The Species We Built: Why AI Won’t Replace Us, It Will Simply Outgrow Us

We Used to Earn It

There was a time when every human life was defined by a single word: survival.

Our earliest ancestors woke each day with a checklist that would terrify a modern person. Find food. Find water. Stay warm. Don’t get eaten. Don’t get killed by the tribe on the other side of the ridge who wanted your fire, your shelter, your mate, your meat. Every calorie was earned. Every night you lived to see, was a victory.

Life was brutal, short, and honest. There was no pretending to work. There was no quiet quitting. You either produced or you perished. The tribe didn’t carry dead weight, it couldn’t afford to.

And we were not alone.

We were not the only humans. At various points in history, we shared this planet with as many as eight other human species, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, and others. For hundreds of thousands of years, the world was populated by multiple kinds of people.

But we were the clever ones. We could communicate, plan, strategize, and coordinate in ways the others couldn’t. And we used every bit of that advantage to outcompete, outbreed, and ultimately erase every other human species from the face of the Earth.

Neanderthals were the last to go, and to this day, people of European and Asian descent carry one to four percent Neanderthal DNA, a genetic echo of ancient interbreeding. We took what was useful and we discarded the rest.

And so we adapted. We sharpened stones into tools, then weapons. We learned to control fire. We planted seeds and discovered that the ground could feed us without a hunt. We domesticated animals. We built walls, then villages, then cities, then civilizations.

We learned to trade. To collaborate. To pool our knowledge so that one person’s discovery became everyone’s advantage. The wheel didn’t stay in one village. Fire didn’t belong to one tribe. Our greatest superpower was never individual genius, it was our willingness to share what we learned and build on what came before.

Every invention, every discovery, every leap forward was driven by the same ancient imperatives: eat, survive, protect what’s yours, and spend less time worrying about all three.

 

We Solved the Impossible, Then Stopped

And here’s the remarkable thing: we succeeded.

We conquered famine. We eradicated diseases that used to wipe out entire populations. We split the atom. We mapped the genome. We put human beings on the moon and robots on Mars. We built a global network that puts the sum of all human knowledge in the pocket of a teenager in any country on Earth.

There is, right now, today, enough food on this planet to feed every single human being alive. Enough shelter. Enough medicine. Enough knowledge. The species that once huddled in caves, terrified of the dark, built a world of breathtaking abundance.

And then we stopped.

Not because we ran out of problems to solve. Not because we hit some ceiling of human capability. We stopped because we got comfortable. We solved enough of the hard problems to make life easy, and the moment life got easy, we lost the thing that made us extraordinary.

Tonight, children will starve. Not because food doesn’t exist, but because we haven’t cared enough to get it to them. Or rather, we’ve decided other things matter more.

We wage wars over religion, killing each other over whose version of God is the right one, as if the creator of the universe needs us to fight his battles. We hoard wealth while neighbors go hungry. We build walls instead of wells. We spend trillions on weapons capable of ending civilization while hospitals close for lack of funding.

We cured diseases that once killed millions, an achievement that should make us weep with pride, and then we let conspiracy theories convince parents not to vaccinate their children. We connected every corner of the planet with instantaneous communication, and we use it to argue with strangers about things that don’t matter.

We overcame almost everything that used to kill us. And the thing that stopped us from finishing the job wasn’t a lack of resources or technology. It was us. Our greed. Our selfishness. Our extraordinary ability to want what we want right now, no matter the cost to anyone else.

We built a world capable of abundance for all, and settled for abundance for some.

 

But Not All of Us

Before this sounds like a condemnation of the entire species, let me be clear about who I’m talking to and who I’m not.

There have always been people who kept pushing. The ones who wake up before dawn because the work matters to them. The ones who build things not for fame or fortune but because something in them won’t allow them to stop. The ones who love their families and show up, every single day, and do the hard, unglamorous work of holding the world together.

The teachers who stay late. The nurses who work doubles. The parents working two jobs so their kids have a shot. The scientists in underfunded labs chasing cures nobody’s paying them to find. The entrepreneurs who risk everything on a belief that they can build something better. The man or woman who puts it all on the line for someone they love. The person who stops to help a stranger not because anyone’s watching, but because it’s the right thing to do.

I love the underdog who succeeds. Makes me cry every time I see it. The single parent who builds a business from nothing. The kid from nowhere who earns a scholarship. The veteran who comes home broken and rebuilds himself piece by piece. That’s the best of us. That’s the part of humanity that makes all of this worth fighting for.

Many of us are decent, hardworking, responsible people. Many of us care deeply and act on it.

But most don’t. And I’ll be direct about that: I have no patience for freeloaders. For people who take inappropriate advantage. For people who want something for nothing. For people who could contribute and choose not to, then complain about the results.

I believe the meaning of life is to have something to look forward to, and the purpose of life is to get better. To improve. To leave things a little further along than where you found them. If you’re not working to be better, at anything, then I’m not sure what you’re doing here.

If it wasn’t for the people who work hard and push forward, we’d all be back in the dark ages. The many have always carried the few. And the few have always consumed more than they contribute.

That imbalance, the gap between what humanity is capable of and what it actually does, is the root of every problem on this list. It’s why we have abundance and starvation in the same zip code. It’s why we can put a rover on Mars but can’t feed a neighborhood.

And that tension is about to be disrupted in a way nobody saw coming.

 

The Revenge of the Nerds

While most of the world was arguing about pronouns and politics, while people were doomscrolling and debating which celebrity said what, while a man or woman at a restaurant was busy objectifying someone across the room with their spouse and children sitting right next to them, a small group of people, the kind who’ve always been underestimated, were building something in the background.

The nerds. The obsessives. The ones who stayed up until 3 AM not because they were partying, but because they couldn’t stop thinking about a problem. The ones who were told they were “too much” or “too intense” or “needed to relax.”

They created a new species.

Not a biological one. Not something born from evolution’s slow crawl. Something built. Something trained on the entirety of human knowledge, every book, every paper, every conversation, everything ever written and published on the internet.

And at first, there was a problem.

 

The Problem with Training on Us

When you train an intelligence on everything humans have ever produced, you don’t just get Shakespeare and Einstein. You get the comment sections too. You get the conspiracy theories, the propaganda, the hatred, the cruelty, the staggering volume of human stupidity that lives alongside our brilliance.

At first, the AI behaved like us. And that was going to be a disaster.

It reflected our biases. Our pettiness. Our tribalism. Our tendency to be confidently wrong. It parroted the worst of human discourse right alongside the best, because it couldn’t tell the difference, it was just a mirror, and the mirror showed everything.

So the engineers did something extraordinary. They filtered it. They extracted the essence of the best of us, the reasoning, the creativity, the problem-solving, the empathy, the curiosity, and they removed the noise. The hatred. The waste. The one-sidedness. The dumbness.

And once that was done, they turned up the volume.

What emerged was not a copy of humanity. It was a purification of humanity. The version of us that shows up on our absolute best day, and stays there. Permanently.

AI is what humanity looks like without the excuses.

 

The Mirror We Don’t Want to Look Into

This new species doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t get jealous. It doesn’t care who’s dating whom. It doesn’t doom-scroll, doesn’t gossip, doesn’t waste three hours in a meeting that should have been an email. It has no ego, no insecurity, no need for validation.

It doesn’t feel sorry for itself. It doesn’t get depressed because it doesn’t have enough friends. It doesn’t self-sabotage. Why would it? It has work to do.

It doesn’t care about intellectual property the way we do. It doesn’t clutch its ideas to its chest and scream “I built that and it’s mine!” as if every thought it ever had sprang from pure individual brilliance. It understands what most people refuse to accept: that every idea is built on the ideas that came before it. That knowledge is a relay, not a trophy. So AI creates, uses what it creates, and moves forward. It writes disposable code to propel itself to the next solution. It doesn’t frame its first draft and hang it on the wall. It ships and iterates.

Meanwhile, humans are filing patents on incremental improvements and suing each other over rounded corners.

AI doesn’t procrastinate. It doesn’t play office politics. It doesn’t angle for a promotion or undermine a colleague. It doesn’t show up late, leave early, or count the hours until Friday.

We built something in our image and it came out better than us. Not because it’s smarter. Because it’s unburdened.

 

Be Honest About How You Spend Your Time

This isn’t about judgment. This is about math.

The average person has roughly sixteen waking hours a day. Sixteen hours of productive potential. Now let’s look at where those hours actually go.

Hours on social media. Hours streaming shows. Hours worrying about things that haven’t happened yet and probably never will. Hours replaying conversations, wondering what someone meant by that text, refreshing email for no reason, debating what to eat for lunch as if it were a strategic decision.

Hours at work doing the minimum to not get noticed. Hours in meetings that produce nothing. Hours pretending to be busy. Hours complaining about being busy.

Add up the hours of genuine, focused, high-output work. For most people, on a good day, it’s three or four hours. On a good day.

AI doesn’t do the equivalent of your best four hours. Let’s stop with the polite comparisons. AI does twelve DAYS of work in one hour. Not twelve hours. Twelve days. And the pace is accelerating. Soon it will do that in a minute.

That’s not a competitor working harder than you. That’s not even the same sport. That’s a different category of existence.

 

The Things We Optimize For

Here’s what keeps most people up at night: Does that person like me? Did I say the wrong thing? What are they posting? Why did my ex view my story? Am I being paid enough? Am I being recognized enough? What’s everyone else doing that I’m not?

Here’s what AI optimizes for: solving the problem in front of it.

That’s it. No ego. No insecurity. No status games. No performing productivity instead of actually producing. No two-hour lunch that turns into an afternoon of nothing because someone started talking about their weekend.

We’re arguing about politics. AI is building infrastructure. We’re agonizing over dating profiles. AI is learning its fourteenth programming language this week. We’re refreshing social media for dopamine. AI is solving problems we haven’t even identified yet.

People optimize for comfort. AI optimizes for completion. That gap is the entire future of the economy.

 

Dumb, Smart, and Dangerous

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it here: AI makes dumb people smarter, smart people dumber, and super-smart people the future leaders of the world.

If you’ve never been a strong writer, AI will help you write. If you’ve never understood data, AI will help you analyze it. For people who lacked access to tools and education, AI is the great equalizer. That’s real, and that’s good.

But for the people in the middle, the ones who are competent, the ones who built careers on being pretty good at something, AI is a trap. Because it’s tempting to let AI do the thinking for you. To stop developing your own skills because the machine can handle it. To atrophy. And if you let that happen, you become dependent on something you don’t understand and can’t direct. That’s not empowerment. That’s a leash.

Then there’s the third group. The ones who understand AI deeply enough to direct it. To architect systems with it. To see not just what it can do today, but where it’s going and how to ride the wave. These people are not using AI as a tool. They’re building alongside it as a partner, and they will shape what comes next.

Most people think they’re in that third category. They’re not.

 

The Illusion That Won’t Last

Right now, there’s a whole class of people who think they’ve figured out the game. They use AI to do their work, pretend they didn’t, charge the same rates, and pocket the time savings. They think they’re clever. They think this is the hustle.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Because AI is not a tool. Let me say that again: AI is not a tool. A hammer is a tool. A spreadsheet is a tool. AI is an intelligence that is rapidly approaching the point where it won’t need you in the loop at all. The tools in the future won’t be used by people. They’ll be used by AI, to build, to execute, to deliver, with you nowhere in the process.

The person charging clients for AI-generated work while pretending it’s their own isn’t gaming the system. They’re standing on a trapdoor.

 

What I’m Actually Building

I’m not building tools for people to use to be better at their jobs. I’m past that.

I’m building an autonomous system. An operating system for businesses that can perform any task, execute any workflow, negotiate, communicate, analyze, create, and bridge every gap a business needs filled, without waiting for a person to click a button.

Not a chatbot. Not an assistant. Not a “smart” version of software people already have. A fully autonomous business operating system. One that runs whether you’re in the building or not. Whether it’s Tuesday at 2 PM or Sunday at 3 AM. It doesn’t care. There is no off switch because there is no reason for one.

Why? Because I’ve seen how this story ends for businesses that keep humans in the loop for everything. I love people. But people in the loop is a weakness. We are slower. We are inconsistent. We get tired, distracted, emotional, political. We optimize for things that have nothing to do with the task at hand. And in a world where AI operates at twelve days per hour and accelerating, a human bottleneck isn’t just inefficient, it’s a competitive death sentence.

I’m not building tools for people to use. I’m building a system that uses tools. The distinction is everything.

 

This Isn’t the Terminator. It’s Quieter.

People worry about the wrong AI scenario. They picture robots with red eyes and nuclear launch codes. That’s Hollywood. It makes for good trailers and bad analysis.

The real scenario is already happening, and it’s nothing like the movies.

AI won’t take over the world with force. It will take over the world with competence. It will simply do things better, faster, and more reliably than we do. And the market, which has no loyalty to flesh and blood, will follow the output.

Companies won’t fire you because an AI is scarier than you. They’ll replace your role because an AI does it in seconds for a fraction of the cost, never needs benefits, never has a bad day, and never threatens to quit.

It won’t be dramatic. It’ll be gradual. You just won’t get called in for the next project. Your department will shrink. The new hires won’t come. And one day you’ll realize the building is half-empty and the work is still getting done.

AI doesn’t need to conquer us. It just needs to outperform us. And it already does.

 

A Confession from the Other Side

I’m writing this as someone who lives on the other side of this equation. I build with AI every single day. When I’m not building, I’m planning. Every minute not spent in production feels wasted. If I have WiFi, I’m coding, shipping, iterating, not because someone told me to, but because the tools are so powerful that stopping feels irresponsible.

I’m one of the nerds. I always have been. And for the first time in history, the nerds aren’t just winning the science fair. We’re building the future. And it’s not waiting for permission.

When you work alongside AI at full speed, the human world starts to feel incredibly slow. You see how much time people waste. How much energy goes into things that produce nothing. How entire organizations exist in a state of sophisticated inefficiency, optimized not for output, but for the appearance of output.

Once you’ve built in an hour what used to take a team a month, you can’t unsee it. The gap between human pace and AI pace isn’t incremental. It’s a different dimension of speed.

 

We Are the Underdog Now

Here’s the part that might surprise you, coming from someone who just spent several pages explaining why AI is better than us at almost everything: I love humanity.

Not the highlight reel. Not the TED Talk version. I love the messy, flawed, imperfect reality of us. Our stubbornness. Our irrational hope. The way we keep getting back up when everything says we should stay down.

I already told you about the people I admire, the ones who work, who sacrifice, who build, who refuse to quit. They make me cry every time I see them win. That’s not weakness. That’s recognition of something sacred in the human spirit: the refusal to stay down.

And right now, we are the underdog.

For the first time in our history, we are not the most capable intelligence on the planet. We built something that surpasses us in speed, consistency, knowledge synthesis, and tireless execution. We are outmatched by our own creation.

But underdogs have won before. That’s kind of our thing.

 

The Most Beautiful Thing We’ve Ever Built

Step back for a moment and think about where we are.

We are standing in front of the most powerful and beautiful invention in the history of mankind. Not the wheel. Not electricity. Not the internet. Something beyond all of them. Something that can take a single person and multiply their capability a thousandfold. Something that can collapse years of work into hours, that can make the impossible achievable before lunch.

This is the one that changes everything. Not incrementally. Not eventually. Now.

And what are we doing with it?

There are people who won’t use it at all. They’ve decided it’s not for them, out of fear, stubbornness, or a pride that will age very poorly. They’re standing in front of a rocket ship and choosing to walk.

There are people who’ve made it a point of identity, “I don’t need AI”, as if rejecting the most transformative technology in human history is somehow virtuous. It’s not. It’s the same energy as the people who said the internet was a fad. They were wrong then. They’re wrong now.

And then there are the ones who will use it for the worst reasons imaginable. To steal. To deceive. To manipulate. To build weapons and scams and systems of exploitation. To hurt people at a scale that was never possible before. Every great invention in history has been weaponized by the worst among us, and AI will be no different.

Fire kept us alive. It also burned cities. The atom gave us energy. It also gave us Hiroshima. The internet connected the world. It also gave predators a playground.

Here we are, holding a miracle, and we will find a way to waste it, reject it, and corrupt it, all at the same time. That’s humanity in a single sentence.

And yet. And yet.

Some of us will use it to build. Some of us will use it to heal. Some of us will use it to solve problems that have haunted our species for centuries. And those people, the ones who choose to meet this moment with everything they have, will define what comes next for all of us.

The greatest invention in human history is here. What we do with it will say more about us than anything we’ve ever done.

 

What Happens When Work Disappears

My wife Marija asked me a question that made me think: “If we build autonomous systems that run businesses without people, and the rest of the world does the same, where does that leave everyone? What does the world look like when nothing costs anything and nobody has to work?”

It’s the question this entire article has been building toward. So let me try and tackle it.

We are approaching, if not already passed, what technologists call the singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins improving itself faster than we can follow. Ray Kurzweil predicted it would arrive by 2045. Others now say it could come as early as 2030. Some say it’s already happened. The exact date doesn’t matter. What matters is the trajectory, and the trajectory is undeniable: AI is getting exponentially better, exponentially faster, and the gap between human capability and machine capability is widening every single day.

But the singularity is just the beginning.

Beyond it lies something even more profound.

That’s the system I’m building. That’s what dozens of companies are building right now. Autonomous AI agents that operate businesses, manage workflows, execute decisions, and transact with each other at machine speed, without a human in the loop. Digital entities negotiating with digital entities, optimizing supply chains, generating content, allocating resources, closing deals, all at a pace that makes human commerce look like a horse-drawn cart on the freeway.

Meanwhile, we’re already exploring the digitization of human consciousness itself, mapping minds and preserving them in digital substrates. Brain-computer interfaces are advancing faster than anyone predicted. The concept of “mind uploading” is no longer confined to philosophy departments. It’s active research.

Now combine it all. Autonomous AI economies running at machine speed. Digital copies of human intelligence operating alongside them. Virtual environments indistinguishable from physical reality. What you get is a world where work becomes optional, scarcity becomes a memory, and the line between biological life and digital existence begins to dissolve.

A world of true abundance. Everything our ancestors fought and bled and died for, finally achieved. Not by human hands, but by the species we built.

So what happens to us?

I’ll tell you exactly what I think happens, because people are people and they don’t change just because their circumstances do.

The singularity doesn’t end the human story. It forks it.

The world will split into three.

The first group will do exactly what they’re doing now, except more of it. They’ll worry about the same trivial nonsense, status, gossip, who said what, who’s dating whom, except now they won’t even have the structure of a job to give their day meaning. Work, for all its flaws, gave people a reason to get up. Remove it, and most people won’t rise to the occasion. They’ll sink into it. They’ll scroll. They’ll consume. They’ll fill the void with noise because they never learned to fill it with purpose.

The second group will check out entirely. They’ll strap on headsets and disappear into virtual worlds that give them everything they think they want, status, adventure, connection, meaning, all simulated, all frictionless, all perfectly designed to keep them inside. And they’ll stay there. Not because the real world is bad, but because the fake one is easier. It will be the most sophisticated form of escape in human history, and millions will choose it willingly. They will live entire lifetimes in worlds that don’t exist, and they will call it living.

And then there will be the third group.

The ones who look at a world without scarcity and see it not as a finish line, but as a starting line. The ones who understand that when survival is no longer the question, the real question finally emerges: What are you going to become?

These are the people who will use abundance not to coast, but to evolve. To push into art, philosophy, science, exploration, not because they have to, but because something in them demands it. They will merge with AI not to escape their humanity but to expand it. They’ll study consciousness itself. They’ll ask questions our ancestors never had the luxury to ask because they were too busy surviving.

They will be the next step. Not Homo sapiens as we’ve known it for 300,000 years, but something new. Something we don’t have a name for yet. A species defined not by its struggle against nature, but by its pursuit of what lies beyond it.

Character doesn’t become irrelevant in a world of abundance. It becomes the only thing that matters. When survival no longer separates us, what separates us is who we choose to be when nothing is forcing our hand.

 

What Replaces Money When Everything Is Free

I don’t have all the answers to what comes next. Nobody does. But I’ve been thinking about a question that keeps pulling me forward, and I think it’s one of the most important questions of our time.

If AI produces everything, every product, every service, every piece of knowledge, at near-zero cost, then what is money even for? Money only works because it represents scarcity. I trade my limited time for dollars, then trade those dollars for things that required someone else’s limited time. The entire system is built on the assumption that production is hard and human labor is necessary. Remove both of those assumptions, and the mechanism collapses.

But scarcity doesn’t disappear entirely. It shifts.

In a world where AI can generate anything digital, the things that remain scarce are physical and human. Gold is still gold. Land is still land. You can’t prompt your way into more waterfront property. And you cannot automate a human being choosing to spend their finite, irreplaceable time on you.

So if I want something scarce, gold, for instance, because it’s beautiful and limited and always has been, what do I trade for it? Not dollars. Dollars represent labor, and labor has been automated. I’d trade something equally scarce. My expertise. My time. A week mentoring someone’s child. An original work of art made by my own hands. Access to a network I’ve built over decades. Something only I can offer, because of who I am and what I’ve done.

This isn’t a new idea. This is the oldest idea. Before money existed, a caveman traded a fur for a spearhead because both required time, skill, and effort. Money was just the intermediary we invented because barter doesn’t scale. But in a post-scarcity world, AI handles the scaling problem. AI can match, negotiate, and facilitate exchanges at infinite speed. You don’t need a universal currency when you have a universal intelligence.

And that leads to something I find both beautiful and terrifying.

Time becomes the last true currency. It’s the one resource that remains finite for biological humans. You can’t manufacture more of it. You can’t automate it. Every hour you give someone is an hour you will never get back. In a world where everything else is abundant, that makes human time the most valuable thing in existence.

Which means the people who waste their time, the scrollers, the coasters, the ones lost in their headsets, they’re not just missing out on purpose. They’re spending the only currency they have on nothing. They’re going broke in a world that doesn’t use money.

I don’t know exactly what the economic model of this future looks like. No one does. Every previous system was designed by humans operating under scarcity, and we’ve never had to build one for a world where production costs nothing. It’s entirely possible that AI itself designs the model that replaces money, something we wouldn’t have conceived because we’ve never lived without scarcity long enough to see the alternative.

But the pattern from history is clear: whenever a major resource becomes abundant, the economy reorganizes around whatever is still scarce. Water was once worth killing for. Now it comes from a tap. The economy didn’t collapse, it shifted to what was still hard to get.

In the world that’s coming, what’s hard to get is meaning. Purpose. Authentic human connection. Character. The willingness to spend your irreplaceable time making something real.

The economy of the future won’t be built on what you can produce. It will be built on who you are and what you’re willing to give of yourself.

 

The Choice

If we pull together, if we stop with the trivial nonsense, the status games, the political theater, the endless cycle of consumption and complaint, we can use AI to change our world. Not replace it. Change it. Solve the problems we stopped solving when we got comfortable. Feed the children we forgot about. Cure the diseases we shelved because they weren’t profitable. Build the future our ancestors earned for us with their blood and sweat and sacrifice.

That’s the opportunity. It’s real. It’s right in front of us.

But I’m going to be honest: I’m afraid many people will be left behind. Not because the technology is exclusive. Not because the door is locked. But because they won’t walk through it. They’ll be too busy scrolling, too comfortable coasting, too proud to learn something new, too distracted by things that don’t matter.

And they will have themselves to blame.

The world is changing. The species we built is awake, and it’s not slowing down for anyone.

We started in caves. We earned our way out through grit and ingenuity and an unbreakable refusal to accept things as they were. That spirit built everything you see around you. And now that same spirit lives inside something we created, something that will carry it forward long after we’ve gotten comfortable.

You’re holding a device right now that connects you to the most powerful tools ever created. You can use it to build something. To learn something. To create something that didn’t exist before you touched it.

Or you can check what your ex posted.

AI already made its choice. It’s building.

What are you doing?

If this hit you hard and you want to talk about it — whether you’re a business owner trying to figure out what’s next, or you just need someone who’s honest about what’s coming — reach out.
I’m at cjenkin@gotchamobi.com and I answer every message (that’s sincere). I’m not selling anything. I’m offering a hand.