“ People are not afraid of losing jobs. They are afraid of losing meaning.
There comes a morning when the world wakes up differently, even though everything looks deceptively unchanged. The headlines still compete for attention, the markets still chase familiar illusions, and world leaders still speak as if they understand the ground beneath them. Yet beneath the surface, something has shifted. A threshold has quietly been crossed.
This shift began when capability moved beyond comprehension. It did not happen through dramatic announcements. It happened in the quiet corridors of Silicon Valley and Mountain View, where engineers started to realise they could no longer fully explain what they had built. When Google revealed Gemini 3, Sundar Pichai spoke with calm authority, but even he hinted at the growing difficulty of interpreting emergent behaviour.
Around the same period, another ripple travelled through the system. A new category of strange and rapidly spreading AI-related tools appeared without warning. To describe this, the column uses a metaphor, Nano Banana Pro, which represents the confusing new class of small but disruptive technologies that enter the world before institutions understand them. It is not a device. It is a symbol of the new technological shock.
“ For centuries, humanity assumed that intelligence was its final monopoly.
Then OpenAI stepped forward again. Sam Altman presented models that behave more like moving tides than linear sequences. For the first time in modern technological history, the creators seemed almost as surprised as the outside world. That surprise spread globally within hours.
Markets felt the pressure first. Not fear of danger, but fear of uncertainty. Volatility surged in ways that traditional models could not map. Hedge funds began to talk about AI driven blind zones, where algorithmic systems interact in ways humans cannot interpret. For the first time since 2008, the smartest money felt blindfolded. But this time, the knot was not tied by human error.
Governments reacted next. Presidents, prime ministers, and ministers of technology realised how limited their vocabulary had become. Policy statements felt improvised. Official briefings felt thin. Authority entered a fog too dense for confident speech. Governance systems, built for linear and slow moving change, stalled in the presence of combinatorial intelligence.
Henry Kissinger, In his late collaboration with Eric Schmidt for the book The Age of AI: And our Human Future (2021), he warned that once machines begin to think in ways humans cannot interpret, civilisation must rethink the idea of meaning itself. What once sounded philosophical now reads like a daily news update.
Meanwhile, another figure stands quietly behind every breakthrough. Jensen Huang and his hardware revolution form the backbone of the entire AI era. Every model, every experiment, every system described here depends on the world he helped build. He speaks loudly, yet the global technology curve moves to the rhythm of the chips produced under his leadership.
But the most important disruption is not technological. It is psychological.
For centuries, humanity assumed that intelligence was its final monopoly. Today, as machines generate reasoning, art, analysis, strategy, code, imagination and music, something deeper begins to shake. People are not afraid of losing jobs. They are afraid of losing meaning. Artists question their uniqueness. Professionals question their relevance. Students question their future. Leaders question their certainty. The human sense of self, once stable, feels suddenly fragile.
This is the second derivative moment. It is not tasks that are collapsing. It is a structure. Education systems strain. Labour markets twist. Narratives dissolve faster than they can be rewritten. Institutional legitimacy weakens. The world feels as if it is ending and beginning at the same time.
As the months ahead unfold, and as misinformation, economic shocks and policy confusion intensify, a quieter truth becomes clear. The world is not collapsing. The world is reconfiguring itself.
Humanity is entering a new equilibrium where intelligence is no longer singular, but distributed across biological and synthetic forms.
A question rises from the fog and waits for an answer.
When machines can think in ways we cannot trace, and institutions can no longer claim to understand the systems they govern, what does it mean to be human in the years ahead?
The world does not yet know.
But the question has already arrived.
Saliya Weerakoon
Saliya Weerakoon is an executive, entrepreneur, columnist, and public speaker with 30 years of experience in Asia Pacific and Middle Eastern markets. Saliya is a fellow at econVue. He lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka and…