In this environment, we meet a character who will go through almost everything the arrival of AI has brought us. The challenges, of course. But also the possibilities. Because in what other world can you suddenly fold up like a telescope and find yourself thinking:

I wish there were instructions for people who fold up like telescopes.

There are no instructions, of course.

But that does not stop Alice. Perhaps she is still too young and naive to fully understand which things are generally considered impossible. Or perhaps she possesses a rare ability:

When Alice finds a bottle labelled DRINK ME, she first checks whether the word “poison” appears anywhere on it. That is sensible. After a brief investigation, she takes a sip. And the world immediately becomes a little bigger. Or Alice becomes smaller. In Wonderland, those are almost the same thing.

Suddenly, she can pass through a door that seemed unreachable only moments ago. On another occasion, she grows so large that she begins to worry about her own feet. I do not think Alice was prepared for that. What saved her was curiosity.

The almost childlike curiosity that woke up in a great many perfectly grown adults when AI became widely available. Everyone received a bottle. It did not say DRINK ME. It said:

TRY ME.

And regardless of whether you were seven, thirty-seven, or slightly older, there was suddenly an opportunity to fall into a new world and see what was waiting at the bottom.

There, a single sentence can produce an image. A question returns with an answer from a conversational partner who sounds as though it has read everything ever written, including books that have never existed.

Work that once took a week can sometimes be compressed into a few minutes. Curiously, after a while, even more work finds its way into the space that has been freed.

In Wonderland, changing size never solved a problem completely either. When Alice became small, she could no longer reach the key on the table. After the next transformation, the key was close enough, but the door was no longer suitable for a person of her new dimensions.

That is how an environment behaves when it has not yet acquired an instruction manual. The ability to create ten options in a minute sounds wonderful until someone has to decide which of them makes sense.

Eventually, Alice manages to return to approximately the right size.

Not long after, she meets the Caterpillar.

Who are you?

he asks.

It should be an easy question. But Alice has already changed size so many times that she is no longer entirely certain.

I - I hardly know, sir, just at present,

she says.

This too feels familiar. The names of our roles may remain the same while the work inside them quietly changes shape.

• A writer can generate without writing every sentence.

• A designer can produce a working prototype without designing every screen.

• A manager may find themselves coordinating not only people, but agents.

The title remains in place. The boundaries underneath it begin to move. Perhaps the hardest question in a new environment is not what you can now do. It is who you become once you can do it.

Share

Somewhere after the pool of tears - the same one in which it is easy to find yourself when the new environment suddenly begins discussing whether it still has a place for you - Alice meets the Cheshire Cat.

He is ready to discuss roads, directions, and possible destinations even though Alice has not yet decided where she wants to go. In this respect, he is rather like a modern AI assistant. Both are happy to continue the conversation. Both can sound remarkably convincing. And neither suffers greatly when the original question disappears somewhere along the way.

Next comes a tea party that never ends. Everyone talks, changes the subject, and moves around the table. The conversation appears extraordinarily productive. It does not, however, lead to a result. There is something strangely familiar about this…

Later, Alice finds herself in court. The Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing some tarts. The jurors write down their own names so they will not forget them before the trial is over. The witnesses answer questions that have very little to do with the case. A letter without a signature, recipient, or comprehensible meaning is presented as evidence.

The King searches it for significance. And, naturally, he finds some. When a text is sufficiently unclear, almost anything can be discovered inside it. Eventually, the most efficient possible sequence is proposed: the sentence first, the jury’s decision afterwards.

At this point, Wonderland stops feeling quite so distant. AI produces a convincing answer. The explanation can be requested later. Only afterwards does someone check whether sufficient grounds existed. Sometimes they did. Sometimes there is an unsigned letter in which everyone would very much like to find evidence. And sometimes the confidence of the answer begins to serve as evidence by itself.

By now, however, Alice is no longer the same small girl who fell down the rabbit hole. During the trial, she begins to grow again. At first, almost imperceptibly. Then she becomes large enough to stop being afraid of the cards. It's not the rules that became more logical. Alice has changed.

She has altered her size several times, become lost in conversations without conclusions, and watched an incomprehensible text transform into evidence simply because someone wanted badly enough to find evidence inside it. Statements that once sounded like the unquestionable laws of the new world no longer seem quite so absolute.

Alice looks at the court and finally says:

You’re nothing but a pack of cards.

Lewis Carroll could not have known about AI. But he certainly knew something about a world in which possibilities appear without instructions, scale changes, conversations continue without decisions, and confidence attempts to replace evidence. He knew something else too.

Leave a comment

What saved Alice was not learning every one of them. That was probably impossible anyway. What saved her was curiosity. She experimented, observed the consequences, argued with the rules, and occasionally admitted that she understood nothing at all.

Gradually, one thing became clear: the world had not lost its logic. The logic simply belonged to the environment, not to the person who had just entered it.

The bottle labelled TRY ME is still standing on the table. No one knows whether its contents will make a person larger, smaller, or simply produce several more options for a decision that still has not been made. But perhaps size is not the important part.

And one day becoming large enough to look at its loudest rules and say:

You’re nothing but a pack of cards.

In Wonderland, a sentence could be passed before the evidence was considered. Our new environment has a sentence of its own - one whose meaning depends entirely on where the pause is placed.

Adapt not. Optimise.

Do not change. Simply learn to perform the same work faster and more efficiently.

Or:

Adapt. Not optimise.

First, understand which world you have entered. Only then decide what is worth doing faster. The words remain the same. The sentence is entirely different. So the question is not whether a choice must be made. The question is where you will place the full stop.

Imagine standing in a tropical forest millions of years ago. You’re hungry. Somewhere above you, hidden among the leaves, hangs a ripe red palm fruit. You know it’s there. You move closer, scanning the branches, trying to catch a glimpse of it before climbing the tree.

But stop. Let’s pause for a moment.

That isn’t actually what our ancestors saw. Evolutionary biologists believe early primates hadn’t yet developed the color vision most of us take for granted today. The fruit wasn’t red. Not to them.

The forest was a world of greens, yellows, light, shadow, and contrast. Finding food wasn’t simply a matter of looking in the right direction. It meant searching branch by branch, relying on shape, texture, smell, memory, and sometimes pure luck.

Then, over many generations, something remarkably small happened. A genetic mutation produced an additional photopigment receptor. For the first time, reds and greens became easier to distinguish. The fruit became easier to find. The forest hadn’t changed. What changed was the ability to perceive it.

That story stayed with me. Not because I was particularly interested in biology. Quite the opposite. Biology was never really my thing. Which is why I still find it slightly ironic that it ended up giving me the language I’d been searching for.

For months I kept noticing the same feeling during product work. Conversations had changed. Discovery had changed. Even the relationship between people and software felt different.

Yet every word I reached for felt slightly wrong.

• Transformation.

• Automation.

• Disruption.

• Evolution.

Each one described part of what I was observing. None of them described the whole picture. I wasn’t looking for a better metaphor. I was looking for better language. Then I remembered another question that had fascinated me for years.

For centuries, scholars have debated why Homer described the sea as wine-dark instead of blue.

Was it language? Was it perception? Or was it simply a different way of experiencing the world? No one knows for certain. But the question itself stayed with me. How much of reality depends not only on what’s there…

…but on what we’re able to notice?

That’s when I realized I wasn’t searching for a better metaphor. I was searching for a better name.

Mutation.

Because, in biology, mutation is rarely the end of the story. It’s the beginning. A small change that quietly reshapes what becomes possible. That was the language I’d been looking for.

Not a metaphor.

A language.

A way to describe many of the changes I was beginning to observe across products, organizations, and the people building them. I eventually started calling it The Mutation Era. Biology had already developed a language for describing something I was struggling to name.

That idea eventually became the starting point for a book I’m writing called The Mutation Era. It’s an exploration of what happens when the environment changes - and everything inside it begins to adapt.