In early October, 2025, the Golden Gate Institute ran its second annual edition of a conference called “The Curve”. I am immensely grateful to the event organizers for bringing this conference together; it was exceptionally thought-provoking.

I gave an invited talk with the title “The Challenge of the Intelligence Age,” loosely based on a twitter thread I wrote in January 2025. Below is the recording. It’s my best attempt to make some sense of what might be a very strange next few decades.

The Talk

The Intelligence Age will test every system we rely on—from markets and institutions to our understanding of purpose and meaning. In this talk we explore how AI might accelerate progress, destabilize long-standing equilibria, and open questions that demand new scholarship and imagination.

The Original Thread

The world isn’t grappling enough with the seriousness of AI and how it will upend or negate a lot of the assumptions many seemingly-robust equilibria are based upon.

Domestic politics. International politics. Market efficiency. The rate of change of technological progress. Social graphs. The emotional dependency of people on other people.

How we live, how healthy we are. Our ability to use technology to change our own bodies and minds. Every single facet of the human experience is going to be impacted.

It is extremely strange to me that more people are not aware, or interested, or even fully believe in the kind of changes that are likely to begin in this decade and continue well through the century.

It will not be an easy century. It will be a turbulent one. If we get it right the joy, fulfillment, and prosperity will be unimaginable. We might fail to get it right if we don’t approach the challenge head on.

It feels outside of the overton window right now to suggest that so much change could happen very quickly, or even to realistically grapple with what those changes might entail. It is too easy to say “the present is more urgent and more real.”

Nonetheless, change is coming. It will be reflected first in the prices of goods and labor. It will force changes in strategy in businesses, institutions of all kinds, and countries.

Then it will force changes in philosophy. What are we here for? Why do we do the things we do? If everything we care about is automatable, what is our role in the world?

We’ll have to tell a new story for a new age. Some of the timeless stories - how we are driven by curiosity, by love, by the human spirit - will remain unchaged. But everything else will be replaced by questions that need new answers.

I don’t know what the future will bring. But my enduring belief is that humanity is beautiful, flaws and all, and the future we build should somehow cherish the human heart.

The Curve

Many of the sessions from The Curve 2025 were recorded and are available on Youtube. I highly recommend checking them out.