We should prepare for a world of ever-improving super-Einsteins

Human minds must get whirring in anticipation of artificial intelligence 'minds' that we're only beginning to comprehend

- NILESH JASANI

The early 2020s may well come to be remembered as the moment humanity discovered how to manufacture intelligence. At first, we welcomed chatbots—clever, conversational and occasionally cheeky, like digital butlers out of a Wodehouse novel. This was the Chatbot Era: amusing and useful, but still basic.

Then came the current Agentic Era. No longer satisfied with talk, we sought action. Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun booking flights, editing selfies, navigating spreadsheets and doing several daily tasks. These early agents, while powerful, remain constrained—they are brilliant assistants, but still locked in their digital cribs.

Yet, something far more transformative lies ahead. The third stage in this journey will see intelligence untethered from digital devices. This is when cognition escapes the screen and begins to permeate the physical world. Whether called embodied AI, robotics or the 'era of smart everything,' this phase will bring adaptive learning systems into everything from fork-lifts to furniture. Powered by action models, experience learning, multi-modal understanding and advanced hardware, machines will begin to learn from and reshape the world around them—physically, not just virtually.

And even this would only be a warm-up. The fourth stage promises an intelligence explosion. We are rapidly approaching an era where the most complex and longstanding human challenges will be met with cognitive power vastly exceeding our own. Some AI models are already rivalling Olympiad-level students in mathematics. It is a matter of time before these systems surpass the most brilliant human minds in every discipline.

This intelligence, endlessly scalable and tirelessly improving, will first prove its worth in the realm of health.