AI Surpassing Human Intelligence: Can Humans Stay Relevant?

I want to talk about AI surpassing human intelligence today. The unprecedented, almost nauseating pace at which things are evolving in the AI domain is going to leave many flummoxed.

In the latest, OpenAI – the dominant force in the chatbot space and soon in the agentic domain – announced the launch of O3, the next model of ChatGPT.

Everyone’s talking about it on social media and news sites. But what’s not getting enough attention is how incredible its new capabilities are.

With O3, we’ve crossed a threshold. You know, one that, until recently, only existed in speculative fiction. We now have a model that can score 25% of something called the Frontier Math benchmark.

If you haven’t heard of it, that’s fine. These are math problems so complex, so hard that almost no human can solve them, let alone truly understand them.

In fact, I am sure if you asked around in your network, nobody you know could crack them. Even many brilliant PhDs would struggle to wrap their heads around them.

I know it’s tempting to brush it off like AI’s logical progression. “Yeah, machines are learning. They are faster. What’s the big deal?” But the big deal is that these machines will now be smarter than we are.

Or, if you like splitting hairs, they’re smarter than almost all of us. That’s a world-shaking shift and it’s only just the beginning.

Why does this matter so much?

By now, you’d have read about it that these AI systems are going to go to places that most human minds can never hope to enter.

It’s a striking example of AI surpassing human intelligence. While it may take a few more years, advanced AI systems will soon be tackling the indecipherable fields of advanced mathematics, theoretical physics, climate change, even soil and Microclimate Variability.

Before long, they’ll be doing more than just solving problems.

They’ll be creating entire intellectual landscapes, building new scientific and economic structures that we can only half-understand if we’re lucky.

What does that mean for us?

Picture a society where the most significant discoveries in science, engineering, manufacturing, finance—basically, every sector that has historically depended on human genius—are all being pioneered by AI.

Imagine the designs for next-generation computers, spacecraft or even vaccines being so advanced that only an AI can comprehend them fully.

How do we fit into a world like that?

We will live in it, certainly. But there’s a looming possibility that we’ll become like children in comparison to these advanced systems.

This isn’t a purely hypothetical scenario either.

It’s a scenario that might very well define the next few decades. Some call it the Economic Singularity. You know, a phenomenon that flips our traditional social and economic models on their heads.

In many ways, AI surpassing human intelligence forces us to reconsider how running our economies, our governments and our businesses can’t keep up with machines.

Something new will have to emerge out of that chaos, but we don’t know what it will look like. Truly bewildering times lie ahead.

In this dizzying scenario, it’s fair to ask:

Do we still matter?

Will we become irrelevant, like outdated hardware waiting to be scrapped?

Is the meaning of human creativity, critical thinking or human thought coming to an abrupt end?

No AI, no matter how powerful, can tell us what it feels like to be human, to love, to lose, or to hope. We’re the ones with that lived experience.

As a simple example, AI can certainly compose a symphony or suggest new chord progressions, but it can’t experience the goosebumps we get when a chorus hits just right.

It can’t experience the tears that come when a film’s crescendo triggers memories of our own heartbreaks. That shared emotional landscape isn’t going anywhere, because it belongs to us.

What’s our role in shaping AI’s trajectory?

Let’s not forget that we’re the ones who built these machines in the first place.

Yes, we may hand the keys to the future over to the machines we created, but we’re not gone. We can choose how we design and deploy these AI systems.

We can embed certain ethical guidelines, certain boundaries—or at least try. We can decide whether to release them into the wild or keep them behind firewalls.

We can dictate which kinds of problems we want them to focus on whether it’s curing diseases, discovering new forms of clean energy or pushing the boundaries of deep space exploration.

We must choose to matter!

We have to stay engaged, stay curious and keep defining what future we want for ourselves.

Will it be a world in which humans and machines work in tandem, each doing what we do best? Or will it be one where we give up all agency and creativity and let the AI handle everything while we idle in a perpetual state of childlike dependency?

That’s an open question, and the answer depends on what we, collectively, decide to do.

If the machines can go to places we can’t, they’ll lead us there, too, if we let them.

AI can solve unbelievably difficult math problems, yes, but it’s not the AI that decides what those problems mean to us or how their solutions will reshape our sense of curiosity. That’s still ours to define.

We get to choose the purpose behind the calculations. We get to decide whether to make the solutions accessible, or to keep them locked away.

Final Word

Yes, the future will get weird (sooner than you imagine).

But in that weirdness, there’s also an opportunity to assert our humanity. This world is still very much ours to inhabit.

So as we watch AI sprint ahead into realms of knowledge most of us can barely fathom, we should remember that, ultimately, we define the value of the journey. And that might be the most human kind of power there is.