In 2023, the man who arguably built the foundation of modern artificial intelligence — Geoffrey Hinton — walked away from Google. Not for a bigger paycheque. Not for retirement. He left so he could warn the world about the very systems he spent his career creating.
He was scared.
Twelve years ago, long before ChatGPT became a household name, I was sitting at a roundtable as an IBM Futurist. Around me: tech executives and journalists drowning in bright-eyed optimism about the digital age. When the microphone reached me, I said something that killed the mood instantly:
“I am genuinely scared about AI and jobs, and how it is going to affect people’s lives.”
Silence.
For over a decade, mainstream self-help has told us to overcome fear, suppress anxiety, and smile through the chaos. I think that is one of the most dangerous pieces of advice currently circulating. You should not try to conquer your fear. You should use it.
Fear Is a Signal, Not a Character Flaw
Here is something the optimism merchants will not tell you: the deeper your understanding of AI architecture, the more reasonable your anxiety becomes. The builders are consistently more frightened than the casual users. When technology moves at a pace where keeping up feels genuinely impossible, panic is a rational response. It is not weakness — it is signal.
Consider what technological abundance actually does to value. We went from carefully composing 24 or 36 shots on a roll of physical film to taking thousands of frictionless digital photos that nobody ever looks at again. When everything becomes infinite, noise drowns out meaning entirely. AI is about to do this to cognitive labour and creative industries — at a scale and speed that the camera analogy does not fully capture.
Signal is what separates the people who navigate the next ten years from the people who get flattened by them. Fear left idle paralyses you. Fear listened to becomes fuel — to research, to adapt, to honestly evaluate where your industry is actually heading rather than where you hope it is going.
Choose Your Suffering
In an era changing this fast, you only get to pick your form of suffering. There are two options on the menu and nothing else:
Option A: Suffer the sudden, brutal disruption that comes from looking away.
Option B: Suffer the friction, the humility, and the hard work of learning skills you do not yet have.
There is no third option. You cannot outsource this. You cannot blame governments, corporations, or the economy for what happens to you if you chose not to pay attention. Surviving what comes next requires taking radical, uncomfortable responsibility for your own baseline — full stop.
Root Yourself in Something Real
As AI dominates the digital landscape, the premium on real-world human experience is quietly going through the roof. For me, stepping onto the mats to train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in my fifties is not a hobby. It is a deliberate anchor. Doing difficult physical things keeps you malleable. It reminds you how to be a beginner, how to absorb friction, and how to build something that cannot be automated — the kind of character that only comes from real-world resistance.
This space is not for gurus with clean answers. It is a real-time record of an ex-IBM Futurist, author, and BJJ blue belt living in rural Croatia, actively working out what comes next. No hype. No certainty. Just the honest read.
