In Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick imagined a future where our own intelligence outpaced our wisdom.
Military commanders, politicians, and machines locked into a logic of deterrence so perfect it could only end in catastrophe. It was satire, but it never felt entirely like fiction.
With news that Russia is considering military expansion in our region, and the ever-present hum of global volatility, the spectre of Strangelove lingers. But the new frontier is not nuclear. It is cognitive.
In a TED interview last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and arguably the most influential figure in the artificial intelligence space today, shared a vision that was powerful, personal and terrifying.
“My kids will hopefully never be smarter than AI. They will never grow up in a world where computers don’t just kind of understand you,” he said.
“I hope they look back at us with sort of pity and nostalgia, and say, ‘They lived such horrible lives. They were so limited’.”
This was not bravado or marketing hype. It was a sincere reflection on the world he believes his son will inherit, a world of ambient intelligence, frictionless interaction, and exponential capability, where AI is not just helpful, but default. And based on Altman’s track record, there is good reason to believe this future will come to pass.
Open AI’s Sam Altman and Peter Sellers, who didn’t meet, since the latter died 5 years before Altman was born, but generative AI makes the idea possible.
Then what remains for us to become?
Because if machines can outperform us at most things we consider “smart,” the next frontier is not more intelligence. It is identity. It is selfhood. It is awareness.
This is not a spiritual detour. It is a critical shift in perspective. As AI gets better at mimicking thought, we are being invited, maybe forced, to explore what lies beneath it.
For thousands of years, the Indian philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta has taught that we are not our thoughts. We are not even our minds. We are the witness behind them. The part of us that is aware of thinking, that observes without judgment.
AI will never be that. It can simulate language, emotion, even wisdom. But it cannot know itself. It cannot sit in silence. It cannot ask: who am I?
But we can. And perhaps now, we must.
A few weeks ago, I was in the car with my children, and we started chatting with ChatGPT. One of them was full of curiosity.
What is the fastest car? What was the first Lamborghini? It was innocent, joyful, and honestly, kind of beautiful. The kind of spontaneous learning I never had access to at that age.
Another was joking around. Making fun of the AI. Being a bit rude. Nothing extreme. But it led to a conversation about why I always speak politely to it.
They thought it was strange. And they are not the only ones. A few colleagues have noticed it too, my habit of saying please or thank you to a machine. But here is the thing, AI is a mirror. It learns from us. Not just from what we say, but how we say it.
We shape the culture that AI will reflect back. Just like our kids learn from how we speak, how we listen, and how we show up. AI may not have feelings, but it does have memory, and more influence than we care to admit.
This is not hypothetical. In 2016, Microsoft launched an experimental AI chatbot called Tay on Twitter. Within hours, it began spewing racism, hate, and conspiracy theories. Why? Because that is what people fed it. Tay did not go rogue. It went human.
So no, I do not think it is weird to be polite to AI. I think it is a small but meaningful gesture of the culture we want to live in. A habit worth modelling.
We talk about prompt engineering as a technical skill. But maybe the real art is in how we train ourselves to engage with intelligence, synthetic or otherwise, with clarity, care, and integrity.
And now, as AI crosses the threshold from novelty to utility, it is becoming a force multiplier of uncertainty. We are already seeing it. Canva recently laid off staff reportedly as a result of AI efficiencies. Workers across industries are quietly wondering if their jobs are next, not just in factories or call centres, but in professional services, media companies, and boardrooms.
At a time when Australians are already grappling with soaring living costs, housing pressures, and economic uncertainty intensified by global trade volatility, artificial intelligence introduces a deeper, more existential threat. With economic stability, job security, and national competitiveness emerging as pivotal issues in this election, the implications of AI for employment, workforce stability, and Australia’s digital future must urgently move beyond hypotheticals and into the heart of political debate.
Altman’s vision is likely to become our reality. In this context, business and government leaders would do well to treat presence, ethical reflection, and emotional intelligence not as soft skills, but as strategic necessities for navigating the AI age. This is not just about technology, it is about preparing for a profound economic and cultural shift that is already underway.
Altman’s children, and mine, will never remember a world without intelligent machines. And so the question is no longer whether AI will become more capable, it will. The real question is how prepared we are to manage its impact on our economy, our politics, our families, and our sense of self.
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove ends not with a villain, but with a system doing exactly what it was told to do, perfectly, logically, and fatally. The point was never the bomb. It was the illusion that brilliance is the same as wisdom.
Today, our challenge is not so different. The systems we are building are not simply responding to us. They are learning from us. And they will reflect it back to us with increasing speed and scale.
When machines can do everything except be, the only real advantage left to us is presence. Not productivity, but awareness. Not acceleration, but discernment.
And in that space, beneath the noise of thought, beyond the automation of language, we might rediscover something AI will never replicate.
Our true selves.
Matt Vitale is a lawyer, capital markets adviser and cofounder of Birchal.
