Many call the development of artificial intelligence the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but I disagree. I would say AI is the first, and the last, intelligence revolution.

Every industrial revolution makes something that was once expensive very cheap—power, computation, information. In the AI era, the cost collapse is cognition itself. Imagine you buy a Tesla in 2026 for $39,990, and in two years, the same model costs $200. That’s the price collapse we are now seeing in AI inference, where models turn learned knowledge into actions.

Millions of us are toiling away in jobs that AI can do better and cheaper. I have long worried about this. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, I asked Hans Moravec, director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at the time, what would become of human meaning if machines grew smarter than us. He said, “Why do you assume the meaning of humanity must rest on the fact that we are the smartest?”

In the subsequent four decades I have spent building AI, I have come to see four traits that will provide both meaning and mastery for humans in the AI era: taste, foresight, conviction, and courage. All of us must now tap into our latent capabilities here to excel.

On taste, Coco Chanel is emblematic of how uniquely human dissatisfactions led to a breakthrough in fashion that changed the modern world. As a woman, she knew in her own body that women’s clothing of the era was confining, not a liberation. Her ability to sense dissatisfaction and latent desire before others could articulate them was an act of empathy.

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