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. 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: 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 2025 research on human–machine complementarity 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, more than 100,000 people were measured against models including the leading systems. The machines beat the average person. But the most creative humans 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 for.

This is the substrate argument made personal. 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 what we put in. 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 is learning from.

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 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 goes further: consciousness, he argues, is what gives the universe meaning at all — 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 honest word for it — is to help people not leave before their time, and to help leaders not sleepwalk 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

Thomas W. Green is a Technology Futurist and keynote speaker. He works with leadership teams navigating the AI transition — where the bottleneck is no longer the technology, but the human operating system itself.