What's your Superpower?

In the Marvel cinematic universe, there exists a substance known as Terrigen Mist. When ordinary people are exposed to it, something hidden within them awakens. It does not introduce anything foreign; rather, it reveals what was already there, dormant and unseen. The transformation appears miraculous, yet it rests on a deeper archetypal truth: that human potential has always exceeded its visible expression.

It is easy to dismiss such narratives as fantasy. And yet, something structurally analogous is now unfolding in our world—not mystical, not biological, but cognitive. With the rise of artificial intelligence, the distance between intention and capability is collapsing. What once demanded institutions, specialized expertise, and years of coordinated effort is becoming accessible to individuals equipped with curiosity and the right tools.

This shift does not arrive with spectacle. It emerges quietly, in moments that might appear anecdotal in isolation, but which begin to reveal a pattern when observed collectively. These are not anomalies. They are early signals of a deeper reconfiguration of what it means to act, to create, and to care.

Consider a man confronted with a deeply personal crisis: his dog has cancer. In another era, his role would have been largely passive—consult the experts, follow established protocols, and hope that the outcome falls within the narrow bounds of existing medical knowledge. Beyond that, perhaps, prepare for grief.

Instead, he turns to AI. He studies, models, and explores potential therapeutic pathways, including mRNA-based approaches that would previously have been the exclusive domain of research institutions. The outcome remains uncertain, as all medical interventions ultimately are. Yet the act itself marks a profound shift. The boundary between concern and capability dissolves. Care is no longer passive; it becomes active, generative, and exploratory.

And then something remarkable happens: the dog’s tumors begin to shrink.

The significance of this story does not lie solely in the outcome, however hopeful. It lies in what it reveals—that intention, when amplified, can begin to operate at levels once reserved for institutions. The locus of agency shifts.

A different transformation unfolds in the story of a blind man running through a city. The environment is dense, dynamic, and filled with obstacles—conditions that typically demand sight. Yet he moves with confidence, guided by an AI system that translates visual information into sound. Space becomes tone. Distance becomes rhythm. Motion becomes a kind of auditory map.

Nothing in the external world has changed. What has changed is his relationship to it.

Here, intelligence does not require the human to adapt to the environment. Instead, the environment is translated into a form that aligns with the human’s existing capacities. The result is not dependence, but a new form of autonomy. He does not become less human through this process; he becomes more fully able to inhabit the world as he is.

Stories like these are increasingly common, though often dismissed as exaggeration or “AI slop.” Yet many are real. And taken together, they suggest a reframing of artificial intelligence that diverges sharply from prevailing narratives.

Much of the discourse around AI centers on replacement, automation, and the erosion of human roles. These concerns are not without merit. But they capture only one dimension of what is occurring. The more consequential development lies elsewhere: in the expansion of human action.

AI is not simply doing things for us. It is enabling us to attempt things that were previously beyond reach. It is less a tool in the conventional sense and more a medium—one through which intention can travel further. It amplifies curiosity, extends perception, and accelerates iteration. It does not eliminate the need for judgment or meaning; rather, it heightens their importance. As execution becomes easier, the question of what to execute becomes more profound.

The metaphor of transformation remains useful—not because it is literal, but because it captures the structure of the moment. What is emerging is not imposed from outside. It is unlocked from within, unevenly and unpredictably, as individuals encounter new forms of capability. Some will ignore it. Others will resist it. Still others will step into it and discover that the boundaries they once assumed were fixed are, in fact, permeable.

Nothing fundamentally inhuman is being introduced. Instead, deeply human capacities—care, curiosity, resilience, creativity—are being given greater range. The result is not a departure from humanity, but an intensification of it.

Recent developments in medicine make this difficult to ignore. In a large-scale evaluation of clinical reasoning, a leading AI system was tested against hundreds of physicians across complex diagnostic scenarios. The results were striking: the AI not only matched but exceeded physician baselines in many cases, improving further with each iteration. In real-world emergency settings, AI-assisted second opinions demonstrated measurable advantages over human judgment alone.

The implication is not that physicians are obsolete. It is that the combination of human and machine produces better outcomes than either in isolation.

From the standpoint of patient care, the conclusion is both simple and profound: there is already a compelling case for integrating AI into every critical decision pathway. The technology, in many respects, has crossed the threshold from experimental to essential. Its adoption will lag, as institutions inevitably do, but the capability itself is no longer hypothetical. But this doesn’t stop at emergency medicine. Plumbers can become better plumbers, coders can become better coders, teachers can become better teachers.

Therefore, I believe that the tension AI provokes, e.g. anxiety about displacement and control, is more than balanced by its likely benefits – and we begin to see more demonstrations of AI’s ability to reduce error, extend life, and improve outcomes in domains where the stakes are highest. However, the contradiction is not easily resolved. But it points toward a more balanced understanding.

AI is neither inherently a threat nor inherently a solution. It is an amplifier. What it amplifies depends on how it is used—and by whom.

We have long defined ourselves by our limits. We measure what we can do against what we cannot, and we build our systems accordingly. But when those limits begin to shift, even subtly, the implications cascade outward. The question is no longer simply what AI can do. The more consequential question is what humans, in partnership with AI, will choose to attempt.

The answer will not arrive all at once. It will unfold in moments like these—where intention meets amplification and something quietly extraordinary occurs. Over time, those moments will accumulate. What once seemed exceptional will become commonplace.

And perhaps, in retrospect, we will recognize that the transformation was never primarily about the machines. It was about the expansion of human possibility that they made visible.

In that sense, the true story of artificial intelligence is not that it is artificial, but that it reveals how much of what we call human has always been waiting—just beyond reach.

And now, finally, within it.

So the question is no longer whether transformation is possible.

The question is: what latent capacity, long held within yourself, can now be nurtured and expressed?

Citations

1. Science (2024). Evaluation of Large Language Models on Clinical Reasoning Tasks.
2. Topol, E. (2019). Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Basic Books.
3. Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The Second Machine Age. W.W. Norton & Company.
4. World Economic Forum (2023). The Future of Jobs Report.
5. Amodei, D. et al. (2023). AI Safety and Alignment: Challenges and Opportunities. Anthropic 6. Microsoft Research. (2020). Soundscape: Enabling people who are blind or have low vision to build a richer awareness of their surroundings. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/soundscape/
7. Romero, P. (2026, March 30). One man, his dog, and ChatGPT: Australia’s AI vaccine saga. Phys.org.