For most of history, physical work was muscle. Then steam, combustion, and electric motors took it. Human muscle became a rounding error in the global energy budget. Cognitive work is on the same curve, compressed in time.

When the price of a scarce input collapses, supply floods and demand expands. Cheaper engines did not reduce coal use. They multiplied it. Cheaper cognition will not reduce thinking. It will multiply it. Most problems on Earth currently go unthought about because thinking is expensive.

AI-powered wearables — pins, pendants, glasses — are turning into always-on audio-visual recorders that capture private conversations and moments without consent.

This has sparked an escalating arms race. Early countermeasures like ultrasonic microphone jammers are already defeated by advanced AI speech-recovery models that reconstruct clean audio from noisy environments. Newer tactics shift from jamming to obfuscation: flooding systems with junk data, layered babble tapes, or real-time “anti-speech” ultrasonic signals designed to confuse reconstruction algorithms.

The internet has stopped being a separate “online” space. It is real life.

It is now upstream of everything in culture, politics, business, and daily life.

Exponential tech is about to split humanity into 5 distinct branches — in decades, not millennia.

The 5 forks: Creators vs Consumers, Longevity Escape Velocity, Brain-Computer Interfaces, Earth vs Stars, Digital Consciousness.