## Core Insight John Carmack's thesis: the modern age richly rewarded the combination of high intelligence and high agency. As AI automates intelligence, the scarce factor shifts to agency alone. People with relatively lower intelligence but exceptional agency will come into their own, provided they are willing to egolessly accept AI advice. The key qualifier is "egolessly." The person must trust AI guidance without the ego-driven need to override it with their own, now-inferior, reasoning. This creates a counterintuitive inversion: humility becomes the force multiplier for action-oriented people. The bottleneck is no longer thinking. It's acting. ## Connections - [[Agency Over Intelligence]] — Karpathy's parallel thesis that agency outranks intelligence - [[Agency as Meta Skill for AI Age]] — agency as the durable AI-age capability - [[Cognitive Sovereignty as AI-Age Meta-Skill]] — the discernment egoless AI-acceptance still requires --- *Source: [[The modern age has richly rewarded people with a combination...]] — John Carmack (@id_aa_carmack), X, February 2026 — https://x.com/id_aa_carmack/status/2022019443547660304*