"The competition for AGI—AI that surpasses humans at all cognitive tasks—is of fundamental geopolitical importance."
That's The Economist, last week. Not some breathless tech blogger or venture capitalist talking their book. The world's most prestigious economic publication. Notice the framing - it treats AGI as a foregone geopolitical contest.
They're not wrong about the competition. They're just wrong about what we're competing for.
I started coding again last year. First time in 13 years. Not because I believe AGI is coming. I think it's alchemy-level nonsense. I started because I suddenly could. Because somewhere between the $560 billion in AI infrastructure spending and the endless debates about consciousness, something genuinely revolutionary happened: machine learning became boring infrastructure.
Boring is the highest compliment I can give technology. Boring means it works. Boring means you stop thinking about how and start thinking about what. Electricity is boring. TCP/IP is boring. And now, after all the hype and terror and mysticism, AI is getting boring too.
But you wouldn't know it from reading the headlines. When former prime ministers are writing op-eds about the AGI race, you know the fantasy has captured everyone - media, politicians, markets. They're so busy staring at artificial general intelligence that they're missing the actual revolution happening at ground level.
Two stories are unfolding simultaneously. One is a spectacular bubble built on geopolitical panic and sci-fi fantasies. The other is the quiet transformation of how we build everything. When the bubble narrative pops, the buildout accelerates.
The Evidence on the Ground
Nine months ago I started coding again. I'd been building systems since the 80s - architected investment fund migrations from mainframes to networked PCs in the City, built ERP for trading firms, then spent over a decade in enterprise consulting. But I hadn't written production code since 2012.
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