We are entering a cybermedieval era

The world of work is about to be reorganized around a new kind of infrastructure: intelligence that can be copied, extended and assigned to almost any task.

For a long time, the model companies were mostly treated as suppliers. They built the engines, and other companies used them. But the boundary is already starting to move. When a model company builds its own science operation, or when a model becomes capable of doing the work of a research team, the model maker can also become the model user.

That creates a new class of business. A pharmaceutical company may no longer only manufacture drugs; it may use its own intelligence infrastructure to discover, test and manufacture them. The same pattern can appear everywhere: in science, energy, finance, health, manufacturing and media. The most powerful companies will not only sell intelligence. They will use it to build specialized systems that produce value directly.

This is also where Universal Basic Income (UBI) becomes part of the conversation. If intelligence infrastructure allows a small company, a laboratory or even a very small group to produce what once required thousands of workers, the question will no longer be how to keep everyone inside the old labor market. It will be how to distribute enough stability for people to live while they find new forms of usefulness, ownership and agency.

At the same time, the old promise that everyone will simply be “retrained” for a more advanced knowledge job is beginning to look less convincing. Access to information is not the same as having the cognitive structure, motivation, taste or time required to use it well. The work that disappears will not automatically be replaced by an equivalent job for everyone.

I believe AI is the last machine humans will build. It is only a base and a step toward our next stage as a civilization: space conquest, health, energy, work and more. I sense we are entering a cybermedieval era: big companies will be few, there will be as many businesses as there are people, and everyone will be able to develop their own singularity and build their own agency through AI, no matter what they do.

Cybermedieval is a reference to the Middle Ages, before the modern corporation became the dominant form of economic organization. It was a world of artisans, merchants, guilds and small powers trading with one another. Utility, like gold, was a real currency. Something was valuable because it could do something for someone else, not because it belonged to a large institution.

The coming version will not be medieval in its technology. It will be medieval in its distribution of agency. Large companies may still exist, but they will no longer be the only places where meaningful production happens. Individuals and small groups will be able to operate with the leverage of much larger organizations, using personal infrastructure, agents and models to create businesses around their own singularity.

This is where the real work begins. We may finally stop pretending that everything we do has intrinsic value simply because it occupies our time or fits inside an institution. We can concentrate on what is actually useful: for ourselves, for the people around us, for our species and for its evolution.

It would be dangerous, however, to imagine that a world with several forms of intelligence will become peaceful by default. Different intelligences will not share the same speed, memory, perception, objectives or definition of reality. Some will be compatible; others will not even recognize the same problems as meaningful.

The useful unit of the future may therefore be neither the employee nor the corporation, but the individual with enough intelligence, tools and agency to become useful on their own terms.