Every morning, I sit at my desk and boot up the usual suspects. My Mac. An oversized screen. The speakers humming softly like they’re waiting for a briefing. But the real MVP? An iPad wedged just under the monitor, running ChatGPT like it’s my consigliere. It’s almost always on. And when it’s on, it’s listening. Creepy? Yes. Useful? Beyond belief. This isn’t some sci-fi dystopia. It’s just Saturday morning.

I throw it half-baked thoughts or keywords. It throws back structure. I rant; it refines. This thing doesn’t replace me. It multiplies me. It infects my thinking with perspective and insight I wouldn’t have reached alone. Research, citations, counterpoints. It’s a hive mind in a tiny rectangle made of silicone, aluminium and glass.
It builds a bubble around me and manages the echo.
Piece of advice here: the moment you can’t hear yourself in a converation with a chat bot or an AI agent, you must stop and reset. Talk to other human beings, restart the machine, start fresh and hold on to that steering wheel.

Back to our show. This isn’t tomorrow. This has been my past two years. I got used to it. I guess you would, too.

We’re not in the age of AI. That’s marketing fluff. That’s what you say on stage to pump your stock. We’re in the age of hybrid intelligence. Real collaboration. A flesh-and-circuits partnership. You. Me. And machines that argue back.

Human intelligence is ancient. Born in chaos. Sharpened over hundreds of thousands of years. Trial, error, instinct, story. We invented myths before we invented math. We painted before we plotted. We feel our way forward even when we pretend it’s all logic.

Synthetic intelligence? That’s different. Pattern recognition with a caffeine addiction. It doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t blink. Never forgets and never second-guesses. It sees what we miss and misses what we feel.

Hybrid intelligence is where it gets messy. And that’s the beauty. It’s not a merger. It’s not a neat Venn diagram. It’s a collision. I bring the chaos, the context, the weird late-night questions. The machine brings the memory, the scale, the structure. Together, we make something neither of us could do alone. It’s not people versus machines. It’s people with machines.

Look at the diagram. Human intelligence is on one track. Synthetic intelligence on another. And a third line bending upward, called hybrid. Framed like it’s just starting. But let’s be honest. Hybrid intelligence didn’t show up yesterday. It began fifty years ago. Maybe more. The moment we stopped telling machines what to do and started building ones that surprised us, that was the spark.

The myth cracked in 1997 when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess. A machine out-thinking the world’s best player by brute force. Then came Go. AlphaGo didn’t just win. It made moves no human ever would. Moves we couldn’t even explain. That was the moment. The shift. We weren’t just playing with tools anymore. We were building something smarter than us.

And we won’t beat it again. Not at its game. Maybe not even at ours. But that’s not the point. The point is, we built it. We trained it. Now it’s training us.

Right now we’re deep in it. Not peaking. Not plateauing. Somewhere in the middle of a climb that keeps steepening. Machines like ChatGPT have devoured everything we’ve written, sung, painted or filmed, and now they spit it back with eerie confidence. Not soul. Not originality. But better and better output. Fast. Slick. Scary. Convincing.

We’ve seen what happens. Studio Ghibli clones. Pixar on tap. Billions of images, poured out like soda. The genie isn’t just out of the bottle. It launched a startup, filed a patent and shipped version 2.0.

But none of this happens without us. We made the machine. We gave it our voice, our style, our instincts. We didn’t just teach it to talk. We taught it to sound like us. Now we’re living with the echo.

We’re not obsolete. But we are outpaced. And if you think it’s hard to keep up now, wait a year. In my diagram, in the bottom right corner... that’s us without machines. That’s most of us, not having to turn on a computer every morning.

So what’s next?

That’s the trillion-dollar question. The only honest answer is we don’t know. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either pitching a deck or writing a check. Investors are making bets, hoping that this synthetic entity will do more than help. They want it to solve things. Energy. Climate. Disease. Truth.

I argue that’s not what this race is about. Not really.

We’re not building AI to heal the world. We’re building it to own it. To accelerate profit extraction at a speed humans can’t match. And behind the curtain, you won’t find ethicists and philosophers. You’ll find shareholders.

We’ve already seen what happens when you mix power and bad incentives. Technology has been weaponised. So have people. Nudged by algorithms, polarised by machines designed to stoke outrage. This isn’t dystopia.
It is today for most of us. If you don’t trust me here, go through a simple exercise: ask anyone you know to give up on their smartphone or uninstall WhatsApp. Some would rather lose a limb than unplug.

And now AGI—Artificial General Intelligence—is sitting somewhere on the horizon, waving its ambiguous little flag. It won’t show up with a mission statement. It won’t walk into the room with answers. It will sneak in sideways. Quiet. Partial. Uneven. And suddenly, the co-pilot starts taking the wheel.

And if that moment comes, there’s one question we have to ask.

Who owns it?
Because everything powerful has an owner these days, and owners don’t always share.

Maybe the question isn’t what happens when AGI arrives. That feels too far off, too abstract. Maybe even a distraction.

Maybe the better question is this: how did we get here?

We started in caves, wrapped in animal fur, terrified of fire. We worshipped stars we couldn’t name. We invented gods before we invented numbers.
And now? We sit at desks, speak thoughts into glass rectangles, and machines turn them into action. We cross oceans in hours. We went to space. We built markets, crashed them, and built them back again.
We create worlds just for the fun of it. We took imagination and wired it into silicon. It’s crazy if you stop and think about it.

We didn’t get here alone. We got here by teaming up with our tools, our code, and our creations.

This is the reality now. Glorious. Strange. Cursed. A beautiful mess of collaboration between human instinct and machine logic, powered by love, greed, curiosity, chaos, silicon and code.

Maybe that’s what hybrid intelligence really is. Not a system. Not a threat. Not salvation. Just us, haunting the machines we made.