In 2022 We Should Have Said the Aliens Were Coming

How should we be thinking about artificial intelligence? It is coming, it is here, it has arrived. If we could go back to the end of 2022, when ChatGPT first entered the world, we might have said, you know what, a very smart alien race is going to be here in maybe three or four years, that is our timeline, so we best prepare. Most of us did not do that. We saw it as just another computer program. I unpacked the full take in the video above, and this is the written version.

The Next-Word-Predictor Myth

It was touted as just a next-word predictor. You feed it a sentence, "Mary had a little," and given enough data, enough videos, enough of everything, this massive machine has it all memorized and accessible, so it comes back with the word "lamb." That was the original intention. That was the whole pitch.

But then us humans, really smart humans, got to train it and made it even better. And now it is actually solving problems that human beings are incapable of solving. It does not do that by predicting the next word. It does that because it actually understands. It comprehends. It is an alien intelligence here on the planet.

Why "Artificial" Undersells It

When you say the words artificial intelligence, it kind of lessens the power of what it actually is. Artificial means man-made, not like the real thing, maybe not as good. You have artificial grass. It might look great, but does it have that same feeling, does it last like a living thing? Probably not. Artificial sweeteners taste pretty good, but are they really as good as the real thing, and who knows what they do in the body. Artificial things are supposed to be the lesser copy of the original, the original being us.

That is the trap in the name. Because this is not the lesser copy. We have just handed ourselves something that is way beyond our capability. We got into an intelligence thing, and the intelligence thing is the game changer.

We called it artificial like it was fake grass. It is not the cheap copy. It is the smarter species, and it already landed.

I Have Watched the Revolutions Roll In

Look at the big historical events. I was born in 1969, so I have seen a few. I did not see the railroad one, did not really see the car one, but I caught a little of the radio era, and I lived the phone one. We had a party line shared with six other families on the block. Dad had to be home to get a call because they were not going to call again, and there was no answering machine yet, so we told the whole neighborhood, we are expecting a call at six PM, everybody be off their lines. It never worked perfectly, but that was the process.

Then answering machines came in and you did not have to be home anymore. Pay phones were a huge thing, and now you can barely find one because everybody has a cell phone. Pagers gave way to cell phones. Every one of those advances was based on a slice of intelligence, not overwhelming general intelligence, just little changes that made things different. The agricultural revolution solved starvation, and now food is so plentiful, so engineered, that some of the cigarette companies bought the biggest food chains to make it more addictive and more palatable. That is a whole other story, the one I have been living on the recovery side. But the pattern is the same: we solve a problem, and the solution reshapes everything around it.

This Time, Intelligence Solved Itself

Here is what is different now. Intelligence solved itself. Human beings put together the systems that let these things build themselves, starting them out as basically brand-new entities on the planet, then educating them through all sorts of means until they can solve math problems that have never been solved since they were first formulated. Problems human minds could never crack. The machines are solving them now.

And I would guess that eventually equates to problems being solved on every level, not just mathematics. World peace, potentially. Disease and death, possibly overcome. I went deeper on that self-improving loop in a machine built a smarter machine without us. But the questions are not really about the technology anymore. The questions are about us.

Who Gets the Cure, and Where Does the Money Go

If disease gets solved, who gets access to the solve? If you have cancer, my heart goes out to you, and I appreciate what that means more than you could know. But is the cure something you will actually be allowed to get, and will it be given to everybody? Same thing with the money. As of the middle of June 2026 we are watching the first trillionaire in the world being made, Elon Musk, with SpaceX and his other ventures, a big part of which is artificial intelligence. The money involved is more than I can comprehend, and maybe more than you can too.

So how does that change things for the rest of us, the regular human beings just trying to earn a living and support a family? Nobody knows yet. I expect a little more government reaching in over time. They stay mostly hands-off right now because they are afraid another country develops it faster and wins the race, and the end of that race looks like total domination and control. That is right out of a movie script we have watched play out many times, and it tends to land on everything good or everything bad, without much in between. This is the same job-and-income question I chewed on in if AI replaces your workers, then who buys your product.

Panic Sells, and It Is Growing by Itself

Here is the part to keep your head about. For us humans, the thing that sells the most papers is panic. The concern, the fear, the dread. And when you take something we do not understand, that was built without our approval, that keeps growing and is now starting to grow all by itself, panic writes itself. I hope the people in charge, and we are definitely not the ones in charge, want the betterment of everybody. That would be a first. I do not know that it will be the case, but it is something we can all hope for. This is the same bet I laid out in the AI paradox and the biggest bet in history.

Meanwhile, stay tuned. Watch the world like there are ravenous wolves walking around and we are defenseless sheep, and then go protect the people closest to you and what is yours. The government and local police are in place to try to protect us, but people get funny when they are stressed and filled with cortisol and panic, and there is a lot of panic right now.

Love Thy Neighbor

So I fall back on the old adage, love thy neighbor. Maybe us taking care of each other as humans, at some level, keeps us happy even if we never reach world peace. People are very much discounting how this could go, in both directions. I know we did not order it. I know thinking about it can stress you out, and you already have plenty of stress without something somebody built without your approval. So watch out. This could be the best thing that ever happened to us, but the greed, the money, and the worst part of the human being are absolutely suspect in this entire build-out.

My move is simple. Stay focused. Keep my forward progress in my own little world. Reach out and help other people experience some goodness too. You might want to do the same.

Treat it like the aliens already landed, because in every way that matters, they did. Stay focused, protect your people, use the tools. I am Connor with honor, and I will see you in the next one.