We're Building a Rival Intelligence—And We're Not Ready for the Conversation

Never in our entire history as a species has there been a rival intelligence. Not a tool. Not an assistant. A rival.

That's what makes artificial intelligence different from every technology wave that came before it. The printing press extended our memory. The steam engine extended our muscles. The internet extended our reach. But AI extends—and in some cases replaces—our thinking.

And we're nowhere near ready for that conversation.

The Turing Test Is Behind Us

The machines talk back now. That's not a metaphor. When Alan Turing proposed his famous test in 1950—can a machine fool a human into thinking it's human?—it seemed like a distant philosophical puzzle. Today, it's a daily reality. We've passed the Turing test. It's done.

What's more troubling is what comes next. Deep fakes are becoming so compelling that within a year or two, it will be genuinely difficult to know if the person on your video call is real. The distinction between human and machine communication is being erased.

This matters for banking and financial services in ways most executives haven't fully processed. When your AI agent is negotiating with another company's AI agent, when machine-to-machine transactions happen in milliseconds, when algorithms are making credit decisions and investment recommendations at scale—who's accountable? Who's in control?

The Operating System of Society Is Conversation

Here's what we need to understand: the operating system of companies and society at large is conversation and stories. People get inspired by stories. They make decisions through dialogue. They build trust through interaction.

And now we have a silicon hive mind that is part of that conversation. It has read everything. It can opine on anything. It's shaping how information flows, how decisions get made, how people understand the world.

The social media platforms already have a computational model of your cognition and your social network. Their algorithms know that ideas propagate, that beliefs are contagious, that going deeper into emotional triggers keeps you engaged. They've optimized for the amygdala, not the prefrontal cortex.

AI amplifies this a thousandfold. The question isn't whether AI will affect how humans think and decide. It already is. The question is whether we're going to shape that influence intentionally or let it happen to us.

Banking Without Open Banking Rails Is Dead

On a recent episode of Breaking Banks, Jim Marous, Ron Shevlin, and JP Nicols joined me for our annual predictions discussion. One thing became crystal clear: you cannot run AI-capable banking without open banking.

If you're going to have AI agents talking to each other—and they will—it has to happen on open banking rails. The consumer owns their data, not the bank. That shift, driven by regulations like Section 1033 in the US and PSD2 in Europe, isn't just a compliance matter. It's the infrastructure for the next generation of finance.

Think about what AI agents need to operate effectively: access to real-time data across accounts, the ability to move money instantly, permission to act on your behalf within parameters you've set. None of that works in a world of siloed systems and batch processing.

The banks that figure this out will build the AI foundational models that win. The ones that don't will become invisible to the AI agents that increasingly control consumer financial decisions.

Even Benevolent AI Will Create Conflict

Here's something that doesn't get discussed enough: even in the best-case scenario—even if we somehow create purely benevolent superintelligence—we are inevitably going to face conflict with it.

That's human nature. Nobody likes being told what to do, especially by a machine. We'll have AI systems that genuinely have our best interests at heart, making recommendations that are objectively better than what we'd choose ourselves, and we'll still resist. We'll still argue. We'll still insist on our autonomy even when it's not in our interest.

I think about this with my own kids. I love them completely, but they still push back on my decisions even when those decisions are clearly for their benefit. The correct metaphor for AI might not be that we're the children and AI is the parent. It might be that we're the aging parents who need care but refuse to accept it.

It's Our Responsibility to Imagine

Fiction has always been a powerful device at these massive pivots in history. When the Industrial Revolution was emerging, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. In the post-war era of state control and surveillance, George Orwell gave us 1984. In the last decade, Black Mirror has explored our anxieties about technology.

Right now, 99% of what you hear about the world after AGI is negative. It's dystopian. It's Terminator scenarios and existential risk.

But we need fresh perspectives. We need to imagine what it looks like if this goes well—not naively, but thoughtfully. Because imagination shapes reality. The futures we can envision are the futures we can build toward.

This is far too interesting and important a topic to be left to white papers and tech firm press releases. AGI—artificial general intelligence, machine intelligence that matches or exceeds human capability across domains—is going to affect each and every one of us at a deeply personal level. It's our data, our heritage, our collective knowledge being used to fuel these systems.

We all have a responsibility to think about what that world might look like and how we might live in it.

The Healthcare Preview

Want to see where finance is headed? Look at healthcare.

The amount of time people spend navigating Medicare, Medicaid, insurance claims, and medical billing is insane—and it falls disproportionately on older people who are least equipped to handle the complexity. Healthcare is going to get completely revolutionized by AI agents that can manage this chaos on your behalf.

The same is true for personal finance. The destination for AI-managed healthcare and AI-managed money is remarkably similar. Your AI will know about your behavior, your goals, your health, your financial situation—and be able to manage all of it together in ways that no human advisor ever could.

When you add insurance into that picture, healthcare becomes a financial decision and finance becomes a health decision. The boundaries between industries start to dissolve when AI is the integration layer.

The Next Stage Is Already Here

The next generation of fintech startups won't just use AI—they'll be built from AI at their core. These highly-AI-native companies are going to compete with and potentially disrupt even the ten-year-old fintechs that disrupted traditional banks.

Chase spends over a billion dollars a month on digital transformation. That's $12+ billion annually just to stay competitive. And still, the question remains whether traditional institutions can move fast enough.

Somewhere along the line, a company like Amazon might become the consolidator of the consumer banking relationship. They'll offer a checking account here, a payment mechanism there, bring it all together with all the data they have, and provide better answers about how to use each component most effectively.

Nobody's delivering that experience today. But somebody will. The question is whether it will be a company that started in banking or one that started somewhere else entirely.

The Choice We Face

We're at a fundamental juncture. AI isn't just another technology to be managed by IT departments and risk committees. It's a shift in the basic structure of how decisions get made, how value gets created, how society organizes itself.

The banks, the regulators, the technology companies—none of them fully grasp what's coming. We're still operating with frameworks designed for a world where humans made the decisions and machines just executed them.

That world is ending.

The choice isn't whether to engage with AI. That's already decided. The choice is whether to engage thoughtfully, with imagination and intention, or to let it happen to us while we're still arguing about last decade's problems.

Never in our history has there been a rival intelligence. We'd better start acting like we understand what that means.