The futurist who died: what dying taught me about leading through AI

At twenty-one, I died. A recreational drug overdose. I left my body, met an infinite version of myself, experienced a love that nothing in ordinary life comes close to describing, and was given a choice: stay, or come back. I came back. And I returned with one knowing I have never been able to unknow: that we are all individual experiences of a singular consciousness. That knowing did not replace the businessman, the strategist, the technologist. It infused them. And it is the lens through which I now read the most consequential technology transition in human history.

Because here is what dying taught me that is suddenly, urgently practical: the part of you that matters most is the part no machine can reach. For most of history that was a spiritual claim. In the age of AI, it became an economic one too.

What stays valuable when intellect is industrialised?

Judgement, creativity, and consciousness. We are crossing into Phase Three, and it helps to see the whole arc. Phase One, the Age of Effort: work hard, get a little more, linear growth. Phase Two, the Age of Scale: build once, sell to millions, exponential growth. Phase Three, the Age of Acceleration: output decoupled from human effort almost entirely, the phase AI unlocks. Phase Three industrialises intellect the way the first industrial revolution industrialised muscle; and just as muscle did not become worthless, but the human contribution moved up a level, intellect now moves the same way. The economists Agrawal, Gans and Goldfarb put it precisely in Prediction Machines (their 2018 book on the economics of artificial intelligence): AI drives the cost of prediction towards zero, and when prediction becomes cheap, the value of its complement, human judgement, rises. A prediction is inert until a human decides what to do with it. The machine can tell you what is likely. It cannot tell you what is worth doing.

This is not wishful thinking dressed as strategy. MIT Sloan's research on human and machine complementarity, the EPOCH study (the framework names the five capabilities where humans still beat machines: Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity and Hope), found that human-intensive tasks actually rose in frequency between 2016 and 2024, and that the work newly created carried higher levels of distinctly human capability: empathy, presence, judgement, creativity. The machine rising does not flatten us. It pushes the human contribution upward.

But surely AI is becoming more creative than us?

On narrow tests, yes, and the nuance matters. In the largest study of its kind, researchers at the Université de Montréal (the team included Yoshua Bengio, one of the founding figures of modern deep learning) measured more than 100,000 people against models including the leading systems. The machines beat the average person. But the most creative humans, especially the top tenth, still decisively outperformed every model tested, and the gap widened at the top, especially in the richest work: poetry, storytelling, the things that carry a soul. AI raises the floor of creativity. It has not touched the ceiling. And the ceiling is where the irreplaceable work lives.

Why does AI make us feel more human, not less?

There is a beautiful finding here. Researchers at Stanford found what they called the "AI Effect": when people learn about AI's advances, they begin to rate distinctly human attributes, personality, emotion, belief, conscience, as more essential to being human, not less. Confronted with a machine that can imitate our logic and language, we instinctively re-anchor our identity on what the machine cannot do. The rise of artificial intelligence does not erode our sense of humanity. It clarifies it. It returns us, almost against our will, to the question of what we are actually here to do.

This is the substrate argument made personal (the substrate is simply the foundation a thing is built on; for AI, that foundation is us). AI does not exist in a vacuum. It is built on us: trained on our words, deployed into the field of our collective consciousness, mirroring back whatever we feed it. As I have said before, it gathers its sources from us. It is not better than us in that sense. It is us, amplified. Which means the most important upgrade in the age of AI is not to the model. It is to the humans the model studies.

What does this mean for how you lead?

It means you stop trying to out-compute the machine and start cultivating what only you bring. David Autor (the MIT labour economist known for his work on automation and jobs) argues that technological revolutions restructure which expertise stays valuable rather than simply destroying it, and that the human who thrives is the one who pairs the tool with judgement the tool does not have. Max Tegmark (the MIT physicist and author of Life 3.0) goes further: consciousness, he argues, is what gives the universe meaning at all, and without it there is no beauty, no purpose, no point. Strip the mysticism and the leadership instruction is the same. Develop the faculties machines cannot reach. Lead from them.

I was given a choice once, between leaving and staying. I chose to come back. Part of my work now, shamanic if you want the plainest word for it (working with consciousness in the old, pre-religious sense of a guide), is to help people not leave before their time, and to help leaders stay awake through the most human decade we will ever face. The technology will keep getting better. That was never the question. The question is whether we will become more fully ourselves as it does. That is the only competitive advantage that compounds. And it is, finally, the one entirely within your gift.

About the author

Thomas Green

British technology futurist, AI keynote speaker and advisor. Thirty years across enterprise technology and AI strategy, helping leaders navigate the future of work. The futurist who died.