Humanity Will Always Be Bigger Than Anything We Create

Every few years, a new wave of technology shows up and brings the same prediction with it: “This time, the machines will outthink the people who built them.”

But that’s never matched how I see the world.

In a recent Inside Strategic Coach conversation, Shannon Waller asked me to share an idea I’ve been thinking about for a long time but hadn’t talked about publicly.

What came out of that conversation is a simple statement that shapes how I look at every new invention, including AI: Humanity is always infinitely greater than anything that humans create.

Humanity as the set, technology as the subset.

At one point, I heard someone talking about how computers would surpass human intelligence, and something struck me so strongly that I wrote it down: “Humanity is always infinitely greater than anything that humans create.”

If you think in terms of sets and subsets, humanity is the set. Every tool, every technology, every computer, every AI system is a subset of that bigger whole. Human beings create technology; technology does not create human beings. That relationship never reverses.

Entrepreneurs sometimes forget this when they hear headlines about AI. They start to imagine AI as some independent, superior intelligence instead of what it actually is: another tool built out of human thinking, human data, and human decisions.

Some of our creations are “smarter” than any one of us in a very narrow way. A thermostat is better at keeping a room at a consistent temperature than I am. A calculator is better at arithmetic. That’s why we built them.

But none of these creations can step outside the system that produced them and claim to be greater than the whole that created them.

Why no machine can surpass humanity.

Humanity, for me, is the growth of knowledge, the growth of mindsets, and the billions of connections between people over a very long period of time.

Anthropologists keep extending estimates of how long humans have existed. We’re not talking about a few centuries of experience; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years of human beings trying things, collaborating, failing, and figuring out better ways. That’s an enormous storehouse of practical intelligence.

Today’s population, close to nine billion, is only a small fraction of the estimated 110 billion humans who have ever lived. Think about how much daily trial and error is contained in that number. Day after day, generation after generation, people have tested different approaches, kept what worked, and passed it on. That accumulated practical intelligence is a big part of what “humanity” really is.

There is no single machine, no matter how powerful, that can stand outside that entire evolving process and claim to be “more intelligent” than all of humanity.

AI is built from human data, human choices, and human goals. It is downstream from humanity, not above it.

The real value is in human connections.

A question came up during lunch with a group of entrepreneurs recently: “Do you care about where society is going?” My response was that society is just an abstraction. It’s a concept, a word that describes how everybody thinks and functions together. But we don’t really interact with abstractions.

What we do interact with are individuals whose judgment we trust and appreciate.

• The 120 people on our team.
• The 2,500 entrepreneurs in our programs.
• The conversations we have in workshops and in one‑on‑one discussions.

That’s what humanity looks like up close.

Shannon highlighted that this is where Strategic Coach is very different from abstract talk about the future.

At Coach, you’re not debating “society”; you’re in a room with other entrepreneurs who are testing ideas in the real world, sharing what works, and being honest about what doesn’t. That kind of environment multiplies human intelligence.

Why Strategic Coach exists in an AI world.

In our conversation around How Entrepreneurs Are Using AI Without Losing Their Edge, Shannon spoke about her 30 years of experience coaching entrepreneurs and developing tools that dramatically improve teamwork, communication, and clarity.

What she loves most about our clients (and I love about entrepreneurs) is their practicality and their ability to make time for what they care about: they schedule thinking time, commit to workshops, and build real capabilities.

AI can’t do that—it sorts data and generates options, but can’t feel a workshop’s energy or invent frameworks from unspoken truths.

True caring shows up in your calendar: time to design your future, conversations to grow your team. Technology executes; humans choose what matters. That’s why Strategic Coach exists as a real place for human leaps, where entrepreneurs combine experiences to create what’s next.

How top entrepreneurs are using AI.

The entrepreneurs Shannon and I spend time with aren’t afraid of AI; they’re curious about how to build it around their biggest strengths. They use it to:

• Extend their thinking.
• Speed up research and comparison.
• Free themselves from repetitive work so they can focus on relationships, creativity, and innovation.

They’re very clear that AI is there to support their thinking, not replace it. The most capable entrepreneurs use AI as a thinking partner. They use it to ask better questions, filter results through their Unique Ability, and make higher‑quality decisions.

They’re not delegating their judgment to a machine. They’re using machines to give their judgment more reach.

Moving forward as a creator.

When you really absorb the idea that “humanity is always infinitely greater than anything that humans create,” something important shifts.

You stop being intimidated by technology, and you start treating it as an extension of your creativity.

Instead of worrying that AI might someday “surpass” you, you ask a much better question: How can this tool help me become an even better creator, collaborator, and leader?

Entrepreneurs are the ones who decide how new tools get used in the real world. You design the structures. You create the value. You set the standards for what “good” looks like.

And at Strategic Coach, the focus will always be on helping you expand the human part—your thinking, your relationships, your capabilities—so that every new tool simply gives you more freedom to build the future you want.