For years, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles were known as the politest drivers in San Francisco. They came to full stops, waited patiently at four-way intersections, yielded generously, and behaved with a kind of algorithmic courtesy that seemed almost naive. Then, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, they began to behave very differently: darting around double-parked trucks, merging aggressively, accelerating the instant a light turned green, even performing the occasional illegal U-turn. Basically, like a NYC taxi driver.

In 2013, a quiet software developer known to his colleagues as "Bob" became briefly infamous when investigators discovered that he had secretly outsourced his entire job to a contractor in China. He had mailed his security credentials overseas, paid the contractor a fraction of his six-figure salary, and spent his own workdays browsing Reddit and watching cat videos. Yet his performance reviews were stellar. Bob was, by every visible metric, one of the company’s best engineers. When his secret arrangement was uncovered, he was fired. But a decade later, his story looks less like a strange aberration and more like a preview of work in the age of AI.

Tokyo moves with the cool precision of an algorithmic machine. Step out of Shinjuku Station at dusk and the city unfurls around you in layers of neon haze—LED kanji flickering like loose packets on a network, billboards pulsing with the heartbeat of a vast digital organism. Crowds slide past in silent, perfect non-collision, as if everyone is running the same invisible protocol. In a metropolis of 37 million, you brace for chaos. Instead you get choreography—an improbable calm humming beneath the circuitry of the streets.

Elon Musk recently predicted the end of the smartphone. “In five or six years,” he said, “we won’t have phones in the traditional sense. What we call a phone will really be an AI edge node — no apps, no OS, just AI.” It’s easy to dismiss such statements as provocation, but he may be right for reasons that have nothing to do with hardware or his views on the mass adoption of AI-generated content.

Every technology revolution offers a brief window of unreasonable advantage—an era when the bold can seize opportunities that later become ordinary. This is that moment for AI. The cost of cognition is collapsing. The rules haven’t caught up. The field is open to anyone ambitious enough to rewire their work, their organization, or their industry around machine intelligence. But none of these conditions will hold for long.