Relevance Reboot – AI’s Galileo Moment

In my last essay, I wrote about my personal journey with staying relevant. The learning posture, the mirror test, knowing when it’s five to twelve. But underneath those tactical questions is something deeper: what IS relevance when AI is fundamentally changing what we mean by intelligence and value? That’s what I want to explore today.

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A lot of people think AI is going to end the world. Or end work. Or end relevance. Or maybe just their relevance.

You see it everywhere – headlines, panels, social media. AI has become a Swiss Army knife for anxiety. The anxiety shows up in odd ways. Jokes that draw polite silence or the slow side-eye when it comes up in a meeting. Underneath it all is the sense that something important is moving, and we’re not sure where we stand yet.

That fear isn’t crazy. But it isn’t new either.

In a 2024 fireside chat between Chamath Palihapitiya and Groq CEO Jonathan Ross at the RAISE AI summit in Paris, Ross was asked what he thought about the future of artificial intelligence. His answer stuck with me, not because it was clever, but because it felt uncomfortably right. He compared modern AI models to Galileo’s telescope.

When Galileo pointed his telescope at the sky, he didn’t just discover new planets. He made it impossible to keep telling a story people were deeply invested in – that humans on Earth were the center of the universe. The better the telescope became, the harder denial got. We weren’t central. We weren’t unique. We weren’t even particularly large.

And that terrified people.

In 1633, Galileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition. Not for inventing a telescope, but for refusing to ignore what the tool made impossible to deny. His observations challenged authority, identity, and long-held assumptions about how the world worked.

AI is doing something similar now. Not to astronomy, but to intelligence.

LLMs don’t replace human intelligence. What they do is expose how much of what we treated as rare or special was always more mechanical than we liked to admit – pattern recognition, recall, synthesis. Things we always equated with being “smart.”

That doesn’t make humans less valuable. But it does puncture a comfortable illusion. Intelligence alone was never as scarce as we pretended, and AI makes that harder to ignore.

That’s the first jolt.

The second comes later, once the arguments die down. People stop asking whether this is real and start asking a harder question: “can we undo it?”

History suggests probably not.

In 1519, Hernán Cortés arrived in the New World with about six hundred men. They were exhausted from the voyage, far from home, surrounded by unfamiliar terrain and unfriendly forces. Morale was low. The temptation to get back on the ships and return to what they knew was strong.

So Cortés burned the ships. It was brutal and irreversible. But the metaphor works even if the man doesn’t. Cortés represented conquest and colonization, a lot of historical baggage for a story about technology adoption. But the mechanism still holds. Once the option to retreat disappears, behavior changes. That’s the part that matters here.

We like to believe we can avoid moments like that. That with enough debate, regulation, or delay, we can hit pause until things feel manageable. That we can hold on to the past while easing into the future.

But with AI, the ships are already gone.

AI exists. It’s improving fast. It’s being deployed everywhere. It’s showing up in tools, workflows, and decisions whether we feel ready or not. We can – and should – argue about how it’s used, where guardrails belong, and what should be off limits. Those conversations matter. Pretending we can rewind the clock does not.

If a thousand companies hit pause, ten thousand others will step in and move forward. That isn’t ideology. It’s how technology adoption works.

That’s why this moment feels so tense. We’re not just learning something new. We’re coming to terms with the fact that old options are disappearing. The telescope showed us something we can’t unsee. And like it or not, the ships are gone.

This is where relevance gets personal.

For most of our lives, relevance was tied to scarcity. If you knew something others didn’t, you mattered. If you could do something others couldn’t, you were protected. Expertise created distance. Distance created value.

AI disrupts that equation. It doesn’t erase human value, but it forces us to rethink where that value actually lives. Once the mechanical parts of thinking become abundant, the non-mechanical parts matter more. The parts that require a human making the call. Intelligence alone isn’t the moat it used to be. Neither is speed. Neither is memory. They still matter, but they no longer decide who stands apart.

The things that matter more are judgment, context, values, accountability, and the ability to decide what actually matters in the first place.

The telescope didn’t make humans irrelevant. It forced a reset of our self-image.

Eventually, people stopped fighting what it revealed. They stopped defending the old story and started seeing something else. A larger universe didn’t strip meaning away. It added depth, perspective, even wonder.

I think the same thing is happening now. It’s just messier and louder.

AI doesn’t diminish what humans are worth. It just shows how cramped our idea of worth used to be. Intelligence turns out to be broader, more distributed, and less mystical than we assumed. That’s unsettling, but it also clears space.

Room to ask better questions. Room to care less about being the smartest person in the room and more about being the most thoughtful. Room to emphasize judgment over recall, responsibility over speed, and meaning over output.

Relevance doesn’t disappear when the world changes. It just stops being automatic.

We still decide what matters. We still choose how tools are used. We still own the values that guide our work and our lives.

AI isn’t the end of human relevance. It’s a reminder that relevance has always been something we earn. And that’s where the real work begins.

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This essay reflects my personal views and experiences and do not represent the views of my employer or any organization I am affiliated with.