Intelligence is the new electricity
10 March 2026
Imagine you're in 18XX AD and you're the first company to setup electricity production, supplied through wires and reaching to a handful of companies. You've successfully replaced manual labour through industrial machines. Seeing potential for even more money, appliances that cater to the retail market popup and everyone is sold on its use cases. The company scales up from a hundred or so employees grew to a thousand, but the standardized and reliable electrical components enabled lesser and lesser human intervention in scaling the business to decrease the users/employee ratio.
One could draw similar parallels for intelligence from this. Intelligence was once manual (mental) labor task. Humans everywhere were the status-quo for bringing in insights and making decisions. When artificial intelligence came in, it was supplied to enterprises - replacing human compute. The intelligence providers scale up with standardized and tested tech even further - while the users/employee ratio remains incredibly low.
Soon, we'll see the need for human intelligence dwindle - atleast at the top of the pyramid.
Humar labourers still exist - assisted by handy electrical tools, working in niche areas where the electrical devices couldn't make feasible designs. Perhaps certain thinking paradigms couldn't be absolutely replaced by certain technical constraints, and human assisted AI could be the future for such niches.