Our Last Century: AI is Transforming Society — and Humanity Itself…
AI has arrived and will upgrade Homo sapiens into a new advanced species, making this our last century…
By the year 2100, there will be no more new biologically born Homo sapiens. It will all be AI-enhanced ‘humans’; the next link in the chain of evolution. Every new baby will already be upgraded in unimaginable ways before they even see the light of day. By the year 2200, there will be no Homo sapiens left. Dramatic? Yes. True? Sadly, yes…
The advent of AI is not similar to the Industrial Revolution or the Internet/computer/smartphone revolution. AI is not just the next big thing. It is the ONLY THING.
In this article, I will dive deeply into my reasoning as to why I think this is our last century. Please read this manifesto in which I expand further into AI, its consequences, and the project Our Last Century.
>> Our story
Homo Sapiens have been around for about 200.000 years. We’ve been strictly hunters and gatherers for roughly 185.000 of those years. Modern civilisation is give or take barely 2000 years old. If you zoom out completely, it has taken billions of years to get to this unique point in time — where we, with our beautiful and unique consciousness, can explore, question, and appreciate the world, reality, and the universe.
Biological evolution is not per se what you call a quick process. But what’s coming next in evolution will not be dictated by our beloved Mother Nature. AI has arrived, and it is here to speed up evolution immensely. And that is an extreme understatement.
“AI is the first invention that can reason, invent, and create by itself, with the power of a billion brilliant minds and all the available knowledge in a million different fields of expertise. ”
>> AI has arrived…
This all might sound dramatic and a bit doomer-ish, but AI is truly a different animal than anything that has ever been invented before. AI is the first invention that can reason, invent, and create by itself, with the power of a billion brilliant minds and all the available knowledge in a million different fields of expertise.
To give you a visual; let’s imagine you have an expertise in history, and your friend in the medical field as a doctor. You both exchange everything you’ve ever learned so that you both become experts in both fields. This whole endeavor would take years!
Now imagine having 10 experts in 10 different fields, having to explain everything to everybody in that group so that they all become experts in 10 different fields. We all know that it’s an impossible feat, so we don’t even bother. But AI doesn't have those limitations.
AI can speak fluent Japanese, tell you how to replace your car engine with your exact car model, inform you in detail how Napoleon went to Russia, write a marketing plan for your social media, and give the perfect reply to a tough email from a pesky lawyer. It’s like having hundreds of thousands of Elon Musk-level geniuses in the palm of your hand.
The amount of data AI can process across countless fields of expertise is just mindblowing. AI is truly a different beast than anything we’ve ever had before, and it will change the structure of society, the economy, and humanity as a whole…
>> The Founders of the Future
Because AI can reason, invent, and create on its own, the exponential will truly be beyond our capacity. It will grow to be more and more all-knowing and all-powerful. We start out with AI, which will turn soon into AGI (artificial general intelligence), and not much later we will have ASI (artificial super intelligence). This moment in time is the singularity; a point of no return.
Human intelligence compared to AI’s god-like super intelligence will be like how we look at ants right now; cute and hardworking, but simple creatures that we just let be.
Nonetheless, we are the parents of AI. The founders of the future. We have collectively built the libraries, studied the world with science, created the internet, and thus built this massive dataset of information that we feed AI to understand us, the universe, and reality itself. We have created the cradle for a new intelligence — which eventually will translate into this being the last century of our species.
Did we shoot ourselves in the foot by creating AI? In many ways no, because it will be unbelievably beneficial in countless ways, but also yes. Absolutely yes, because it is also the end of Homo sapiens…
“We are the parents of AI. The founders of the future. We have created the cradle for a new intelligence, which eventually will translate into that this will be the last century of our species, the Homo Sapiens... ”
>> Extrapolating
It has been historically hard to predict the future, but we can already safely say it will for sure be transformative. When we extrapolate what AI will become—a quantum computer-powered, nuclear-powered behemoth of a supercomputer, that is filled to the brim with all available information in the world, and has the power of a billion brilliant minds with expertise in millions of fields of expertise that instantly can crosslink, study, reason, conclude, and create, with multiple billions of physical robots at its disposal—you could for sure conclude the future is not like anything we had before the advent of AI.
The leaps forward will hit society like a ton of bricks. The transformation will come with lots of friction, just like we had with the internet, the smartphone, and social media. Technology tends to be equally great as it is awful, with many upsides and downsides to it. The smartphone for example can guide us on the road to our destination, but we are also locked into the screen for multiple hours a day, looking at silly cat videos and arguing with anonymous strangers about who’s the better clown in the circus we call politics.
AI will have those same features: it will be absolutely fantastic when it cures many diseases, fixes the economy and inequalities, creates new wealth, and makes life just more enjoyable for everyone. But it will also bring immense new problems we’ve never had before, like mass unemployment, loss of purpose, and (for us now) unimaginable consequences.
David Bowie said it best in 1999: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.”
>> UBI/UHI?
If AI goes out there and creates new wealth on its own in ways we never could have imagined, it could potentially 3x the GDP. Or even 10x!
If all the digital jobs, like copywriters, coders, and marketers, will soon be decimated by AI agents (this has already begun in 2025), and the physical jobs are decimated by robots (this starts around 2028), how in the world are most of the people around the world going to get income to feed their kids, pay the rent or mortgage, and have some fun in life?!
According to many futurists and AI experts, governments should start implementing Universal Basic Income (UBI). A system to give everyone a set amount of money per month (like 4,000 dollars a month) so that they can pay their bills and thrive decently (in my opinion, it should be Universal High Income (UHI), like 10.000 a month). This is of course a complex matter with many complicated layered upsides and downsides, but if we don’t give the jobless masses money to eat, live, and thrive, we will have global chaos and destruction guaranteed.
The transition from the old working world to the new jobless AI world will be intense, but it is inevitable…
>> 90% tax?
BUT, as of now, I have a hard time believing that the companies that will generate the revenue through their AI systems and robots, will pay giant amounts of taxes. They have always found tax loopholes to evade paying their fair share. There are dozens of sneaky loopholes to make sure they pay zero to as little taxes as possible like via Panama, the British Virgin Islands, Dubai, the Netherlands, Ireland, and so on.
Huge companies like Meta, Google, Starbucks, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer, Nike, and Coca-Cola have (‘legally’) evaded hundreds of billions in taxes.
Will these giant tech companies—that creates the AIs and robots of the future that generates the revenue of the future—just now give away their newly generated revenue in taxes to the government that hands that money to the masses in the form of UBI or UHI?
To pay the masses all UBI or UHI, the revenue must be immense, and the tax should be sky high, like for example 90%. But we all know how capitalism works, and that is to generate as much profit as possible, and giving 90% of it away in taxes will be far-fetched, to say the least.
>> A new -ism?
It might be that because of AI and robots, capitalism needs to change, or even be replaced by a new -ism. We might get a form of AI-socialism if we have mass job loss and UBI/UHI implemented. In general and historically, socialism and communism haven’t worked out at all, and I fear it will be a disaster yet again, but an all-powerful fair, and well-intended AI could make it work this time. I doubt it, but I don’t know if we have a choice in the matter in the near future.
We’ve talked about the immense impact of AI on our society and the economy, but it’s time to talk about what impact AI has on our species.
Are you ready? There is a chance of steam coming out of your ears after this next part:
>> The realization that this is our last century
I still remember where I was when I realized that this is our last century. I was deeply contemplating AI in early 2024 on a rooftop in Kuala Lumpur looking out on the spectacular vista of this immense city and not giving a damn about what was in front of me, I was completely occupied with this mind-bending realization. It all clicked that evening and I thought: “Oh wow, this is it. We’re done. It’s over. This… this… this is our last century… ”
My brain was running over hours and steam was coming out of my ears when I was contemplating all the possible implications of this new superintelligence. Realizing what was coming was quite confronting, and a bit heartbreaking. Our beautiful flawed species is coming to an end…
I was (and still am) full of melancholy and nostalgia for us.
Since that evening I have deep-dived even more into AI, studied it intensely, followed all the AI experts, read all the threads and books, tested all the LLMs and wrappers, debated with dozens of futurists,… and concluded that we are in for a wild ride!
Let me explain to you what I saw to make me confident that this is it for us.
>> The upsides to being AI-enhanced
Just imagine the mind-blowing upsides of being AI-enhanced in the very near future:
Your IQ jumps up to 200
You understand and speak all languages without ever having to learn them
Your brain is connected to the LLM in the cloud, making you all-knowing
Your body no longer ages — you're in top shape all the time
Your emotions are stable
Your stamina and libido are sky-high
Your system notifies you with a popup whenever you're deficient in something
Your nanobots eliminate any diseases or cancers
You never have to attend school or take another course again
You’re wiser than Marcus Aurelius and the Buddha
You become the very best version of yourself
And so on, and so on…
And you're telling me you don’t want these upgrades?
If you don’t, it’ll be like you right now competing with a housecat in a game of Mario Kart. The little kitten has no clue what’s going on while you’re already crossing the finish line.
It would be like a strong, trained adult boxer fighting a small, untrained child. You wouldn't stand a chance — mentally or physically — against these enhanced superhumans.
“It would be like trying to teach a chimpanzee to speak fluent Japanese. It’s not happening — because it can’t.”
Staying ‘behind’ while others constantly upgrade themselves might be a choice for some, but you’ll quickly become part of a simple, fragile, and obsolete species — unable to grasp the technologies and concepts of the future. It would be like trying to teach a chimpanzee to speak fluent Japanese. It’s not happening — because it can’t.
>> The next link in the chain of evolution
The mass adoption of constant self-upgrading is inevitable. Within decades, a whole new kind of ‘human’ will emerge. In the fields of futurism and transhumanism, there are already names thought of for the next species of ‘humans’. The next link in the chain of evolution is near, but what is their name?
The possible names for our successors could be; Homo Deus, Homo Novus, Homo Evolutis, or Homo Technologicus. Which one do you prefer? Or do you have a better one in mind?
I’d rather not have to worry about a name for these new kids on the block, but you can bet the house on it that these AI-enhanced ‘humans’ will be here before you thought it possible.
>> The AI Timeline: 2025-2100
This timeline is just a rough estimate because we truly can’t predict what the future holds with whatever AI comes up with. I still laugh at the comical ad from the Netherlands where people in 1998 told what they thought about the mobile phone. They absolutely couldn’t imagine that we in the near future would all have a phone in our pockets, let alone have a little supercomputer with internet, social media, and navigation on it.
Put on the subtitles to hear their humourous lines:
A rule of thumb in predicting the future is that technology moves fast, but society moves slowly. It takes time before billions of people are on board and use that new technology on a daily basis. But this time with AI, it moves exponentially faster. It’s a steep curve straight up from here!
If we extrapolate with the knowledge that we have today, the AI Timeline for this century is roughly;
2027: Significant losses in white-collar jobs
2028: The first million humanoid robots
2030: AGI has arrived
2032: First billion of humanoid robots
2033: Significant job losses in blue-collar jobs
2034: First country with full UBI
2035: ASI, and thus the Singularity has arrived
2036: People start upgrading their biology, intelligence, beauty and longevity
2038: Half of the world's vehicles are self-driving ‘taxis’
2040: 10 billion humanoid robots
2042: GDP has doubled since 2025
2043: Half of the world has UBI implemented
2045: The first people will become AI-enhanced
2048: 25 billion humanoid robots
2050: The whole world has UBI implemented
2060: 50% of the population is AI-enhanced
2070: 75% of the population is AI-enhanced
2080: 97% of the population is AI-enhanced
2090: Only a tiny percentage of natural unenhanced Homo sapiens are left
2100: All newborn babies are AI-enhanced, with no biological natural Homo sapien babies being born anymore without enhancements.
2200: The very last of the Homo sapiens…
I might be way off here in my predictions, but if I’m even remotely close to what it will become, this whole timeline is a gigantic transformation of everything we are familiar with in the year 2025. The amount of progress we will have made in for example 2050 compared to now in 2025, will make the year 2025 look like how 1725 looks to us right now; simple, old-fashioned, and backward.
>> Our heritage
Soon when Homo Sapiens get enhanced and upgraded by AI, we will diminish as a species. The next chain in evolution will overpower us in intelligence, power, health, strength, longevity, wisdom, inventiveness, and creativity. We will be flawed, fragile, emotional, and simple monkeys compared to these super-humans.
Now that you know what’s coming and understand more deeply that AI is going to change the fabric of society, the economy, and humanity, it’s time to talk about our heritage.
We need to make sure we leave behind our mark. End our beautiful journey on a high note. We need to celebrate that we have lived. After all, we are the cradle of civilization. We are consciousness thriving. We (maybe the only one in the universe) have been the species that embraced science, wielded electricity, and built the internet and AI, and thus the future.
We are the last generations of Homo Sapiens. And we need to celebrate us. I want to honor us with Our Last Century, a comprehensive project that entails a whole plethora of incredible art that honors us in the most beautiful way possible.
>> Our Last Century: the multiple year project
To honor us in the best way possible, I have in mind a giant multiple-year project that encompasses many ambitious goals. To achieve what I have in mind, I will travel across the world to gather the most compelling, beautiful, and fascinating photographs of our people, our world, our culture(s), and our zeitgeist.
For the first two years of the project—while I build the brand and the shops and sites, and write the book—I will compose hundreds of epic photographs from all continents that guarantee the ‘Oh, WOW!’-effect. People need to see these photos and just gasp for air in disbelief.
The whole project will be translated into more than just a set of photographs.
Our Last Century encompasses:
+ a luxury coffee table book
+ a non-fiction book (this article turned into a book)
+ Hundreds of premium prints
+ An exclusive series of 1/1 Fine Art pieces
+ An NFT series
+ Short 10-20 min documentary
+ Award-winning body of work
+ Showcased in galleries in multiple cities around the world.
Our Last Century will be a complete brand, that could become more than just this first set of art and products. It might translate into a movie or TVseries, a video game, and so on. It could also translate into paid appearances, sponsorships, brand deals, and other potential opportunities.
>> Funding Our Last Century
I might be wrong about all of this, but what if I’m not? What if this is it? What if we don’t honor and celebrate us while we still can?
Let’s not waste time in this short window of time when we can make Our Last Century happen.
I’m looking for an investor or fund that can invest in this beautiful project. Funding is absolutely needed to get the content from around the world, build the sites and shops, create a plethora of products, establish and market the brand and products, and build a worldwide known brand.
The estimated timeframe is about 3 years, of which 2 years is dedicated to obtaining the photographs and content, building the brand and the shops and sites, and writing the book. The last year will be an all-in effort on marketing and sales to successfully launch the whole set of products.
If you are interested in funding Our Last Century, I would love to show the full financial picture with expected costs and projected revenue. Your input would finetune the outcome of the costs, revenue, how the whole project will start, and so on.
Let’s chat!
>> About the founder and photographer
I’m Marcus Musashi (39), a culture and travel photographer, world traveler, entrepreneur, and futurist from The Netherlands.
I’ve been traveling the world and photographing its beauty for more than 20 years, and full-time for the last 5 years, visiting and documenting beautiful people, awe-inspiring cities, and nature’s greatest hits.
My photographs are often described as colorful, atmospheric, and full of life. My goal with my photography is to raise people’s eyebrows and make them say out loud, “Oh, WOW!”.
I’ve been deeply inspired by the documentary HUMAN by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the colorful and atmospheric photographs of Steve McCurry, the touching masterpiece and disturbing premise of The Last of Us, and the astounding body of work of Jimmy Nelson.
The advent of AI has made me realize that this is our last century… and we should cherish, honor, and document us in the best way possible before the music stops playing for us Homo sapiens. Photography is the best medium to do just that.
Our Last Century will be my Magnum Opus.
>> The question that bothers me
With superior intelligence and capacity, will AI and the next link in the chain of evolution give a damn about what we care about now? Will they appreciate music? A mesmerizing painting, a hilarious joke, and a compelling photograph?
Will the enhanced in the near future still venture out to Mount Fuji to appreciate its majestic grandeur?
This question bothers me…
Will ‘they’ adore nature, culture, music, art, and everything else as much as we do? If they don’t, it will mean all of that beauty will fade away.
I think it’s essential to make sure AI and the enhanced deeply understand that it’s beautiful and worth adoring and preserving.
This is the main mission of Our Last Century.
>> Charity: for the kids!
This immense transition will come with lots of friction, especially in the less developed countries where physical labor will be diminished by the advent of AI-powered robots and where UBI isn’t installed yet (or won’t be at all). This means that parents will have less work (or no work at all) and less income, making life harder and harder for these impoverished kids. Their livelihood is in danger, and probably also their lives if they don’t get enough food.
I’ve seen poverty with my own eyes in the past few years, and it’s heartwrenching. It would be just wonderful if we could help out just one kid. It would be beyond epic if we could help dozens or even hundreds!
With the revenue earned from Our Last Century, we pledge to give to charity with 10% of the net proceeds. We will make sure the kids who need help the most get the help they need.
>> Closing words
So, yeah, we’re done, this is it. Enjoy your humanity while it lasts.
But let’s not get sad about it. Let’s rejoice! Let’s celebrate!
Let’s end on a strong note.
Let’s create a body of work that honors us, and cements our legacy as the founders of the future. The beautiful and curious species that imagined, created, and shaped the future.
Our Last Century is a tribute to us. The last of us. This is our last century.
