From Collage to Code: How AI is Rewriting Reality

Most people imagine the future as being like today’s world but with better gadgets - smarter phones, faster internet, and better cars. But that really isn’t where we’re heading. In fact, it’s not even close.

Artificial intelligence is moving at a speed that most people are still underestimating, even though its rapid development is in plain sight. Instead of climbing a steady hill, it’s rocketing up an exponential curve, and if progress keeps compounding, that curve may soon become almost vertical.

Each leap in AI shortens the gap to the next, with every step forward propelling us huge distances in scientific development and technological evolution. Machines are now designing better chips for themselves, refining their own code, and optimising their own architecture. As a result, technological milestones once thought to be decades away are compressing into years, sometimes months.

So far the average person has mostly noticed this in the digital world. Ever-better image generation, more intelligent conversations with AI models, and improved data analysis. But these things are just what we see on the surface. AI is gearing up to rewrite reality itself - not just shaping the digital realm but directly shaping the matter that makes up the physical world.

Bit by bit. Even atom by atom.

While this sounds like science fiction, it isn’t. The first steps toward an editable world are already here.

The Collaged World

Look around the room you’re in right now. Your desk, your chair, and the clothes you’re wearing. All of it is a collage of natural materials. We live in a world built from fragments - pieces of nature assembled into things we can use.

A wooden table is a tree, copied and pasted into something we can eat from, and your cotton shirt started life as a plant. Bricks are just clay from the earth - reshaped, baked and stacked into neat little patterns. Plastic is reconfigured oil, and alloys are blended metals. 

For thousands of years, humans have built their world by cutting, pasting, and stitching together nature’s code. We’ve been remixing the software of reality rather than rewriting it. It’s surprising that we rarely think in this way, but that’s exactly what we’ve been doing since we first climbed down from the trees.

Even our most advanced technologies are still patches on existing materials. Composites, polymers and rare-earth cocktails aren’t synthetic - they are collaged natural resources. We keep discovering new ways to combine and layer different materials, but the source code of matter has remained largely untouchable.

It’s like we’ve been making collages from someone else’s photographs. We can rearrange the pieces in creative ways, but we haven’t been able to alter the original imagery itself.

Until now…

AI Is Rewriting Reality

AI is beginning to change the rules - gifting us with new abilities in manipulating the world around us. It’s as if we’ve found a hidden setting labelled “developer mode” in the operating system of life. For billions of years, the physical world was locked in read-only, observable and touchable but resistant to editing. 

And it’s been stuck that way for a very long time. Biological evolution was a slow opening act - a process of trial and error that took hundreds of millions of years to move from simple cells to complex life. Even then, it took millions of years more until humans were able to generate tools powerful enough to begin tinkering with the building blocks of life.

But now, with AI, we have started to unlock an “advanced mode” that is gearing up to make the impossible possible.

This isn’t fantasy. It’s happening in front of us:

• Protein design. AI systems like AlphaFold cracked protein structures that had puzzled scientists for 50 years. Now those same systems are designing entirely new proteins - building vaccines, cleaning up waste, catalysing chemical reactions that nature never invented.

• Fertility science. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University recently created early-stage human embryos from skin cells. This could one day allow same-sex couples to have genetically related children, or open up entirely new approaches to reproduction and development.

• Energy. AI is already stabilising plasma inside fusion reactors - a key obstacle to clean, limitless power. A problem once thought to require decades of human research is now being tamed by intelligent algorithms.

• Robotics. Reinforcement learning is training machines to fold laundry, build electronics, and handle delicate materials with superhuman precision. Each new advance in machine learning multiplies what robots can do in the physical world.

These aren’t random headlines - they’re glimpses of a new paradigm. This is the beginning of a different era in which we will be able to code reality at a molecular, atomic, and systemic level.

As a creative, I view it as being similar to the jump from using traditional art materials to creating with digital software. For centuries we’ve pieced together materials found in nature, and now we’re moving towards capabilities that might allow the manipulation of every pixel.

The Inferno Ahead

What makes this moment both astonishing and alarming is the rate at which these changes could unfold. Change is something humans have always needed to deal with, but the potential shifts coming down the track are like nothing we have seen before. 

And that’s because AI isn’t just advancing. It’s advancing its own advancement. Each breakthrough accelerates the next, and this recursive loop is why predictions as to where we are heading are becoming increasingly fragile. The future doesn’t just feel uncertain - it feels decidedly unstable.

What this means is that we could be living in a world that still feels familiar in a decade, and find it dramatically transformed just a few years later. That might sound extreme, but AI’s trajectory makes swift, dramatic changes like that plausible.

For example, if AI masters molecular manufacturing, we could see:

• Labs that design and test therapies entirely in silico. Drugs created, simulated, and optimised before a single human trial.

• Self-replicating micro-factories. Small-scale, autonomous units that turn waste into building materials, reducing both pollution and construction costs dramatically.

• Custom enzymes and nanomachines. Tools that extract metals from the air or water, potentially ending the material bottlenecks that have long shaped our economies.

None of this is pie in the sky. It’s just the logical extension of what’s already happening in protein design, synthetic biology, and robotics - all sped up by AI’s self-reinforcing acceleration.

The ways this might transform our planet are extraordinary. Biological evolution began as a slow taper, impacting our planet gradually over unimaginable distances of time. But AI could ignite an inferno of change that sweeps through everything in decades, altering established systems and our physical world in the process.

Whether the picture I’m painting is a utopia or a catastrophe depends on both your perspective, and how we navigate this shift as a species. But one thing is clear - we’re moving from collaging our world to coding it. And while it’s impossible to predict what the rate of change will be, one thing is becoming increasingly apparent - we are in the midst of a transition from a patched reality to a programmable one.

What It Means for Us

While all of this is incredible, awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping, there’s only one thing that really interests me. What does this actually mean for us - everyday people - and the lives that we lead?

We already know that the Intelligence Revolution means the skills we’ve relied on for centuries may become less and less relevant. But when AI can design molecules, manufacture materials, and assemble products, it threatens to upend our world in much broader ways. As creatures who need predictability to feel comfort, it’s troubling to realise that we are approaching a time of unprecedented uncertainty in our lives. The occurrence of AI means that the timelines we’ve been trained to expect - steady, generational change - are collapsing. And as a result, our social systems (built from the ground-up for slow progress) will struggle to handle the vertical acceleration that’s inevitably coming our way.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom - there are mind-blowing possibilities here too. Medical and scientific breakthroughs will bring unimaginable benefits to our lives. Having the ability to edit the physical world will likely help us to cure diseases, improve quality of living for billions and reverse the damage we have done to our planet. If we do things right that is. 

It’s also important to remember that the industrial era led us to collage nature at scale; damaging our planet and health for centuries. Perhaps the ability to code nature instead of patching it will one day make us reflect on the wasteful, unethical and damaging processes we relied on in the past. And maybe the editable future we are entering is more utopia than dystopia. Only time will tell. I’m hopeful. 

A Layered Future

This is the layered future we’re moving into. Not just AI writing content, generating pictures, and automating tasks. We are moving towards a re-authoring of reality - from the digital to the physical, from the impossible to the possible.

If you want to explore where we’re heading - to look not only at what AI is doing but at where the machine of tech is taking us - sign up to my mailing list and join the journey. Because these shifts are no longer thought experiments - they’re happening.

And the only real questions left are how quickly the fire will spread, and how will it affect us?

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