The Force Is Real

AI is the modern Force—amplifying human will, for better or worse. Our future depends not on what AI can do, but on the intent behind how we use it.

There’s a moment in Star Wars—not one of the action scenes, but a quiet one—when Obi-Wan tells Luke, “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

It sounds like fantasy. And it was, until now.

We’re building it.

Not the blue ghosts or mind tricks, but the real thing: a system that gives individuals the ability to impose will on the world at scale. That’s AI. The Force, in Star Wars, wasn’t just power—it was intent that scaled. And that’s exactly what AI is becoming. It amplifies what you mean. And that makes it not just a tool, but a test.

It’s easy to miss this, because AI doesn’t look like power. It doesn’t glow or roar or explode. It suggests. It generates. It whispers. But so did the Force. It wasn't the weapon—it was what made weapons obsolete.

And more importantly, it was everywhere.

That’s what we’re seeing now. AI isn’t centralized anymore. It’s leaking. Into browsers, into command lines, into startups, into the minds of 12-year-olds who just figured out how to clone Drake’s voice into an apology to their math teacher. The difference between having power and not having it is collapsing.

For a long time, power came from institutions: governments, banks, universities, armies. But we’re approaching something stranger—something like volitional liquidity. Anyone with a will strong enough to direct the machine can shape reality. That’s what the Force was, and that’s what AI is becoming.

And like the Force, AI has a light side and a dark side.

This is not just a metaphor. There are already Jedi. And there are already Sith. There are people using AI to teach others, to automate drudgery, to make creativity abundant. There are also people using it to exploit, mislead, and deceive. What’s missing isn’t intelligence. It’s alignment.

When a founder automates an entire workflow with one agent and scales their startup 10x, that’s the Force. When a hacker deepfakes a CEO’s voice to trick an assistant into wiring money to an offshore account, that’s the Force too. The same infrastructure. The same capability. What separates the Jedi from the Sith is not their tools. It’s their will.

And that brings us to the real crux of it: we are entering an age where the defining variable isn’t access, but intent.

The End of the Leash

The scariest part of all this is how fast it’s happening. There’s a gap between what we can do and what we’re ready for. And it’s widening.

Think about it: we’re deploying multi-agent systems capable of negotiating, reasoning, designing, and iterating—all in environments we barely understand. A company of five people now has the leverage of a pre-IPO unicorn. We’re not building tools; we’re building armies. And they follow orders—good or bad.

This is the end of the leash era. For centuries, we constrained power with structure: licenses, oversight, hierarchies. But now, anyone with an API key can do things that governments couldn’t do a decade ago. And we’re handing out those keys like Halloween candy.

This isn’t necessarily bad. But it is new. And that means we need a new kind of governance—not just external, but internal.

We’ve been asking, “What can AI do?” The more important question now is, “What should we do with it?”

This is where the Force analogy becomes more than literary. It becomes strategic.

In Star Wars, the central conflict wasn’t about lasers or politics—it was about alignment. The light side used the Force to serve others. The dark side used it to dominate. The danger wasn’t the power. It was the corruption of will. And that’s our situation now.

Because when you give people unlimited power without a framework for values, you don’t get utopia. You get chaos.

And we’re flirting with that now.

Will to Do Good

We are not going to stop the spread of AI. Nor should we. The democratization of power is not the problem. The problem is that we haven’t yet democratized the will to use it well.

That’s what we should be focused on now: not suppression, but regulation and alignment at scale. Not just in code, but in culture.

The Jedi weren’t better because they had more Force. They were better because they trained their intent. They had rituals, ethics, masters, apprentices. They didn’t just build tools—they built a philosophy. It’s not that we need literal monks with lightsabers. But we do need frameworks that ask: What is this power for? Who is it serving? What are we building—tools for liberation, or levers for control?

We should be designing AI with the same questions we’d ask a Jedi in training. What do you want? Why do you want it? What happens if you get it?

This isn’t about morality in the abstract. It’s practical. Because the biggest risk of AI isn’t sentience. It’s amplification. It makes small misalignments enormous. A system optimized for short-term efficiency can quietly demolish entire professions. A company obsessed with margins can wipe out communities before realizing what they’ve done.

That’s why we need something like what I call “world creators”—individuals and teams who see their role not just as builders, but as stewards. People who think a few steps ahead. Who don’t just ask, “Can this scale?” but “Should this scale?” And, “What happens after it does?”

This used to be a luxury. Now it’s a requirement. Because power has outpaced deliberation. We’ve handed people the ability to alter systems, narratives, markets—and sometimes, their own identities—with a few keystrokes. The most important variable is no longer intelligence. It’s character.

The Human Layer

Ironically, our best chance to align AI may come from the thing it can’t yet replace: human intuition. Our pattern-matching abilities aren’t perfect—but they’re great at detecting risk, contradiction, bullshit. That’s our species’ superpower. The ability to notice when something is off—even when we don’t know why yet.

In fact, the best governance for AI may be democracy—not the system, but the habit. The habit of distributing concern. Of hearing objections from people outside the room. Of surfacing failure modes that the builders didn’t see. That’s not bureaucracy. That’s resilience.

AI will not replace that anytime soon. Not because it’s not smart enough, but because it doesn’t care enough. It doesn’t worry. It doesn’t wake up at 2 a.m. thinking about edge cases. But we do.

Especially when we work together.

This is why the next phase of AI evolution can’t be about solo genius. It has to be about collective stewardship. Because one person with the Force is dangerous. But a network of people, aligned and intentional, is civilization.

What Kind of World Are We Building?

We’re standing at a fork in the road, and both paths are seductive.

One leads to more—more speed, more scale, more capability. That’s the dark side, if we pursue it without reflection. It’s how we end up in a world optimized for everything except meaning.

The other path leads to intention—toward a world that’s not just better, but wiser. Where AI helps us create systems of abundance that actually feel humane. Where power flows not to those who want it most, but to those who use it best.

It’s not going to be easy. But here’s the good news: it’s not magic. It’s design.

The Force is real. And now we all have it. The question is no longer whether AI will shape the world. It’s whose will it will follow.

So choose carefully.

Because you’re not just coding an agent. You’re casting a spell.