A new human era is coming. It needs humans who know themselves.

Demis Hassabis has put a date on it.

The head of Google DeepMind — and a Nobel laureate, so not someone given to loose talk — now says artificial general intelligence is "maybe 2030, plus or minus a year." He calls it the beginning of a "new human era." Speaking at Stanford in May, he went further: "When we look back at this time, I think that maybe 10 years from now, we'll realise that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now." And a warning attached to all of it: "We don't have long to prepare for what that means."

You can argue with the timeline. Plenty of serious people do. But notice what almost every headline does next: it talks about the machines. What they'll be able to do. Which jobs go. Which industry gets reordered. The whole conversation points outward, at the technology.

The most interesting thing Hassabis said points the other way.

Asked what stays valuable when machines can do so much, his answer wasn't about coding or strategy or any technical skill. It was taste, original thinking, and emotional connection. The things that are harder to automate are the things that were never about raw capability in the first place. They're about being a particular person, and being able to meet another one.

That should change what "preparing" means.

The scarce resource is self-knowledge

If taste and connection are what hold their value, then the bottleneck isn't the technology. It's you. You can't bring taste you haven't developed. You can't offer connection from behind a self you've never looked at. And you can't choose a future that's actually yours if you don't know what "yours" even means.

This is the part the AGI conversation keeps skipping. We're being told everything external is about to change — and almost nothing is being said about the internal work that lets a person stand steady while it does.

Here's the uncomfortable bit: most of us don't know ourselves nearly as well as we assume. Not the story we tell at dinner parties — the actual operating system. What genuinely drives us, underneath the goals we inherited. Which view of the world we're really living inside. The way we move through a problem, a team, a crisis. We run these patterns every day without seeing them, and then we're surprised when a borrowed plan doesn't fit.

Awareness comes first. Choice comes second. You cannot choose your way out of a future you can't see clearly — and that includes the future of your own life. When the ground shifts as fast as Hassabis says it will, the people who do well won't be the ones with the most information. They'll be the ones who know what to do with it because they know who they are.

And we have to do it together

There's a second half to this, and it matters just as much.

A new human era is, by definition, a more crowded and more connected one. More people working alongside systems they don't fully understand, and — the harder problem — alongside each other. Hassabis named emotional connection as one of the few things that gets more valuable, not less. But connection isn't a mood. It's a skill, and it runs on understanding: I get something true about how you're built, you get something true about how I'm built, and we stop wasting each other's time guessing.

The trouble is that understanding another person usually takes years. We don't have years to spare on every relationship that's about to matter. We need a shortcut — a shared, honest, fast language for who each of us actually is.

what-world-way: the shortcut

That's the whole reason what-world-way exists.

Three questions, and they cover the basics of a person:

• What drives you — the deep motivation underneath your choices, not the goal you happened to pick up along the way.
• Which World you're drawn to — the view of how things work and what matters that you carry around as if it were just "reality."
• The Way you move — how you actually go about things when no one's scripting it for you.

Put those three together and you have a portrait. Not a box, not a label to hide behind — a readable picture of the basics of who you are, in plain language you can hand to another person and they'll understand. It's a head start on the self-knowledge that's about to get expensive, and a shared vocabulary for the connection that's about to get scarce.

It won't tell you everything. Nothing does. But it gets you, quickly, to things that otherwise take time and work to put into words — what you want, where you stand, how you operate. That's exactly the ground you want under your feet before everything else moves.

Prepare the inside, not just the outside

Hassabis is right that we don't have long, and right to push the conversation past the tech-industry bubble. But "preparing" has been framed almost entirely as an outside job — policy, compute, regulation, reskilling. Necessary, all of it. Incomplete.

The inside job is quieter and it's yours. Understand yourself well enough to choose a future that's genuinely positive for you, not just impressive on a slide. Understand other people well enough to build the human connections that are about to be the rarest thing in the room.

The machines are getting a head start. We can give ourselves one too — and it starts with knowing who we are.

What's your what-world-way?