Human peaks will be prolonged (pt 1)
The End of the Genius Years: Why AI Will Demolish Age-Based Performance
Youth is the elixir of genius…
Einstein revolutionized physics at 26. Darwin conceived natural selection at 29. Zuckerberg launched Facebook at 19. We’ve internalized this narrative so deeply that by 40, many of us have already written ourselves off as past our prime.
The data backs this up—sort of. Peak scientific productivity tends to be in the interval between ages 30 and 40. Nobel Prize winners, on average, do their groundbreaking work at 39. In the natural sciences, productivity continually decreases with increasing age. But here is what should blow your mind: this isn’t a law of nature. It’s a hardware limitation that we’re about to overcome.
By the way, this article is the first in a series about AI and society. We believe its important to ponder the intended and unintended consequences of the technology we’re unleashing on human society.The Biological Bottleneck
Let’s get specific about why human performance peaks with age. Scientists break cognitive ability into two types:
Fluid intelligence: Your ability to process novel information quickly, see patterns, and solve new problems. This peaks in your twenties and thirties, then gradually declines. It’s why young mathematicians and physicists often do their best work early.
Crystallized intelligence: Your accumulated knowledge, experience, and wisdom. This continues growing throughout life, but here’s the cruel joke—just when you know enough to do truly meaningful work, your ability to execute on it declines through a mixture of factors - group commitments, increasing societal responsibilities, and sheer aging; among others.
Think of it like being a computer. Young people have fast processors but small hard drives. Older people have massive hard drives but slower processors. Neither configuration is optimal for peak performance.The Trends That Will Change Everything
Now consider what happens when we add AI to the equation. Software developers using Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot completed some tasks 56% faster. That’s not an incremental improvement; that’s adding 4.5 hours to an 8-hour workday. While we can’t yet do it for everything at work yet, we will get close to this amount of productivity acceleration for a wide range of workloads in the next two decades.
But the real revolution is happening at the extremes of the age spectrum:
On the young end: A 15-year-old with ChatGPT, Claude, and the right AI stack can now:
Access the equivalent of multiple PhDs worth of knowledge instantly
Generate production-quality code without years of training
Conduct meta-analyses across millions of research papers
Build and test sophisticated prototypes (in software, chemistry and biology) in days, not months
On the older end: A 65-year-old expert with AI assistance can:
Process new research at the speed of a graduate student
Maintain the execution speed of someone 30 years younger
Leverage decades of pattern recognition with AI’s computational power
Lead virtual teams of AI agents working 24/7
The Prodigy Paradox in Action
Last year, a 14-year-old used AI/ML to detect heart disease in 7 seconds using a mobile app. Not by being a medical genius, but by knowing how to orchestrate AI tools to identify patterns that human researchers had missed. Recently, a high-schooler achieved the same kind of feat: identifying millions of unknown space objects that NASA and other space agencies couldn’t.
Twenty years ago, this would have required a full research team, millions in funding, and decades of specialized training. Today, it requires curiosity, basic computer literacy, and $20/month in AI subscriptions.
On the other hand, consider the 73-year-old professor who’s using AI to maintain a research output that rivals researchers half his age. He’s publishing papers at a rate that would have been physically impossible just five years ago, not because he’s working harder or has more grad students, but because AI handles the time-consuming aspects of literature review, data analysis, and initial drafting.
The New Performance Curve
To recap: traditional career productivity looks like a bell curve: slow ramp-up through your twenties, peak in your thirties and forties, gradual decline after fifty. But with AI, we’re expecting to see something unprecedented, a flattening of the entire curve.
Instead of a 10-15 year peak window, we’re potential looking at 50-60 year performance window.Goldman Sachs estimates generative AI could add $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy. But they’re thinking too small. They’re calculating based on current workers becoming more productive. They’re not accounting for millions of people entering productive years earlier and staying productive decades longer.
The Clock Is Already Ticking
Here’s what should light a fire under you: we’re in a unique historical moment. AI tools are powerful enough to provide significant productivity gains, but are not yet universally adopted. Surveys show very few executives expect AI to significantly impact their business in the next 1-3 years, but most expect massive impact in the 3-10 year window.
That gap between what’s possible today and what’s widely adopted is your opportunity. But it won’t last. You need to take advantage of the moment for yourself, your startup and your business.
Next week we’ll dive into the exact playbook for starting to extend your peak years in both directions. Whether you’re 15 or 75, we have a specific recommendation for leveraging AI to demolish your age-based limitations.
We’ll cover our five-step system, the specific tools you need in your stack, and the counterintuitive approaches that separate those who thrive from those who get left behind.
🎥 In case you missed it: check out our latest podcast on the ProductMind YouTube channel. Ted and Oji have offer their quick takes about the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on productivity. They hone in on the concept of ‘AI slop’ (the use of generative AI tools that produce subpar work). And… they hash out their thoughts on the surprising adoption of AI in low-income markets, the importance of encouraging women in tech, and the financial dynamics surrounding AI investments, including the rise of billionaires in the AI space. It’s a good one, folks! Here’s a clip 👇🏿👇🏽
🎵 We are excited to announce we have expanded our podcast 🎙️to Spotify. Please give us a listen and if you like what you hear share with a friend, follow us, and (or) rate us 5 stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Want to dive deeper?
Check out our book BUILDING ROCKETSHIPS 🚀 and continue this and other conversations in our 💬 ProductMind Slack community and our LinkedIn community.
Do old people really have bigger hard drives? I might argue that humans of all ages have the same capacity hard drive, but different RAM, and processor speeds. And firmware is all over the place! ;)