I speak to a lot of people and audiences about the advances in artificial intelligence.
One of the most common refrains I hear is something along the lines of this: “I tried ChatGPT/Gemini/ClaudeAI and it didn’t do a very good job.”
I understand the sentiment and agree that, at the present time, AI remains far from perfect.
What most people continue to misunderstand is that artificial intelligence is only going to continue to get better.
If AI continues to advance at its current rate–and it is doubling in capacity roughly every seven months–this suggests that within the next six years it will be 1000-fold better! (Such is the power of exponential growth.)
Please let that sink in for a moment.
The message should be clear: Just because artificial intelligence couldn’t do what you wanted it to do last year, last month, last week or even yesterday, this does not imply that you get to assume that it will never be able to do the task.
In fact, for many jobs, there is a good chance AI will do them even better than you and I, and probably even sooner than you expect.
Big change is coming and you must to prepare for it.
Putting your head in the ground like an ostrich and hoping AI will go away is not a strategy.
If you want a good primer on how to prepare, I recommend this piece, “The 5 Most Important Skills to Learn in 2026.”
If you don’t have time to read the article, the five skills are: 1) Critical Thinking; 2) Attention Management; 3) Financial Literacy; 4) Adaptability; and 5) Self-reflection.
The list is not perfect and, personally, I do not ascribe as much weight to the issue of financial literacy as the author does.
What I do subscribe to is a need for all of us to hone and advance our spiritual literacy.
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
In many ways, this is saying much the same thing as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who famously said: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
If we are to survive and prosper in the future, it is essential we recognize the truth in these statements. We are spiritual beings. We are souls–and the real you is soul!
Our task, as I see it, is to grow our soul.
On my Substack platform, I have written more about how we might grow our souls–here, here, here, and here–but, as a professional futurist, it is my contention that as AI and other technologies advance, many people (but not everyone) will have something of a “spiritual awakening.”
This is to say that after reflecting deeply on the coming change which AI will impose upon society, many people will come to the startling insight that they are not just a body and a mind. They are something more–they are a soul.
Thus, hidden in the coming technological revolution is a glorious silver lining–actually, I liken it more to a “Golden Thread”–and it is this: As more see themselves as souls and spiritual beings, they will also begin seeing others in the same light. And it is THIS transformation that will most define our future.
It is for this reason, I remain convinced that the direction of the future will be Spiritward.
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