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.

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.

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.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at NVIDIA’s headquarters in Santa Clara. It’s hard not to walk through those glass corridors without feeling that you’ve stepped inside the engine room of a new industrial age. Banks of machines hum like power plants. Engineers move with quiet precision, orchestrating what feels less like software development and more like manufacturing reality itself.

Meta and EssilorLuxottica just unveiled their newest Ray-Ban Display smart glasses: stylish frames with a built-in display and a neural band for intuitive control. Tech outlets are already celebrating the design, the convenience, the futuristic promise. But the real story isn’t what these glasses allow you to see. It’s what they allow AI to see.