Everyone and their toaster is predicting that AI will change everything. Whole industries vaporized. All jobs obsolete—next week, apparently. You, jobless and serene, writing haikus in a meadow while a bot files your taxes, wins a Pulitzer, and gets optioned for a Netflix series.

The only question: what calendar are these predictors using?
Where does the exuberance come from?

It starts with our overvaluation of intelligence

Intelligence, as it turns out, might be one of the most overrated traits of all time.
It doesn’t make people happier. Or kinder. Or better at relationships.

If anything, being smart often means more anxiety, more second-guessing, and a better ability to invent new ways to be miserable.

At the same time, we worship intelligence. I do. It’s seductive—a neat, clean solution to messy problems. A golden key. It’s the quality we imagine fixes everything from traffic to heartbreak.

But that reverence might be blinding us.
We’re overestimating how fast intelligence alone can change the world, and underestimating how stubbornly human everything else remains.

Intelligence doesn’t move systems. People do. And people are… slow.

We use only a fraction of what’s available

We talk about intelligence like it’s the end-all be-all. But most of us use about 1% of the intelligence available to us, human or machine. Just like you use 1% of your phone’s features.

(Be honest: when’s the last time you used your phone’s barometer?)

Modern phones are supercomputers that would have shocked NASA in the ’60s. They’re packed with capabilities: sensors, accelerometers, high-end GPUs, microphones that rival those used by Elvis recordings, and processors powerful enough to edit 4K video.

And what do we use them for?

Other than games, our processors are bored to death.
The most common app is probably the flashlight.

The internet gave us the entirety of human knowledge—every fact, theory, and historical footnote—at our fingertips. We could’ve become polymaths. Renaissance men and women, each and every one.

But how often did we use it to read random Wikipedia articles about 15th-century shipping lanes or the mating habits of squid?

Mostly we Googled whether penguins have knees, tracked celebrity breakups like they were geopolitical events, or checked what time the Super Bowl starts—and watched video compilations of people slipping on ice.

AI offers even more. Will we use it?

AI now offers an even better opportunity.
It’s an instant tailored tutor, amazingly knowledgeable and able to teach you using any format, language, analogy, and level you want.

And yet—I don’t ask it to teach me a new concept every day.

Even at work, most of our tasks don’t exactly strain the limits of our cognition. Sure, we might have one or two tough problems a week that actually require serious thought.

But most of the day?
Emails. Meetings. Rearranging bullet points in a deck. Clicking “Reply All” by accident and then sweating it.

These aren’t exactly Turing Test moments.

AI could help with the heavy lifting—but there’s just not that much heavy lifting happening.

Yes, AI will be brilliant. But brilliance is niche.
The demand for intelligence might be wildly overstated.

Most of daily life runs on habit, vibes, and gut calls.
Not on 3D chess-level cognition.

So, will the world be unrecognizable in a few years?
Maybe not.

Not because AI will stall.
But because we might not take advantage.