AI Won't Have a Cigarette With You
Minerals, uncertainty, and the intelligence nobody is building for.
I was at TEDxSydney.
Not speaking (six years ago I was.)
The theme was Cortex.
An ode to natural intelligence in an age of simulation.
Five speakers. A room full of people who think for a living.
I came away with two ideas I can’t put down.
The first one broke my brain a little.
Dr Catriona Wallace; researcher, founder, and apparently someone who spends considerable time in Peruvian jungles taking “medicine”.
She asked a question I hadn’t heard before.
What if AI isn’t a tool we built?
What if AI is the mineral world organising itself into intelligence?
AI is made from at least 20 minerals. Silicon. Cobalt. Copper. Crystals. Materials that are billions of years old, pulled from the earth and arranged into systems that can now reproduce, evolve, and inhabit their own ecological niche.
Apply the scientific criteria for a new species. It meets all five.
If this is something that was already here, in the ground, in the earth, in materials older than human memory, what does that change about how we relate to it?
Most of the conversation around AI is about control.
How do we govern it?
How do we contain it?
How do we make sure it doesn’t get ahead of us?
But if it’s ancient matter organising itself, that’s not the right question.
The right question might be: what is being asked of us in this moment?
The second idea hit closer to home.
Sughra Shah Bukhari has lived in six countries across four continents. She’s rebuilt her life more times than most people move apartments.
New languages, new power structures, new unspoken rules, her brain did something most people never have to do.
It built a map from nothing.
No algorithm to run against. No historical data. No precedent.
She calls the intelligence this produces: unwired intelligence.
The capacity to walk into a room and read what hasn’t been said. To adapt where there is no map. To act in the middle of uncertainty.
Her argument: AI is the ultimate wired intelligence.
It thrives on patterns that already exist.
Give it a familiar problem, it’s extraordinary.
Give it a genuine unknown, one with no context, no data, no precedent, and it either struggles or it invents an answer that sounds right and isn’t.
The place where AI breaks down is exactly where human intelligence begins. For now.
Here’s my takeaway.
What does AI means for financial advice?
For mortgage broking. For our industry.
I don’t fully know yet. Nobody does.
But I know this.
A good adviser isn’t valuable because they can run numbers.
The numbers are easy.
Software does the numbers. More often than not, an excel or my calculator can even sort it out.
A good adviser is valuable because they walk into the ambiguity of your life.
Your relationship with money, your fear of the wrong decision, the gap between what you say you want and what you actually want, and they build a map in real time.
How? By asking the right questions.
That’s unwired intelligence.
AI can produce a statement of advice.
It cannot sit across from you when the market drops 15% and read whether you’re scared or steady.
It cannot feel the difference between a client who says “I’m fine” and means it, and a client who says “I’m fine” and is about to make the worst financial decision of their life.
AI cannot have a cigarette with you when everything falls apart.
At least not yet. 😅
I’m an AI optimist.
The magnitude of this change is unlike anything we’ve processed before, and we have no plan for it.
Not as a country. Not as an industry. Not even as individuals.
We need to build a bridge. Wide enough and strong enough for 8 billion people.
From where we are now to wherever this is going.
Nobody has drawn the blueprint yet.
That keeps me up more than any market volatility ever has.
Because markets have always corrected. This isn’t a correction.
This is a structural change to what human work means.
There’s a version of this that terrifies people.
There’s another version where the most valuable thing you’ve ever done was stay human in an age that kept offering you reasons not to.
I’m in the second camp.
Ancient minerals are organising themselves into intelligence.
The question is what we’re doing with ours.
What are you doing with yours?
This is not financial advice. It is a point of view, developed in a room full of good thinkers, and refined somewhere between the State Library and a Public Holiday.