0. The End of Pre-AI Thinking
February 14, 2026
For years, our thinking about AI has been dominated by visions of the post-AI world. Much of this imagination has been shaped by fiction like The Matrix and similar narratives, which present AI as a singular endpoint: a dramatic rupture after which society is fundamentally transformed. These stories have quietly become the reference points by which we judge AI’s influence, risks, and promises.
This framing has misled us.
While we speculate about a post-AI world, we fail to notice that the foundational premises of the current world are already breaking down. Traditional economic models, most notably the assumption that resources are fundamentally scarce, were not built for systems in which intelligence, coordination, and production scale at near-zero marginal cost. As AI advances, these assumptions do not bend; they fail.
Equally overlooked is the fact that this transformation will not occur in a single leap. There is no clean jump from “pre-AI” to “post-AI.” Instead, we are moving through a series of transitional stages, each with its own economic logic, social tensions, and policy failures. Treating AI as a future event blinds us to the changes already unfolding and leaves us unprepared for what comes next.
This blog marks the beginning of a longer exploration. My goal is to examine what these intermediate stages actually look like: how AI reshapes incentives, labor, capital, and power before any hypothetical endpoint is reached; which assumptions collapse first; and how individuals, institutions, and societies might prepare. The only uncertainty is whether this series will conclude before ever-accelerating AI makes all this effort obsolete.