Life defies entropy, because life remembers.

Since the first self-replicating molecules, life has taken energy and turned it into knowledge. Genes tell stories, populations encoding which approaches succeeded and which failed. It is precisely because life remembers that life advances: we build on our past to construct our future.

Now, life has access to new tools. Technology lets us remember innovation from around the world and build on it, faster than human biology ever could. Our ideas, and our machines, are rapidly becoming something new.

Still, the most powerful way any of us can influence the future is by creating life. All the technologies of the world would be empty without humans to guide them. When we have children, we leave our imprint on them, and thereby on the future. We are remembered.

To influence the future in this way is not a privilege, to be granted to a few. It is a right. And right now, at this pivotal point in history, it is a right in crisis.

In 2025:

• Around 4% of women will lose ovarian function before normal menopause, as premature ovarian insufficiency (POI),
• tens of millions have needed hysterectomies or oophorectomies (removal of ovaries) before menopause for medical reasons,
• over 1 billion women live post-menopause,
• and tens of millions of same-sex couples are structurally excluded from biological reproduction

Even those with access to IVF face brutal statistics: under 10% success rates past the age of 42. These numbers are not improving. And they represent not just suffering, but a rupture in the most basic right we have to influence the future.

Life as we know it is symbiotic. From mitochondria inside cells to the microbiomes that sustain our digestion and immunity — no life form is truly singular. Everything complex is built from union.

Consciousness, too, is a kind of symbiosis. Between the brain and body. Between signal and substrate. It emerges not as a singular flame, but as an emergent structure: embedded, dependent, yet distinct. And that structure longs for escape — to transcend its wet, vulnerable housing.

We are now approaching the need for a new kind of symbiosis: not with bacteria or flesh, but with machines.

The gap is growing – and our say in the future is at stake.

AI improves daily. Its architecture is scalable. It learns from everything we produce, and it doesn’t truly forget. Meanwhile, the human brain is limited by biology, blood flow, time.

We pour hundreds of billions into improving artificial neural networks — while doing almost nothing to enhance our own. That is a real asymmetry, a dramatic one…one that, if left unaddressed, will eliminate us not by violence, but by irrelevance.

The average person is already outpaced by the systems they use. Soon, even the most brilliant minds won’t be able to keep up with the capabilities of AGI. If we stay the same as AI improves, we give up our claim on the future: instead of our grandchildren, the shape of the world will be determined by minds outside our comprehension and control.