The Age of Artificial Intelligence (Estimated reading time: 7 minutes)

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Technology so often just seems to change the tools it offers, yet underneath this trend today it is reshaping identity, power and economic structure. In the following thought piece, I explore how these shifts in digital autonomy may soon become the defining security blindspots for organisations and individuals alike.
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Sometimes a generation finds itself in the crucible of history – born into an age where structural change is not just possible, it is certain.

Now is such a moment.

A moment when the future runs before our eyes like molten steel — white-hot and unstoppable beneath our feet. Not 2026 specifically, but this window of perhaps three to five years when everything we believed in, built and took for granted meets an anvil of our own design, and the security plan for our future is taken from us by a technological miracle we created but never truly imagined.

The age of artificial intelligence
In all truth, nothing will ever be the same again whether or not the machines really do possess intelligence, or are just utilities delivering repetitive tasks we were once paid to perform. Security is no longer limited to equipment, your banking details, your card numbers, or for that matter where you were born. The new security is about identity – not merely the identities already encoded and profiled into state-owned digital tokens, but something far more fundamental. Because in a world where machines undertake the labour, the only thing left to authenticate is the human. Who you are, what you are allowed to do, and critically, whether you are permitted to participate at all.

We are not “on the road to hell”, as the song once put it, but we are about to lose the vestige of individual sovereignty – the right to access what we wish – provided it is legal – and with it, our ability to reach our goals and desires. Redeeming that sovereignty at any level in the future, will only be possible for citizens with additional income streams (or capital) to reach beyond whatever Universal Basic Income the Humiliores are afforded by their economically impoverished nation states, starved of useful income tax; and at the behest of the controllers of the technology that keep them in power.

In the days that are coming the only difference between a madman and a genius will be – one of them has money.

Humanity needs to understand that we are not just fallible, we are approaching economic redundancy. And ironically, the most educated people amongst us, the so-called elite, may be the first to sample that fate. The AI revolution is not about technology or innovation; it is about cost – cutting it. And just like the guillotine in the French Revolution, the first heads to fall will not be the peasants, but the nobles. The lawyers, the strategists, the consultants, the analysts; me. The currency of expertise is now free, instant, and tireless. It simply no longer needs us.

But before you settle your feet on that sheepskin rug with your signature coffee in hand, quietly marvelling at the karma that has befallen the ‘good and great’, remember this: the same redundancy package will also be served on the hard-pressed domestic cleaner and the busy plasterer. Profit, after all, has little interest in niceties or that ‘human touch’. Machines driven by pattern inference will undertake repetitive tasks faster, more cheaply, and more reliably than any human ever could. As I said at the outset, we are living in the crucible of history but not because AI is so brilliant, but simply because it will be so cheap and so ubiquitous that not using it will destroy competitive advantage. And through it a new aristocracy will arise – for the first time since the Templars controlled the debts of kings, only this time it will be the owners of multinational technology companies and their chosen courtiers.

Humanity thrives on inequality.

The quiet comfort of knowing that what you have may not be much, but at least it is more than the fellow down the road. People spend their lives adorning their private wooden gazebos, as though by keeping out the elements they might somehow secure a kind of immortality. But like anything built on sand, without foundations you have image, not reality.

This all worries me, and I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact, I have spent countless hours lying awake, running through virtual scenarios instead of sleeping, trying to understand where this may lead. Yet even in those moments it is clear that some people will navigate what lies ahead. When a huge tidal wave is forecast, a competent captain leaves port immediately and charts a direct path – straight into the massive wave. This is not conjecture; it is simply fact. Humanity will survive what is coming, and as part of that survival inequality will continue to prosper. The real question is how we make sure we still have a gazebo, and perhaps even one we can share with those who didn’t quite catch the wave.

So this is the rub: if human labour no longer provides economic value, how does society continue to function?

The answer?

Humanity – from the richest to the poorest – will end up playing The Game, and their success at that game will determine their fortunes and keep the ancient wheel of social inequality turning. Explaining The Game is beyond the scope of this article, but it is not an abstract concept –  it is how each of us will spend their many long hours – alone, searching not so much for entertainment as for fiscal autonomy.

If this analysis is even partly correct, then the time for passive observation has passed. What we need now is a serious attempt to map the futurescape ahead, to understand how to play The Game before it is fully upon us.

I am beginning that work and I am looking for people willing to help devise and implement a plan where even without the anchor of economic identity, humanity in all its complexity still has a place to grow.

If this piece resonates, I’d welcome a wider conversation and together we may yet get our ships out of port in time to ride over that wave.

Mark Benham works within organizations helping them navigate the intersection of evolving security threats, system complexity, and human factors, particularly where traditional frameworks fall short of current realities.