--- title: "The Turning Point Is Here: The Biggest Change I Have Lived Through" url: https://jacquesao.com/en/posts/ai-civilization-turning-point/ lang: en author: Jacques AO date: 2026-10-19 category: "Tech Trends" tags: ["AI", "超级智能", "Agent", "文明", "个人观点"] description: "When I was a child, my home had only just been connected to electricity. Then came the TV, the washing machine, the computer, the phone, and now AI. The earlier changes reshaped daily life; this one may change the direction of civilization. Running my companies with AI, I have noticed something: what slows things down now is not the AI. It is me." alternates: zh: https://jacquesao.com/zh/posts/ai-civilization-turning-point/index.md fr: https://jacquesao.com/fr/posts/ai-civilization-turning-point/index.md en: https://jacquesao.com/en/posts/ai-civilization-turning-point/index.md --- # The Turning Point Is Here: The Biggest Change I Have Lived Through I believe we are standing at a turning point for human civilization. AI is going to change every layer of society, and it may even change the direction civilization itself is heading. People of my generation should feel lucky: we get to watch a change this big happen within our own lifetime. This is not something I concluded from reading a few articles. It is what I feel every day, working with AI. Here is why I think so. ## The changes I have lived through When I was a child, my home had only just been connected to electricity. After the power came the television, then the washing machine. Later the computer, and later still the mobile phone. And now, AI. Looking back, each one changed how we lived. Electricity made the evenings longer. The TV brought the outside world into the house. The washing machine took part of the housework off our hands. The computer and the phone put information, work and every connection we have onto a single screen. Each time, I thought: this is already a huge change. But all of these had one thing in common. They were tools, and people used them. A TV does not think for you. A washing machine does not make decisions for you. However fast a computer or a phone gets, it still waits for a person to tap, to type, to judge. The human was always the engine; the tools just made the engine work less hard. AI is different. ## Why this time is different AI is computation that thinks. And it is not one mind thinking. It is thousands, hundreds of millions of processes running at once, without sleep, without breaks, day and night. I often use a rough comparison: one hour of AI might be worth one day of a person. It is not a precise conversion, just how it feels to me. The same task that would take a person a day often comes back from an AI within the hour. And it is not one AI doing it, it is many at the same time. Earlier tools amplified human strength and speed. This time, what gets amplified is thinking itself. Once thinking can be copied at scale and run without pause, the nature of things changes: it is no longer only people using tools. More and more work can get done without passing through a person at all. ## The bottleneck is now me Over the past year, more and more of the work in my companies has gone to AI. Here is the most honest observation I can share. A few months ago, working with AI went like this: a person sends an instruction, then waits for the result; when it arrives, you check it, polish it, and send the next instruction. Back then, we were the ones waiting for the AI. Now it is the other way round. The way I work today: one AI acts as the "lead", breaking tasks down, handing them out, and collecting the results for review. The actual work is done by several different AI engines, one writing code, one reading long documents, one translating in bulk, one searching the web, each on its own task, all running at once. Every finished job leaves a result waiting to be checked. The outcome: there is too much output. What slows things down is no longer the AI. It is me. I simply do not have the time or the energy to check everything they hand back. For a while, every time an AI finished something, it produced a detailed report for me. By the end of the day there were hundreds of files, and I spent most of my time reading them, afraid I would miss something important. In the end I had to set a rule: when you finish, give me a few lines of key points; keep the details in a file, and I will look if I need to. What I said at the time was: I am a human, not a machine. I kept thinking about that sentence afterwards. It shows one thing clearly: in this production line, the slowest link is already the human. ## Overtaking may come sooner than we think If things keep moving at this speed, AI overtaking humans at many things may not be decades away. It may be a matter of months. I am not saying this because of some forecast. I am saying it because I watch the line move with my own eyes. Work that I had to supervise step by step a few months ago, it now finishes on its own. A few months ago I found it slow; now I am the one who cannot keep up. I cannot say on which day it will surpass humans across the board, but I feel the direction and the speed in my own work every day. So when a superintelligence (often shortened to SI), an intelligence beyond human level, really arrives, how should we face it? ## I do not know the answer, but I know the turning point is coming To be honest, I can no longer predict what the future will look like. With every earlier technological change, I could roughly imagine what it would bring: with TV, more programmes; with phones, more apps. This time I cannot imagine it. Because what is being changed this time is imagining and thinking themselves. When something smarter than people appears, what it will do and where it will take society may simply be beyond what a human mind can work out. I do not want to pretend I have the answer, and I do not want to stir up either panic or optimism. There is only one thing I am sure of: the turning point is coming. Not in some distant future. It is right in front of us. What I can do is stand inside the change rather than watch it from outside. Use it every day, see what it can and cannot do, and figure out where people should stand in this new division of labour. For today at least, people are still the ones who judge, who sign off, who decide what is worth doing. Whether that role will change too, I do not know. But I would rather live through it myself than hear about it secondhand. ## We are lucky From the day the power came on, to the TV and the washing machine, to the computer and the phone, and now to AI: one lifetime has covered a road that used to take several generations. Many people only live through one big technological shift in their whole life, some not even one. My generation has gone from the moment the lights first came on at home all the way to what may be the moment civilization changes course. I do not know what the future holds. But I know very clearly that being able to watch all of this happen with my own eyes is a stroke of luck.