The Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges

There are at least three important things you need to know about AI going into 2026

and beyond. I'll cover them here, and maybe add a couple more,

but let's start with number one, which is that artificial intelligence is not artificial;

it is real cognition. And the reason it's real is because intelligence is built into the structure

of the cosmos. And let me explain that in more detail. So if I connect billions of individual

fungal elements in a forest to the point where they begin to behave as an intelligent

whole organism, responding to the environment, adapting with goal-oriented behavior,

would you call that artificial intelligence? The answer is no. You'd call that natural intelligence.