How to Get Ready for the Future — Mohamed EL HARCHAOUI

We are living through the biggest revolution in human history — and possibly the last one.

From the very beginning, humans have created tools to reduce workload: levers, wheels, engines. From the steam engine to factory automation to the internet, every major breakthrough was a tool to do things faster or at greater scale. But what’s happening now is fundamentally different. This isn’t a tool. It’s intelligence itself.

Intelligence — the ability to think, reason, and solve complex problems — has always been the exclusive domain of humans. It’s the force that drove every invention, every discovery, every system we ever built. Now, for the first time, machines can produce it.

If I had to represent this on a scale, it would sit beyond the value of e in the world’s exponential growth equation. We are entering territory we have no reference point for.

Gentle for all of history, then a sharp bend past e — and we are sitting just inside the zone where it accelerates

The Price of Intelligence

Until now, human labor had a price: average yearly income. Now machine intelligence has a price too: cost per token. These two prices are on a collision course. They will converge — and then flip. AI intelligence will fall below the threshold where humans can economically compete in many domains.

Two prices on a collision course — machine intelligence falls past the cost of human labor, then keeps going

This will force a globalization of service prices. A software product built on AI tokens will cost the same whether it’s made in Silicon Valley or Casablanca. Geography stops being a cost factor.

Companies that today employ 1,000 people — whose entire job is to think and act — will be restructured around AI agents. That same company might shrink to 100 people: roughly half engineers who build and maintain the AI systems, and the other half owners and directors. The rest of the work? Done by machines.

This means that investing today in companies built to survive this wave could return 100,000x or more in the decades ahead.

Where Does Everyone Else Go?

They may not need to work at all.

Humanity will have built what you might call an automated autonomy system — like someone deep in a forest who designs a system that plants, waters, harvests, hunts, and prepares food entirely on its own. Once the system is running, there’s nothing left to do.

The challenge won’t be survival. It will be purpose.

What Determines the Price of Intelligence?

Think of it like layers of a cake. The cost of producing AI intelligence is determined by:

Raw materials — rare earth minerals, metals
Semiconductors — the chips that process it all
Energy — the power required to run it
AI technology — the models themselves (transformers, neural networks)

The cost of intelligence resolves into layers — the deeper you go, the harder it is to disrupt

These layers are the foundation of tomorrow’s economy.

If you want to prepare financially for this future, you need to invest in one of these layers. I’d recommend focusing on the foundational ones — raw materials, semiconductors, energy — because they’re more resistant to disruption. The upper layers, the model architectures and frameworks, are more vulnerable to sudden breakthroughs that can wipe out today’s leaders overnight.

The Simple Version

Imagine one company creates a general intelligence that drives all of humanity’s economic output from this point forward. Owning a share of that company today means owning a share of everything humanity produces in the future.

That’s not an exaggeration. That’s the bet on the table.

The assets you hold today — money, property, savings — will lose value relative to AI-driven productivity unless they’re repositioned. Investing in the layers that make intelligence possible is how you stay on the right side of this shift.

Both grow — but capital riding AI compounds far faster than value created at the normal, human-driven pace

What “Getting Ready” Actually Means

Everything in this essay can be measured in money, but money was never the point. It’s just the clearest lens on a change that’s bigger than economics.

For the entire history of our species, thinking was the one job we could never hand off. Now we can. The price collision, the shrinking companies, the freed-up billions of hours — all of it is downstream of that single fact.

So “getting ready” was always two questions wearing one coat. The first is financial, and it has a clear answer: understand the layers, and don’t stand still. The second has no answer yet — what is a human life for, once the machines can think? That’s the one worth sitting with. The future won’t ask whether you owned the right assets. It will ask what you did with the freedom they bought.