On AI, Economic Revolution, and Self-Actualization

The invention of AI is dramatically raising intellectual output per person. Things that used to demand trained specialists, months of time, and serious money — writing, design, working software — can now be produced in minutes, at near-zero cost.

History leaves clues

There's a pattern history keeps repeating: when a technology significantly raises output per person, a civilizational-scale economic transformation follows.

Take the Industrial Revolution. Mechanical energy replaced the function of human and animal muscle. A single person who once could work at most two hectares of land could, with machines, work hundreds or thousands. The effect wasn't simply more productivity — it was a structural leap in the world economy.

The historical data is startling. Global GDP grew by roughly 115x in the last 200 years — from around USD 1.2 trillion in 1820 to more than USD 137 trillion in 2023 (Maddison Project Database 2020, constant 2011 dollars). For the 1,800 years before that — from the first century up to the beginning of the 19th — global GDP was essentially flat.

We're entering the same phase

We're now stepping into a similar phase. The intellectual functions that drove the world economy for the last century — analysis, writing, design, research, coding — will be replaced (or accelerated hundreds of times over) by a machine called AI.

If the trajectory holds true to the historical pattern, we can expect the global economy to grow hundreds if not thousands of times over its current level in the next century. It sounds hyperbolic. But it's really just a repetition of what happened 200 years ago — with a different input: no longer muscle, no longer mind, but something deeper still.

The consequence isn't unemployment

The consequence for us isn't losing our jobs. Not mass unemployment. Not the collapse of meaning. What awaits is the logical consequence of human evolution: we'll be pushed — forced, really — to actualize a deeper layer of ourselves.

If the Industrial Revolution forced us to shift from relying on muscle to relying on the mind, the AI Revolution will push us to shift from relying on the mind to relying on something deeper than the mind.

What is it?

The soul.

The power of the soul

In the years ahead we'll discover methods and disciplines for actualizing our soul, recognizing it, and putting its power to good use.

If the mind can compress distance and time on Earth — through communication, transportation, computation — then perhaps an actualized soul can compress distance and time between planets. Or between star systems. Interstellar travel may not be a century away. And the concept of immortality — in a form we can't yet imagine — may become operationally real.

Sounds speculative. But the leap from "crossing oceans by sail" to "landing on the moon in eight days" would have sounded equally insane to someone in the year 1500.

What we can do today

Right now, the biggest opportunity lies in integrating AI into the economy — to raise the quantity and quality of economic output astronomically. That's the most actionable, most profitable work in the short-to-medium term.

But the deeper drive behind all these revolutions — larger than the business opportunity, larger than the efficiency gains — is the human effort to keep actualizing the truer self.

Worth remembering, in the middle of the weekly AI news cycle.