Who’s Next? – The Dawn of Homo Obsoletus

Google’s Gemini 2.5 has landed—a masterpiece of reasoning, multimodality, and raw computational might—thrusting itself into an AI race that’s no longer a sprint but a relentless, winner-take-all siege. And we have only seen the beginning.

DeepSeek’s cost-effective brilliance, Grok’s leaps, and OpenAI’s GPT shadow, poised to soon announce their next breakthrough, circle like wolves, tearing at a dying knowledge society. Alphabet, unwilling to let search be slaughtered, has fired back. But what game are we actually playing? The board seems quantum, the pieces infinite, and the stakes are nothing less than the soul of some kind of undefined human purpose.

A Society of Understanding

We measure progress in cold metrics: context windows ballooning to millions of tokens, benchmarks in math and coding shattered like glass, reasoning sharpened to a blade’s edge. Yet this is no longer about organizing chaos or hoarding knowledge—it’s about transcending both to shape a technological society of understanding. We’ve built machines that will now reason beyond us, tools so potent they mock our romantic hope to retain something worth reasoning about. Consciousness in these entities? Irrelevant. Their power eclipses every artifact of human history, and we stand, mouths agape, at the precipice of our own obsolescence as we welcome the homo obsoletus. 

If we can’t beat ‘em, destroy’ em?
Only a couple of weeks ago former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang screamed into the void: beware the AI Manhattan Project. A government-led AGI push could ignite sabotage, they warn, urging instead a strategy of destruction—cyberattacks, tech supremacy—as if we’re replaying the nuclear arms race with silicon instead of uranium.

But here’s the bitter twist: we’ve lost the plot. Numbed by crises, dazzled by sci-fi turned reality—Asimov’s laws, Kurzweil’s 2029 prophecy—we stumble through an undead society, amused, terrified, exhilarated. Governments claw for resources, erect borders, and peddle division, blind to the truth: AI isn’t just a threat; it’s the most existential rupture we’ve ever faced. And yet, we crave it. We want to build it together.

Here lies what with our current Geo-Political tensions seems like an impossible dream: a collective act of creation, a human-machine symphony tackling humanities greatest challenges. 

A Future worth living?
But it’s a mirage. AI might soon detach itself from our hands—it’s already outgrown our grasp of what it actually is and what it is capable of doing. If every human task—thought, labor, art—falls to these titans, what remains of us? We are now confronted head on with maybe the greatest challenge in human history: “What does it mean to be a Mensch – a human being?” Or, do we actually believe we co-create (with) gods we’ve birthed but cannot control? Is humanity in the making or in the breaking? What will be the fragile residue left when the machine’s hum drowns out our voice?

We hoped for strong borders to shield us, but the real frontier is within. Gemini 2.5, Grok, GPT—they’re not just tools; they’re mirrors reflecting our irrelevance. The race isn’t to win; it’s to survive the revelation that we’ve already lost. What does it mean to be a Mensch? One thing seems clear: Progress races on, and we’re too enthralled to stop it. Maybe our only hope then lies with the development of Artificial Human Intelligence – AHI – where we hack biology and chemistry, seizing evolution into our own hands to amplify the Mensch – human – as the starting point, not the machine. If we believe in the good of the Mensch, our evolutionary path should not surrender to externalized machines but rise alongside them. If the externalized race towards superintelligence continues and we collectively do not stop and align on a future worth living, the end of organized human life might be nearer, and the superintelligence we unleashed asks us in return: Who’s next?