘It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.’

Across a writing career spanning seven decades, Berry has developed a thorough-going critique of technological modernity as we practice it. He wrote those words a full 26 years ago. I think we’re now in the early days of the conflict he foresaw.

You see it now via newly-emerging activist groups such as Stop AI. Groups such as this one are just the start; we’re going to see a febrile mass-movement pushback against AI and its economic and cultural implications:

You see it in growing alarm over the relationship that children are building with AI companions. A fierce battle over this issue is coming; it will make our anxiety about teens and social media seem a relic from a simpler time:

You hear echoes of the coming battle between creatures and machines in news that Amazon executives expect humanoids and other robots to displace more than 500,000 of their workers. Amazon’s leaders are already preparing PR strategies to deal with the anger that will ensue:

In the book, I’ll set out on a journey into this clash. I’ll show how the creature vs machine conflict will manifest politically and philosophically, but also as a mass-movement and visceral struggle; one that will scramble old social and political allegiances, uniting former enemies and splitting old friends. We’ll look at how the conflict will shape us as a collective, but also touch our personal lives and families. I’ll deepen my articulation of the split by talking to those — technologists, activists, philosophers and more — on its frontlines. I’ll excavate the submerged origins of both the creature and machine positions, exploring how the divide is born of unresolved tensions that run far into our past. And I’ll build a bold argument on how we can find a way through.

It is intended that the book will be published in 2027. This means that for the next 12 months, my life will be a lot about writing it. As it sounds, lots of work is ahead. But this is a chance to bring an idea to the world that has become, for me, an obsession.

So why tell you all this now? First, and as I said at the start, the creature vs machine idea took shape in this newsletter. It feels to me, then, that it belongs to the NWSH community — and that’s why I’m so excited to bring you this news. And second, because the journey I’m about to embark on to write this book will do much to shape things around here for the next year and beyond. It’s a journey I want to take you all on, too.

In practice, that means that here in NWSH I’ll report on the trips I take, the people — technologists, thinkers, artists and more — I speak to, and the thinking it all fuels. You’ll get early previews of the book as it emerges, and a peek behind the curtain at the research and writing that made it all happen.

There are so many dimensions of the coming clash between the creature and machine worldviews, and the stakes could not be higher. This conflict will be for the future of how we live and work. For who gets to thrive, or simply survive, in our economies. For the destiny of the nation state, and our relationship with the Earth. And, in the end, for the nature of the human being itself. Together, we’re going to explore all that.

So, lots more coming soon. It’s going to be a big adventure. And at the end of it all, we’ll have something to send out into the world.

Thanks for reading. Wishing you a great week,

David.

As most of you know, The Exponentialist is the technology-focused research service that I co-founded with Raoul Pal, the legendary macro economist and CEO of Real Vision.

I’m super-proud of the community we’ve built; there’s nothing else out there quite like it. It’s all about empowering members to understand — and flourish inside — the future taking shape around us now. That means a world transformed by AI, humanoid robots, blockchains, and more. It means a world in which all the old rules are breaking down, and where we must seek new ways of working, living, and being.

One signal of what this community means to its members? We just held our first in-person meetup — in London. People flew in from Germany, Spain, Dubai and Malta to be there. An evening of wonderful discussion ensued.

If this sounds up your street, then I have something for you. It’s an exclusive discount code for members of NWSH, which gives you 10% off when you join the Exponentialist for six months, or 15% off when you join for a year.

Members get:

• A monthly deep dive essay from me, plus Exponential Age news and key charts. If the update is fewer than 7,000 words, it’s a short edition.

• Monthly Fireside Chats with me and Raoul; we fire up Zoom to talk through the big ideas and happenings on our mind. And members join the call too to ask questions (see the picture above).

• Regular video interviews with the founders, thinkers, and artists shaping the Exponential Age.

• An investment portfolio devised by Raoul and Julien Bittel, two of the most talented macro analysts on the planet. One trade last year scored members a massive 255% return in just three months.

To avoid surprises: yes, the entry price to this community is steeper than subscriptions tend to be around here on Substack.

But if you want to go deep on the exponential future taking shape around us now, this is the community for you. You’ll get direct access to me and Raoul. And you’ll become part of a super high-value community of fellow seekers.

And if you’re able to set aside a little capital to follow our investment portfolio, I’m confidant you’ll make your entry price back — and then some.

To take advantage of the discounts on offer now, just hit the relevant button below. You’ll be prompted to make a free account on Real Vision: the platform that hosts our community. And you’ll then be taken to a purchase basket, where the discount is auto-applied. Any glitches, just reply to this email and let me know.

To get 10% off the standard $799 for six month membership (discount code EXPO_10), just hit this button:

Give me 10% off The Exponentialist

Or to get 15% of the standard $1,500 for a year’s membership (discount code EXPO_15), hit this button:

Give me 15% off The Exponentialist

I can’t wait to see you inside! Thanks for reading,

David.

Welcome to this special update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 30,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮

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It’s been too quiet around here recently.

Which is, of course, my doing. I’ve been working on a couple of big projects across the summer; time has been at a premium. The real point is: both projects have major implications for the future of this community. I can’t wait to share more on all that in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, though, I’ve still been writing a whole lot. As most of you know, along with Raoul Pal I run The Exponentialist, a community focused on emerging technologies and their economic, social, and human implications.

In this special update, then, I’d like to share a recent essay from The Exponentialist. One that allows you a glimpse of the kind of work I do there. And that articulates a set of ideas that are at the heart of my current thinking on our shared future.

The essay introduces a theme I’ve been developing for a while now. It is about post-human economics and a great coming civilisational quest to create more intelligence per unit energy.

This is an attempt, really, to envision a world in which AI and robots have created conditions of radical knowledge and material abundance. When this happens, everything we know about the economy as it exists today starts to break down. I want to try to make sense of that. And of what comes next.

In this essay I make a few mentions of last month’s essay. That piece argued that in a post-human economy, GDP is no longer a coherent measure of economic flourishing. But all that is recapped in this essay; everything you need to understand this piece is contained within it.

These kinds of essays go out to Exponentialists every month, along with a tech-focused investment portfolio, monthly community chats with me and Raoul, and regular guest interviews.

You can go here to learn more about The Exponentialist. But that’s enough preamble. Let’s get into it.

Post-Human Economics

What am I talking about when I use the phrase post-human economics?

The idea is tied to another, one that sits at the heart of my thinking on the Exponential Age. That idea is the coming economic singularity. It’s really this idea that I’m trying to extend — trying to fathom — when I talk about all this.

So the next question becomes: what do we mean by the economic singularity? In physics, a singularity is a point in spacetime where all the usual rules of physical reality break down.

The economic singularity thesis says that now — and via the convergence of a set of transformational technologies — we’re moving towards a transition that will see all the old rules of the economy break down. Via that transformation, the categories and very language we’ve always used to describe the economy will fall into incoherence.

Increasingly, this idea is the focus of my thinking. My research is converging around a set of related questions. What is the path to this singularity? What does the transition phase look like? Is it possible to peak beyond the event horizon, and understand the nature of post-singularity economic conditions?

Developing the idea of a post-human economics, then, is really about forging a new way to model all this. It’s about building a new language via which to approach the economic singularity.

In last month’s essay, I played with this idea. The transition into the singularity, I said, can be understood as a transition from an economy built on human inputs and conditions of scarcity — that means material, cognitive, and labour scarcity — to an economy built on automated inputs and conditions of radical abundance. And under those conditions, GDP no longer makes sense as a measure of economic flourishing.

In this essay, I attempt to push that idea to its logical conclusion. I do that by asking: if GDP is not a valid measure of economic flourishing inside a post-human economy, then what is? What should we measure?

My answer? Eventually, the most coherent measure of flourishing will be around how efficiently our civilization converts energy into intelligence. That is, it will be intelligence output per unit energy. In the post-human economy, everything lies downstream of better and more abundant intelligence. And under those conditions, the economy becomes an endless, relentless quest to maximise that metric.

When we understand the path to that world — a world in which intelligence output per unit energy is the best measure of flourishing — something amazing happens. We’re empowered not only to understand the transition from a human to a post-human economy, but to glimpse beyond the event horizon of the singularity, to the outlines of the post-human economy itself.

Just as it sounds, I’m attempting with all this to push my thinking to the very edges; to model the shape of the radically new world that is coming.

Figuring all this out means trying to piece together a seven-dimensional puzzle. One that none of us understands. I’m thinking aloud, step-by-step, and trying to make sense of it all. So treat all this as just one further step in a long journey, which is always subject to revision. The work of making sense of what’s happening now — of the emerging Exponential Age — is only just beginning.

Let’s get into it.

*

The Handoff

Before we get into the argument on intelligence output per unit energy, we need to revisit a prior question. What are the practical forces at work pushing us towards a posthuman economy?

Remember, we currently inhabit a human-centred economy. That means one built around human needs. One built on human inputs. And one enacted around conditions of scarcity; material scarcity, scarcity of human labour, and cognitive scarcity, too.

Those conditions are now being overturned. But how? I went deep into this in my last essay. And really, everything I’ve written about the Exponential Age can be deployed as an answer to that question. The answer, in a word, is technology. Technology is overturning those conditions.

But at the heart of the story are robots, especially humanoid robots. And AI, especially AGI, or superintelligence. They are the central path to a post-human economy.

When it comes to humanoids, advancement has been rapid over the last couple of years. Look at what’s happened in just the last few weeks.

The US humanoid startup Figure released HELIX, an AI that blends a sophisticated LLM and reasoning model with advanced machine vision. The result is a robot that can understand natural language, reason about its physical environment, and then take appropriate action. This means it can perform everyday, unstructured tasks via ordinary spoken instructions.

As Figure showed in their demonstration video, tell their 02 robot to ‘tidy the kitchen’ and it will now understand that celery goes in the fridge and canned fruit goes in the cupboard, even if it has never seen these objects before. And it can act on that understanding.

Other big players have just released similar models, too. DeepMind’s Gemini Robots and Nvidia’s GR00T N1 both allow humanoids to understand, reason, and act.

Right now, most of the humanoids on trial inside workplaces, such as Amazon fulfilment centres and BMW factories, are performing the same structured task over and over again. But HELIX and these other models are a key step towards humanoids that are able to work independently in everyday environments, taking a loose set of instructions such as ‘keep this place tidy’ or ‘sort these packages’ and acting on them in a coherent way. There’s still work to be done, but we’re getting closer to a ChatGPT moment for humanoids.

Meanwhile, as I wrote about at the start of the year, AGI feels ever-more imminent.

OpenAI’s o3 remains the frontier model for now. A reminder: look at its performance on the GPQA Diamond benchmark, a set of super-hard science and maths questions. It’s so good that it outperforms human PhDs who are answering questions in their specific scientific domain and who are allowed to use Google to help.

That’s why I call this The Last Chart. It’s the final chart we get to make as Earth’s apex intelligence. After this, we hand the baton to the machines:

Okay, there’s a little hyperbole at work in that statement. But not much.

Put this all together, and what is happening? The iconic technologist Kevin Kelly — co-founder of Wired magazine and a Silicon Valley legend — wrote a blog post recently that sums it all up so well.

That post was called The Handoff, and it taps into another core idea in Raoul’s work: demographics are destiny.

In the developed world, said Kelly, we’re about to hit a historic moment. The human population is about to peak and then start to decline — the first time that’s happened inside modernity. Meanwhile, billions of AI agents and tens of millions of humanoids are about to come online. They are the new worker population. When we think demographically, we can no longer think only about the entities that are born — the humans. We need to count the entities that are made, too — the AIs and robots.

What’s happening now, said Kelly, is a historic transition. It’s an economic handoff from we humans to the AI and robots we are creating.

If we accept this vision, the question becomes: what does this handoff do? What is the nature of this shift? The answers are far reaching: This shift will rewrite the underlying logic of the economy, transitioning it from an economy built on human inputs and conditions of scarcity, to one built on automated inputs and conditions of radical abundance. We move, in other words, towards a post-human economy.

I went deep on this process in last month’s essay.

First, AGI and agents will eliminate scarcity across many knowledge work domains. Across many services and knowledge-based industries — coding, law, marketing, consulting, finance and more — production of outputs will be substantially or completely automated. We’ll see the rise of instant, hyper-personalised, zero-cost production.

Eventually, this phenomenon will move beyond services and into physical products, too. Abundant energy will converge with humanoid robots and next-generation manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing to push the cost of much physical production down to something negligible.

In the next section, I want to zero in on this transition. What are its implications? And what is the nature of the new economic reality it is leading us towards?

Another question can act as a kind of proxy for these deeper, more complex ones. In the new world that is coming, what will we measure?

*

What Do We Measure?

We know what we measure now. Inside the human-centred economy we’ve built, GDP is the principal measure of flourishing.

But as we saw in the previous essay, as we transition towards a post-human economy, GDP starts to become incoherent as a measure of anything meaningful.

Automated outputs across much of the knowledge and services economy will push prices to zero. Eventually this will move to some physical products, too. So we’ll see huge economic welfare gains — lots of great new stuff! — that is not captured by GDP.

At the same time, we’ll see AIs transacting with AIs in lots of ways. This could produce skyrocketing GDP growth rates — 10%, 50%, 100% per year — via activity that is entirely divorced from any impact on we humans or our wellbeing.

Once we get there, what does GDP even mean? And if we don’t measure GDP, then what do we measure? If we understand the answer to that question, I think we understand so much more.

Remember, GDP makes sense inside a human-centred economy in which the fundamental condition is scarcity. GDP is essentially the scorecard we use in answer to the question: to what extent are we overcoming scarcity? So if we can pin down the fundamental measure of success inside a post-human economy, I think we be able to glimpse the fundamental nature of that system.

The big idea I’m playing with at the moment? In the post-human economy that is coming, intelligence itself becomes the primary metric.

Just as the human-centred economy pursued GDP, so the post-human economy will pursue intelligence output, or what I call intelligence value.

That’s because in that world, everything is downstream of better and more abundant intelligence. Scientific and technological breakthroughs, more advanced and cheaper healthcare, finance, knowledge work, manufacturing, logistics, everything comes down to intelligence.

In this environment, the primary economic goal shifts towards the efficient conversion of resources into intelligence. The more we do that, the more we flourish.

The fundamental constraints when it comes to intelligence production are cost and energy. That means the cost of producing the intelligence stack: the chips, the data centre they will live in, the running costs, and so on. And then the energy to run that stack.

To be more specific, then, what gets measured is intelligence value per dollar per unit energy.

What I think we’re going to see in the decade ahead is a shift towards a civilisational system that has this imperative at its heart. In so many ways, this is the big transition that’s coming. It’s the transition that most characterises our march into the Exponential Age. We move from a system that measures GDP, to a system that measures intelligence per dollar per unit energy.

We’re getting closer, now, to understanding more about the true nature and shape of a post-human economy.

But to get closer still, we need to zoom in. How does the transition to a post-human economy play out in practice? What are the mechanics at work here?

So what are the mechanics that govern this quest for more intelligence per dollar per unit energy? There’s lots more left to come in this essay. To keep reading for free just click through to the NWSH version that stands online:

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