“Why couldn’t we drive it out?”
“Because you have so little faith.
Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed,
you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’
and it will move.
Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Matthew 17:19-20

According Archimedes, an engineer, all you need is a long enough lever and a fulcrum. If you wish to move the world…
According to Jesus, a leader, all that his disciples need is faith. If and when they want their expressed wishes to come true.

We’ve been moving our world down the history lane for quite a while now.
2000 years, give or take a couple of centuries, since the two mentioned above have shared their apparently conflicting advice, we’ve arrived at an infliction point.

We’ve almost levered ourselves out of our history.
And replaced ‘us’ with ‘ME’.

Chimps have learned to use grass blades to fish ants. And sticks to spear bushbabies.

We, the smartest among apes, have learned to lever the walking stick into a club.
To whittle clubs into spears and then lever them into arrows.

Using tools we’ve levered ourselves from working beasts into humans.
Using weapons, some of us have levered themselves into leaders.

Using money, some of us have levered themselves – collectively – into relative abundance. Relative to others…
Using ‘borrowed’ money, a few of us have levered themselves into financial gurus. And others into homeless people. 1929-1933 and 2008 are but two of the more poignant examples.

Using printed information – a.k.a. books – we’ve levered ourselves out of ignorance.
Using widely disseminated and specially crafted information – a.k.a propaganda – some of us have levered themselves into temporarily powerful positions. At the expense of those gullible enough to swallow that poison and causing immense suffering to the bystanders who had the bad luck to be there.

Using automation we have levered skilled workforce into clerks.
Using procedures, we have levered clerks into pen-pushers who check for conformity instead of thinking by themselves.

Nota bene!

Neither of these is an argument against leverage!
After all, we live in the best world we’ve been able to build for ourselves…

The only thing we should pay attention to is the fact that our levers have become progressively powerful.
As in starkly more and more powerful. And not necessarily more powerful in a progressive way… On the contrary, more likely.

Our weapons have become so powerful that we are able to obliterate life on Earth. If enough ‘unstable persons’ among us will somehow end up controlling enough of those weapons…
Our single-mindedness regarding profit, levered by an intense Neo-liberal propaganda about money as a panacea, has dramatically changed everything. From the very geography of the Earth to the way we relate to the world.

Nowadays we have started to leverage our thinking.
Not for the first time, indeed, but with renewed intensity!

Writing has allowed us to divide a big problem into smaller problems. Each of those smaller problems was assigned to and eventually tackled by a specialist. Ultimately, it was the job of the ‘project manager’ to assemble the ‘solution’ by making ‘good use’ of the results provided by the specialists.

No longer.
Powerful enough computing and skillful code writing have been levered into Generative AI.
Very soon, ‘project managers’ will no longer need specialists. Only specialized generative AI apps.

Those apps will constitute Archimedes’ ‘long enough lever’.
The already existing automation will constitute the fulcrum.
The wishes of those happening to be able to use the apps and control the fulcrum will constitute the faith mentioned by Jesus.

Are we ready for this?